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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   23459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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The online discourse, I've been watching this week is the $20 Burrito. As a super TLDR; this is an intra-right argument that got started by one conservative saying young conservatives are upset about food affordability, and gave an offhand example about '$20 burritos'. The response was a combination of:

Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.

The response to the response is that this is a losing message to one's own side, avoids accountability for losing focus on why 2024 went Trump, and suspiciously aligned to Iran war support.

Before I address that specifically, a little about my personal burrito.

I am as close to a controlled middleclass experiment as possible.

I live in the same zipcode I grew up in; my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to. I work in the same industry as my father. I aspire to give my family the same life I grew up with. I can't live the life my parents lived.

In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.

My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.

Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.

While being considerably more successful than my father in my career, I financially struggle to same life he lived.

  • I am sure someone could sit down and make the math math. I am sure Caleb Hammer could compare the monthly finances and find things to yell at me about.
  • I am sure you can make arguments about why this city is more expensive, and how I could make out better if I moved. But I didn't ask for that. I don't reap the benefits of my home becoming less affordable.
  • Arguments about lifestyle creep fall deaf when food, housing, and healthcare the big 3 cost considerably more. OK my TV is bigger. I have a phone. fuck that.
  • Finally we can make the argument that I don't have any fundamental 'right' to that life, and this is where the burrito debate comes in.

I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.

Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.

This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'

The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war

My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.

By modern standards, that is a tremendous success. I know you're comparing yourself to your father, but you and your wife have had three times as many children as the average US couple. And more than twice as many as the average human on the planet.

I'm hoping for four if the stars align.

By modern standards, that is a tremendous success. I know you're comparing yourself to your father, but you and your wife have had three times as many children as the average US couple. And more than twice as many as the average human on the planet.

This just reinforces his point though. He is way more successful than the average, who generally want to have more children than they actually have, yet he still fails to match his parents.

People like me have been predicting far worse inflation for... decades. I'm fond of the quip "Peter Schiff has successfully predicted 20 of the last 2 recessions!" But hey, if the return is big enough; I'm not sure it is. Anyway, End the Fed!

Hopefully I am wrong, and I have been for decades, but I still think the time is coming where the piper will need to be paid. More and more I think it will be a slow malaise spiraling as we make worse self-reinforcing populist/socialist policy changes rather than a relatively short- to mid-term hyperinflation shock.

Hopefully the US can keep growing at a faster pace than we accumulate debt, maybe AI saves us. While food prices are going up (wages have been as well), food price inflation is still well within the bounds of frugality. So what the food discourse indicates to me - I already believed this - is that a bunch of people on the "right" don't have what it takes for real austerity. If you're throwing a tantrum over a hiccup in beef prices - a primarily example I see of "Oh you don't think it's that bad?! LOOK AT THE PRICE OF BEEF" - you don't have what it takes do do what's necessary to really address these issues, and removing 50 to 100 million people from the country isn't feasible and probably won't actually fix the problems.

nicknow

We can all agree inflation is an economic problem AND also agree that we each must take responsibility for what we actually control, and change our behavior accordingly. That just pisses off people that can’t understand that the cards you are dealt may be unfair (societal problem) but you still have to play them best you can (personal responsibility.)

wayne

Often, where you should be fighting tooth and nail in the political arena to reject intolerable conditions, you should simultaneously as an individual resign yourself to reality as it currently exists and more or less just get on with it as best you can. There may be political conditions in which it’s just literally impossible for this or that group to get ahead, but that’s not true of any group in the United States of America in 2025, whatever real challenges exist.

Hopefully the US can keep growing at a faster pace than we accumulate debt

Debt to GDP has been going up fairly uniformly and quickly since 2001? Your growth isn't outrunning debt accumulation.

Hopefully the USA can the future*

"Peter Schiff has successfully predicted 2 of the last 20 recessions!"

A good quip but you flipped the numbers.

I don't reap the benefits of my home becoming less affordable

Do you not? The expected comeback is that you get a Better Neighborhood, have access to a better school for your kids, and also there are home equity loans and HELOCs.

More importantly, the GDP per capita goes up. As this anecdote illustrates, Americans can get 1000x more Services value per capita (in this case ambulance ride-value) than Chinese. This enables higher wages to everyone, more consumption (eg of burritos), continued investment into R&D, even bigger services economy, and probably the business case of your software company too.

The burrito is just a textbook case of Baumol effect.

Yeah. Massive Baumol effect makes arguing about relative GDP per capita frequently silly. QOL in most developed countries is not 4x the QOL that it is in upper-middle tier countries, despite the pay disparity. There are certainly poor countries in the world, but even then a rising tide in technology and developed world investments means that a lot of the benefits in living conditions have spread down the stack.

That's the difficult part of anecdotes, that people's mileages may vary.

While in different industries, both I work and my father worked in front-office white-collar roles. My parents (well, my father) had to pay off a mortgage on my childhood home, which was a nice one in a nice place. If I sold some ETFs I could buy my childhood home in cash today—twice over—even though it has substantially increased in price from the time I was a kid, as it was in and perhaps still is in a booming area.

Electronics are obviously a given, but looking back on childhood photos (or before they had me), it's rather stark that even my furniture is nicer-looking than what my parents had when they were around my age. I don't think either of my parents would had been aware of a foodstuff known as a "burrito" at my current age.

At the same time, both my parents and I—and our nuclear and extended family in general—concur on a vibes-based front that there may be some sort of perceived quality of life decrease for young people that's not wholly captured in statistics. However, we're generally optimistic for the Millenial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha future going forward, although competition for white-collar jobs may be increasingly stiff (but it has always been increasingly stiff from the time my parents/uncles/aunts/older cousins were young).

Arguments about lifestyle creep fall deaf when food, housing, and healthcare the big 3 cost considerably more.

As an aside, the big 3 are housing, healthcare, and transportation. Food is not a trivial cost, but it comes in well behind those items for most households. The very specific subject of burrito discourse really is straight up lifestyle creep, but let's leave it aside, since I think your point is more about the general subject of affordability and why political leaders (particularly GOP leaders) don't seem to rate it highly.

The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war

Why would they act any differently? You're probably not going to vote for the Dems in November, and even if you are, the vast majority of their supporters consider it unthinkable. The style of American conservative politics has increasingly become a collectivist one in which vertical obligations only flow upwards. You owe your country (and, by extension, conservative political and economic elites) uncritical, unflinching loyalty. You are owed nothing (especially not by your betters).

In general, GOP leadership does not care about middle class affordability issues. And I do not mean that in a cynical sense where all pols are frauds who only pretend to care about things as a means to scam votes from the gullible. That does happen, but most politicians have real preferences and political goals, and they're usually not particularly coy about them. Republican political leaders tend to be conservative culture warriors (and thus largely uninterested in affordability except instrumentally), pro-business gentry (mostly putting them on the opposite side from the middle class, whom they would like to pay less, charge more, and work harder), or National Power types (who are primarily focused on international competition, not the welfare of citizens). Trump himself may have run on affordability in a rhetorical sense, but most of his banner policy ideas were things that were going to make things more, not less expensive.

To be a little charitable to the politicians, affordability-minded middle class voters often have incoherent preferences. They hate inflation, but they also hate high interest rates. They want housing to be cheap, but they want their house to appreciate in value. They hate how the US healthcare system works, but are highly skeptical of any changes. They want public services but hate taxes... Sometimes this is different subgroups with different preferences, but frequently it's not, and politicians find it safer and easier to do nothing than upset voters by trying to fix things. It is not some mystery why housing keeps getting more expensive, for example, but the actual solutions are widely unpopular.

edit: I misremembered the balance of household expenses

The big three are housing, healthcare, and transportation. Food is not a trivial cost, but it comes in well behind those items for most households.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey indicates otherwise. For USAian consumer units (households) in the middle quintile of income before taxes:

Expense categoryProportion of total expenses (%)
Food14
•Food at home9
Housing⁎36
•Shelter⁎23
Transportation17
Healthcare9

⁎As defined in this dataset, "shelter" includes rent, mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance, home insurance, etc. and is what a layman probably means when he says housing, while "housing" includes not just shelter but also utilities, housekeeping supplies, furniture, appliances, etc.

I stand corrected. I'm not super interested in quibbling about the specific numbers, since the point is taken that food is higher than I recalled and healthcare lower, but I would at least note that USDA estimates put food expenses at ~10% of household income. They are looking at disposable income, however, which may factor into the difference. I suspect healthcare may loom larger because by and larger you're not going to have a really bad year where your food costs shoot up an order of magnitude.

One of the best analyses of this phenomenon that I have read is this one by Johann Kurtz: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

His main thesis:

I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.

Some of these negative changes stand out in the normal datasets, while some do not, for reasons I will explain. In short, what has happened is that previous generations were able to take advantage of highly valuable and productive social capital as well as their exploding financial capital to move through each of these life stages in a fiscally efficient manner. (Don’t worry: I will define what I mean by social capital and back my argument with data).

Our current young, lacking access to this social capital, must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment — capital that they do not have. We see this clearly in the data on schooling, homeownership, and family formation.

Sometimes I feel like the data is capturing an accurate average of a highly lumpy picture.

My extended family is scattered to the four winds. The difference in outcomes in different circumstances and different regions is shocking.

The lucky ones in Northern Virginia are doing great. They all have six figure government-adjacent jobs and they bought homes before the real estate market exploded. Their retirement funds are bursting at the seams and their hardest decisions are whether Becky is taking dance lessons or violin lessons this year. The unlucky ones in Northern Virginia either live in run down shitty rentals an hour and a half away from their jobs that cost an increasing fraction of their paycheck every year, or they're reaching the point where they have to sell their farms.

The lucky ones in Pennsylvania are doing great. They work in healthcare or education and they bought their homes before the real estate market exploded. I don't think they could get fired unless they committed a felony on the clock. The unlucky ones in Pennsylvania can't hold down a decent job because the plants keep closing, and several have had to sell their homes because they have to desperately move around to follow the work. The skyrocketing cost of rent makes it harder and harder every year.

I have no lucky relatives in Kentucky. They're all doing their best to not starve to death as they try to recover from the floods a few years ago. There's very little work. The environment is hard on cars. It's reaching the point where they can't even afford to move out of the area. Drugs are a common escape.

I don't have any more relatives in West Virginia. They're all dead. The deaths over the last five years were not due to natural causes.

I don't disagree with @iprayiam3. I also don't disagree with all the people telling him that he's wrong because Actually Look at Line - Line Go Up. Line Definitely Go Up. I've read the same graphs as everybody else. I can't disagree with the direction that Line Going.

On the other hand, it feels like the truth of the average person doing better is obscuring another, separate truth, which is that the American middle class lifestyle is more precarious than ever, and a concerning number of people are falling through the cracks. It points to a structural weakness in our country that troubles me, both because it's a structural weakness and because so many people choose to use Line Going Up to avoid even discussing it.

My cousin who died of a fentanyl overdose after he got hurt in a forklift accident doesn't give a shit about how big his TV is. His widow doesn't really care either.

My cousin who's working 60 hours a week at three jobs just to make rent is doing his best. He's working far harder than I do. When my uncle smugly tells him that he "should invest in them mutual funds, boy", he's missing the entire damned point.

I'm reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos

When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It doesn't mean you just slavishly follow the anecdotes, then. It means you go examine the data. It's usually not that the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not collecting the right thing. If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time, your metrics look like they shouldn't be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.

Clearly, a lot of people think something is wrong in this country. It's easy to suggest that the people complaining are retarded, lazy, and wrong. After all, Line Going Up! Look at Line! If Line Go Up, why aren't you Going Up along with aforementioned Line? The thing is, that's exactly what the quote above is trying to warn us about. But if that's true, what the hell is actually wrong? What data are we missing that prevents us from getting a clearer picture?

I have some thoughts. I don't know if they're complete, or even correct, but I want to get them down.

One thing I've mentioned repeatedly above is the cost of housing. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it really seems like housing instability has an outsized psychological impact. It also tends to be the biggest single monthly cost most people have, so even a small percentile increase tends to be a big bottom line number.

At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places where a person can exist in public for extended periods without a financial transaction involved. This goes back to the $20 burrito. Maybe it's not universal, but for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down. Small corner bars dying along with their owners and getting replaced by Another Goddamned Chipotle. You can't shoot darts at a Chipotle on a Friday night. You can't even linger for too long before they ask you to buy another burrito. The end result is that if you want to be out of your house, you're either deep in the woods, or you're spending money on another goddamned burrito in a way that simply didn't happen 20 years ago.

On top of that, job security is getting worse. Layoffs used to be the kind of thing that would get an executive fired, because it meant that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their business and client demand. Nowadays layoffs are just good clean fun that will probably result in the bosses getting a bonus. It was a lot easier to have a positive outlook about a meagre lifestyle if you know it represented a solid floor. That's less true in the year of our Lord 2026.

Am I ignoring the fact that Line Go Up? No, I am not. In fact, I'm one of the lucky ones. I have been able to capture some of the Upness of Line, and I'm doing better than I ever expected to do in my life as a result.

At the same time, the fact that this discussion is even happening suggests that there's something wrong that we're not capturing. When people say "It's just lifestyle creep," I'm reminded of the line from Chernobyl when Dyatlov says "3.6 Roentgen. Not great - not terrible". He's making decisions based on the readings while simultaneously not considering the limitations of those readings, and coming to a specious conclusion as a result.

Keep harping on Line and its Up at your peril. Calling people lazy and retarded and wrong feels good in the short term, but it feels like it's dangerously close to shooting the messenger. The fact that they're not communicating it in clear, quantifiable terms doesn't mean there's nothing there.

Regarding the "Line" and whether it is going "Up", inflation-adjusted income really did hit a turning point post-pandemic. After years of consistent real income growth in Obama 2 and Trump 1, things have stagnated since the end of pandemic, worse since mid-2025. To the extent that affordability issues are a recent development, they are quite visible in consumer data. Neoliberalism may have had its issues, but it really was an aggregate income growth machine; the new paradigms do not appear to have solved any of the issues and are not driving top-line income growth.

Great post. Tangentially,

for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down.

Good. Took my kids to one once. Nothing like when I was young. The homeless people aside, the whole place was a temple of wokeness and the books belonged in a bonfire. I'm aghast that my tax money is going to support this establishment, just as I am when I drive past the local elementary school and see 'progress' flags and coded anti-white messaging in the wall murals. And that's before we get to all the trans stuff in both.

Down with all of it, I say. I'd pay twice as much in the relevant taxes to be rid of them. If I could send the people who've been running them to prison I'd do that too.

I think the two complaints are actually intrinsically related. Libraries are getting worse because of lack of public funding, support, and use. They're getting less funding, support, and use because their woke administrators use them as instruments of indoctrination and refuse to enforce order on the homeless. It's a vicious cycle where people like you are (rightfully) happy to see the entire institution burn because leftists have hijacked the public trust. We replace librarians with PTA-style parents associations, and we enforce a strict dress code with armed security at the doors, and instantly the public libraries return to their former glory.

Even as a card-carrying (well, Cato pocket constitution-carrying) libertarian, I think public libraries are an institution worth trying to save. Certainly much moreso than the universities.

To be fair, you do live in San Francisco.

Thankfully not. I just work there occasionally.

It's tragic. Local libraries were a refuge for me growing up. Learning that there was a place with air conditioning and more books than I could ever read, for free, only an hour and a half's walk away, was one of the most mind-blowing things that ever happened to me.

If this is what you want out of libraries, they are still amazing. It's the internet cafe sections with the homeless issues, in my experience.

It sounds like what @birb_cromble wants is a place where kids with the same disposition to reading as he had growing up could go, possibly unattended, for hours at a time. A library which has an internet cafe section at all and/or which doesn't studiously bar people who cause the homeless-in-libraries type issues will not be that place.

Edit: and that's before considering some of the changes to the stocked books and their arrangement and presentation.

Yeah, we used to go every week and I'd come home with like 8 books and read half of them. Wish my kids could have that experience.

One daughter is now going to a private school that has its own pretty good library, though they only go up through grade 8, so unfortunately limited for someone at her reading level.

One thing I've mentioned repeatedly above is the cost of housing

Yeah, my sense is that that is a big factor. I have no statistics to back this up, but I live in the Northeast United States and my sense is that a lot of the new single family houses being built in the suburbs are very very far from the cities with the jobs. So that the average price of a house is misleading. And in fact, one of the results of building more housing far away from the city is that road congestion increases, arguably raising the premium for housing which is more convenient to the city.

I would have predicted that work from home would fix this problem, but at least for now, the situation seems pretty lousy.

Anyway, I think it's also worth noting that this is a factor which seems to have changed considerably over time. In the 1970s, notwithstanding the high interest rates, it was possible to buy a single family residence in the inner suburbs of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. on a much lower income than what is required today, relatively speaking. Since then, it seems like things have really gone downhill. (Or uphill, if you happen to have bought a house decades ago.)

Newly constructed homes are also quite a bit bigger than they used to be, particularly in the Northeast.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ

The higher cost of red tape means the fixed costs of development are higher and push builders into building larger, more costly homes to cover the higher fixed costs.

Newly constructed homes are also quite a bit bigger than they used to be, particularly in the Northeast.

I agree with this based on my general observations.

The higher cost of red tape means the fixed costs of development are higher and push builders into building larger, more costly homes to cover the higher fixed costs

Well suppose you buy a lot in a fancy suburb for $1.5 million; build some monstrous house for another $1.5 million, and sell the whole thing for $3.5 million, netting you a $500k profit (less the interest on your financing). How much of the money involved went into red tape? And how much would have been spent on the equivalent deal from 30 years ago?

The last time I saw any anecdotes about this was at leasr 6 years ago. From builders, it cost about $250k per lot after buying to buy a large parcel to have the legal right to build a subdivision.

If you buy a lot, the price likely already includes most of the cost. Its buying lots of land and getting the rights to build more than one home that is expensive.

The last time I saw any anecdotes about this was at leasr 6 years ago. From builders, it cost about $250k per lot after buying to buy a large parcel to have the legal right to build a subdivision.

That sounds high to me. Perhaps they are including the cost of building access roads; sewer connections; municipal water connections; etc.

If you buy a lot, the price likely already includes most of the cost.

And yet single lot developers are building much bigger houses nowadays than in the past. Which makes me think that there is much more in play than just the cost of red tape.

Yes, they were including all of those costs.

Yes, they were including all of those costs.

In that case, I would disagree with attributing $250,000 to "red tape." When you build a house you need to have a sewer hookup; water; electricity; and so on. I suppose one could argue that these things are legal requirements and therefore count as "red tape," but realistically who is going to buy a new house in a subdivision if there is no water, sewer, electricity, or road access?

Also, I am pretty sure that these things have been required for decades in new subdivisions.

More comments

One thing Austin did was cut the minimum lot size for single family home. Less lawn but you can build 3 times the number of homes. Makes sense that supply increases and prices decreases.

  1. https://austinmonitor.com/stories/2024/05/austin-cuts-minimum-lot-size-by-more-than-a-third-requiring-less-land-to-build-a-home/
  2. I first learnt about it when the mayor talked to Bloomberg news: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNwx1Z_8vHw?is=Qpk96aObhARYtV63

One thing Austin did was cut the minimum lot size for single family home. Less lawn but you can build 3 times the number of homes. Makes sense that supply increases and prices decreases.

I agree that this would make sense, in the sense that permitting more units of housing to be built would be expected to result in a reduction in price per unit. Of course, whether this is good public policy is a separate question. And it doesn't seem like an efficient cause of the explosion in prices for single family houses.

More comments

The thing is it’s worse than what you’re bringing to light, because this problem is endemic to that whole area and it exists even beyond the whole housing market.

We can stick with the northeast, per your reference class. Take housing out of it for instance. How many people do you think have ever actually tried to build a new business in NYC? Not that I have, but there’s a good body of literature people can read on this and it’s clear that from the people that have, the problem of the business side of things looks very similar to the problem ordinary citizens have of it.

For most people, unless you’ve directly witnessed/experienced it, you just would not believe the regulatory/bureaucratic/tax/economic nightmare doing business in NYC is. Just basic things like getting permits can take months to years due to incompetence. And everything has gigantic fees associated with it. Building in NYC is at least 75% more expensive than in NY/CT, just due to fees, taxes and lost time. By itself NYC as a standalone city is uncompetitive and nobody would want to start businesses without some sort of inducement (here’s where we get to policy…)

NYC itself is an archaic disaster of a regulatory/tax regime and this isn’t even debatable. They’ve been the paradigmatic case for years in political discourse when it comes to the poster boy for dysfunctional politics. For example, their zoning and regulatory laws haven't been overhauled since 1963. Just think about how much the city has changed since then. Back in the 80s/90s, the city decided to try and do something about it. So they created entities like the NYBDC and the ESDF (and also others) that have the ability to waive fees, freeze taxes, stop unnecessary overregulation and fast track permitting, etc. just reflect on that. NYC is so messed up, that they’ve created government entities to fight off other government entities. And the worst part about it is you simply can’t begin anew and start all over.

So when the average person complains that Amazon or some other corporation is getting massive tax breaks; that’s an incomplete picture of reality. NYC itself as a whole is uncompetitive, and the NYBDC/CoC/ESDF/etc., in addition to the city of NYC itself waives fees, permits, taxes, and everything they can to make NYC economically competitive at any level. This is all aimed at trying to level the playing field, which is where it should start to begin with.

You can always make the argument if you want that we shouldn't have to give these giant incentives or giveaways to 'lure' companies in. But I think we should already have a tax/regulatory framework in place that makes the city competitive. The reason these policies exist in the first place is because of an enormous failure of the state to create an environment that is conducive to investment.

If you want to look at the mechanics of how this happens on the ground, it goes a little something like this… About a decade or so ago, I remember they were re-zoning a fairly large area in NYC. Investors go in and perform an analysis of things. They identify two buildings adjacent to one another that are for sale. One’s vacant and the other has a struggling business that's just skirting by, breaking even. There's 10 employees, and the two properties when combined get you say $70K year in all taxes (this includes property, payroll, your business license, etc.). So you want to buy the buildings and put in approximately $10 million into development. In just the first year alone, you would be projected to pay $1 million in all taxes and $750k in the second year, etc.; and on top of that, the permitting process could take up to two years. So right there, that’s a deal breaker, and under those terms, you’d just walk away leaving the city/state to collect $70k in taxes. So what happens instead is you work with the city to cap your liability at $700k in the first year and $500k in years 2-10; and additionally they’re expediting all the permitting and sign offs for you. (And don't forget that the $10 million is taxable to the construction companies that are building this thing, and the state gets a cut of that too…)

So now keep going and look at your analysis from the other side. You could look at this and say "This is bullshit! You’re getting a $3 million tax break!" (Which again is $300k in year one and $250k in 2-10) And technically you’re not wrong… Incidentally, that would be the obvious headline you’d see ran all across the news: "Rich assholes get an obscene $3 million tax break at the expense of the people!" And people would rage until they had an aneurysm over this and politicians would say idiotic populist diatribe about it. But that would be an incomplete picture which is so misleading to the public that it’s more analogous to lying than being mistaken.

Now go back to the analysis. Look at what the city is getting… From the status quo, they’re getting a whopping $70k a year from the current arrangement (which is $700k over 10 years) in all-source tax revenue. But look at your project: with the tax breaks, the city is now getting $5.2 million in taxes over ten years (that's an increase of $4.5 million). If an average teacher's annual salary is $75k, then that's nine new teachers that are funded by this project. And this is exactly the negotiations that are had at the local level when you are pitching your project to the city; "even with the tax breaks, we are paying $X millions in taxes versus the $Y dollars you are getting at present." And don’t forget that the project is going to hire X amount of people compared to the Y amount today.

Of course you can still disagree if you want, but the reality is NYC is likely better off with X corporation + tax breaks, instead of X corporation goes to Boston.

I don’t work in this industry and never will. It’s extremely hard, I don’t want to deal the personalities involved; and I intensely hate it with the fury of 49 crackheads, but members of my extended family own and have leased land to local businesses and they’ve negotiated with corporations and local bureaucrats before where I’m from; so I’ve heard a lot of these stories and I’ve been with them when I was younger and watched them do this. Now just imagine how much harder this all is in a place like NYC. This is a city where business is ran on thuggery and gangsterism on steroids. It’s why people like Andrew Yang never had a chance in hell there. He didn’t understand the topology of power and in all honesty, Andrew Yang is a really nice and likable guy. That will get you absolutely crushed and ran right over in a place like that. Bloomberg was able to hold it down as mayor because he was a fucking bulldozer of a personality. If you remember back in 2008 when Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs went to Warren Buffett because they desperately needed the liquidity to survive the shocks from the crisis, one of the first things they did immediately after it was over was to scramble to pay him back to get him off their credit stack; because it’s well known that behind the “Oracle of Omaha” facade to the masses that you’d get from watching an interview with him on Yahoo Finance, behind the scenes he’s an absolutely ruthless and cutthroat asshole; the happy grandfather vibe is just marketing to the public. That’s the kind of personality you need to run a place like that and fix these problems. You’re dealing with people like this everywhere.

The work is extremely hard from the business side and if it’s difficult on that side you can be damn sure that the “rational voter” really is a myth. Other sources (1, 2).

Take housing out of it for instance. How many people do you think have ever actually tried to build a new business in NYC? Not that I have, but there’s a good body of literature people can read on this and it’s clear that from the people that have, the problem of the business side of things looks very similar to the problem ordinary citizens have of it.

I'm not an economist, but assuming that NYC is hostile to new businesses, it seems to me that this would help ameliorate the housing issue I mentioned. Because it means that more people will start businesses in Stamford, Morristown, White Plains, Garden City, and so on. All cities which are far more easily accessible from distant suburbs.

So I would argue that the problem is not so much that NYC is a bad place to start a business, but actually the opposite -- that it's too great a place to start a business. That notwithstanding the extra taxes, the regulatory hurdles, the crime, and so on, NYC offers a huge array of advantages.

my sense is that a lot of the new single family houses being built in the suburbs are very very far from the cities with the jobs

Yes, because the places closer in are already occupied. It's worse in places with Urban Growth Boundaries; you can't build closer in because it's occupied and you can't build further out because that's to be left as a playground for the planners. Then YIMBYs come in and want to replace single-family homes with apartments.

Yes, because the places closer in are already occupied. It's worse in places with Urban Growth Boundaries; you can't build closer in because it's occupied and you can't build further out because that's to be left as a playground for the planners. Then YIMBYs come in and want to replace single-family homes with apartments.

Ok, well anyway you slice it, I think it's a significant part of the reason young people today often feel poorer than their parents. Economic activity and job growth has concentrated in 5 or 10 big cities while at the same time, there's basically the same number of single family houses in locations convenient to those cities. So it's become much more expensive for a young family to get a basic 3-bedroom house in a nice suburb. Anyway, that's my personal theory, I have no data to back it up.

I live in the same zipcode I grew up in

By any chance is it a suburb of a large city? My sense is that there has been an explosion in the price of housing which is convenient to large cities.

I'm not sure what to say about food, except that I think people tend to eat a lot more prepared foods and restaurant foods than they did back in the 1970s.

The typical economically right wing explanation for the rising cost of living would be that the government is spending beyond its means, resulting in money printing and inflation which ultimately enrich those connected to the government at the expense of the broader public.

But obviously Ben Shapiro and Dan Crenshaw can't make an argument like that when they're trying to justify spending untold billions on a wildly unpopular war after Trump explicitly ran on "no new wars".

Consequently, they're reduced to playing dumb, either mildly dumb by pretending it's all about the cost of food vis-a-vis other expenses or downright retarded by pretending that the issue is about literal $20 burritos and going "heh, don't you know burritos aren't actually $20". They're basically in the same position as Biden was four years ago; they can pretend nothing is wrong or they can blame the last guy. Neither is likely to work.

Consequently, they're reduced to playing dumb, either mildly dumb by pretending it's all about the cost of food vis-a-vis other expenses or downright retarded by pretending that the issue is about literal $20 burritos and going "heh, don't you know burritos aren't actually $20". They're basically in the same position as Biden was four years ago; they can pretend nothing is wrong or they can blame the last guy. Neither is likely to work.

As I've said countless times, the main issue of 2024 was prices. Fair or not, that's what it was, and what it continues to be. The no 1 complaint I constantly saw was "Bidenflation". The no 1 sign I saw for Trump was the "Trump low prices, Kamala high prices" one. The most successful Trump ad buy was literally portraying Harris as an idealogical obsessive concerned over unimportant culture war fights (trans people in prisons) over the everyday issues the typical American deals with (prices/jobs/etc).

So what lesson was taken away from this? Nothing. Trump has pressed multiple "slow down the economy" buttons that most presidents would never push with his tariff nonsense and record pace losing war, while spending his time about the same things the typical American doesn't really give a shit about like the reflecting pool or ranting about transgender data centers (no seriously, he seemed to have mixed up "transistors" with "transgender") or whatever else.

Like I believe most of the complaints are pure vibecession both now and during the Biden era, but if you explicitly run on a platform to focus on the economy and lie and say you will lower nominal prices (because you know that's what people want) and then fail to do it, then of course people will be upset. There is literally no way around this, the GOP ran on lowering prices, and everyone can see prices are not lowered. They exploited the delusion there's a fix everything button for votes and then seem surprised that people actually believed in the fix everything button they were constantly told and promised was real.

Depends on what area of the economy you’re talking about and even single issues have different causes when you investigate the problem across the country.

Someone I’ve known for a long-time and I were talking about this very recently. She was originally born in NYC before moving as a kid out to where I’m from, and infrequently goes back out there to visit her dad and relatives. A perennial issue of NYC’ers that’s always on the social roundtable is housing.

One of the major causes of the housing crisis in NYC is the existing institutional bureaucracy that makes building anywhere from 2x-3x more expensive and twice as slow than comparable cities. This is basically the root cause for why there's no middle class housing: because it’s not economically viable because it’s so damn expensive to build there. Or if you want to put it differently: only expensive housing can profitably get built.

The reason why bureaucrats can’t just go in and take a blowtorch to the bureaucracy though is because it would cause a lot of well-connected people to lose out on significant 'outside' sources of income. So instead we get empty, populist talks and political rhetoric and never any actual solutions.

You can go ahead and pass whatever taxes you want to, but a massive chunk of those proceeds will just get skimmed away until people dead ass serious about correcting the root of the problem, go full Gangs of New York and be prepared to butcher a few dozen people in the city square over it. The solution here isn’t "just throw more money and the government at it,” because too much government is precisely the problem.

It is exactly the same position biden was in 4 years ago. I remember multiple debates here with an 'inflation isn't real' stan, who just trolled cherry picked statistics to explain why everyone was wrong. Then Trump won the popular vote. Now the right is stepping on the same pitchfork, and the DSA is winning.

The typical economically right wing explanation for the rising cost of living would be that the government is spending beyond its means

Regulatory costs also are another significant right wing explanation, at least among the more academic focused. And it's more plausibly true: deficit spending doesn't help costs, but that's a bipartisan issue. And the costs of health care and housing (probably the biggest actual costs, both absolutely and relative to the past; unlike food, which is cheaper than ever) are driven by regulation.

Some of it's also just the legal environment. Easily half the time I spend running my business goes toward managing insurance and compliance stuff instead of actually accomplishing any kind of productive work. And those costs apply to every level of every transaction, so prices balloon all around. Granted this is also directly downstream of overregulation.

Addendum. The point I wanted to make with my post was in my final few paragraphs, which were specifically about the conversation happening at 2 levels. 1. empirical, and lifestyle morality rebuttals; and 2. the political messaging that has shamelessly about-faced, and is using 1 to avoid accountability on policy conversations.

I included my 'natural experiment' anecdote, clearly distractingly, to simply stake out that, I personally care about affordability and policy goals that preserve and improve it. I had hoped to start a level 3 conversation about level 2.

But basically all the responses here have been addressing the same conversational talking points at level 1. Again my thesis is:

Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.

This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'

I'm not arguing against the italicized as false, so insisting it's actually true isn't really a response to my post.

I'll recenter my point with this tweet and subtweet:

Dan Crenshaw:

Just hearing about this dumb $20 burrito debate so just thought I’d make the losers on social media angry before going to bed.

Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates.

The market doesn’t care what you think something “should” cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?

To which a rando responds, " this you?" and quotetweets an older Dan Crenshaw post:

America: our foodprices are too high what are you doing about inflation?

Biden admin: just be vegan and stop complaining you bunch of rubes.

This is gold. I would like to discuss this as the neocon messaging strategy. Not whether any burritos actually cost $20 or reminders that home cooking exist.

Take this comment as being slightly trollish but one thing I've noticed in the discourse online about this is the conspicuous absence of right-wingers pointing out that cooking for oneself isn't a man's job but a woman's one. A hundred years ago a young single man in the United States would have bought prepared food or gotten food with their lodging instead of being expected to cook and clean by themselves. It's genuinely weird that the position of some conservatives is that we've moved backwards in division of labor since the 1920s, and that this is a good thing and young men should be learning domestic chores to save money.

This is anachronism. The virtuous man should be self-sufficient. Hunters, trappers, soldiers and any other man had to know how to hunt/raise game/cattle, butcher it an cook it. Having inept friend who does not know how feed himself without his mummy was always sign of weakness. Even inside household they did these things since time immemorial including any heavy lifting job such as preparing firewood for hearth etc. Cooking by men was never some taboo, it was always subject to practical domestic division of labor.

As far as I know, the social reality back then was not that hunters, trappers, soldiers – or miners, workers, cowboys, coolies etc. for that matter – cooked meals alone for their own personal consumption only. Instead they cooked and ate together, or at least in smaller groups, just as how they normally hunted/worked/fought and lived together for most of their time. Not even trapping was usually a completely solitary activity, was it? In those days, after reaching adult age but before getting married and forming a family, young men usually joined some sort of all-male social group that existed for a shared purpose (work, combat, hunting etc) and this was their venue of socialization, the community where they spent most of their time. The spectre of a single man living alone and looking after himself alone was not usual.

Sure, but what I meant is that knowing how to prepare meal or even sewing and repairing ones clothes was not seen as some taboo girly thing that no proper man can ever do.

In 1920 most single men lived in accommodations that did not include a kitchen. We are now a wealthy enough society that bachelor pads have kitchens.

Single men in places with kitchens were generally expected to cook for themselves, albeit with less complexity(but we shouldn't overstate that; old timey housewives were not making elaborate 5 course meals like tiktok tradwives today), unless they were rich enough to have a housekeeper. The real shift in gender roles around cooking is that it's no longer seen as an insult to the woman of the house for a middle class family to go to a restaurant- which it would have been in 1920(the upper class in the days of having servants did not cook for themselves, regardless of gender).

In 1920 most single men lived in accommodations that did not include a kitchen.

I'm guessing most of them did not live alone, period. And if they did, it was usually for a short period. And even then they usually cooked or at least ate with other men. See another comment of mine in this thread.

The typical single person before the war boarded rather than renting an apartment, and boarders were fed as part of their rent.

The increase in single-hood seems relevant here: even without the gender roles arguments directly, cooking for two (or a family!) is a lot easier to amortize than two people cooking for one. I (male) cook for our household probably more than half the meals we eat at home (we do eat out more than we probably should, but for us it's not a financial concern).

It's genuinely weird that the position of some conservatives is that we've moved backwards in division of labor since the 1920s, and that this is a good thing

Why is it weird? The only conservative answer for men is "fuck you, get good" [tacit: in return, the division and realities of labor are how you acquire social power/over women- hasn't been true since 1920, but with a temporary break from 1950-1970], which is why feminism was a natural outgrowth of it.

I've noticed in the discourse online about this is the conspicuous absence of right-wingers pointing out that cooking for oneself isn't a man's job but a woman's one.

Who's doing the talking? Is it the young men, who simply don't have this frame of reference, or is it the old men, who do (and are intentionally undermining it because their view of gender interaction never progressed beyond the 1970s)?

The answer for normie middle class families having the woman of the house out for whatever reason in the 60's and 70's was not 'and we go to a restaurant'. It was 'dad handles food'. That food might have been bologna sandwiches(and everyone in midcentury america ate bologna sandwiches and thought that was an ok and normal thing to sometimes have for a meal), but, like, just talk to older people- men were expected to feed themselves rather than starve or eat out.

Cooking isn’t gendered coded. Different places and different times had different genders cooking.

Professional chef if anything is male coded slightly. Grilling meat is heavily male coded.

Cleaning is feminine coded. Not cooking.

Food preparation / cooking is predominately or exclusively done by women in 98% of studied primitive societies, and there’s no history of men cooking for themselves in European civilization. I remember reading a study on Italian men living alone, a country with a highly masculinized image of chefs, and the diets they wound up keeping were horrible. IMO the sexual division of lifestyle is one of those load-bearing pillars of civilization that we disposed of to hastily as you’re just not going to get working men to cook healthy meals for themselves. It doesn’t matter how possible this is from a purely theoretical biomechanical analysis if men across the world simply do not cook good meals for themselves. It almost seems like the only men doing this are into bodybuilding, so maybe it helps if you pretend you’re Goku and home cooking is an integral part of your transformation into a fantastical hero.

Food preparation / cooking is predominately or exclusively done by women in 98% of studied primitive societies

Shit biased anthropology study as usual, where they deliberately defined cooking strictly as "domestic, daily meal preparation at the family hearth". We can even skip communal or ritualistic cooking in the agricultural primitive societies done by men or men doing many cooking related tasks such as gathering fuel for hearth, skinning and butchering game, milling and other labor intensive cooking related work that was defined out of scope of this shit study.

Hunters and gatherer societies and to large extent also pastoralist and agricultural males cook all the time, they embark upon hunting trips or group male activities that can take from days to weeks. So they process game, they butcher and cook it. Moreover they are also able to repair their clothes and tools. It is not as if cooking is taboo haram activity for men, it is just logical division of labor. Domestic cooking and cleaning is delegated to women, because they have to stay with kids in safe domestic environment anyways. Hunting, hard labor related to construction, wood cutting and storage, herding other work outside is domain of men. But there is blending of the two - young girls can go gathering berries or herding livestock, especially poultry. The same with young men.

you’re just not going to get working men to cook healthy meals for themselves.

Well, this is their choice and their problem. If they see cooking as something so degrading that they prefer failing heath and early death to such dishonor, who are "we" to dissuade them.

It’s probably not that they find it degrading as much as that men have little instinct to want to cook a healthy meal for themselves, or cook at all, and so they don’t. But if you’re trying to design society so that your citizens have the best health, you may want to consider how evolution designed the sexes — is there a particular sex which naturally enjoys colorful things, and preparing beautiful things, and nourishing others, and is especially receptive to praise from male authority figures? Maybe it’s better if this half of humanity masters the art of cooking and then uses this skill to lure in a husband, and then they can live within a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship happily ever after. And this is not unlike how humans have lived since the advent of fire. Otherwise, what, we curse a quarter of the population to ill health, every generation? Unless we find some intervention that actually works to make men cook. Or we can just subsidize healthy meals, which isn’t a bad idea and would probably save us money in the longterm and health expenses.

But if you’re trying to design society

The last thing I want would be to "design society". And if you have such grand ambitions, you know well you ain't going to make it all the way up to the post of Supreme Leader.

Otherwise, what, we curse a quarter of the population to ill health, every generation?

There ain't any "we", they curse themselves. You do not have to go full boomer mode to accept that cooking is today cheaper and easier than in all recorded history.

And if such situation is really so grave, it will not last long. If you can't survive without slave who will feed you, pick your garbage and wipe your ass, you ain't going to survive, and you wouldn't be missed.

The last thing I want would be to "design society".

We already do so to a great extent, whether you see it or not.

Men also have much dirtier homes. This isn't just about food.

you’re just not going to get working men to cook healthy meals for themselves.

When I was young the answer to this was "steak". Quick and easy to make a good one, gentle learning curve to make a great one, feels manly to cook, pairs with any sides, great for protein+iron.

But although I'm trying to hold back from adding to the "$20 burrito" discourse (with at least two links and a page of ranting), I have to admit that steaks actually are becoming steadily more expensive, even adjusted for wages.

It almost seems like the only men doing this are into bodybuilding

Right? If you can talk yourself into going all-in on the protein power of lean chicken, that's still affordable and also a decent meat with which to practice cooking skills, but making chicken (at least with a stove top or oven; grilling every day can be a hassle) instead of beef you just don't get the same "primally in touch with my caveman ancestors", "top of the food chain over mammals 5 times my size", "nature red in tooth and claw and steak knife" vibes.

Shrimp have become cheaper over my adult lifetime even in nominal dollars, gone from luxury to staple prices in real terms, but that might be even trickier these days? IMO making fancy scampi for a date feels manly, but for young men self-conscious about their masculinity I'd worry that the "I will not eat the bugs" meme may deter them from literal arthropods.

The older I get the more I hate data and academic papers and just want to trust my instincts. Because it’s virtually impossible to read thru studies and figure it out; and more times than not it seems like my instincts end up being correct after someone does a thorough literature review.

I enjoy cooking. I can do it as a hobby. There are a lot of famous male chefs and my gut says more than females. Some reason evolution made me enjoy cooking and I feel like I know plenty of men who enjoy cooking.

There does seem to be something with meat especially that men enjoy doing. Men love barbecuing. And men doing the hunting, starting a fire, and making meat safer to eat is a story I can believe we did a lot of evolving around. Girls do seem to have a stronger desire to do things like baking. So perhaps your statistics are picking up activities like that.

Perhaps it’s a pre-civilization trait that was ditched in most agricultural societies but is still a significant gene in the male population.

Cooking doesn’t feel like work to me. It probably would feel like work if I did a 12 hour shift in a factory, but in white collar world where your not physically tired it seems like a hobby for a lot of men.

There are a lot of famous male chefs and my gut says more than females.

This is probably more because working in a professional kitchen is a tough job where you have to perform quickly and get things right each time.

I personally cook because I'm the better cook vs my wife but my dad, male cousins, brother, and friends don't cook. One of my friends, he actually taught me a lot about cooking when we were roommates but he doesn't cook most of the time because it's a hassle as a single guy.

So, one data point in that it doesn't seem to be a hobby for a lot of men. It may be popular in some social niches for some men, though.

Heck, most of the women in my age group don't really cook either, compared to my mom and grandmother's generation.

OP did say “cooking for oneself.” I don’t think that’s ever been male-dominated outside of the army.

The editor seriously hopes that her toil may not have been in vain, but that her country-women may find just cause to be satisfied with the Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book.

My read is that convenience store food / takeout is really just the old tradition of having food made by Cook or your landlady, it's just that now Cook lives in a warehouse instead of downstairs.

Housing, healthcare, and education have real affordability problems, but food prices consistently lag general inflation. The grocery unaffordability really is mostly lifestyle creep- potatoes and pasta were once the staples, nobody ate prime cuts of steak very often, etc. Casseroles, spaghetti and meatballs, etc are still cheap if you have even a little bit of flexibility in ingredients.

Now it is annoying that some specific items- like beef- have gone up in price. But it is not proof of general grocery inflation.

my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to

This, specifically, is much more expensive because bishops in the US have generally embarked on a policy of reducing subsidies towards catholic schools and have entirely failed to realize that this means dramatic price rises and fewer people going to them. Catholic school in the eighties often charged only a nominal tuition to tithing parishioners because the diocese ate most of the bill.

Almost everything in the chaos in institutional Catholicism is due to that single policy trend.

my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to

This, specifically, is much more expensive because bishops in the US have generally embarked on a policy of reducing subsidies towards catholic schools and have entirely failed to realize that this means dramatic price rises and fewer people going to them. Catholic school in the eighties often charged only a nominal tuition to tithing parishioners because the diocese ate most of the bill.

Almost everything in the chaos in institutional Catholicism is due to that single policy trend.

Certainly so. But this is a good example of the broken discourse. That is a real response to the problem of Catholic schooling. "but think about how many more computers your unaffordable Catholic School has!" or "just homeschool your kids" are not. Extend this analogy to political solutions to the broader affordability converstaion.

There was never a program to subsidize beef or housing for all or nearly all American consumers, however- although red meat subsidies have been a thing in Argentina.

There simply wasn’t a single policy choice that drove up housing costs in major metros, or healthcare costs more broadly, or education costs everywhere. The Catholic church’s decision to stop subsidizing the education of its members is a single cause problem, unlike these things.

I thought this post was going to be about how Chipotle burritos ordered for pickup are delivery are obviously and notable smaller and less filled than the ones they make while you watch.

When you tell someone as they're making it, "Add this, add that" they don't know when you'll stop and they don't want a tiny burrito with just a line of chicken and rice and no other stuffing. So they put in more as they go but then get overstuffed.

When someone sees up front, "Oh, they want guac" it doesn't matter that the guac is $2 add on, they are mentally subtracting the beans and beef that would have taken up that volume and create a more "normal" burrito.

Yeah I feel like for at least a decade the universal advice has been to slow walk fillings like this. I remember someone joking about this with Subway in high school.

It's like ice creams. If you get two scoops, they'll be smaller than 2x a single scoop.

What you do is get a single, wait till they're done, say actually you'd like a double (b/c the new scoop will have to be the same size) and then...

...get ice cream all over your shoes because 2x a single scoop doesn't fit in a cone, and swear off lifehacks from the internet.

My childhood observation about ice cream is scoopers give larger scoops to the opposite sex.

...get ice cream all over your shoes because 2x a single scoop doesn't fit in a cone

I've started asking for ice cream in a bowl, but with a cone sticking out from the bowl. It's great - the great taste of a cone, and the security of a bowl.

It’s a good idea, but the insecurity is somehow part of the fun :)

swear off lifehacks from the internet.

Which, long term, saves you money!

Great lifehack!

For some reason this took me a lot of effort to parse but, yeah, that does make sense.

Apply the burrito test to your own life. When your father was your age, was a decent burrito available at a nearby restaurant at any price, let alone $20? Unless you live in certain places like California, the answer is almost certainly "no."

Unless you live in certain places like California, the answer is currently almost certainly "no." I've never had a decent burrito anywhere east of Denver. (Chipotle's good, but only very vaguely resembles the food I grew up eating).

I’m quite fond of the “My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes” review on ACX because it is about a simple but often ignored truth: the food that people ate in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was absolutely terrible. It was cheaper because it sucked.

It sucked and the portion sizes were a lot smaller, and their plates had a bigger portion of carbs. They are pasta, potatoes, bread, rice, casserole etc in huge portions, compared to today’s preference for mostly meat diets.

And yet they were much skinnier than we are. In some sense, their diet must have been healthier than ours is; it must have lacked the orange soda.

Yes, they ate fewer calories of lower quality food, a higher portion of it carbs.

So first of all... yes.

Second, this goes to the point about missing the point of the meta commentary. "Ackshully, you are doing great!" and "Ackshully, you got this other thing instead", and "Asckhully, you just aren't working hard enough" aren't acceptable answers to people asking for political focus on addressing specific things.

Burrito availability isn't fungable with housing affordability. My kids are 4 in a single bedroom, but we have more expensive burritos per square mile than when I was a kid isn't a useful point.

These are all fine empirical discussions to have in the abstract. They aren't a response to a class of people who are explaining that their political party isn't focused on the right things.

The point is that "the burrito" test is intentionally obtuse.

There is a class of voters saying, "address affordability", and the response is, "no, you're good."

So first of all... yes.

That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago. My mother who grew up in the Midwest never laid eyes on a burrito until she was at least in her 20s. My father grew up in the SF bay area, so he likely ate them from a young age, but he's in a small minority. And even he didn't have access to sushi or other such "exotic" food we take for granted today.

But my point is that I think you are probably doing better than your parents and you are simply failing to recognize it (or if not you personally, then at least the average member of your cohort). Your kids are 4 to a bedroom, but you admit that is because you are simply prioritizing your spending differently. You are spending more on things like food and healthcare and in exchange receiving much higher quality food and healthcare than your father's generation did. My burrito question is emblematic of this fact. And you can't just handwave away modern cars and phones and TVs and the internet and everything else your father didn't have. You are objectively choosing to spend money to get more and better stuff in other areas of your life for yourself and your children, and in exchange you are settling for slightly worse housing. You and your family are objectively better off overall.

I completely agree we need to address affordability, because it's good to do that regardless of whether people are doing better than their parents or not. There are a bunch of simple things we can do to accomplish that, but they largely lack political support: deregulate housing and make it much easier to build, get rid of tariffs, lower taxes and government spending.

That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago.

Such comparisons ignore that things got better for a long time and then many people believe this trend reversed. If you lack certain things and the trend is to make such things more affordable, then this makes it easier to chase dreams. If the reverse happens, then it is harder.

If the amount you can save is less than the rise in housing prices, then if you cannot afford a house today on your current salary, you will be able to afford it even less tomorrow, despite your saving. Then you need a yearly salary increase just for housing to stay as unaffordable as it is today, and a far bigger salary increase to make it more affordable. If those salary increases don't happen, then it can be equally true that you are wealthier in some ways than your parents, and still feel like you are circling the drain, rather than making progress in life.

And if lots of things are getting just a bit more expensive than the growth of salaries each year (on average), then that would feel like death by a thousand cuts, in other words, a feeling that something is wrong without ever having a clear casus belli. Then I would expect people to blame one of the cuts that is slightly deeper than the rest, which can then be dismissed as being wrong, but the reason would then not be that the price of burritos is actually fine, but that the price of thousands of things are slightly wrong, combining into a big wrong.

A second issue with such a comparison is that studies have shown that happiness due to wealth is more about one's relative position. This makes perfect sense in many ways. If you are the richest man in a medieval town where everyone is almost unfathomably poor by modern standards, including that 'richest' dude, then that guy would likely end up with a one of the most beautiful women in the town and be respected by everyone. And if they would die of a disease that we can easily cure or prevent today, they would never be aware that this technology would exist in the future. No one in my childhood was upset over not having one of these not-yet-existing smartphones.

It seems that women's standards have increased by a lot, and way faster than how men have improved, so most likely we have a women's affordability crisis that is just as insidious as the housing affordability crisis, but cannot be admitted to by mainstream people due to ... reasons.

And the standards for raising children have also increased a lot, while the ways to meet the standards have become commercialized, so it become very hard to afford children if you want to also meet societal standards with regard to how to raise them.

My suspicion is that many young people are already experiencing a strong sense of dread (often subconscious) at how milestones that have been considered at the core of human existence for most of human history now seem totally out of reach, and the anger at burrito prices is more an immense anger that even something relatively minor, but meaningful to their lives has become hard to afford: 'we can't even have that?!'

That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago.

I think either the '+' is doing more work than it should there, or you mean something more like 50+ years -- I grew up in the 80s in very-small-town Canada, and frozen burritos were literally available at the corner store. They were terrible ofc, to the extent that a strong case could be made against them even belonging in the category -- but people certainly knew what burritos were.

I can't imagine the Midwest being so very different as not to have its own terrible burrito factory at the time?

I can't swear that the first time I saw soft tacos in the grocery store was before 1990, but I'm pretty sure they were a thing -- maybe they'd be called "wraps" in the 80s, but it was hardly an exotic concept.

I deliberately wrote decent burrito, meaning something roughly on par with Chipotle. That did not exist most places in the US 30 years ago.

I can't imagine the Midwest being so very different as not to have its own terrible burrito factory at the time?

My mom grew up in a very rural part of the midwest. She saw an avocado for the first time as a teenager when another kid who had been on vacation somewhere brought one to the school as a curiosity to show people.

Your kids are 4 to a bedroom, but you admit that is because you are simply prioritizing your spending differently.

Where did I admit that?

You are objectively choosing to spend money to get more and better stuff in other areas of your life for yourself and your children, and in exchange you are settling for slightly worse housing.

No this isn't what is happening. I can compare exactly my father's new constuction price to his income in the early 90s and the price of a house of similar sqft today in the same zipcode against my income and the ratios are very different.

Again. telling people that there aren't actually affordability issues because you know better than them about how they're just wasteful with money is a braindead strategy, but sure keep trying to make it.

Adjusted for inflation, do you make significantly less than your father did at the same age? If so, that would explain your experience. But it is very much not the typical US experience. Real wages have risen consistently, and this is true across all income deciles.

Of course, there is a distribution of outcomes, and some people will inevitably see their incomes decrease even as most incomes increase. You may be one of those people, for whatever reason. This is not a new phenomenon, and it doesn't warrant new policies to address it. It's just a fact of statistics that some people will (based on genetics, luck, whatever) diverge from the typical outcome and end up making less than their parents did, even while most people are making more.

If that's not the case, then it means you are choosing to allocate your resources differently than your father did. You are choosing to live in a high cost of living area (the fact that it's the same zip code is irrelevant; the relative desirability of zip codes shifts over time). You are choosing to spend more on other things besides housing square footage.

telling people that there aren't actually affordability issues because you know better than them about how they're just wasteful with money is a braindead strategy

How did you take that away from what I said? I said you were choosing to spend your money differently. That's not accusing you of being wasteful (although if you are being wasteful, that would certainly be a relevant fact). I'm saying you are prioritizing other goods more highly than you prioritize housing square footage. That may be a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up. Weekly for me. The avocado toast meme is straightforwardly true, just on work lunches over 15 years of working every day downtown, I spent as much extra over cooking my lunches as I have been able to save for my retirement. I would have had doubled my net worth that I accumulated on my own had I been smarter exclusively on work lunches, if nothing else. I am, and I assume many if not most in my generation, THAT bad with managing my expenses.

Now I find myself kicked back up to the same point my parents were at my age due to inheritance and I am desperately praying to find the strength to do better this time, but still. I'm not sure we can blame the economy for most of it. I would more likely blame the culture for creating a generation or two with an attitude to "small" expenses that basically assign them a cost of 0$ and let that balloon into giant amounts.

My father would regularly take us out to a burrito place after swim practice, especially if my mom was out pet sitting for someone. Because it was getting late and we were hungry and he's the man so he only cooks fancy meals on special occasions not dinnerslop. This was before Chipolte was as big as it is now, but it was basically the same concept - and affordable.

And we'd get take-out cheese pizza weekly on Fridays because we're Cathoilc.

It used to be that McDonalds and Carls Jr and other fast food things were affordable to someone in the middle class. Not every day, but weekly. And a monthly sit down restaurant on birthdays or other lesser holidays.

My parents would also comment that when they were kids they couldn't afford meat every day and that we were lucky. And so maybe my kids are better off than that. Though in the last few years we've had a lot of intentionally meatless weeks, now that I think of it.

The standard of living rose. Maybe only a handful of generations got to feel it, but for a few decades things actually were quite good. And now they are declining. Maybe that decline is to a baseline that's still pretty good. But a certain demographic sees the decline in their own lifetime.

Yeah, according to my parents and grandparents, when in the seventies nobody thought about running to a local restaurant for food because you didn't want to cook. You ate a sandwich or you cooked, and that was that.

I am sure someone could sit down and make the math math. I am sure Caleb Hammer could compare the monthly finances and find things to yell at me about.

...

I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.

Again this kind of commentary is missing the point.

But moreover, no. "You're just eating out the otherwise advantage you would have over your father" is trivially not true. That's why I brought up my life as natural experience. I live basically the same life that was grown up in. It shouldn't need fine tuning to be able squeeze into. Especially when I am so much further in my career.

My father was a mid level engineer in the 90s, even by generous standards, I make twice what he was making in inflation adjusted dollars. My house and family are half the size.

You're telling a lot of people they're missing the point. They're not missing the point. They're disagreeing with you.

Housing, food, and educational costs are real, measurable things that can be tested against your personal experience. Some of them check out against your perceptions, some don't. But it's also relevant, all the ways in which your life and the things available to you are different than when your father grew up. Saying "I want the same life my father had".... Well, too bad? The world is different. Your children also will not grow up in the same world you did.

Now what you're saying is "My world is worse than the one my father had." And that's debatable, which is why people are talking about lifestyle inflation and burrito availability, and you're stomping your foot and saying "No, no, you're missing the point!" But really, this is the point.

no see my addendum post. my point is the messaging strategy, not the object debate.

Saying "I want the same life my father had".... Well, too bad? The world is different.

This is not a good party line to justify a shifted focus from domestic policy to Iran. sorry. that's my point.

"too bad" is a retarded way to talk to your base.

If a party rose up and promised to put boomers in the golag and give their houses to families raising children, and I voted for them, and you ask me why, the answer is, when I told you I couldnt afford a house to fit my family on a director level salary, you told me 'too bad'.

Housing, healthcare, and education costs are real things to complain about. For Catholic k-12 education specifically prices have risen because bishops no longer wish to subsidize it, despite the many downstream effects of not doing so, but higher education, healthcare, and housing are all multivariate problems which are expensive because no one in positions of influence really cares about keeping costs down. That's reasonable to complain about and seek policy changes over.

Rising food costs are not real, however. Grocery inflation is much slower than wage growth. What drives rising food costs is poor spending discipline- doordash is certainly the most visible example, but ordinary families didn't use to eat steak very often and Americans now think it's unhealthy to eat carbs.

Okay, fine, but that is also why people are voting for the DSA. Like you, their anger may be understandable but their reasoning is, as you put it, retarded. Maybe your base does need better messaging (the Dems certainly do) but it's not surprising you're getting tripped up by people pointing out that the things you claim are, uh, not necessarily true.

I'd prefer people engage with facts rather than demanding their anger and resentment be given a populist head-pat.

I'd prefer people engage with facts rather than demanding their anger and resentment be given a populist head-pat.

If you're paying attention to the twitter kerfuffle, this isn't an ask for a populist head pat. There are specific asks.

Stop it with Iran. Deport more people. Stop it with H1Bs. Stop having high level official GOP politicians make sneaky amnesty pitches. Pass the save act.

You can disagree with whether those solutions will actually help. But it's being evaded by the um, ackshully burritos are only 14.59 in my area, and how dare you poors eat them anyway. IRAN CAN'T HAVE NUKES!

The burrito debate is also the propositional nation debate is also the Iran debate is also whether MAGA is America First or controlled opposition + foreign adventures.

Tell me if I'm getting the argument here:

  1. You feel your life is worse than your father's.

  2. When people argue your beliefs are factually incorrect, you say its about "the messaging strategy, not the object debate."

  3. Based on your feelings (which need not be true at the object level), you believe you are entitled to submit a list of "specific asks" to someone (?) who is for some reason obligated to implement them.

Can you flesh out the last part?

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Well, no argument here that MAGA messaging sucks. But you know the phenomenon of all those Bernie bros who turned Trumpers? I think it not unlikely a lot of burrito MAGAs will turn into DSAers.

The fact that you initiated this as you being angry that you think your father had it better than you is why people are debating that. You did a poor job of framing this about whether or not your party is appealing to its base.

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Restaurants would basically have not existed before the 1990s if people ate out as infrequently as you imply. There are stats on food spending at and away from home and since the 1980s the share of food spending at restaurants has gone from maybe 40% to 55%, not increased by a factor of 52 from people going yearly to weekly.

If your middle class family was truly representative of the average consumer back then in never buying fast food or snacks from the drugstore or gas station, there wouldn't be fast food restaurants or snacks offered at the drugstore in the first place because the market would be at least an order of magnitude smaller.

It's quite clear that people do eat out more these days but taking anecdotes like yours as representative would exaggerate the scale of the change between generations. I think it's plausible people eat out maybe twice as often as in 1980, not 10 or 20 times as much, which is what your story or the one above implies to me.

Yeah, my (I'm late GenX) family got fast food as a very special treat, but my parents were probably in the 95th percentile for frugality (we hunted the vast majority of the meat we ate for the first decade of my life and my mom was an extreme couponer decades before it was a trend). Many of my friend's families paid extra for convienient food, with things like Schwann's (home delivered, frozen prepared entrees) or eating out more than weekly being very common.

You can simply look up estimates of the number of restaurants in the US. There were 386k in 1982 and 789k today. Per capita that works out 166 per 100k and 220 per 100k population. Not a drastic increase over 40 years of economic and population growth, about 30% growth per capita for restaurants.

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I'm not sure exactly how the difference is made. It's the experience I had and most people I know had. Maybe I'm in a bubble. Maybe people went out socially more often? My local Wendy's, the closest fast food to me, seems to be surprised and unprepared whenever I decided to go there in person. They have a normal sized for a fast food restaurant dining area, but it's always empty. Even the drive through seems underutilized. The staff is mostly just fulfilling doordash/uber eats orders non-stop.

In general the cost of ingredients and food has gone down compared to wages, so I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive to compensate. Having everything delivered would be one.

I ate out somewhat less as a kid too, but not quite as infrequently as you describe. I've seen many other people make the same argument as you though. There's probably some degree of social bubble effects, maybe you're upwardly mobile, and I would also guess that parents with young kids tend to eat out less often than people at other stages of life.

I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive.

Franchise fees and real estate costs have gotten bonkers over the last ten years. Unless you're a real estate company masquerading as a fast food joint like McDonald's, this can be back-breaking.

Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up.

As a geriatric millennial, I feel like I saw a transition from restaurant/delivery-is-occasional-treat to restaurant/delivery-is-alternative-of-near-equal-stature-as-home-cooked in real-time growing up. Especially having spend much of my initial childhood in Korea, which was further back compared to America in development, especially in the 80s/90s. In Korea, we basically ate the same home cooked meals with very minor variations in side dishes every single day, and America was little different in the 90s. But as I grew up, getting takeout or delivery for dinners just seemed more and more common. Nowadays, I've seen people claiming that eating the same country's cuisine two days in a row - to say nothing of the same meal - is just unacceptably boring and a standard that no one should be subject to, which I find a ridiculous standard; a clean, warm, predictable, nutritious-enough, and fairly palatable meal every day is a standard I'd consider quite good enough for everyone of any class. Of course, most people don't go to such extremes, but I see that sort of attitude of bare-minimum-expectations-creep a lot.

From the literal standpoint, unless you're ordering from super fancy joint (and probably getting a personal taxi for your food on top), no burrito should cost you 20. That's completely nonsense. I literally get 4 burritos for the family at 12 bucks at taco bell on the way home sometimes and if I cook my own it's even cheaper.

But lets take it more seriously as "food prices in general are high and I'm being hyperbolic in my complaint". Well, food prices are not that high historically compared to a share of income. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-family-disposable-income Even post 2020 is a pretty small blip on the chart compared to how much households were spending.

But fine, people are ahistorical and judging off their own perceptions rather than actual data and their own lived experience is food getting more expensive. Why is that? Well lots of it is that they're just eating out more, there was a massive spike in food consumed away from home and it now outspends food at home. This of course is more expensive, but also a choice. Or maybe food prices are just another proxy for the real financial strain in housing costs, and the pressure there bleeds over into their food budgets or something.

But honestly, I think all of this is also irrelevant. If you look at the replies of people who are pointing out that burritos are not 20 dollars, the complaints aren't "you're lying, a burrito is 20", it's "yeah but that's trash food and it's unhealthy". They're not saying it's 20 bucks at taco bell or at home, they're saying it's 20 bucks at their bougie MAHA/Gwyneth Paltrow approved entirely name brand products all organic no pesticides each cow got tucked in at bedtime by the farmer burrito joint. This what they consider the basic standard of food now and everything else is toxic non-food, plus of course the personal taxi for it, so no, a burrito does not cost less than 20 for them.

Don't think it's fair to compare a taco bell burrito and a Chipotle-style super burrito. Taco bell burritos can hit the spot but are undeniably cheaper in quality. Chipotle burritos use real meat chunks at least.

And taco bell packet sauces slathered on a bean burrito is always a 10% risk of painful, explosive, and watery poops IMHO. That organic wagyu burrito where the beef was hand-massaged daily is honestly way tastier and does not have the same risk of explosive poop.

Don't think it's fair to compare a taco bell burrito and a Chipotle-style super burrito. Taco bell burritos can hit the spot but are undeniably cheaper in quality. Chipotle burritos use real meat chunks at least.

Taco Bell is real meat, it's ground beef + seasonings + water + oil and then a little bit of things like thickeners and other binders. Is it the best cut of meat ever? No, but it's perfectly safe and edible. In fact it's more reliably safe than food was at pretty much any other point in history (even accounting for the recent outbreak, since having random infections and parasites was basically the norm for much of the past).

And taco bell packet sauces slathered on a bean burrito is always a 10% risk of painful, explosive, and watery poops IMHO. That organic wagyu burrito where the beef was hand-massaged daily is honestly way tastier and does not have the same risk of explosive poop.

I've never had that issue once and I think it's either just a meme or serious lack of fiber in people's diets so they get hit with the 1-2 punch of grease + sudden fiber introduced.

I think Taco Bell is actually one of the safer fast food restaurants because almost everything they serve other than lettuce is pre-cooked and shipped sterilized and sealed. They should probably just start gamma-irradiating the lettuce.

People think groceries are more expensive because Americans are increasingly switching to carts full of items that have always been more expensive- like yeah, steak prices went up, but Americans weren’t eating ribeye very often until pretty recently.

More broadly meat consumption in general is up massively, like 50% per person in the last 50 years.

Sure- that's generally true of societies with rising wealth. You see the same exact thing in Mexico, China, Japan, etc. US per capita protein consumption is perhaps rising because Americans believe they need to way overconsume(Americans ate far more balance meals with a lot more carbs in them in the nineties) protein while minimizing carbs(which are cheap). But rising food budgets in America specifically are probably much more driven by eating more expensive cuts rather than more meat per se; steak was considered a treat by most people when I was growing up, not something you ate every day.

rising food budgets in America specifically are probably much more driven by eating more expensive cuts rather than more meat per se; steak was considered a treat by most people when I was growing up, not something you ate every day.

I'm wondering if @loper's 50% figure is worldwide, since I'm not reading that for the US, but even the US stats I'm finding show a significant increase: over the last 60 years per-capita meat consumption is up by something like 25% if you include seafood or 20% if you don't, but we've shifted a bit away from increasingly-expensive beef and toward increasingly-affordable poultry. Within each category, could we be eating more expensive cuts overall? While it's possible to export or import more or less of different cuts, to a first-order approximation each cow we consume provides one cow's-worth of each cut of steak. It could be that we're trying to eat more expensive cuts, and thereby disproportionately bidding up prices there, but it looks like the opposite has happened: ground beef has become increasingly expensive this century, doubled in inflation-adjusted price over 25 years.

Unless you are Methusala, this is patently false. Steak for Sunday has been my staple from 2005 through 2020, but after Covid lockdowns, I can't do it anymore. This has been broadly true for everything; I used to be able to afford a variety of nice deli meats to make sandwiches to take to work for lunch, now I buy the shittiest hamburger meat to make burritos with (the tortillas are kinda stale by the end of the second week, but them's the breaks). I didn't change, the prices did; good stuff is out of reach, switching to lower quality stuff has only somewhat aleviated the problem, and likely won't even manage to do that in a few years, even though I'm more financially successful than I've ever been.

You ate steak for a single meal a week for fifteen years? Totally disproves my point that expectations have risen in the general public.

I wonder how much of this we can blame on college. 20 years ago, I could get a full meal plus a drink at the student center for under $5. A cheesesteak from a food truck was $3. Subsidized, obviously, but it's not like they tell you that.

Then you graduate and go back to the real world and watch that cheesesteak climb to $15 over a few decades and it feels like the world must have gone crazy.

I don't have an answer to your question and I confess to finding both the enshittification and 'life is better now, actually' arguments to be convincing on different days and depending who's making the argument, but consider:

In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.

In the 90s software dev was probably a more rarefied and in-demand skillset than in 2026 where we pump out over 100,000 CS degrees a year. On top of that, the barrier to entry for literally everything has plummeted as the internet disseminates information so efficiently. Used to be you had to actually go out and learn things from people or hunt them down in library stacks, whereas now I can instantly pull up dozens of videos on youtube teaching me to do literally anything known to man or ask an AI and get an expert-level answer in seconds. Relatedly, software dev has been outsourced to lower-income countries - my friend's (somewhat famous enterprise software) company does almost all their programming in the middle east or eastern Europe.

All that to say, you and your father could be equally talented and if he were working today he'd also be managing a team of 25. Or maybe he'd be an ML engineer and still easily affording his new construction house and herd of children, taking the kids out for 200$ worth of burritos every Sunday night.

The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?

But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?

I'd say the average Chinese has it pretty comparable to the average American in the 50s. Thee average Chinese can afford the medical care that an American had access to in the 50s. Doctors are cheap and not overwhelmed and there is a social safety net but limited. Specialist treatments and complex drugs no but those weren't available in the 50s. Successful Chinese don't need to work crazy hours. Chinese tech companies work crazy hours and people in factories but others less so. The Chinese middle class also live comparatively to urban Americans and there's almost as many of those as the entire US population. The big lag would be a lack of suburbia but middle class suburban houses don't really exist even in extremely rich Asian societies like Singapore.

Or maybe he'd be an ML engineer and still easily affording his new construction house and herd of children, taking the kids out for 200$ worth of burritos every Sunday night.

Sorry to be pedantic, but this is not true either. ML Engineering has existed for quite some time, easily longer than Neural Networks have been used. It's a well paid field, but it's only paid slightly higher than the median SWE. Pretending that the LLM-ML Engineers pay is anything more than the top .1% of the field would be fallacious.

Sorry to be pedantic

No worries.

It's a well paid field, but it's only paid slightly higher than the median SWE. Pretending that the LLM-ML Engineers pay is anything more than the top .1% of the field would be fallacious.

In my field, the 'data scientists' and ML engineers are a different breed and in much higher demand than the people who just write code. But thanks for the correction.

My field is ML Engineering (in defense research), and I would agree that we are different than a SWE, and the demand is, these days, higher. But unless the you are an LLM-MLE, the pay is commiserate if slightly higher, I make about $10 an hour more than SWEs with relatively comparable experience at my company.

The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?

Not calling you out in particular, but "China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese." This may seem obvious, but I think China vs USA discussions often ignore or elide this point. China has a population about four times the size of the United States'. I think this is the most important fact about the world to consider when discussing such comparisons.

When we say "We want the USA to remain the biggest economy in the world, and not to have it surpassed by the PRC." We aren't just saying we want to be richer than China, we're saying we want the average American to be at least four times richer than the average Chinaman. That's an insane level of arrogance and privilege to state!

I can imagine my richer friend saying: "FiveHour, I hope my two kids are as wealthy as I am, and that your two kids do a little better than you did, but in my heart of hearts I hope that my two kids are always richer than your two kids." I could accept that.

If my richer friend said: "FiveHour, you have four kids and I have one, I hope my son is so much more successful than all your kids that he is richer than all four of them combined and it is important that this remain the case, it would deeply upset me if your four kids combined made more than my son." I would be dumbfounded by the weirdness of that position and assume he kind of hated me.

If China and America are equally wealthy as states, all the wealth that is in America can go to China, and just bring China's standard of living up 25% from where it was. (obviously this is a ridiculous economic concept, wealth and income are different and neither China's nor America's economies will make any sense with the other eliminated)

We aren't just saying we want to be richer than China, we're saying we want the average American to be at least four times richer than the average Chinaman.

And why shouldn't this be true? You correctly identify that your richer friend kind of hated you, this is accurate. He doesn't care about your kids, only his own.

That's an insane level of arrogance and privilege to state!

Not really, I don't want the Chinese to run my country or have power over me and the Chinese similarly don't want me running theirs. The way to make this to happen is to be more a lot more rich and powerful than the Chinese. The Chinese think the same way, there's nothing personal about it. And compared to the example of two friends, having a larger economy gives one country power over the other that doesn't exist in the same way as for two middle-class people with a wealth difference.

This is such a zero sum way to look at it. America and China are too far apart and too big for one to really have that much power over the other. In the 50s and 60s when America was hugely more powerful versus China we scarcely had power over them much less the ability to run their country. I wouldn't particularly care if China surpassed America in power because I think it would barely effect America. It might effect Taiwan or the South China sea, but America barely if any. And Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia are working just fine as democracies despite being next to China. America is geographically blessed enough that we don't need to DOMINATE! the entire world to be comfy and happy. In fact trying to do that has seemed to hurt America these past three decades.

I suppose the wealth goes somewhere, but no one would blink twice if you were to say “I hope US business leads the world and not China”.

That's exactly my point! Americans feel perfectly comfortable saying that America's economy should remain the world's largest! We feel that it's the natural order of things! We don't reflect on what we're saying and what it means!

It's likely that in 100 years, China and the US will have the same number of people. It doesn't seem too weird to me to say, "despite this temporary blip in Chinese population, I would rather have the US remain the world leader for the duration of this time period."

I think they know exactly what it means.

American nostalgia is a hell of a drug; it is nostalgic for a time period when they were the undisputed leader economically, politically, militarily and culturally. These are still true, but it has become so normalized they don't notice, or the comparisons with other Americans make them feel like losers.

In the 90s software dev was probably a more rarefied and in-demand skillset than in 2026 where we pump out over 100,000 CS degrees a year.

Actually, no I know what my father did in the 90s and how much he made. He was working at IBM through a period of massive layoffs. But again. All these comments quibbling the complaint are just making my point and the point of the folks responding to the responses.

Every response that tries to justify the current state as not real, is avoiding the actual discussion of political policy goals or visions of the good. Kamala LOST in part because 'inflation isn't real ackshully' was a losing message.

There is a populist movement that wants specific political goals, and one party is saying "yes! socialism", and the other is saying "no you suck! you're not allowed to have that. You can have high gas prices instead."

Actually, no I know what my father did in the 90s and how much he made. He was working at IBM through a period of massive layoffs. But again. All these comments quibbling the complaint are just making my point and the point of the folks responding to the responses.

Yes, you can't be wrong, regardless of what people reply it just proves that you're more right. Disagreeing with you is pointless, only productive conversation can be had if we first agree with your premise.

Every response that tries to justify the current state as not real, is avoiding the actual discussion of political policy goals or visions of the good. Kamala LOST in part because 'inflation isn't real ackshully' was a losing message.

The point is not to justify the current state, the point is that, have you considered the tiny, infinitesimally small chance that maybe you're wrong in evaluating the current state? A lot to ask, I know. And much like Kamala, suggesting someone on the internet adopt humility is ever the losing message.

But anyways, setting all that aside and having a discussion on the level you want to discuss, I agree there's no reason we shouldn't push for making things more affordable. What's your populist plan for doing that? And what's your answer to the question I posed at the end of my post? I'll read whatever you write with an open mind, convince me that you actually understand why things have gotten worse, and what the fix would be. I don't believe that the MAGAs or the Bernie bros or whatever flavor of populist you identify as have the answers to those questions, nor do I believe that you'd actually improve things given power.

There is a populist movement that wants specific political goals, and one party is saying "yes! socialism", and the other is saying "no you suck! you're not allowed to have that. You can have high gas prices instead."

Perhaps next time they'll be able to elect the populist politician running on the 'Push the 10$ burrito button' platform, and then he'll actually push it instead of the retards in office now who just admire it on their way to the office every morning.

  • -12

Actually, no I know what my father did in the 90s and how much he made. He was working at IBM through a period of massive layoffs. But again. All these comments quibbling the complaint are just making my point and the point of the folks responding to the responses.

Yes, you can't be wrong, regardless of what people reply it just proves that you're more right. Disagreeing with you is pointless, only productive conversation can be had if we first agree with your premise.

What is your point? You speculated that perhaps my father was making a lot of money as software engineering was in high demand, and I responded by giving a little more detail to explain no that's not the difference. yes it is possible that based on what I first said my father was actually relatively higher earner than me, and you speculated such. I explained that unfortunately no. This isn't about "i can't be wrong". I actually do know more about my own life than you, and didn't cite every possible hypothetical explainer for the sake of brevity and anonymity.

What are you trying to say?

I actually do know more about my own life than you, and didn't cite every possible hypothetical explainer for the sake of brevity and anonymity.

And I know more about my own life than you, but I don't share your absolute confidence in making flawless apples-to-apples comparisons between my parents economics situation 35 years ago to my experiences today. I believe that you know the dollar amount your dad made and the number on your paycheck. I don't believe your interpretation of the meaning of those data, and the broader implications.

What is your point?

Concisely:

  1. I disagree with the premise that '2026 burritos are unaffordable.' I'm not convinced that it's not true, but I don't believe that you (or the dozen vibecession posts when Biden was president) have conclusively made the point. Many others also seem to disagree with this premise.
  2. But granting this premise, or ignoring it if you prefer, I don't believe that you or anyone else has a pithy answer on improving affordability across the board. Railing at our politicians (and I'm sympathetic to both Trump and Biden here, modulo obvious self-owns) for not pressing the affordability button elides all the complexity of both the problem and potential solutions.
  3. Again granting this premise, where do you think the wealth has gone and why do you think things have gotten worse? Boomers? China? Socialism, immigrants, demographics? Lazy millennials? Or do you not have answers to these questions and your goal was just to start a discussion to see what people think?

In the 90s software dev was probably a more rarefied and in-demand skillset than in 2026 where we pump out over 100,000 CS degrees a year.

Early '90s, no. Software was just an ordinary white-collar profession; you could do well but not like today. When the dot-com boom hit in the mid-90s, that's when salaries started exploding, so a developer catching the early edge of that could do very well indeed.

Dot com millionaires were not a thing in the early 90s, but as far back as the 80s, computer programming was considered a very well-paying profession.

Nybbler is correct in this; I was there also -- it was a good job, but kind of how being an accountant is a good job. You had to like it; people weren't really getting into it for the money until the mid-to-late 90s.

I was IN the profession in the early 90s. It was well-paying (like many white-collar professions), but not very well-paying. You weren't even breaking 6 figures as a very experienced software developer (individual contributor) in the DC area, for instance. Nowadays (or at least just before the current slump) you could make the equivalent right out of school.

not very well-paying

What do you consider very well paying?

I started programming for money in the 90s and I could make more in a day programming than I could in a week delivering pizzas. Maybe my calibration for very well paying is fucked, but that seems pretty good to me.

At the time, "6 figures" ($100K) was the popular line for very well paying (about $240K now). You weren't going to get that as a programmer. Of course it paid much better than pizza delivery.

But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good.

China lives are pretty fine honestly. I haven't been to the deepest echelons of Rural Poverty which I'm still sure exist somewhere but I've been to about 30 cities across China covering a decent geographical spectrum and economic spread. Most people are doing fine and don't have a bunch of the petty crime and drug user owngoals that are plaguing the West recently.

Yeah even the depths of rural poverty in China don't have the disfunction they do in America,

I mean China is a very large place and there are a lot of Chinese people so I'm sure there are some truly fucked up parts, but social harmony for working class Chinese > social harmony for working class Westerners from my sample size.

There's really nothing to this. You're comparing a nostalgia-tinged view of your childhood to your current situation where you're the adult, and finding the former to be better. With no numbers, so it's all vibes.

Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.

Yes, software is a funny field that way; an IC in the right place can make more than a middle-manager elsewhere.

As for burritos, a steak burrito in Midtown Manhattan is $13.50. Not $20.

No, I'm not. I know the numbers, Im just not going to write an autobiography here. Again, I am very close to a natural experiment. I know what cost what then and now. No I'm not going to deanonymize myself to show my reciepts.

As for burritos, a steak burrito in Midtown Manhattan is $13.50. Not $20.

Holy fuck. way to just do the meme.

'Tsk.Tsk. Afforability is fine.' - is going to bring us DSA rule, and fuck it, we deserve it because of this shit.

'Tsk.Tsk. Afforability is fine.' - is going to bring us DSA rule, and fuck it, we deserve it because of this shit.

The DSA is dealing in unreality. I am not a politician and would prefer not to. That you perceive a problem, or that a lot of people perceive a problem, does not mean that problem is even real, let alone that it looks like what they claim (see also: food deserts). That's true even if someone can get power and wreck everything by promising to solve the problem. In this case referring to "do the meme" is just a new way of engaging in the fallacy of poisoning the well; that you can anticipate the response does not mean the response is incorrect.

That surprises me. It’s around $12 where I am, and I want to believe my cost of living is further from NYC.

DFW is a surprisingly expensive fast(or fast-casual) food market nationally.

Coastal California here and there's no way I'm getting a steak burrito for less than $16; $20 totally normal especially after tax.

Now, machaca burrito will be a couple dollars less, but not worth the savings IMO.

Chipotle charges $15.60 plus tax for a steak burrito (with guac) in my part of coastal California. A place I like in SF charges $16.25. You can hit $20 with various additions but it's on the high side of things.

My favorite spot is a particular truck (Las Pencas) in Daly City, can get a solid veggie burrito for $12 (no promises about whether the refried beans have some pork products in them, though, depending on how strict you are).

The downfall of 99% of veg burritos is that they replace the meat with lettuce instead of a veg protein and Las Pencas is in the same boat.

Hah, as another vegetarian, I prefer replacement of meat with lettuce over tofu or some meat substitute.

Tofu works terribly as a 1 for 1 meat substitute because it doesn't provide flavor it absorbs flavor.

As an omnivore, if you're going to replace the meat, please use some sort of beans. Beans as found in nature, not processed into tofu.

More comments

Not a Chipotle enjoyer, generally, and when I go I don't get a burrito but I believe you.

Where do you like in SF? I find that the tortilla matters more than almost any other particular.

I've been a vegetarian for a number of years now so I can't speak to the meat options, but the veg burritos at Senor Sisig are quite good.

Ah -- yeah, haven't cared for them the couple times I've tried, but that mainly did have to do with their, uh, take on meat. The 'tocino' was particularly egregious. Can totally believe their veggie options are good.

As for burritos, a steak burrito in Midtown Manhattan is $13.50. Not $20.

Man, I didn't think my area was higher cost than that. Granted, I deliberately looked at the trendiest place I could find.

A steak burrito runs $16.25 (cauliflower burrito would start at just under $15), and adding guac & salsa would bump it above $20. Place down the street doesn't offer steak burritos, but it does have two beef burritos served with sides of rice and beans for $17. Also a full restaurant on main street with bowls that can be turned into burritos, a steak burrito will run you $28. But presumably we're not talking sit-down establishments here.

I picked a Chipotle I've been to as a benchmark; certainly you can get fancier burritos than that.

Ah. $12.15 for the basic steak burrito from the Chipotle, then.

I was thinking about it from the EU point of view of a regular employee and I think a lot of this comes from how insane the modern state costs. Let me make my case from numbers in Slovakia.

Direct income and payroll taxes in Slovakia for average salary is around 45%. This includes social contribution, income tax and all the rest. Out of 55% that is left you pay 23% VAT on all goods and services. Other than that you need to pay property tax, excise taxes for gas, alcohol and tobacco. In reality, you might be left with about a third of what you earned. But it doesn't even end there.

Fees and other direct payments There is constant and very opaque stream of various payments. You pay for building permits, you pay for your passport or other state documents, you pay car registration fee, you pay road tax and highway toll, you pay even a fee for your dog. It is numerous small things that however add up quite quickly and more if you are bellow average income as many of these are just nominal prices.

Indirect taxes These are various hidden taxes often paid by producers. Manufacturers also pay various taxes and fees: they pay for carbon emissions, they pay packaging recycling fees, and they pay customs duties on imported raw materials. Or take another example: developers pay cities and the state infrastructure development fees and for social policies, because what cities collect from your income tax and property tax isn't enough for them. Builders, of course, pass all of this into the price of your apartment, and you end up paying VAT on top of that non-transparent indirect taxation as well. All of this drives up final prices and reduces your purchasing power out of the pittance you have left.

Forced labor. The state has literally enslaved people, demanding labor for absurdities—like how you have to wash out beverage cans at home like an imbecile so they don't smell and attract wasps, and then wait in line at grocery store for the one functional reverse vending machine, just so the state returns your stolen, exorbitant recycling deposit, the recovery of which cost you a bunch of time and your own water. But it also enslaves companies and individuals through filling out various forms. You pay accountants for tax returns, and companies must comply with regulations like GDPR, for which they have to hire extra consultants like a GDPR Data Protection Officer. They have to fill out paperwork, they have to pay corporate lawyers and attorneys who must track thousands of new directives, regulations, and amendments that the EU and member states churn out every year. Behind this is an army of office workers who produce nothing, not even a single nail—they only produce paperwork for the state bureaucracy, such as the new paperwork on the gender pay gap in your company according to the latest EU directive, because that is exactly what was missing for perfect prosperity in our countries. And the great thing for the government? This is officially considered added value, and you pay VAT on it too. It’s a perpetuum mobile, where every new hidden regulation brings an increase in corporate costs, which companies then use to raise prices, and that increases tax revenue at the expense of your wallet.

Conclusion: The Shift to Autarky If you add everything up, your real purchasing power is maybe a quarter of what you produced. This spiral of higher tax and regulatory burdens completely demotivates people from producing. Even now, domestic autarky combined with bartering and undeclared work—which is tax-free and unregulated—is paying off for people. If you cook that $20 burrito at home, perhaps using your own ingredients from your garden, you bypass this entire machinery. The state is shocked by the "illegal" sale of homemade Christmas cakes. A person who bakes cakes and sells the leftovers is now literally treated as an enemy of the state, simply because they found one of the few remaining ways to increase their standard of living without non-stop bleeding. And yet this I think is what people are feeling right now. It is not exactly affordability crisis, it is just that some things are so overpriced that it stops making sense.

To me the brutal thing is the recursive nature of the VAT. Your company builds a gizmo. They sell the gizmo, they pay vat on the gizmo, they distribute some of the profits as salary, you pay vat on the outputs.

In comparison in Paraguay (where I moved to), you can actually discount the VAT from your taxes, as an individual, automatically. I end up paying less than 10% taxes, all things considered.

I briefly visited Slovakia this summer. Not sure what to make of it. Went to a small bar and asked if they served anything to eat. The bartender didn't even acknowledge me. Maybe he didn't like the English language. The clientele was all older men drinking beer in the middle of the day.

Or you could just move to the libertarian utopia of Somalia, where state capacity is low and you do not have to pay taxes to government.

I am rather sure that most countries pay for their passports. Likewise, "indirect taxation" is inherent in every taxation system I know. "You are not only paying your own taxes, you are paying (through increased prices) the income tax of the mechanic who fixed the engine of the farmer who farmed the corn in your burrito".

The forced labor part was really straining my suspension of disbelief. Waiting in line to recycle your cans using the German system. The horror. It is basically Sered' all over again. They do not even reimburse you for the water you need to clean your cans. I am sure that Amnesty International will start a new campaign on the drink can slavery problem any day now.

(FWIW, I agree that the EU has a general problem with too much red tape. The problem is that the costs of reporting requirements is not coming directly from the EU budget, but is treated as an externality. "Gender pay gap reporting will lose tax revenue on the order of $whatever Euros" is not a framing used as often as it should be used.)

I do not think that the answer is going off grid and farming your own burritos. Quite simply, the gains from division of labor and better scaling are much higher than the tax burden even if the tax burden is 80%. If I need to get an X-ray for a pet, it is tremendously more effective to pay heavily taxed income to some vet who in turn payed a lot for an X-ray machine produced under these suffocating tax and regulatory burdens rather than simply building your own X-ray machine.

The forced labor part was really straining my suspension of disbelief. Waiting in line to recycle your cans using the German system. The horror. It is basically Sered' all over again. They do not even reimburse you for the water you need to clean your cans. I am sure that Amnesty International will start a new campaign on the drink can slavery problem any day now.

What suspension of disbelief, I was not writing a fantasy and it was just an example. The actual price of used can is around 0.5 to 1 cent. The cost of empty PET plastic bottle is tenth of that. What do you disbelieve - that you literally wash trash, store it in your flat where you pay EUR 5000 per square meter and waste time transporting it to the grocery store where it has to be processed by some vending machine with more energy and labor from store clerks and truck drivers? What did I say that is fantasy. The whole system actually depends on people not returning the thrash, just learned helplessness and accepting additional tax.

The actual benefits of these policies are net negative, countries in EU did have garbage collection solved for decades. This is just a ritual that is enforced by government on people for basically no practical reason. The social cost of this system in Slovakia is around EUR 100 million at least, maybe around 0.1% of GDP. On its own it is not so much, but it adds up with everything else. It is death by thousand cuts, there are thousands of new regulations and directives poured out of the state machine every single year, each of them associated with small cost. The end result is $20 burrito that you cannot afford. There is no simple solution to this, that was my main point.

While overwrought, it is entirely possible to have a perfectly functional society with much more modest tax burdens.

Or you could just move to the libertarian utopia of Somalia, where state capacity is low and you do not have to pay taxes to government.

This does seem like a dubious dichotomy. The statecraft of prosperous countries has converged to a remarkable degree, but that doesn't mean that "the way prosperous countries do it" and being piss poor are the only two options. Complain about absolute monarchy in 1000 AD, and your snarky interlocutor might have suggested that you just move to the anarchist utopia of Greenland instead!

Do you believe that all taxation is theft slavery, or can some of it be justified?

Your arguments are fully generalizable.

Taxation is what it is - forced confiscation of wealth and labor. The more important thing however is that it creates deadweight loss. Additionally, it is subject to exponential impact. Increasing taxation from 1% to 2% of your income is negligeble, increasing it from 75% to 76% decreases your purchasing power significantly. We are closer to the latter now.

My main point is that legal market interaction increasingly stops making sense and tax and regulation evasion is how you can best get ahead. The $20 burito is here to stay, unless things change radically. So cooking at home is a new norm.

Calling it slavery or forced labor is stretching the complaint too far.

What do you mean. Do you not have to file your taxes or you go to jail? Do businessmen and ordinary people not have to spend labor and money to comply with regulatory system or otherwise they will be fined and potentially criminally prosecuted under threat of violence from police? How is it not forced labor.

The main point is that this is invisible to the government. It just offloads these costs over to the private sphere and does not care anymore. People just conform. Of course billions of people now have to click trillions of times to reject cookies or whatever other stupid regulation requires them to do from now on to forever, it is just fact of life that we need to cope with in our learned helplessness, another piece of straw attached to our backs.

I've been to expensive and gucci places and I think it completely loco to pay $20 for a burrito. If a restaurant tries to charge that much, literally walk out and go somewhere else. It's true though that restaurants in general have gotten more expensive though, but I think it's probably a structural shift in the labor market as well as the attitudes of young people getting food and ordering delivery. If there are suckers out there who will pay $30 for delivery of a shitty meal, then someone out there will charge that much.

In my personal IME groceries are up slightly but not enough that I really notice.

holy shit. my post was about how it's not about the burrito, and the complete obtuseness of the responses that focus on it, and all i get is obtuse responses that focus on it.

EDIT: Matt Walsh, making the same point:

I've seen a lot of incredibly stupid straw men on this site over the years, but neocons actually pretending that the whole affordability conversation is literally just about burritos is maybe the stupidest one of all time

Try to make a point using an incredibly stupid and obviously wrong hyperbole, and obviously you're going to get millions of people pointing that out.

The problem is that the affordability crisis has been complained about, acknowledged, and attempted to be fixed for at least 2 decades now. I remember that the insane cost of housing and schooling were major political issues in the mid-2000s, and even after the 2008 crash, housing continuing to inflate to such an extent that they stayed flat instead of going down like most other things was basically common knowledge. The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things. They could probably do better, but a generic "address the affordability crisis" gives little to work with, and it's like going to a medical research center and telling them to "address the death crisis." They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time. It's just background noise at this point.

So that just leaves the other, more specific parts, which are comprised greatly (not your post, but certainly the posts you are alluding to) by complaints like the burrito thing. So that's what's being addressed. And I think it's especially valuable, because bad arguments in favor of good positions have a way of discrediting the good positions themselves if those bad arguments are left standing too long without being cut down by the people who have those good positions. And complaining about the cost of prepared food is a very bad argument when the affordability crisis is the topic.

The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things.

Like what?

They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time.

Sorry, but this is just nonsense. They've been trying very hard to fix it merely in the sense that almost all actual solutions to the problem have been declared off limits, and part of the 'solutions' like rent control just make the situation worse.

I think a major issue is that some specific things that people really enjoy have surged massively in price, sometimes in ways that aren't reflected in inflation.

For example ground beef where I live is effectively up more than 100% since 2020 both due to price increases and the almost complete lack of meaningful sales. If you're price conscious and your usual diet consists a lot of ground beef this will feel outrageous.

Agree that beef prices massively surged, especially ground beef, but somehow pork and chicken are down. I think this points at a major habbeing in the beef industry in particular, rather than generalized massive inflation.

My cope is buying whole briskets and grinding them, because somehow ground beef is now regularly more expensive than brisket.

Beef issues seem to be industry specific. Similar issue with coffee during the Biden years. It wasn't inflation that jacked the price so high, it was a few years of extreme weather events that disrupted harvests (though apparently one of the issues in 2023 was that so many people were trekking to the US that there weren't enough laborers to handle the harvesting.

For beef, herd levels are at a low point for apparently weather-related reasons. The gap was being closed with imports, but there have been issues with that, including the expansion of screwworm and standards/safety issues. The topic is a Big Fucking Deal among certain parts of the MAHA faction that I only really catch in passing.

I also remember $5 eggs last year, glad that's over

Yeah, egg prices got insane, but that was another industry specific thing. Some birds tested positive for an avian illness and one of the last acts of the Biden admin was an order to purge something like 100 million chickens, which was either a reasonable safety precaution or a malevolent overreaction, I have no grounding to discern between the two.

Agree that beef prices massively surged, especially ground beef, but somehow pork and chicken are down. I think this points at a major habbeing in the beef industry in particular, rather than generalized massive inflation.

I suspect some sort of Biden era regulation or enforcement specifically aimed at this goal. Though in my area ground beef isn't particularly worse than other beef; it's sitting at $7.00/lb ($6.00/lb for the large pack) for 80/20. A whole brisket is $9.00/lb. Steaks are terrible, bone-in ribeye is at $20.00/lb -- they actually have a fancy boneless grass-fed ribeye for $13.99/lb, but I tried it and it's not very good (this is Australian beef, whereas the others are all US)

Wow that's way high. I can get brisket for 4.50 for no roll and 5.50 for choice right now at walmart, and can get better if it's on sale at another store. (TX)

Yeah, I'm in the NYC area. Everything's more expensive. To be fair, the nearest cow is somewhere in central Pennsylvania.

I've replaced almost all of our (unground) beef intake with chuck roast. Slice it thin (and maybe pound it a little) and I think it's better than flank steak for fajitas. Else I just cube it and braise it. Couple hours of that and it's so delicious and tender. Plus you're getting a lot of nutrition and flavor out of the connective tissue that's converted to collagen. Hoping nobody else figures this out. Also, typically about half the roast is suitable for cutting into steaks and cooking normally, whereas only the other half is something you wouldn't want to cook that way.

Real steaks, like ribeye, have become exorbitantly expensive, but I've found that in almost all cases I like lamb shoulder chops better anyway and they're less than half the price per pound. My go-to is to marinate them in a little bit of very high-end soy sauce and rice vinegar.

Cannot for the life of me figure out why filet """mignon""" (it almost never is) is so expensive. Worst cut of meat on the cow IMO unless you're doing something very specific with it, but people go nuts and I sincerely think it's because "mignon" sounds fancy.

Filet is great though. It kind of lacks the meaty steaky flavor though, and the tender texture might be offputting to some people. Goes good with some sauces or deep fried.

Worst cut is definitely something like top round.

Worst cut is definitely something like top round.

Ah, yeah.

I do like, and purchase and eat, filet; it's just, as you say, pretty dependent upon some kind of fat sauce (I'm a huge fan of steak au poivre which generally wants filet) or an elaborate construction like a beef wellington, where it's saved by all the duxelles and buttery pastry. But I have seen people buy and cook filet 'mignon' (def not) with just salt and pepper, and then muscle through it with their molars, the whole time convinced it's a great steak.

Steak au poivre with strip loin is pretty good; that's how I typically do it. You can just grill up tenderloin (whether in the form of filet mignon or not) and it'll still be tender, but it doesn't have a lot of beefy taste. Note that if you have a porterhouse, one side of it is tenderloin.

You can do fajitas with top round, though I prefer sirloin (or occasionally prime-grade top round). Bottom round and eye round are so far as I can tell useless without more processing than I can do.

I feel like people realised that here long ago. When I can get flank steak for almost the same price then why bother?

Here the chuck roast I'm buying is $10.99/pound whereas the flank steak is usually more like $27.

But most people probably aren't feeding a wife who insists that every piece of meat be organic, pasture-raised, and from an animal with an endowment set up such that buddhist monks will be praying for them in perpetuity; etc.

whereas the flank steak is usually more like $27.

You might want to consider asking your friends out of state to buy you some beef and fedex overnight it to you. You'd still save money.

Even so chuck roast is generally sognificantly cheaper

Are whole cows available in the bay area? You might be better off buying a whole/half a cow directly from a rancher and getting it processed to eat over time.

Yes, that's definitely been something we plan to look into, and I'm not sure why we haven't gotten around to it yet. The economics make perfect sense and I'm more than happy to use all the weird cuts that would come along with it. Probably I should put Claude on the case.

Highest price = highest quality! O_O

It's a known phenomenon from marketing psychology. Sometimes if you increase the price of something to an absurd amount, you'll get more units sold.

One of my favorite books is 'How to Blacksmith'. It starts from absolute zero principles - that you have nothing and educates you on how to get into said topic.

The very foreword starts off with 'If you're thinking to get into this to make money as a side project, don't. You will not. Do not do this. You will end up disappointed and frustrated.'

It's not until the very last chapter that he basically says 'If you're determined to try and make money off of this, these are my experiences.' And one illustrative example he gives is 'If you're not able to sell a product, the first thing you should so is increase the price.'

And yet, despite all of this, I find alot of sales people I've interacted with seem incapable of grasping this.

My understanding is

  • Prices differ in different regions of the US. $20 to feed a rural family a quality meal may be easy in a rural town but impossible in a big city.

  • Food and housing have significantly increased in price since 2020. Under Trump the rate hasn’t further increased, but nor has it decreased. Have salaries increased to match? At least tech have not, but they were high to begin with; I don’t know other fields, but the general vibe I hear isn’t good.

  • Healthcare is also fucked. I don’t know if it increased but regardless it’s absurd.

  • Telling people “the general economy is great”, when they specifically are struggling to afford things, is useless at best. Whoever credibly promises to help those people will win their vote. “It’s the economy, stupid.”

ETA: almost everyone should learn to cook. It’s not only cheaper and healthier but tastier; or you can get frozen vegetables, canned meat or beans, and garnish (e.g. hot sauce), and make bland food that is very cheap, very fast, healthy, and requires barely any equipment.

It doesn't even have to be bland! Spices are quite inexpensive per flavor unit. You can easily put some white rice in a rice cooker, add a ton of seasoning and frozen vegetables, chicken boullion, even crack in an egg or two, and get a meal that smells amazing, has strong flavor, and costs about $2/person, tops. I think people just generally don't know how to use seasoning and are afraid to experiment, so they just don't use it.

Blue collar workers have gotten some pretty big raises recently, but not enough to keep up with housing.

It's amusing to watch the downstream implications of this: a decent chunk of local discussion I see (very blue neighborhood in red state) is "vote blue", but also "why are plumbers/electricians/HVAC visits so expensive?" What did you think paying blue collar workers more meant, and why didn't it include what you pay them for services? I don't like paying the rates, but I at least appreciate that "living wage" isn't, like, free, man.

ETA: almost everyone should learn to cook.

My autism insists upon finding out what sort of exceptions you had in mind here. Not looking to argue; just more curious than I probably should be.

I was thinking busy rich people, disabled people, and college students on meal plans in dorms without kitchens.

My guess would be 50-70% of people really enjoy cooking. So it’s part leisure activity. It makes sense prepping food is enjoyable because it has evolutionary advantages.

But some people do not enjoy it. And a strict economic sense wages can be high enough to mostly outsource food prep today and justify it as money saving versus their wage level.

I'll give quadruple amputees a pass on that one, I'm sure some can make it work, but it's probably not worth the effort compared to other things they could be doing.

...compared to other things they could be doing.

Such as cornholing or becoming proficient with firearms.

I wouldn't even dunk on frozen vegetables, I find them generally a better choice on every metric compared to out-of-season/long-distance shipped fresh vegetables, which by virtue of having to go through a long distribution chain before hitting the shelves are picked too early. Of course, in-season local vegetables are at the top of the pyramid.

Agreed, fresh meat (or tofu) + steamed frozen vegetables + rice + sauce is a perfect meal.

Frozen veggies are way underrated. As best as I can tell, there's nothing at all worse about frozen vegetables compared to fresh ones in terms of nutrition, and they tend to be significantly cheaper and easier to store. Different people have different tastes, of course, but personally, I find that the experience of eating boiled or even microwaved frozen vegetables is exactly equivalent to eating fresh ones that have been steamed or prepared in an equivalent way.

Nothing wrong with frozen, and as you say the nutritional content is pretty close to fresh-picked, but idk why anyone would ever boil them. That's definitely gonna kill both nutrition and flavor. Steaming is preferred in every case I can think of.

Haven't had a microwave in ten years so idk about that part. Maybe fine.

Does boiling actually kill nutrition? Haven't experienced that for flavor. I boil them because I can't be bothered to steam them, and boiling is one of the easiest ways to heat them up so that they're palatable.

Yes, boiling vegetables tend to reduce the nutritive content unless you drink the water with it. But not necessarily by enough to worry about.

Does boiling actually kill nutrition?

Yes, heating anything up that much is going to destroy all sorts of compounds.

I can't be bothered to steam them, and boiling is one of the easiest ways to heat them up

Steaming is just boiling with a basket on top.

I think the main sin of boiling as a way of cooking is that the nutrients leach out into the water, which is then usually dumped out. It'll be fine if you poach veggies in a soup you then eat, though.

Sure, but no need to boil a soup! I'd guess I keep it below 180 (f) at all times and only bring it up that high initially. We eat a lot of stew and I'm fully convinced that it tastes better when it's not boiled.

Any sort of heating is going to nuke the vitamin C at the least. Boiling also leaches stuff into the water.

Unfortunately, yes. Up to 50% of their water-soluble vitamins are lost during boiling. Especially if peeled. Though, I'd worry more about pesticides in the peels than retaining vitamins. Steaming is better but I share your preferences for making them palatable by boiling.

The peak is from your own garden. There's nothing like dinner being almost ready and sending your two year old out to the yard to pick some tomatoes and basil. Every time we do that I can almost see the glowing border of the memory as I'll experience it in my old age. The bright colors, the dirt between her toes, her hair in the sunshine. Were I Japanese, I'd see ghostly cherry petals blowing. And it tastes great, too.

You have disciplined two year olds. There is no way any of mine would have made it back with more than one tomato. If they see a tasty tomato then they're eating it.

The bigger issue is that she hasn't quite yet figured out how to harvest the basil without inflicting any amount of unnecessary damage upon the plant. But she's getting better, and basil is pretty hardy stuff anyway.

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