I really dislike how so many videos have clickbait or over-the-top titles or people making funny faces. That kind of lowbrow, tabloid presentation leaves me with no desire to watch the video.
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I had caught this one the other night. About the South Atlantic Anomaly (radiation hot spot).
I don't recall if I even ever heard about this before. It's a BBC presentation.
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Hey someone posted biology in here (I probably wonโt need it since Iโm doing human evolution)
But anyone who wants to learn how to do the backwards shoulder roll (this, half splits and mid way high kick are the only flexible stuff I can do also known as Iโm not flexible) only posting this in the LT school section is because I do learn this from being at school aka I do dance as a class
while the other two I learned at home by watching LT live shows and dance videos so um yeah
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I really like this New York Times guest essay. It's long but well worth a read, especially for our American audience where wealth inequality is greater. I'm putting it in the Classroom thread because a) I don't know where else to put it and b) I learned something from it.
Through the lens of a Disney vacation, the author explores how businesses increasingly focus their efforts on the extremely wealthy, who, as a demographic, have become their own mass market in America.
Modern technology and analytics capabilities have allowed companies to track consumer spending patterns and increasingly market their services to the ultra-wealthy. This leads to a class system wherein experiences which were once universal are now stratified by wealth. At Disney this translates to the average person sitting in a 120 minute line for a ride while those who can afford to stay at a Disney property; hire a guide; and pay for an expensive Lightning Pass can cut to the front.
If you've ever gotten the vague feeling that services are getting worse and more expensive despite the median income supposedly being the highest it's ever been, it's because you are no longer the target audience. Catering to the middle class used to make good business sense once upon a time, but now any business who doesn't cater to the ultra-wealthy will get left behind.
To be clear, I personally have no interest in Disney, but I think the vignette this article paints applies far beyond its narrow subject matter. It's one of my favorite reads of recent times. Gifted article. If the link expires and you want to read it leave a note here and I'll reupNote
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Groundbreaking Study Finds That Ice Can Actually Produce Electricity
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Had a busy and tiring day yesterday, I will try to read that NYT article tonight. But yeah I recall reading back in February- US consumer spending drives ~70 percent of GDP but spending is increasingly concentrated among high-income households.
- The top 10 percent now account for half of all spending, up from 36 percent over the past 30 years.
The share of Americans who are in the middle class is smaller than it used to be. In 1971, 61% of Americans lived in middle-class households. By 2023, the share had fallen to 51%, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.โ
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and...-middle-class/
While overall this looks mostly like there are fewer middle class and more wealthy, the problem is that the middle class that remains is poorer.
But the middle class has fallen behind on two key counts. The growth in income for the middle class since 1970 has not kept pace with the growth in income for the upper-income tier. And the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has plunged.โ
Note Pew's definition of "middle class" is not based on things like "do you own your own home" but on this:
In our analysis of the ACS data, โmiddle-incomeโ Americans live in households with incomes that are two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size and the cost of living in their area.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/05/...s-methodology/
This strange sliding scale is going to produce a particular result which may not match what people think of as a "middle-class lifestyle" because of how medians themselves are calculated.
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Great PEW article. I especially like this graph you linked:
That really says it all. Look how much more spending power the middle class had on the left side of the graph compared to today. They were leaps and bounds ahead of the appropriately niche market of upper-income households.
The PEW article would have you believe that, despite upper-income households seeing the largest gains, everyone is better off today:
But that's what I like so much about the NYT essay. It takes a middle-class family and shows how their experience at Disney is worse than it would have been 50 years ago. You essentially have to be a part of the ultra-wealthy to get the experience that was available to the middle class back then.Households in all income tiers had much higher incomes in 2022 than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation. But the gains for middle- and lower-income households were less than the gains for upper-income households.
Good memory. I looked it up and found a slew of articles, indeed from February. According to Marketplace:
Whereas the PEW graph above, which ends in 2022, shows the top 19% of households accounting for 48% of income, only three years later the top 10% account for 50% of spending. That is very disturbing indeed.Obviously thereโs always been a spending gap between rich and not as rich. But Brown said the chasm really started widening in 2023[...] Thatโs partly because richer households tend to own stocks and maybe the only thing rising faster than the price of eggs the past couple years has been NVIDIA shares.Note
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Read the article. It was good.
I work with some people who used to be huge Disney fans and would buy annual passes - I worked with some people in another city previously who did the same - and who loved the FastPass (free) system and the ride scheduling on their phones etc. They have stopped going completely since 2020.
As I have said privately before, I do not trust "median income adjusted for inflation" type stuff because the CPI has systemic problems in how it captures housing costs, health care costs etc.
Also to repeat myself from a long time ago, when I was young I was taught there were 5 economic classes. The ultra-poor living in total poverty (beggars and other homeless people, low end prostitutes, chronically unemployed or disabled living in fleabag hotels or rooming houses etc); working poor, who had jobs but few benefits and no job security and a low wage, typically waitresses, secretaries, farm workers, manual laborers, Walmart workers and so on; working class, who had decent trade or office or factory jobs and often owned their own homes, but often were also a few paychecks from disaster; middle class, who were either educated professionals (doctors, lawyers, architects, professors, bankers, stock brokers and bond traders etc.) or business owners (who often had significant net worth but worked very long hours in the family business) - the defining characteristic of all these people is having to work but not having a boss; and upper class whose primary attribute is not having to work at all yet maintaining an upper middle class or higher lifestyle.
Since then I have seen a relentless narrative in the US which only uses lower/middle/upper class, and even any talk of that is discouraged as "class warfare". "Lower class" is a term rarely mentioned if ever in casual conversation among workers in my experience, I think it is used primarily by statisticians, local government service providers, academics and the like. A gigantic number of people consider themselves to be middle class, when their circumstances, in my view, make them working class or working poor. But most people think they are middle class and thus must be doing alright and the system must be alright because at least they're not at the bottom, living in an abandoned building as a squatter.
I would be considered "middle class" today but in real terms I am much worse off than my working class parents, who did not go to college and had mediocre jobs. On the other hand my brothers, a surgeon and a bond trader, have a level of wealth and privilege that is hard to imagine (except of course I have seen it close up, so I don't have to imagine it). They had to work for what they have, so they were not rich, they were the essentials examples of what "middle class" used to mean. Educated professionals who worked hard and as a result, gathered significant wealth and could afford non-working wives.
And as I have mentioned before, one has to be careful anytime there are discussions of "high income" and the like. Income is a technical term and includes wages but does not include capital gains. People with income, work. In addition a lot of their wealth does not come from working and is not captured by statistics on income. If someone with a $1 million house has it appreciate to $2 million, and their stock portfolio grows from $500,000 to $1 million, those gains, whether actualized or deferred, are not captured by measurements of income. So the picture is actually worse than it appears. If you count capital gains, many of the "upper income households" have increased their wealth far more than their income alone would indicate. And there is another entire category, another invisible layer on those charts, of people wealthy enough not to work at all. I have known several such people; it is another world. The normal stresses of life are entirely absent from their consciousnesses. They too have grown much wealthier in recent years, but they do not show up on "income" charts at all, since they do not work.l i t t l es t e p h e r sNote
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Thanks for reading, chuft.
Interesting about the five vs three class model. If I understand right, you're saying the consequence of the three class model is that people get a false sense of security from being told that they are "middle class" when under the higher fidelity of the five class model they would be considered "working class" or maybe even "working poor?"
Also good point (again) about capital gains/net worth not being captured in a discussion of income. On the surface it seems like such an obvious oversight, but upon further reflection I can see that statistics on income wouldn't be very useful if they measured net worth, which tends to fluctuate by huge amounts depending on the broader market conditions.
Wealth inequality is much more exaggerated when looking at net worth rather than income. The share of the pie held by the "bottom 90%" has shrunk by over 30% since the '80s.
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Yes I am saying people by nature, our very nervous systems, are calibrated for comparison. If you stick your hand in cold water for a bit and then in room temp water it will feel warm. If you put your hand in hot water and then in room temp it will feel cold. The same with eyes and brightness etc. We detect differences rather than absolutes. People are always comparing themselves to others. If there are just three classes, and being rich is held to be an unusual privilege accorded to those born to it or the very few who create it themselves, then most people will be content to be middle class - they just want to avoid being lower class, although as I said that term is rarely if ever used in US public discourse. They may not be winning the game but they are not losing either, and they have been propagandized to believe those with money deserve it.
Even invective against the wealthy is typically expressed in attacks on "billionaires." You will rarely if ever hear attacks on people who make $200,000 to several million a year, or even those with net worths in excess of $50 million or more. Most Americans secretly think they or their children will break into that class and they feel uncomfortable with the thought they and everyone they know are quite likely to die the same class they were born. The only ones targeted for rhetoric (but never for taxes) are people worth a billion dollars or more.
The term "working class" has been removed from US discourse. If people thought they were working class they would vote differently and they would have a very different attitude towards all those wealthier than them. They would be below average, inferior, an intolerable state in a competitive culture. But middle class - well what more can you reasonably expect to be right?
It was not always this way. Look at this classic scene in Jaws between the rich dilettante Hooper and "working class hero" Quint. From the 1970s.
1:07 to 2:20
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This video is absurdly quiet but 0:42 to 1:02 it is made clear Hooper is rich and a dilettante.
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Yes alkaloids are common insect poisons in plants. They are bitter to the taste, because we evolved to sense poisons as having a bad taste. I think much of the reason people drink caffeine is because we live an unnatural lifestyle where we can't nap during the heat of the day because of work, so we have to do things to stay awake.
Another interesting case is producing estrogen-like chemicals, or chemicals which affect estrogen levels. This is done to effectively put herbivores on "birth control" to keep their numbers down so they don't eat the plants.
"Plants have physical and chemical mechanisms for defense from attack by animals. Phytochemical defenses that protect plants from attack by insects include antifeedants, insecticides, and insect growth regulators. Phytochemical options exist by which plants can modulate the fertility of the other major group of plant predators, vertebrate herbivores, and thereby reduce cumulative attacks by those herbivores. The success of such a defense depends upon phytochemical mimicry of vertebrate reproductive hormones. Phytoestrogens do mimic reproductive hormones and are proposed to be defensive substances produced by plants to modulate the fertility of herbivores."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1474615/
I first heard about this years ago when it was advised not to use, Vitamin E I think it was, or D, derived from wheat germ, as it contained estrogen or estrogen-like chemicals which the plant made to reduce fertility in herbivores. It was better to use synthetic vitamins.
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