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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Mod hat on, mod hat off? I'm sorry to be confusing you at this early stage in your moderatorhood, I wasn't intending to be condescending, more referencing this meme.

Welcome to dealing with the Awkward Squad! And believe me, I'm even more confused than you about how the heck I managed to garner five AAQCs, I genuinely never set out to deliberately write anything that might be nominated, so it's a mystery to me!

I did take the mod hat off by my own initiative, it's not like the others yelled at me haha.

You're a regular here, we might bicker but I can't ever deny that your net contribution is very positive, even if you have your own quirks that make me raise an eyebrow, or on certain topics, want to claw my eyes out.

So my initial annoyance that motivated me to put the mod hat on was swiftly overruled by me sighing deeply and accepting that it wouldn't make a difference plus it wasn't a big deal in the first place. I suppose the fact that you were referencing a meme from a show that I haven't watched does make sense!

I haven't even watched the show myself, it's just been floating around on social media for years about "people so far removed from the actuality of the situation they may as well be living on another planet".

It has also been a favourite gambit of media in the UK to ask politicians who try to lean too hard on the "man of the people" bit questions such as "so how much does a litre of milk cost?" and watch them squirm as they have no idea, never having gone grocery shopping themselves or if they have, never having to care about the cost of whatever they want to grab off the shelves.

Do most people who buy groceries every week know the current price, offhand, of every single one of the 30+ items they buy?

Of the staples like milk and bread? yeah.

Maybe not the exact price, but they do have a general idea of the staple groceries and will notice if the price of milk goes up by more than a few cents (and they can't switch to the cheaper version because that's gone up too).

Not to the cent, but they'd probably have a few brackets that they break items into and be able to say "a buck each, something like that" or "about $5", especially for frequently-recurring purchases like milk. Particularly people for whom the price of groceries is a meaningful fraction of their budget.