▪️They’re resurrecting this false meme from last year, when the “10 year challenge” meme was popular. I’ll post the original bust below, but I’ll note the current Redfin estimate is $383K, which has gone up since last year, but still way below $550k (also the meme cites 2022).
▪️This meme currently has over 340K likes on Twitter & has been widely shared elsewhere. It presents this house like it was sold for these prices in 2012 & 2022, but is actually complete fiction, like someone just picked a random picture of a house and fabricated a price.
▪️This particular house was hard to find, reverse image searches brought up just a few sites, where this house was used as a generic example of modern American ranch-style architecture. Like here:
https://architecturestyles.org/post-war-modern/
▪️I nearly gave up, but in a caption one site mentioned it was in Des Peres, near St. Louis, MO. If you look closely at the original photo, you can see “eleven hundred and nine” written above the garage.
▪️It was a long shot without the street, but I tried a search for “Des Peres 1109 ranch style home” and bam, it came up on Trulia!
https://www.trulia.com/p/mo/saint-louis/1109-cameo-ct-saint-louis-mo-63131--2060091681
▪️It’s 3 bd 2 ba, 1478 sq ft. It was last sold in Aug 2008 for $220K. According to Redfin it’s estimated at $322K, Trulia & Zillow put it at $337K ($290-385K range) and it was assessed for property taxes at $296,400 in 2020.
https://www.redfin.com/MO/Des-Peres/1109-Cameo-Ct-63131/home/93514369
▪️I don’t know what is was worth in 2012, as it wasn’t for sale then, but in 14 years it went from ~$220K-330K. If it went up exactly with price inflation it would be $280K, so it certainly exceeded that, but not the more than 3X in 10 years that this meme suggests.
▪️Meanwhile, average hourly earnings were $21.70/hr in Aug 2008, $23.24/hr in 2012 and $31.31/hr today. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out no one earns the Federal min wage. Just 0.8% of full-time workers earn at or below it, and most of those are in leisure & hospitality that get tips in addition. It makes no sense to use it as a metric for any price, especially home prices.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
▪️To pre-empt the objections that this meme still makes a valid point housing has gone up, ok. But these numbers are pure fiction, they don’t accurately represent the change in this house, the median US price, median St. Louis price, nothing. Why not find an actual 10 yr home price instead of making it up? I guess the answer is because you can get 340K likes, so who cares?
So many of these right wing accounts are just whiners now, this is a diatribe about automatic sinks and towels, the horror! As I explained in a prior post, most of the newer terminals have great bathrooms, some now have completely private stalls and plenty of them. The worst and most crowded airport bathrooms are invariably found in aging terminals that are decades old. It’s a reminder that airports were usually drab and uncomfortable.
I think the heyday of the air hand-dryers was like 15-20 years ago, where often you couldn’t find real towels. Now you can at least usually get real paper towels in airport bathrooms. Remember those old cloth roller towels that would go in a loop and somehow “clean” themselves? Yuck! Public bathrooms have always been gross, it seems some are deliberately having selective memories.
Airport food and drinks were always expensive, but now practically everyone brings those huge cooler flasks with them and fills them up. So not sure what he means that ...
I first critiqued this terrible take by looking at how food has actually improved substantially. Even though I said the same could be done in every category, people said “you’re only doing food.” So let’s do air travel and see why it’s not gotten better, not worse.
▪️Aircraft have greatly improved. Just 15-20 years ago, many domestic routes (~15%) were flown by turboprops like the Brasilia, Dash 8 or Saab. Now, almost everything is in jets, and most aircraft have WiFi. Some even have Starlink, where you probably have faster WiFi than your home. Most major airlines offer dozens or hundreds of movies and shows to watch.
▪️Newer designs like the 787 have lower cabin altitudes and improved humidity, which make a huge difference in passenger comfort on long haul flights. The first/business class international market has gotten very competitive globally, with many carriers offering excellent service and amenities. Pods, suites, showers, etc. Coach still sucks but is dramatically cheaper ...
This is the complete opposite of an empirical fact. The right has now joined the left in being pessimistic about the modern world and completely unappreciative of the amazing abundance we now have. I’ll just focus on food here, but you could do it for almost every category.
▪️Fresh produce used to be available only in season. In the winter it was canned or frozen. People used to send fruit for Christmas gifts, it was that much of a luxury good. Now, you can get giant, sweet berries year around in every grocery store. Corn on the cob in February. Not to mention once rare items like dragon fruit, heirloom tomatoes or baby bok choy.
▪️If you didn’t live on the coast, seafood was either not available, frozen, or extremely expensive. If you lived in the Midwest and traveled to coastal locales you would quite literally be able to eat food you had never seen. Salmon has become much more abundant and accessible. You can get fresh ahi at Walmart today. Sushi and oyster bars exist everywhere ...
