I want one of these so bad

When you say "these," you're talking about a revolution, right?

Seriously. It's like looking at a map of a battle and assuming the arrows are actual terrain features.

The topic of the original posted screenshot is about inter-generational financial advice. I'm pointing out the need for intellectual humility when talking to a younger generation, by identifying a specific cognitive bias that tends to trip people up. And because this particular bias forms through experience, it tends to apply more to people with longer experience (that is, people who are older).

I thought my original comment wasn't judgmental, and didn't even purport to claim that all (or most) old people actually fall victim to the bias, to where they're acting upon that bias. I'm just pointing out that it's something to look out for, and to keep in mind, if you're ever in the position to be giving younger generations financial advice.

Coming in here and trying to defend old people against an imagined attack is, frankly, off topic and not particularly helpful.

"Blame" means to attribute for some negative result. There's no assigning fault here, just an observation, and an explanation behind that observation.

If I said "Bob is a fucking idiot," that's not blaming Bob for anything.

So yeah, I stand by my explanation behind the observation in OP's screenshot: that people tend to draw on past experiences even when those experiences are no longer as relevant, or are even actively misleading. And that the phenomenon I describe (that not all prices inflate at the same rate or preserve the same ratios to each other) exacerbates the problem.

Please stop blaming “old people”.

I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm pointing out the mechanism that causes a portion of old people to be out of touch on these things. They rely on their own experiences to draw inferences that don't actually apply to others.

There's a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she'd be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I've seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month's rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month's salary of a factory worker.

That's the real problem with old people's sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn't possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.

The poverty line was historically measured simply by multiplying the USDA's cheapest food plan for a household to buy groceries with adequate nutrition, and multiplying by 3.

Then, in the intervening 6 decades or so, food inflation has gone up significantly slower than housing inflation, to where that simple assumption of "barely enough to eat, times 3" began systematically understating actual poverty.

Today, feeding the reference family of 4 (2 adults 20-50, 1 kid aged 6-8, 1 aged 9-11) costs $996.20 per month (as of March 2025). That's basically $12,000 per year, so the poverty line for a family of 4 is $32,150 (updated every January with September data).

Black Panther - the villain is an extremist with a point. Killmongers desire for revenge and modes go too far. He should be better, like the royal family are. Luckily Killmonger inspires the legitimate authority to make a choice to do more and be more benign. Maybe he just should have trusted in the legitimate authorities all along and stayed inside the social bounds... Which had not made change until his use of force and theft?

That basic theme and tension is present in a lot of black American discourse, of how much to work within the rules of the system and how much to actually violate the rules of the system in order to effectuate change. You can place a lot of the black civil rights icons onto the spectrum of how to use law breaking or violence as means to protect or advance black rights.

During the abolitionist era before the Civil War, David Walker called on slaves to physically overpower and literally kill their masters, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated for violent rebellion to overturn slavery.

Post-emancipation, anti-lynching advocate Ida Wells called on black families to arm themselves, to provide the protection that the law would not. Malcolm X also advocated for self defense, and predicted violence as the inevitable consequences of continued oppression of black Americans (which some took to mean he also advocated for initiating violence to advance black rights "by any means necessary," but I personally think those views ignore nuance and context).

Each of these controversial figures often had a more nonviolent contemporary who advocated for less violent means to win hearts and minds.

Black Panther's writer and director, Ryan Coogler, definitely knows all of this. He's steeped in black history, both the history itself and the history of the art and literature and discourse around those topics. Placing that conflict and tension at the center of a freaking Marvel movie, designed to be a high budget blockbuster, was basically a work of genius.

The movie itself ultimately takes the side that coexistence is a better goal than reversing the subjugation, to oppress the former oppressor. But that doesn't really much fit within the debate of this original comic, of whether the superhero movies advocate for preserving the status quo.

Their tattoos?

Yes, that's already what I'm saying. The United States celebrates its Independence Day, not any day that has anything to do with the creation of the Constitution that forms our basis of government.

They also know hurting themselves.

In the case of the US, yes.

Even then, not really.

We celebrate July 4, 1776, the creation of our national identity independent from England, not June 21, 1788, when our constitution took effect.

Well we already lost that in 2022, when it dropped back down to a $2000 annual credit you get when you do your taxes the year after, and after this year it'll drop again to $1000 unless the law is changed.

There's literally been bipartisan efforts to expand the child tax credit ($1000 per year baseline, expanded to $2000 for 2018-2025 and expiring this year, plus COVID era provisions or up to $3000 or $3600 for 2021), and the bills to do so keep dying without a vote.

If they were serious about this they'd expand the 2021 program to where parents were getting $300 checks every month, and make that permanent and indexed to inflation.

So much of the Trump presidency is announcing a new program that sounds good, but isn't even enough to make up for a program that he already killed.

Yeah, it might be public relations, but the malaria nets and polio vaccines and HIV treatments and guinea work eradication did actually save millions of lives.

It's one thing to argue that doing good doesn't make up for doing bad, but it's another thing to refuse to acknowledge the good at all.

General Milley was his first term appointee for Chair of the Joint Chiefs, and one of the first things Trump did in his second term was to strip Milley of his security clearance, security detail, and even his placement of his portrait with the other former chairs.

Jerome Powell was Trump's pick for Chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Yellen (the first time that a Fed chair had not gotten a second term, and Trump has been clamoring for the power to fire him.

Jan. 6 "rally"? Uhhhh

He's fired a bunch of lower level officials.

His pick for acting US Attorney for SDNY (basically Manhattan) was fired a few weeks later for refusing to drop charges against Eric Adams.

The acting IRS commissioner has changed over 5 times in the 90 days of this current presidency, including the most recent firing of a guy that was too close to Elon (in some kind of Bessent-Musk feud), just a few days after his appointment. The previous acting commissioner was fired for refusing to illegally share IRS data with DHS to help with immigration enforcement.

And the current turmoil in the Pentagon is the firings of people he appointed to these positions. It's a mess.

This is how politics works under an authoritarian: senior officials throwing other officials under the bus by appeal to the authoritarian's ego.

I know several people in this category: still employed by the government and subject to government ethics rules, unhireable by any company that still needs to follow that government agency's rules about conflicts of interest.