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 now.
▪️High protein/low sugar snacks are now everywhere and delicious. Protein powder used to be the main option, but was cumbersome to bring away from home and tasted meh. Or the old protein bars that tasted like cardboard. Now you have Core Power at every gas station, and countless protein bars that actually taste good with minimal sugar. Back in the 80s and 90s there was almost nothing.
▪️Items like Greek yogurt used to be obscure. Now there’s dozens of options, flavors, full/reduced/no fat, etc. at Target. Vegan isn’t my thing but you can get plant-based “meat” that actually tastes good and a wide variety of other options. Also oat milk and almond milk, those basically didn’t exist in the 80s and 90s.
▪️The variety of fast food restaurants is unbelievable now. I remember in the mid 2000s when a Chipotle opened near me and I was ecstatic. Now, it doesn’t even move the needle. Any decent sized town offers practically every cuisine under the sun for takeout, and you can get it delivered if you wish. Delivery used to only be for pizza and other niche places.
▪️Specialty and artisanal products have exploded, now available in every grocery store. Used to be you had to seek out a bakery to get good or fancy bread. Or specialty shops to get special spices, hot sauces, cheeses and chocolate. Now it’s easy. Go to Total Wine and you have a huge selection of wine from almost every country.
▪️It’s easy to get pessimistic, but if anyone from the 1980s went to a Costco today they would be absolutely blown away by the abundance and quality of food. Someone from the 1950s would think today’s grocery store is a miracle. The average person can eat better than millionaires of just a few decades ago, but few appreciate it. Sad.
▪️This is a proposal that pertains only to graduate level nursing degrees, not undergraduate ones (which were never considered professional degrees). The proposal will have a 30-60 day public comment period next year, where groups can object, before the DoE will decide on it.
▪️This is about how much federal student loans someone can take out for a particular degree. The cap on graduate degrees is $100k ($20,500/yr), while a “professional degree” limit is $200k ($50k/yr).
▪️Under the new rule proposal, professional degrees include:
🔹Pharmacy
🔹Dentistry
🔹Veterinary medicine
🔹Chiropractic
🔹Law
🔹Medicine (including osteopathic medicine & podiatry)
🔹Optometry
🔹Theology
▪️The nursing degrees excluded are ones like master of science in nursing (MSN), doctor of nursing practice (DNP) and PhD in nursing. These degrees would be limited to $100k in federal student loans, like all other graduate degrees.
▪️These changes came from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s...
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
