The issue evaporated

Interesting at several levels.  From On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class by Resident Contrarian.

A theme to which I return very intermittently is how the income and wealth of academics, state employees, and journalists blind them to the hard economic realities of many people and blind them to the unworkability of many proposed policies.  

I have been reading Resident Contrarian for some time.  Though I now discover that I don't know how long due to the fact that there is another blogger Manhattan Contrarian whom I have been reading for years.  I have not established, till this moment, that they are distinct from one another and therefore I cannot speak to that point in time when I started reading Resident Contrarian.

Regardless, Resident Contrarian is speaking to that theme to which I revert periodically: wealth and income enable you to live in a world with different decisions and different decision processes without understanding that you live in a world different from some 60-80% of other people.

Apparently, Resident Contrarian was, until a year or eighteen months ago, not just a family man living hand to mouth but a family man living at the line of 'just barely enough.'  

There once was a guy who was very, very broke. To be clear, he wasn’t the brokest guy you’ve ever heard of. There were poorer people (he knew some, even) but he did spend a long, long time trying to raise a family on not a lot of money; think “a family of four on 35k or less in a major metropolitan area” destitute.

After a lot of lost sleep due to stress and a lot of lost time spent on optimizing resumes nobody ever read, he wrote an article about being poor, meant to let people outside the poor-people-bubble in on what it looked like from the inside. This was the beginning of the shift of the man’s luck; that article went pretty viral and suddenly people were paying attention to his writing.

Shortly after that, he got a pretty good job offer, cried in his car in the parking lot of his terrible cold-call sales job, and then suddenly wasn’t poor anymore.

This is his piece to those still in his former position, describing how that extra income has changed how he makes decisions.  In doing so, he does further illustrate how the decision-making of those with too little income is not necessarily bad or irrational.  They make the best decision they can under the worst constraints possible.  

It is a refreshing piece by someone who has been on both sides of the divide.  On one side of the divide, constrained decisions can end up creating increasingly onerous cascades of negative outcomes.  On the other side, minor emergencies are simply dealt with because they can be dealt with.  

A close friend and I both tell the same identical and unbelievable story:

The other day, something was going wrong with one of my tires, and the other three weren’t that far from failing in the same way. I went to the tire store and bought four new tires for it. They put them on, and I went home. It wasn’t a big deal.

If this story seems boring to you, it’s because you are like most people: something like the $500-1000 spent in this story is an inconvenience. It might even be a major inconvenience that keeps you from doing something else you wanted to do with the money. But you had the money in the bank to pay for the tires, so it wasn’t a catastrophe.

My friend and I both told each other this identical story at different times like it was the weirdest thing that ever happened. I didn’t go to a shady used tire store in south Phoenix. All the tires I bought matched. My credit was not checked. I didn’t have to get a ride to work for days/weeks until I got paid and spent future-rent-money on the problem. The problem just went away.

The other day my kid revealed he had been nursing a middle ear infection for a while. He was only just now telling us because he literally couldn’t sleep over the pain; he would have kept it quiet forever to stay consistent with his tough-kid mindset and to avoid doctors if it were possible to survive without doing so. (My wife informs me, as I write this, that he didn’t even tell us - she just heard him crying in his room. I swear we aren’t bad parents, he just doesn’t like to complain).

But now he was letting us know about it at 3 am. I got out of bed, drove him to urgent care, picked up some drugs and painkillers, and it was handled.

I didn’t have to deal with a single government employee; I didn’t have to wait a month. I didn’t have to find an aquarium supply store that sold pet amoxicillin. I didn’t have to explain to anyone that the smaller of my two children couldn’t go to a thing because we were in a days-to-weeks-long process of getting him treatment for a problem. I just showed up, handed someone a card that indicated I had a high-paying job, and the issue evaporated.  

Worth a read.

History

"The winter of 1607–1608 was one of the landmark severe winters of the seventeenth century, when the Thames froze solid. After this failure New England was “esteemed as a cold, barren, mountainous, rocky Desart,” and interest in colonization there was retarded" https://t.co/jSvcmAcH1v

— Tom Nelson (@tan123) July 5, 2022

 

History

from the advice from a father to his son, mesopotamian text (over 4000 years old) pic.twitter.com/DLUycdDDLq

— Nightmare Vision (@GodCloseMyEyes) July 1, 2022

 

Our main finding is that people who had a spiritual understanding of life had worse mental health

From Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households by  Michael King, Louise Marston, Sally McManus, Terry Brugha, Howard Meltzer, and Paul Bebbington.

I have long regarded those claiming to be "spiritual" but not religious as merely pusillanimous.  Apparently there is more to the "spiritual" position than I would have anticipated.  

Our main finding is that people who had a spiritual understanding of life had worse mental health than those with an understanding that was neither religious nor spiritual. Those who were religious were broadly similar, in terms of prevalence of mental disorder and use of mental health treatments, to those who were neither religious nor spiritual after adjustment for potential confounders, except they were significantly less likely to use, or be dependent on, drugs or alcohol. This supports evidence from a national UK sample of people from a range of Black and minority ethnic groups Reference King, Weich, Nazroo and Blizard on the vulnerability of people who describe themselves as spiritual. It adds to the evidence that people with a spiritual understanding in the absence of a religious framework appear to have the worst mental health.

An Insight

'This is the nature of crowds: the mob can only ever be a humble slave or a cruel master. As for any middle ground of liberty, the mob can neither find it nor maintain it with any respect for moderation or law.'

- Livy (History of Rome, Book 24) pic.twitter.com/eDAfCbVmxr

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 3, 2022

 

I see wonderful things

Blue Whale under a boat 🐋

📷 T_Johnson pic.twitter.com/s4xhrmcFbQ

— Curiosity (@Sciencenature14) July 5, 2022

 

The Olympic does her part

From The U-Boat War 1914-1918 by Edwyn A Gray.  Page 248.  

May was a black month for the U-boat Office with sixteen submarines destroyed including Claus Rucker’s U-103 which was rammed and sunk by the luxury liner Olympic. Once again the inexperience of the crew contributed to the loss of a veteran commander. Rucker had already seen much service in the Mediterranean with U-34 and he had been switched to command the new U-103 with orders to hunt the troop-carriers bringing the American Expeditionary Force to France. He found the Olympic coming up-Channel escorted by four US destroyers and, with experienced skill, he placed his boat in the exact position necessary for a successful attack. But, at the last moment, the crew failed to bring the after-torpedo tubes ready for action and Rucker had to break off his interception and find another attack position. While passing alongside the liner with his periscope poking above the surface, further incompetence by the men controlling the diving trim caused the submarine to break surface and she was quickly spotted by the troopship’s look-outs. A shot rang out but the range was so close that the shell passed harmlessly over the top of the conning-tower. Olympic's helm went hard over and she swung towards the U-boat which was desperately attempting to turn inside the liner’s turning circle. But it was too late. The bows of the former White Star liner ripped into U-103’s hull and, as the submarine bounced and jolted down the length of the liner, the tip of Olympic’s port propeller cut her victim open. The U-boat’s bows swung up, pointed to the sky for a few seconds, and then slid back on her last dive to the bottom. Rucker and sixteen of his crew were picked up by the destroyer David, a gesture of mercy that contrasted vividly with Rucker’s own treatment of the trawler Victoria in June, 1915, when he had mercilessly shelled her crew to death.

I enjoy it when knowledge from one chapter of history spills into another.  I have read extensively about the Titanic.  She had a sister ship, the Olympic which shows up here, six years after the tragic loss of the Titanic in 1912.  The Olympic as a successfully aggressive warship, not just a luxury liner.  

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

Where Physics Nobel Prize winners were bornhttps://t.co/11nA1lhHW2 pic.twitter.com/Tk1uV89GN3

— Whyvert (@whyvert) June 30, 2022

 

Peloponneso. Isola di Bourtzi, 1937. Grecia. Photo by Herbert List

Peloponneso. Isola di Bourtzi, 1937. Grecia.  Photo by Herbert List 

Click to enlarge.