The median American is, materially, much richer than the median person pretty much anywhere else. The US is a bad place, by rich-country standards, to be in the bottom 10%. But in terms of consumer wealth - how large your house is, how many cars your family has and how nice they are, if you have a dishwasher and home A/C, how often you eat at restaurants or travel long distances, can you afford a home repair or the latest gadget - typical American workers are second to essentially nobody. Having grown up in and left the US, I am deeply familiar with all of its downsides, but there's an abundance of data to support this.
The problem is that many Americans are so bogged down in expenses that they don't feel wealthy despite their median wealth. For example, it's basically assumed that you must have a car and pay its high recurring expenses, including ancilliary expenses like having a home big enough to have a parking space.
Being completely car dependent is to me a fundamental problem in much of both countries, and the advantage USA has is that the cost of running a car (or often 2 especially for a family) takes a smaller part of a middle class salary. In UK , Europe, many countries outside of N America you're just not forced to own a car in the same way. That's not just extra costs when you've got a family, but a source of isolation for people that are old or disabled. (Not to discount the many other wonderful fantastic things about life in N America. :) )
It's not like Americans are all buying X so they can't afford to buy Y - there isn't really a major category of consumption where the US median is below the OECD median. If the US had a higher savings rate, then people could smooth out consumption more (build up savings some years, draw them down in bad years or in retirement), and maybe enjoy more psychological security. But it doesn't really make sense to say that Americans are unusually "bogged down in expenses" and yet have more goods and services in every significant category.
To me it's want versus need. A lot of people feel like they're forced into things like that and don't feel wealthy despite being wealthy by any objective measure.
I think that's an indication of a successful society. How people feel about their wealth isn't something society should be responsible for. It's a personal, philosophical, and maybe spiritual struggle.
That having a bit more money matters when your employer can fire you for any reason. When college costs are astronomical. When you can lose your healthcare for any reason. When getting cancer might mean losing your house. When housing costs mean that anyone who rents could well be thrown out into the street.
But your tv is bigger than three average tv in Germany. For sure!
That's not quality of life. That's trinkets to hide the horrors. All good as long as you don't think about it and get lucky.
Median American pay for full-time workers was ~$62,000 USD in Q4 2024 (BLS), which is around $85,000 CAD. The median Canadian salary is very definitely not $85,000 CAD.
If you are going to play this game you also need to adjust for taxes. I lived a few years in Montreal, then a few years in Toronto and after that I moved to US. During this years my perception of income taxes went from “they are pretty high” in Montreal to “Wow, they are much lower” in Toronto to “how are public services funded? Taxes are almost 0” in the states..
Then you’re paying higher consumption taxes and property taxes, and higher prices on business costs passed on to you. Do I even have to explain this? Just because you can’t see the ball anymore doesn’t mean it stopped existing
I guess you have not lived in Canada... In Canada consumption taxes is for both federal and provincial (and city) governments. In US there is no federal consumption tax.
(I think it is you who needs explaining not me....)
A ten year old Honda Fit is like $12K, pretty fuel efficient, and probably reliable and low-maintenance (I owned one until recently). People aren't buying $50,000 new Ford F-150s because they just need a working car to go to work and the grocery store.
> People aren't buying $50,000 new Ford F-150s because they just need a working car to go to work and the grocery store.
Let me introduce you to half of my block. And I live in a city with fantastic public transit where you don't even need a car. I see those loan notices in mailboxes....
The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.
A 2023 Belgian study[0] tested 39 brands of straws (paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel, and plastic):
Paper and bamboo straws most frequently contained PFAS, sometimes at high levels.
Plastic straws also contained PFAS, but less consistently.
Stainless steel straws were PFAS-free in that study.
That was the first one for me as well and I was surprised they included it. I have never seen a disposable straw that does the job well, except for plastic. I actively avoid restaurants that use the cardboard straws because of it. That's how bad they suck. I can't believe the EU was foolish enough to ban plastic straws when there just isn't an actual viable alternative.
Quality of non plastic straws has improved dramatically, I don't even notice they are not plastic anymore. Unless you are sucking on a drink for hours they don't disintegrate.
The actual text is "Bans the worst beach‑litter plastics (straws, cutlery, sticks) and cuts pollution" and the tooltip says "Targets the most littered plastic items with bans, design and collection rules, and extended producer responsibility to clean up coasts and waterways."
I looked a bit further, it bans a long list of plastic single-use stuff: plates, cutlery, certain food containers, certain cups, and a bunch of other things. It also regulates some labelling for other single-use products.
It claims that "80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27%".
Saying it's just a "plastic straw ban is" ... eh, well, a straw man. And single-use plastics are a substantial source of litter/pollution (I didn't investigate the accuracy of this claim in-depth).
In conclusion, this seems about as accurate and good faith as the ol' "EU bendy banana myth".
Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics. But random people littering is not even remotely the main source.
Poor and unregulated waste management is. Of course the fact that a lot of western countries were and still are exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries where they somehow end up in rivers and oceans.
However there is no inherent reason why plastic straws or anything else inherently have to be dumped into oceans.
Of course silly token measures are much easier than actually regulating the global fishing industry..
> Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics.
On a thread that is about someone misrepresenting a single-use plastic ban as a "plastic straw ban", this is very much not obvious at all.
As for the rest: if there is no plastic, then there is nothing to "waste manage". Or at least less, and mismanaged waste actually breaks down in a reasonable timeframe. It's been an issue for decades. Everyone knows about it. Nothing really changed.
You missed his point. People have measured this. Basically all plastic waste in the oceans come from Asia. This was true before these EU regulations and is also true of America where such bans don't exist.
It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.
The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.
> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.
In part, the rest of society subsidises the price of cheap disposable items by paying for their disposal and clean-up. I'd much rather that the manufacturers were made to bear that cost, though I doubt that would be practical in a global market. Probably the easiest way to implement it would be to add a cleanup charge to the price of those items (e.g. like VAT).
On a related note, I'd want any branded litter (e.g. McDonalds cartons) to be charged back to the company - it should be their responsibility to deal with the rubbish they produce and they can easily add a small charge to each order.
The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.
Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
Obamacare was passed via regular order (60 Senate votes), not reconciliation. There was a follow-up package to tweak it that passed via reconciliation in 2010, but the original bill was regular order. It's the only (very brief) window where one party has held 60 Senate seats since 1977.
"Despite Democrats holding thin majorities in both chambers during a period of intense political polarization, the 117th Congress (2021-2023) oversaw the passage of numerous significant bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Postal Service Reform Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, and Respect for Marriage Act."
All of these except the first two were bipartisan and got 60 Senate votes (or more)
It does seem like things are trending toward less public laws passing over the last decade, as well as record low time in session and other congressional activity.
Threads being over is a good thing, isn't it? Truth's been discovered, all parties agree, no more time spent on going in circles, can move on to do other, meaningful things, etc. Unless you are facebook, and you optimize on endless churn, stealing time and showing ads.
I haven't seen the original comment, but the wiki article is moronic. None of the listed example seems even bad to me, claiming that they are the devil is ridiculous. Maybe even a false flag.
The only one that actually has anything to do with "terminating cliche" is "Let's agree to disagree.". But that's just the common phrase you say after you've decided to opt out of an argument. It is not (and can't be) the cause of it, it is the consequence of it.* And it is by no means any bad, or should one avoid it.
* : something something people being able to easily leave an argument makes them do it more. But it would need a lot of stretch to argue that the possibility to go away from arguments is a net negative for humanity
edit: can we agree that the random shit you linked is 100% unrelated to the argument at hand, therefore/and definitely should not be used?
edit2: yeah, it assumes the truthness of some ridiculously nonsensical concepts, and uses them in a meta meta way, that is 2-3 steps away from the topic at hand. Much-much more annoying than anything listed. "This is the hill you want to die on, huh? Naah.. How about.." *points downwards* "..there is this hill there 14000 miles away (actually there is only ocean), how about we move this fight there?" Yeah no thx.
This ignores batching - token generation is much more efficient in batch - and I strongly suspect is itself written by AI, given the heavy use of bullets
You can't choose arbitrary bits of mantissa, because what types are allowed is defined by the underlying hardware and instruction set (PTX for Nvidia). People have done some exploration of which layers can be quantized more vs. which need to be kept in higher precision, but this is usually done post-training (at inference time) and is largely empirical.
I feel like this should be higher because of facts.
The PACT Act is perhaps the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history.[22] The PACT Act brings these changes:
- Expands and extends eligibility for VA health care for Veterans with toxic exposures and Veterans of the Vietnam, Gulf War, and post-9/11 eras
- Adds 20+ more presumptive conditions for burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic exposures
- Adds more presumptive-exposure locations for Agent Orange and radiation
- Requires VA to provide a toxic exposure screening to every Veteran enrolled in VA health care
- Helps VA improve research, staff education, and treatment related to toxic exposures
Literally things that we should do if we are going to send kids off to fight and then expose them to these things.
This is what happens when people (a lot of veterans/current army personnel, also basically all gun nuts) vote for a guy who very actively avoided serving his country in vietnam war, thanx to nepotism of his uber rich parents.
Such person will never hold veterans in high esteem, all people under him are meat bags to use and throw away once not needed and long term care for wounded is expensive, especially in US. Compare it to somebody who actually went through the experience, be it just mandatory draft or actual combat.
