To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.

Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.

Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.

I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.

(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)

My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.

They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.

Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.

The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.

The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.

It’s only the combo of money savings, higher quality (most steams are shit), unavailability of what I want (the best versions of several TV shows and movies are piracy exclusives, for one thing), and unified UI that make it worth it. Start chipping away at those, and it gets not-worth-it pretty fast. Apple tried with their unified streaming service UI on Apple TV, but several big players who hate their paying customers refused to implement it, so that’s a dud.

Hell, I in-fact still pay for like five streaming services despite all the above. I’d gladly pay one higher bill if it let me stop fussing with this crap.

If it’s unethical, it’s somewhere around running a stoplight that’s plainly not registering your presence and hasn’t turned for ten full minutes, with perfect straight mile-long views either way and not a car or person in sight. Not really unethical at all.

Docker minus the giant well-populated well-maintained image library would be almost useless to me.

[edit] one daemon improved immeasurably by Docker is Samba, of all things. The invocations are a little arcane, but once you’ve got them figured out it’s one extra option line to add a user, one line to add a share, repeat as needed. So very much better than relying on distro-magic to make it work, or, god forbid, trying to configure it manually with some config file that ends up inexplicably having no portability, or is silently ignored despite the claims of the docs, or doesn’t work at all because there’s some option commented out by default that definitely shouldn’t be. Docker forced them to finally make the “I just want to share a damn directory, to these users, either read only or read-write” use case, which is probably the vast majority of use of Samba, straightforward, concise, and reliable to configure.

Or that one short story about discovering the light of another star was about to reach us… and getting the predictions of its intensity very wrong.