Yes, I've always said you can't be a great engineer without being lazy. Good engineer maybe, but it takes a lazy one to truly innovate.
I don't think babies are supposed to be profitable.
If you're already gonna have a baby anyway, the 5k is a bonus. Otherwise it won't do much for you.
Estonian here, similar, but two languages wasn't actually an option at least earlier this century. I started my first foreign language in 3rd grade and the other one in 6th. Could've added a 3rd one in high school but didn't feel like it personally.
Daycare isn't entirely free but the fee is very small.
Hospital visits are 2.50 per night for inpatient or 5 euros a visit for outpatient I think. Without insurance most tests are still double digits, but major surgery can go into the thousands. Insurance is tied to having employment - but being in school, raising a child under 3, etc counts too. And so does registering as unemployed. Pretty much the only time you have no health insurance is if you're a NEET and don't register for unemployment.
And you can walk to places. In my hometown, we could just walk or cycle to the next town over. There's a separate light traffic road next to the car road.
Thanks now I can't get it out of my head
Dat 9 am lemmy scrolling life. Should be going to sleep.
Right before Arena!
It's mostly hipsters with modded iPods, everyone else just streams music. You can stream it in lossless quality on some platforms and download most played songs to your device if your mobile bandwidth is limited.
Hell I'm a weird hipster who likes to have local copies of things and even I've given up.
They should start going back now. Do Morrowind next.
Russian talking heads? Sure. They always make fun of the west and western leaders. But does Trump speak Russian?
Anyway, while Russian media is all more or less under Putin's control, that doesn't mean they're always necessarily saying the same things he's saying. If Trump's having 90 minutes phone calls with Putin, I'm fairly sure he's not getting ridiculed. Likely Putin talks to him like an equal - to his face, anyway. And being seen as an equal by your hero can pretty much blind you with emotions.
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.
Is there a real definition of middle class? I've seen income percentile based ones, but that's just bs, because depending on how poor or rich and equal or unequal a society is as well as cost of living, being in the 50th percentile might mean you're dry pasta every day (because it's cheaper than instant noodles, per kilogram), or it might mean you're very comfortable.
What follows is entirely subjective, and is my perception of middle class is, in the US versus my own country, Estonia)
To me, middle class means you can live a comfortable lifestyle, and once you've been earning a decent income for a while, you can lose your job and keep living mostly the same lifestyle for several months without going bankrupt. But in reality, that may be only people in the top 20% (excluding the 0.1% ultra wealthy that are most definitely NOT middle class).
Middle class is the classic 80s and 90s American movie/TV show family. Either the sole provider, or both parents if both are employed, lose their jobs? Well, it'll be a tight few months, but we'll make it.
Home is not middle class though. This article puts it into perspective. I love this bit: "So what did Kevin’s parents do for a living? It’s likely the mom was a fashion designer considering the amount of mannequins in the home. As for the dad, he was likely a regular businessman." What the hell is a "regular businessman" and how do I become one and make 300k+ 2022 dollars solo or 600k+ total household?
Now you could say "this is what the middle class was in the 80s and 90s, it's not like that anymore", to which I'd say, no, it's not that the middle class has changed, it's that the middle class is shrinking hard, and most Americans are actually working class now.
Anyway, this is my thoughts about a country I don't live in and thus heavily skewed based on media. In my own country, the middle class has only started forming over the last decade or 2. We gained independence from the soviet union in 1992 and at first the class system was "hustlers and organized crime vs normal people (poor)". Nearly all the wealthy businessmen of the 00s either had organized crime ties in the 90s, or deceived people out of their capital vouchers (yes, that was a thing during the privatization of the country). After all, what good is a voucher when you need food money NOW?
A couple of decades later, to me, growing up middle class here means you're not worried about where the down payment for your first home is coming from after you've held a job for a few years. Growing up upper middle class is never having to rent in your life, your parents help make sure of that. Upper class is if your parents didn't just buy you a home with a loan or fund your down payment, they bought it outright for cash. Now yes, it's possible that your parents are loaded and don't help you at all because "damn kids need to learn how to make it on their own", but most parents do realize that getting started in life is ridiculously hard, so if it's within their means, they tend want to help their kids get their foot in the home ownership door one way or another. Also noteworthy is that unlike the US, buying an apartment/condo here is a much better deal generally, so most people's first home is an apartment/condo. I mean we get shafted less when renting too, but most people still want to own (even if with a loan), because otherwise you're just paying someone else's mortgage, or funding their holidays.
All in all, middle class is a vibe based definition more than a numbers based one if you ask me.
I was gonna say there's no typo but the comment has been edited. What was it originally? Que?