Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?

In my experience, it’s not a choice they’ve made. Some people are bad with money, to be sure. I’m related to a few. But they don’t typically just decide they’re going to blow August’s grocery budget on a new wardrobe; they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills. Some bad choices, some unavoidable occurrences, some terrible luck, but nothing that crosses the line to them being frivolous.

Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.

I don’t live a whole lot different than my parents did then. We have more kids than they did, but I’m in a higher earning potential career than he was. Plus, my wife and I are both employed. Yet if either of us were laid off, we would not last long on savings.

One thing I’ve learned as I get older: yeah, people are irresponsible. But the generations are pretty much the same, and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way to get clicks on your article but a bad way to actually get any meaningful insight about people. So if our generation is having more widespread problems than our parents’ generation did at this age, it’s probably not because we aren’t as responsible as they are. Something systemic probably changed.

not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc).

It’s easy to say “stabilize your finances!” but on a practical level it’s almost impossible to do when there’s no wiggle room. You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month. It’s not like there’s any money to be put into savings if you’re making $2,000 a month but putting $1,000 toward rent, since most people rather like to eat.

I’m thankful to not be in that situation, personally, but it’s not something you can just wish your way out of. Even your examples require a certain level of financial breathing room that people don’t tend to have when every dollar is spoken for. You can’t finance a truck if your DTI is already high. You can’t take CDL training or night school if you have to work two jobs just to keep food on the table.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.

But if you get into that scenario, you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever. That’s not really an option for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is,

I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.

At the end of the day, irresponsibility with money is still a problem for sure. And keeping-up-with-the-joneses is probably a problem for some people. I’m not one of them, and none of the people I know are either, but I suppose some people have that issue. In my experience, though, most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations. They’re just trying to keep their heads above water.

I disagree strongly that $1k is enough for any one emergency. My healthcare deductible is higher than that. The last two times I’ve needed car repairs, the bill was $2-3k to get the thing back on the road. If one of our appliances breaks down, we might be able to replace it for $1,000 if it’s the dryer or the dishwasher, but if it’s the fridge, that’s not close to enough.

$1,000 was plenty when I was in college back in the mid-00s, but I was single with no kids. That’s just not a realistic emergency fund in 2024, and even less so if you have a family.

Honestly, what you see isn’t familiar to me at all. The people I know are very good at being frugal and wringing the last out of every dime, not being extravagant or frivolous, etc. We have no car payment on our ten-year-old minivan, own our home, and haven’t been clothes shopping in years except to replace things that wear out, that sort of thing.

The problem isn’t budgeting; we have a budget, and we stick to it pretty well. There are very few things we could cut, and doing so might save us a hundred or so dollars per month. The problem is that inflation has eaten up every dollar from my paycheck we used to have in surplus. The problem is that my salary hasn’t kept up with inflation and nobody else around here is hiring.

Yes, you can budget yourself from the top of one financial class into the bottom of another one; and you can manage money poorly enough to drop from anywhere to the bottom of the heap. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant financial crunch happening for most people in the world right now.

Seems like everyone has their own preferred explanation as to why that’s happening (corporate greed vs. government overreach), but the fact that it’s happening seems pretty clear.

Every time I’ve ever tried it I get a droplet of water stuck in the crevice where the lens meets the frame and have to go get a towel anyway.

It, uh…makes…food…uh…come in…?

For sure, but like…I’m a middle-aged software engineer in a low cost-of-living area. My parents always had enough on one income, but we’re struggling on two.

We’re very much NOT upper class.

I kinda think that not being strapped for cash is being upper-class.

Upper-class: Always having enough

Middle-class: Always having almost enough

Lower-class: Never having enough

Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash.

Whoa. What group do you run in? Literally everyone I talk to on a daily basis is.

I actually just thought through an average day, and the people I talk to regularly. I’ve had conversations with each and every one of them over the past few months about how we’ve had to make major changes to our lifestyles in one way or another because the money is going out faster than it’s coming in. We’re all solidly middle-class, for whatever that means anymore.

So what circles are you in where not everyone is looking for every possible discount they can get? Saving $5 on groceries means I can afford another gallon and a half of gas. I can’t afford to be principled about privacy when those are the stakes. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Replicators, which are universal and basic.

Sure, though it’s not something that anyone is likely to switch OSes for.

Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.

Firefox is not eliminating MV2 extensions. You can stick with Firefox.

They said “seemingly.”

Nice. I’m planning to install it after work.

The tab previews are pretty nice. Good QOL, assuming it doesn’t kick my GPU into overdrive to make it.

Skip the sharp blow and use a microfiber. You can get them in packs of like a million from Costco and they work way better than anything else.

Yep, this is what I go with. Yeah sure, my insurance doesn’t cover them and they’re a little less durable than the ones I get from the optometrist, but I can buy four pairs and still have not equaled my deductible.

My midwestern US schooling taught me almost nothing about African or diaspora history beyond the slave trade. When I learned that there was a whole big huge continent whose history I didn’t know, I was fascinated. Simultaneously, I was awakening to the systemic injustice that Afro-folks experience in the United States, and wanted to learn as much as I could about their background and context.

Maybe so, but I would say they’re more alternatives to Firefox than any of the Chromium forks are to Chrome (except Arc, I guess) by nature of the fact that you don’t have to strip telemetry out of the Gecko codebase in order to ship a private fork.