Everyone I've come across from NZ says it like igg, so there's that one, too. Aussies have a weird vowel to it that I hear at times, too.

In my experience, it's not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there's any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says "The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it." and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us "I'm too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you're still young." She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I've seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No "Hey, let's just see what it says," just straight to deciding it's impossible, so they don't even bother to check what's going on.

If you read the article, it's defined purely in terms of income:

The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.

In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it's just $30,120/year. I don't know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you're in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it's the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.

That being said, financial struggle doesn't necessarily mean they're one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.

I hope they come through for him, because the video of a bunch of his fans being arrested and him hauled out would probably be hilarious.

I can't understand why anyone would expect most people to want to have kids. I can hardly afford to take care of myself, things look like they're only likely to get worse, and all indicators are that if I did have kids, they would be facing an even worse future when they hit adulthood. Why would I do that to them?

People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.

I'm sure it won't happen, but there's a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like "Nah, hard pass, we don't want you either."

Yeah, talking about jobs being created without any context on the types of jobs being created is meaningless. Great, there are now more part-time jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits and erratic schedules near me, just the sort of job creation I was waiting for so I could regress in my career.

I think at this point, all of us poors are just crossing our collective fingers and hoping the rent doesn't go up, we don't lose our jobs and we don't have to move for any reason. I'm hoping my landlord turns out to be immortal right now. "Affordable" units in the hood here are going for $3,000+, and you need to make less than the equivalent of minimum wage at a full-time job each to qualify for them. We stumbled our way into a three-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $2,200/month, and he hasn't raised the rent at all. The people who lived downstairs before said he charged them the same rent for close to 10 years before they moved out, so hopefully that streak will continue. Just have to worry that he'll die and whoever inherits the house comes in and jacks up the rent once they can, in which case we'd definitely need to move pretty far away to be able to afford something.

And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.

It's probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won't make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That's something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.

What is this setup that requires thousands and thousands of dollars to achieve encryption? It's just typing 'y' and hitting enter during my install, if anything. It's good general practice and the highest cost involved is a totally negligible effort to type an additional password in at boot. It's not like we were talking about rigging up some crazy kill switch that somehow physically destroy your drives at a keystroke if you think the feds have shown up.

Honestly, cover letters are something that needs to die out for most jobs, they're entirely pointless. 99% of the time, it just seems like they want you to rehash the contents of your resume and grovel a bit for the company. Screw that.

You want someone with 5 years experience in a role, my resume shows I have ten years doing that job, make your call if it's good enough to interview me or not. I'm not writing an essay about how excited I am for the opportunity to count widgets at your company, and how it's always been a dream of mine to work inventory control for a company that changes the world by ensuring stock buybacks can regularly happen by overworking and underpaying their staff.

Biggest waste of time I see recommended for applications. I don't apply to any job that requires them.