this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
734 points (97.1% liked)

Showerthoughts

36905 readers
1539 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

An hour spent commuting is 1/16th of your daily life, and that hour is by far the biggest risk to your life every day. You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] spongebue@lemmy.world 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I'm not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask...

At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.

Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account... Do you really expect that housing prices would just... Stay the same?

I'm also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year's worth of wages?

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Agreed. My wife and I are doing pretty well and we don't even make anywhere near $150/hr combined. Maybe in the Bay and NYC that wage would make sense but not most places. Making that the minimum wage would just cause a ton of inflation and put most people back at square one.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago

Maybe not one year, but it looks like a median home in the US in 1965 cost around 6 years of a median income.

In the 1854 book Walden by Thoreau, he gives a pessimistic account of how long it would take to afford a property in a town, that is still less than today:

An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family- estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less

Although he goes on to describe building his own more remote cabin for $28.

Something is very, very wrong with incomes and housing prices currently that wasn't as bad a problem in the past.