Cooper Lund: I've seen this image posted three times in the last three days and each time the user who has posted it has melted down when people start pointing out the myriad ways it is incorrect, like confusing median and mean, and what household income is. It's a digital madness rune.

I've seen this image posted three times in the last three days and each time the user who has posted it has melted down when people start pointing out the myriad ways it is incorrect, like confusing median and mean, and what household income is. It's a digital madness rune.

When I say this image is a madness rune, the point is only reenforced when it makes people turn into the like police

even the first panel, which is *close* to correct, is not correct. it's sort of amazing.

"Real Median Household Income in the United States" is an actual statistic FRED publishes that people can look up fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOI...

Real Median Household Income in the United Statesfred.stlouisfed.org Real Median Household Income in the United States

The median is $74,580. Looks like the original meme creator doesn't know that mean and median are not synonyms.

And income inequality is objectively increasing- you don’t need to make anything up about it.

At the medians of madness

My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that increasing the *mean* annual individual income by $10k would require the top 10 earners to each be getting something on the order of Musk's total net worth annually.

That person responded to every part of my thread on this with a giant thumbs up picture & snarky variants on "good job, thanks for all your hard work." bsky.app/profile/rain...

This meme is not aimed at people who think nothing's wrong. It's aimed at people who think everything is so wrong that the system is irretrievably broken, & there's no point in even trying to participate, because both parties are the same. Disinformation researchers track stuff like this.

The top number should be 126,500 and the bottom number would be around 74,580. Still a depressing relationship.

Love to be told about my country by someone who doesn't know where the dollar sign goes.

I always point this out online and I keep getting told that sometimes Americans do this and I cannot think of anyone who would recruit this way

I don’t know how “get taught” got changed to recruit but stop it iPhone

no, "recruit" was correct

I believe people sincerely want the anime girl meme implying everyone is broke and desperate to be true, because it would validate them for it to be true.

If everything is doomed and horrible then it's not my fault that I'm a miserable sack of shit that blows all my money on drugs

"Anyway, my analysis of international and political situation right now is [insert the DSM-V symptom list for major depression]"

people seem to want to believe that the US is a third-world hellhole on par with an African military dictatorship, instead of a largely well-off but flawed country

There's a lot of poasters here deeply invested in the idea that the USA terminally sucks.

And for an ostensible first world country, the USA has a lot to work on. But there’s no need to make shit up to try to get that point across

A lot to work on? Definitely. Terminally sucky? Not so much.

I mean it does terminally suck, just not nearly as hard as other places on this rock suck. Relatively speaking it's alright but it's far from good.

If only they'd move but then they'd probably make those countries worse.

It's kinda sick to make that comparison when US imperialism created those hellholes. Slightly racist too! A perfect liberal.

This is a strange thing to say when literal capital-E Empires from countries other than America had so, so much more to do with Africa's problems

The US is a capital-E empire that helps or has helped every colonial project out there.

Incorrect

The empire part or the "helps all colonialism" part?

Rude

Labeled by Bluesky Moderation Service

74,500$ is a good clue something is wrong.

It's not far off from median *household* income

True, but the particular household where this meme was made does not appear to be an American one, if “74,500$” is any indication.

Lmao I hadn't thought of that

Meh, I see XXX$ all the time from people who write conversationally. That's how you would say it out loud. No one ever says "dollars 74,800" so why write it that way.

Because that’s the way it’s written and language doesn’t make sense? Like, ok, you think this is more logical, but it’s simply not the way it’s done, so who cares what you think?

to be fair, putting the dollar sign after the amount isn't a super uncommon mistake that americans make, like it's not on the level of mixing up "its" and "it's" but it's not something I'd automatically assume is from a foreigner like if they represent a date in a non-american way or write "colour"

I'm just saying seeing it written that way doesn't make me think the person writing it isn't a US of American.

you mean median hosehold income, right? /s and yes, this is just me being snarky with weird spelling / grammar making things look like obvious spam

The *median* is also going to be far more reflective of the typical American than the mean, anyway.

I want inter quartile range memes

That’s two incomes typically?

Honestly, there's a lot of ways to get close to the baseline figure. That doesn't bother me. I'd note though that BEA estimate is that the top 10% got 37.08% of household personal income in 2022., so the ratio of (mean of the bottom 90%) to (overall mean) is (1-0.3708)/(1-0.1), or almost 70%

the only way it could be more sus is if it was written like 74.500$

Euros doing Kremlin agitprop, badly.

Putting the $ at the end when talking about the US should be a banning offense. It's automatically poaster's madness indicative and down goes my personal ban hammer.

This ranks up there with 'medieval serfs had more free time than modern Americans" for weird leftist misinformation efforts. Like, I get it. Billionaires suck. But there's a lot of real things for us to focus on.

"American women were more free 50 years ago."

OMG, I hadn't even heard that one. Marital rape wasn't outlawed in a lot of places until the 1990's, but sure, the 70's were a great time to be a woman.

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