A lot of this stuff is older generations genuinely not realising that their financial intuitions are out of date.

Holidays, entertainment and clothes have all got significantly cheaper in real terms while deposits for house purchases have of course spiralled https://t.co/tw5mLja4NW

— David Algonquin (@surplustakes) February 7, 2022

That’s quite right. Back in the 1990s, when houses weren’t nearly as expensive as they are now, my grandfather said something like, “You should save up your army money and buy a house when you get out.”

I said, “Pa, I couldn’t even make a down payment on a house with what I can save in the army. Houses aren’t $8,000 anymore.” And in the 1990s, as compared to now, houses were cheap. But the last time he’d bought a house was back in the 1970s so he still thought they were 1.2x median salary, when they were already more like 2.5x even by then.

Now it’s far worse, of course. But yeah, a lot of Boomers have financial intuitions from the era when housing and medical care was quite cheap and have never updated them.

The doofus below is just an example of how you wash your hands of other people’s problems and lives while signaling your moral probity and uprightness. It’s a status signifier, too: I don’t need to be down here in the weeds interacting with the plebes; I am above all that and them.

People like Ebony are terrible humans and I understand sometimes why conservatives hate academics so much.

Faculty need to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Here are three things I've stopped:

*Driving students to research and workshop sites without a release
*Having students in my home except for program wide occasions
*One-on-one coffees or lunches; happy hour for any size group

— Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (@Ebonyteach) February 6, 2022

Sounds like a very inhumane, algorithmically-driven, impoverished world. This is exactly what liberals crave, though. They want their lives and their personal relationships decided on by an HR department. They fucking love that shit. They want to be controlled and they want to appear virtuous while using that appearance to abuse others with tacit institutional approval; oh, I know you don’t have enough money to buy food, but I’ll fight for justice while you starve! Cool, cool.

Fuck this idiot and all the people like her who want such a cold-blooded and heartless world.

Covid fear porn panickers like Ian Welsh are basically anti-vaxxers — so close to being anti-vax that the difference doesn’t really matter.