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Is that the metric you want to choose to decide how happy you should be about a given situation? Comparative performance with people in the same demographic an
by AvenueIngres 10y ago
Is that the metric you want to choose to decide how happy you should be about a given situation?
Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better. Otherwise you can pretty argue ad absurdum that yeah, you aren't starving, you aren't dead so everything is good! R-r...right?
- tudorw 10y agowell, the reality is that level of optimism is required for the 800 million people living on a dollar a day, and if they can do it then perhaps those more fortunate could learn something there, as the Somalian I met said, 'nobody promised me tomorrow', or the popular 'yesterday was better than today, and today will be better than tomorrow'...
- AvenueIngres 10y agoOh please, I am barely holding back my tears. Is that unreasonable for people to improve their living conditions and be disappointed when those don't even match the ones of their parents? Or should they just accept the extreme poverty threshold as the sole upper bound required to be content about their lives.
- hueving 10y agoOk, if you go that route, don't complain about rich people wanting more and more. They are just "improving their living conditions".
- AvenueIngres 10y ago>don't complain about rich people wanting more and more. I don't. That's the basic human thing to do and harnessing that greed has lifted billions of people out of poverty.
- hueving 10y agoBut the comment you were replying to was implying that nobody is going to get sympathy because they are in the top 1% and feel like they must be in the top 0.5%.
- xenobioticants 10y agoThere's 'sweet, a promotion, I can finally afford that nice car' "greed" and then there's 'lets destroy 6000 people their jobs to make the shareholders happy so I can get a $1.000.000 bonus' greed.
- gohrt 10y agoSo, accumulating ever more amounts of personal wealth is fine as long as you aren't the the top 1%, er 0.1%, er 0.01%, er, as long as you have less than someone you know.
- ryandrake 10y agoThere has to be a line somewhere. I don't claim to be the person qualified to draw it, but society has to be willing to define it and say "Wealth accumulation on this side of the line is OVERALL healthy for promoting fair and evenly distributed prosperity, and wealth accumulation on the other side is OVERALL destructive and benefits only a small few."
- empraptor 10y agoI can't say whether it's unreasonable. Doing better than their parents and is certainly what many people have come to expect. But it seems like an unsustainable expectation at least in the absence of some revolutionary breakthrough in energy and food production. And our parents' lives don't have to serve as a measuring stick for our lives. There is no law of nature that says we deserve to live better than our parents, or in fact live in this world at all.
- tudorw 10y agowhy is it reasonable ? what right did your gene line earn to be a permanent recipient of privilege?
- ridgeguy 10y agoI think your rhetorical questions distill down to: "Is it unreasonable that societies expect conditions improve over time and act so as to bring that about"? No, I don't think that's unreasonable at all. I think it's a good value to adopt and a good goal to strive for. No guarantees of success, of course, but it's the road I wish more of us would choose.
- briandear 10y agoNone of those dollar a day people are living in London or anywhere within 2000km. You need to earn a dollar a minute to even have a hope of a basic apartment in the city. Even then it's a long-shot.
- kasey_junk 10y agoThats about 75K a month...
- xyzzy123 10y ago$60/hour is 75k/mo?
- kasey_junk 10y agoHa. I had an extra 8* in there...9600 per month.
- cmdrfred 10y ago525k a year to rent a basic apartment?
- AvenueIngres 10y agoYou don't spend a year of salary on a house, most people don't have anything close to that cashflow. And here, OP is talking about their budget which implies they are taking a mortgage on at least 15 years.
- cmdrfred 10y agoGrandparent said: >You need to earn a dollar a minute to even have a hope of a basic apartment in the city.
- xyzzy123 10y agoI guess you could choose the ridiculous interpretation that the poster meant $1/ minute, 24 x 7 x 365.... Or you could have picked the more charitable (dare I say reasonable?) interpretation that they meant earnings of $10k/mo, which is a little bit low tbh, if we're talking pre-tax dollars.
- refurb 10y agoComparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better. That seems like a great way to always be depressed about your position in life. Someone is always doing better than you are.