The best way to fight it is to simply be unmarketable as a community. This is how Verizon ended up having to sell Tumblr for less than 1% of the price they paid for it like only 3 years later. If the cost outweighs the benefit, fewer people will bother trying.
Everything I’ve seen has said that Millenials and younger are spending more on experiences and less on things, but also that their purchasing power is much weaker than their parents’ was at the same age. Millenials, I think, have about half the purchasing power as the Baby Boomers did in their 30s and 40s.
Also of note that I just saw the other day is that the price of cars has jumped up about 30% since 2021.
So, not exactly what you’re looking for, but some of the stuff I’ve seen/heard that probably plays contributing factors to this.
The US is currently in its second biggest spike of COVID infections ever. At the estimated peak on the 11th, they’re expecting 2 million new infections per day. The current strain going around is supposedly different enough from the ones the vaccines up until September were designed for that it is effectively immune to those vaccinations.
COVID never left, and in fact the more recent strains have been more infectious and more severe than the original ones were, but we haven’t heard much about them because basically everybody who can be is vaccinated.
Sometimes it takes my brain a moment to realize that what you’ve said to me is actually Words and to assign a Meaning to those words, and that you haven’t just done the human equivalent of when the Roomba drives back onto the charger.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they’ve considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We’re so used to ICE cars that they’ve contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
The current strains of COVID are more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was. Up until the end of 2023, the only reason we didn’t hear about it was because the vaccines were effective against them (and the corporations want to pretend that it’s been over for several years now). The latest strain is resistant to vaccinations from before the end of September, and the US just saw the second biggest spike in COVID cases since 2019, with an estimated peak at 2 million daily new infections on the 11th.
Just because big businesses say that the pandemic is over so everybody goes back to work and buying stuff doesn’t mean that the pandemic ended. There are plenty of immune compromised people who never left quarantine because they can’t with COVID still around. The rest of society simply decided that their deaths were less important than going back to drinking in crowded bars.
On the cooking one, I also recommend cooking double portions when you can. If you can cook twice as much with minimal effort, that’s half the cleaning you have to do afterwards and half the meal planning you have to do. You get up in the morning and know that you have leftovers from dinner ready to go for lunch in the fridge. Also, rice. Rice is cheap, good for you, and incredibly flexible in what you can do with it. A rice cooker is also a great appliance to have in general. Not only is it an easy set and forget for a pot of rice, but you can do all sorts of meals in it from steaming meats and vegetables to cooking soups and even baking desserts. An air fryer is similarly flexible and great for making meals for one person. You don’t have to preheat it or anything and it doesn’t cost all the energy that a full size oven does.
It’s the Jobs, Gates, and Woz generation, but until they step out of the way we won’t get a new generation of pioneers in technology. It used to be the dream was to create the next big thing, now the dream is to make something that gets you bought up by Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
I think it’s part of what I’ve seen called the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” effect. There’s a certain group of poor folk who have been convinced that, any day now, they’re going to come into wealth (through some nebulous means and no real action of their own), and so act like they are already part of the wealthy class. Even going so far as voting for benefits for the wealthy and against their own interests, including voting for the destruction of the very social programs that support them.
Just an assumption on my part, but I think you would find a correlation between political affiliation and treatment of service industry staff when it comes to lower income people.
This is the same sort of reason why you can’t 3d print items that will come in contact with food. 3d printing leaves microscopic holes in the surface of the object, and once food gets in there, it’s never coming out and will become a breeding ground for all kinds of nasty stuff.
I have a buddy who went to a convention in Seattle right around the time they legalized it. Said you could smell it as soon as you walked outside; the entire city smelled like pot.
Just because somebody has it worse doesn’t mean that it’s okay. If you stub your toe, should you not be able to complain because I broke a bone in my forearm when I was 6 and the doctor had to snap the other one with no sedation/painkillers so it would heal correctly?
Plus, cost of living is a thing. They may have been richer than 80% of the population, but I bet their cost of living was higher than most of them as well. Minimum wage in my state is $15 USD, twice the federal minimum, and somewhere around 80% of the workforce in the state capital has at least a bachelor’s degree (the highest percentage of workforce by city in the country). Despite this, the vast majority commute from outside the city every day for work, because the cost of living inside the city is so high most people can’t afford to rent an apartment. I made more money in 2022 than the bottom 51% of Americans, and I can’t afford to move there.
Despite never really having any problem customers in my 14 or so years of working in food service, I’m right there with you. Between the stress of dealing with people day in and day out, working every holiday with no overtime or holiday pay, and being expected to do the work of 2 people and not take any vacation time because “the company can’t afford to hire more people,” I will never work retail/service again. People talk about dreaming that they’re back in high school, I dream that I’m back working there. Even 3 years after I left the industry.