Well put yourself in their shoes. They ARE the middle class when they are surrounded by only the top 1%.
We are not existant/irrelevant others. That will stay the same as long as their heads remain attached.
LavaPlanet@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Maybe that’s why these 1%ers wealth hoard so hard, maybe they genuinely think they ARE middle class.
forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
They’re either extremely uneducated in current standards of living, or being purposefully deceitful. I’d like to think it’s the former. They should have a class for rich people so they can understand what life is like without family money or high salaries.
Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
No class can teach you what it feels like to be a few bucks away from homelessness.
When the class is over the billionaires go back to their worry free lives. The poor worry about ending up on the street.
kmaismith@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
See now if failure to pass the empathy class results in your forced destitution there might be some incentive to pay attention
SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Made me think of the Meme: “Who wants to be a millionaire? - but with Billionaires, so it’s more of a threat.”
If we made empathy classes a must with our current governing systems, I cannot imagine them not beeing corrupted and used against the poor within seconds of becoming obligatory.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Warren Buffet keeps around the house he bought in Omaha, Nebraska in 1958 and brags about how little it is worth. The man travels on private jets and sleeps in hotel high rises, surrounded by an army of aides and adjuncts and a smattering of medical staff. But he’s still got the title to that old homestead from sixty years ago, so he’s perpetually middle class according to business talking heads.
Horsey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember seeing a clip a long time ago of someone asking Gates how much a banana is and he was like… 5$?
boonhet@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I’d have the same difficulty tbh. I don’t live in the US so no rice-a-roni here anyway, but there are a lot of premade foods available here too, and… I just don’t really buy them very often, even if I’m alone, I just cook or throw like a frozen pizza in the oven, but I don’t experiment a lot with those boxed meals. I also only ever buy stuff like laundry detergents at discount so I never even think about the normal price. I go to the store, see a detergent at the regular price, go “fuck no” and buy something else that’s on discount and half the price per liter or per pod. There’s nearly always something available for a good price, sometimes it’s a local brand that’s already cheaper than the foreign brands.
I can, however, tell you the prices of different pasta brands (the cheaper ones, not the expensive ones) to within 20 cents. Usually half a kilo of dry pasta is like 1.19, or under 1 euro on discount. Frozen french fries - used to be around 1.20 for 750 grams, jumped to something like 1.79 and hell I think in some stores it’s 2.19 now unless there’s a discount. Pack of mince meat - depends on size and whether it’s pork, moo or a mixture of both, somewhere between 2.50 and 5 euros per package.
SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
In the U.K. there’s a somewhat popular TV series called “Rich House, Poor House”. We still worship the rich.