I see it this way too now. “What does this culture do with this situation?” - and all jokes aside, pretty good chance some of the answers to that snuck in subliminally, that influences how I parent. Haven’t watched too much in 20+ years, but it’s there.
But yeah nonetheless, I do understand the annoyance folks have with the lad.
Giant bag of rice is another great way to stretch the meal dollars and works great with an instant pot too!
That one is “Bureau of Land Management”
this guy coaxes
Sternly: “ya did great son and everyone loves you. Ya punched a budding Nazi and made it both entertaining and endearing, there’s no PR firm on earth who can ever stir even a shadow of what you did”.
Wait til ya hear about all the many places and things in the US named after the literal tribes of humans who once lived in roughly that exact spot 😐
I can’t get enough of that either and while all the great memes do the lad justice, I can’t help but feel we’re all robbed by the way they don’t capture the eager, self-satisfied “I can’t wait to deliver this L”, delicious, audible little clap 😭
Hwel by golly and bless your heart, may the Lord do His work. Praise Him 🙏
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.
Just to elaborate for the folks I’ve run into who doubt and downplay the worst of it - even if you remove the more lurid reports, the simple fact of “recruitment” for such a hideous enterprise, what accomplishing that requires - that is hunting humans for sport.
Extending globally to identify and traffick vulnerable young people, targets meeting the right criteria to make it all “work”.
No metaphors are needed, nor any reliance on anything remotely controversial in the files. Hunting humans for sport is exactly, dead on correct.
But there’s so many of us…
Always wondered about long pig myself, but gosh, the regulations!
For real lol, this is garden variety extortion of the “nice place ya got here…” flavor. Even the dumbest criminals alive know this one.
Caring for older cars can be a real pain in the neck but it’s super rewarding too. Nice save.
I don’t need your help with this idea. I’m engaging with the word (in this thread), where people are at, and pushing for the same understanding you are.
Offer info, that’s great. Why are you telling me to read something…? The fundamental point about which I’ve been littering the thread with comments?
That’s because of the way that word is, ya see.
It’s not the same. As slavery or feudalism. Or indentured servitude. Or sharecropping. Or company towns and scrip. Or union-busting, “off-shoring”, easy payday loans, easy credit, permanent basement minimum wages.
But here, and now? And surely, more clearly all the time, not just here, not just “for now” -
It’s a new shape of boot, one of a few really, that look like the old boots, but a little different. And now with sparkling added (modern) effervescence ™.
How about we see some private landlords start to organize together and work against the corporate hellscape landlording, for the benefit of themselves and their renters, maybe see if that engenders some sympathy for the poor souls stuck landlording, eh?
People who inherit things and don’t understand what it took (from themselves and worse, from others…) to build those things -
These people have, definitionally and usually irrevocably, deranged behavior.
Accordingly, among all the other things they do, these people often do hilariously (except for the real costs) stupid things with what they inherit.
At least they finally moved on from the crippling avocado toast. What an indulgence, is no one doing the math to find out - how much did rents go up en masse, by all these indulgent landlords splurging on produce on bread?
Even warming it, some say toasting, for sheer enjoyment?
Landlords need to get real and live within their means. Surely there’s a purpose-built WSJ article to reference here, gimme a minute…
Old man Da Vinci furiously scribbling while also delivering the overexcited stream-of-consciousness babble of a little kid with his favorite thing