*EVERYONE* here was bitching about TPP until Trump decided to do away with it.
Because Trump.
Trump said many things and stated many goals I agreed with, however I never heard anything that made me think that he actually had any sort of logical support for that stance, would actually do it if elected, nor a plan in how to do it if he was, and a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't know if this is false decisiveness, but he has to do something, be it a stunt or not. He's already getting a lot of heat from almost half of the country. He needs to consolidate and keep calm his electoral base at least. Politics, just like economy, is more about emotions than technicalities.
To paraphrase Caesar in Rome: "If I do nothing, I will appear weak. If I accept the deal my predecessor made, my support will turn against me. Therefore, I must strike it down.
Well, obama failed to provide for displaced workers after forcing coal mines out of business. Now stupid dems can suck fat dick in the company of their saudi terrorist cave-buddies
Hearing a conservative complaining because the Democrats didn't give out enough entitlements and work programs seems to be a first for me.
Why isn't he being prosecuted for perjury - lying to Congress - that's what I want to know
My guess and original suspicion is that it was because Congress told him to lie to them before hand. I doubt Congress, or at least some in Congress knew what the real answer was, but wanted a nice public refutation to present. Snowden probably not just blew the cover off Clapper, but also Congress.
Yet SJW's whine about "cultural appropriation" all the time. How can it be a melting pot is "cultural appropriation" is evil?
Melting pot is adoption, not appropriation, would be the general response. Wearing an indian feathered headdress because you think it looks cool would be appropriation. Wearing an indian feathered headdress because you went to the pow wows and earned it would be adoption.
I completely agree. The religious stuff got so bizarre and obsessed towards the end that I simply could not force myself to finish it. It's like the author had a minor stroke while writing it.
It's been a long time since I've read it but it seemed a pretty standard story: guy comes to Earth with a message that people should love one another and the people kill him for it.
By Western, they do mean European. That's because the Japanese got curry from advisors from the British navy (who got it from India). Curry is a good way to prevent scurvy which the Japanese had a big issue with on their first naval trip to Hawaii and the Americas and spent month in port just recovering. So, they adopted British naval cuisine which was curry. Apparently, they still serve curry in the Japanese navy every Friday. They have done their own thing with it by adding flour to the sauce to make it thicker, cooking it with beef (which they also got from the 'Westerners'), and serving on rice along with a side salad and glass of milk.
It's what he knows. I imagine he'll stick with it as it'll make for good news and look like he's doing something. I expect him to fire and replace more people than Lincoln did generals.
During the primaries, I pointed out that people were upset with slimy politicians quo enough that both parties were being overrun by non-party members in their primaries. Of course, the Republicans got rid of the politician part and the Democrats got rid of the slimy part.
Well, it is shit like the GP posted that is why Clinton lost.
Fear of minorities is why Trump was elected. Period.
Well, considering Trump's vote count was the lowest in the last few elections or at best the same as to make no difference, while the Democrats lost 10% of their voters. I'd probably put the loss more on the Democrat's side.
That's one of the things that blows my mind. There are a lot of people in the U.S. who basically said, "I'm sick of all you billionaire New York atheists controlling my life! You're out of touch with the working man, and don't care about me!" and then proceeded to elect Trump. It's like an Onion article.
Sort of funny that they managed to keep one corrupt, elitist New York Democrat out of office by voting in another corrupt, elitist New York Democrat.
and this brings to mind a question I've been wondering for a while. At this point, is there _any_ source which both sides would accept as authoritative?
Shit. There's no source I consider as authoritative, even for my own personal reading. It's always check various sources, compare them, try and find local news articles about the event because they often have more detailed information, but even then, there can and has been a vast amount of information that just never hits any news pages because people don't care enough to pay for the type of research that goes into publishing such. Take the news article on the network guy that kept the passwords from his boss in SF. Lots of information that even conversations here didn't/couldn't find. Luckily one of the jurors was a/. reader and showed up to answer questions and explain things after the trial and he revealed lots of information that probably never saw any print edition.
Your best luck is probably the Wall Street Journal. As explained by Hunter S. Thompson, the WSJ is read by people who are reading it to make money. If they bias the news, and somebody makes a business decision on that biased news, millions or even billions could be lost, and the readers would look for someplace else to get their news. Notice that they happily sit behind a paywall and get plenty of people willing to pay. Back in the day when HST explained all this, there was also the New York Times, but they have been caught not fact checking their articles as much as they should have and have lost a lot of prestige.
I have a dim understanding that modern physics believes that faster-than-light travel is not possible, full stop. I don't quite understand the equivalence, but FTL is the equivalent of time travel, and since we believe that time travel would violate causality, we believe that FTL is impossible no matter what mechanism you propose (teleportation, hyperspace, whatever).
Not as I understand it. FTL travel is not possible in acceleration in Minkowski (flat) space (which most of our observable universe approximates very well). This is also where there becomes time travel. In Reinmannian (curved) space, things aren't so simple. Because it is curved there are multiple light-like paths between the same two points and these can be of different lengths, so one path can be considered FTL by the standards of the other path. Wormholes are an extreme version of this and although travel through one may seem to be FTL by an observer in normal space the path through the wormhole is equally valid and has its own distance and time associated with it. It may be time travel also to the observer in normal space, but that is also dictated by the path through the wormhole. Hyperspace is a similar situation but different as it is not any time of spacetime as we know it, but rather a different type of space probably like all the extra dimensions that string theorists keep talking about. The idea is that one leaves this space, goes totally into hyperspace, moves and then comes out again into normal space. Again, there is a path through hyperspace as the two points in normals space time are related to it, but either the natural laws in hyperspace are different and allow for greater than c travel or the distance between the two points is shorter.
Those are hypothetical ways of FTL and time travel. Now, it could be that physics ends up showing that such things can't exist, but the general issue with FTL travel is with the special theory of relativity which only holds for flat spacetime (that's why it's "special"). Wormholes could be shown to be unstable and collapse anytime any information goes through them. There are things like time travel has talked about in real physics in things like "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" by Tipler, Frank (Physical Review D. 9 (8): 2203–2206) but has also been argued against by a paper by Stephan Hawking. As far as I know theoretical physicists are still making bets on such things and in any case, have not been experimentally verified.
"Asked later, as he signed autographs, how such a database would be different from Jews having to register in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump repeatedly said, “You tell me,” until he stopped responding to the question."
1. The Mainstream media (MSM) kept telling everyone HRC was going to win, so everyone in rural America and flyover country made 100% sure their vote counted, and wow, did it!
And yet, less Republicans showed up to vote for him than either McCain or Romey. His number beat Bush, but barely and I doubt he ended up with a higher percentage of voters. Trump won because Hillary couldn't get the votes that Obama got as 5 or 6 million people who voted for him didn't vote for Hillary.
I don't see that happening. And if it does, the manufacturing will probably come back here - and be done by robots. That's the only reason why it's still down there - Mexicans are still cheaper than automation (and of course the capital investment has to be recovered; which adds to the inertia of staying there.)
That is true, Trump promises to bring back jobs for completely uneducated people but many of those jobs will be taken over by robots even within his first term of office. If Trump really wanted to improve the lives of these rust belters that elected him he'd be promising them education levels that allow them to function in a future economy instead of goading them with toll barriers and bigotry.
If I remember the stats I saw earlier today, most of Trumps supporters are in the 45+ bracket. I doubt offers of education for future economies will really interest them that much. Still, every president I've seen in the last 35+ years has promised more jobs and a better economy, and I've yet to see anything yet that makes me think there is a sure fire way to do that besides dumb luck. I certainly haven't seen anything to make me think that Trump knows anything more than all the past Presidents that have failed to do so by their own actions.
I'd rather see a proportional split of each state's electoral votes personally. The electoral college has its place, namely as a concession to the smaller, less populated states so they don't get railroaded. Since most states benefit from this, I doubt it would ever be ratified, especially since it would also seem to hurt the ruling party in those states also since two of the last three times their guy got elected President, it was only due to the electoral college. Granting a states electoral votes proportionally to the voter's choices would give representation to voters in non-swing states. It might also allow for some third party bits if they were allowed to form coalitions for their votes in some manner. I'm sure there's a ton of things that could go wrong with that, but in a quick post, I'll throw that out there.
Insults like yours against the common person is what helped Trump take the election. I hope you're proud of yourself.
Hey, an AC post I agree with! Margins in the battleground states were pretty slim in some cases. I do wonder how many Trump voters got off their asses because they were called "deplorable"? Insulting in politics is much like bombing countries to break their moral. It rarely works and more often just deepens their resolve.
This has been something I've been asking about for years with no good answer. Namely, what evidence exists to prove that so-called "dark matter" is actually matter rather than a defect in our mathematical model of gravity?
It's like this. There are various evidence of something going on, such as galactic rotations, CMB patterns, gravitational lensing, etc. (These are described in the Wikipedia article on Dark Matter.) There have been, and currently still are, various explanations for these different evidences. Typically, we can do something like give each one a grade like the typical US grading scale of A-F. So far, the idea that there is matter out there that only interacts via gravity scores pretty highly A-C in all these. Other explanation such as MOND may score a B or even an A in one, but typically get an F in others. In the case of MOND, it doesn't even get an A in galactic rotations which seems a write in, because the resulting new law of gravitation would be so complicated that nobody has even proposed a hypothetical one that works in more than 2D solution, let alone addressing any of the other evidence on hand. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary support, and so far
It was the same approach with the origin of the moon. Lots of different theories but none really fit all the data until some serious computer simulations could be done in the late 80's to show that collision with another smaller mass caused ejection of mantle material was the best fit. Even then, it was added to as I think now it was ejection of two masses that later combined to form the moon.
Keep in mind that things like more normal matter, or MOND were first preposed 70+ years ago when the evidence was first seen. People have bene looking into them, testing them, coming up with different theories and after all that work, the current one for dark matter is the best we have to fit all the evidence. So, just because we leave out cat food and it disappears is not reason to think we have a cat we've never seen, but at this point, the cat food is being eaten, the litterbox is being used, cat toyed are being moved under couches in the middle of the night, and at times if we knock on the walls, we can hear something meow back at us. Still never seen the cat and can't proves it's there, but if it's something other than a cat doing all this stuff, the new answer is going to be a lot weirder than the explanation of a cat we've never seen.
How do you feel about Russia meddling with the elections?
You mean when the Russians gave the American people accurate information that America's own leaders were trying to hide? Is that the "meddling" you are referring to?
True, but how do we know that Russia will be fair and balanced?
Ah, so you'd have flushed the U.S. auto industry down the toilet during the last recession. Approx 1.5 million Americans worked directly the auto industry. Another roughly 6 million jobs are connected to it. They generate about $200 billion in state and federal taxes. The auto industry paid most of the U.S. government money back, as did the banks.
So you'd whack them all on the alter of Ann Rand. Let's let cut the U.S. economy because some misguided theory which has no use for humans or their offspring.
Sure, I base all my real world decisions on science fiction books I liked as a kid. While we're at it, let's only have voting for people who do Federal Service.
From the 1930s Keynes predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
These days, you probably could get a 15 hour a week part time job and live on that so long as you were willing to live at a 1930's standard of living. No car. No electric appliances. No phone. You might even get away with a 1950's standard of living. Sometime back at the start of the 2008 recession, I wondered how bad things would have to get to look like the Great Depression like people were saying. Anyway, I found a study on the standard of living in the 1950's of middle class families that studied actual metrics like how many suits the breadwinner had on average, how many weeks of clothes people owned, how many electric appliances they owned, how much of a percent of their money was spent on food and clothing, etc. It was very sobering. The average member of a "middle class family" (I never did get a definition of what middle class meant however, but apparently they studied what was considered middle class at the time.) had a little over a weeks worth of clothing. A family had and average of around three electric appliances total in 1950. The average husband owned 1.54 suit jackets. The father got the eggs and bacon and everybody else got oatmeal, because that's what they could afford. Overall, the 1950's were not that good a time, but rather a time of increasing standards. Salaries were going up, electric appliances were being bought, people could afford more clothing. If one wanted to live at those standards of living they probably could as at the time a major portion of their money went to food and clothing which have come down in price probably by an order of magnitude. Housing would be a sticky issue as many of the forms of housing that used to exist, no longer does. Homes have gotten larger and tend to have many more features, and seems to be going up.
Slashdot Mirror
Teach logic to preschoolers, I say.
But that might lead to critical thinking.
Only if you teach them to be rational also. Controlling strictly logical people is just a matter of controlling the premises they are given.
*EVERYONE* here was bitching about TPP until Trump decided to do away with it.
Because Trump.
Trump said many things and stated many goals I agreed with, however I never heard anything that made me think that he actually had any sort of logical support for that stance, would actually do it if elected, nor a plan in how to do it if he was, and a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't know if this is false decisiveness, but he has to do something, be it a stunt or not. He's already getting a lot of heat from almost half of the country. He needs to consolidate and keep calm his electoral base at least. Politics, just like economy, is more about emotions than technicalities.
To paraphrase Caesar in Rome: "If I do nothing, I will appear weak. If I accept the deal my predecessor made, my support will turn against me. Therefore, I must strike it down.
I suspect we'll see a lot of this.
Well, obama failed to provide for displaced workers after forcing coal mines out of business. Now stupid dems can suck fat dick in the company of their saudi terrorist cave-buddies
Hearing a conservative complaining because the Democrats didn't give out enough entitlements and work programs seems to be a first for me.
Odd that in America the preservation of coal is seen as a conservative ideal
That is just political pandering. Coal is dying because of simple economics.
So was slavery. Doesn't meant the South won't go to war over it.
Why isn't he being prosecuted for perjury - lying to Congress - that's what I want to know
My guess and original suspicion is that it was because Congress told him to lie to them before hand. I doubt Congress, or at least some in Congress knew what the real answer was, but wanted a nice public refutation to present. Snowden probably not just blew the cover off Clapper, but also Congress.
Yet SJW's whine about "cultural appropriation" all the time. How can it be a melting pot is "cultural appropriation" is evil?
Melting pot is adoption, not appropriation, would be the general response. Wearing an indian feathered headdress because you think it looks cool would be appropriation. Wearing an indian feathered headdress because you went to the pow wows and earned it would be adoption.
I completely agree. The religious stuff got so bizarre and obsessed towards the end that I simply could not force myself to finish it. It's like the author had a minor stroke while writing it.
It's been a long time since I've read it but it seemed a pretty standard story: guy comes to Earth with a message that people should love one another and the people kill him for it.
India is West of Japan
By Western, they do mean European. That's because the Japanese got curry from advisors from the British navy (who got it from India). Curry is a good way to prevent scurvy which the Japanese had a big issue with on their first naval trip to Hawaii and the Americas and spent month in port just recovering. So, they adopted British naval cuisine which was curry. Apparently, they still serve curry in the Japanese navy every Friday. They have done their own thing with it by adding flour to the sauce to make it thicker, cooking it with beef (which they also got from the 'Westerners'), and serving on rice along with a side salad and glass of milk.
So, he is playing "The Apprentice" then?
It's what he knows. I imagine he'll stick with it as it'll make for good news and look like he's doing something. I expect him to fire and replace more people than Lincoln did generals.
During the primaries, I pointed out that people were upset with slimy politicians quo enough that both parties were being overrun by non-party members in their primaries. Of course, the Republicans got rid of the politician part and the Democrats got rid of the slimy part.
Well, it is shit like the GP posted that is why Clinton lost.
Fear of minorities is why Trump was elected. Period.
Well, considering Trump's vote count was the lowest in the last few elections or at best the same as to make no difference, while the Democrats lost 10% of their voters. I'd probably put the loss more on the Democrat's side.
That's one of the things that blows my mind. There are a lot of people in the U.S. who basically said, "I'm sick of all you billionaire New York atheists controlling my life! You're out of touch with the working man, and don't care about me!" and then proceeded to elect Trump. It's like an Onion article.
Sort of funny that they managed to keep one corrupt, elitist New York Democrat out of office by voting in another corrupt, elitist New York Democrat.
and this brings to mind a question I've been wondering for a while. At this point, is there _any_ source which both sides would accept as authoritative?
Shit. There's no source I consider as authoritative, even for my own personal reading. It's always check various sources, compare them, try and find local news articles about the event because they often have more detailed information, but even then, there can and has been a vast amount of information that just never hits any news pages because people don't care enough to pay for the type of research that goes into publishing such. Take the news article on the network guy that kept the passwords from his boss in SF. Lots of information that even conversations here didn't/couldn't find. Luckily one of the jurors was a /. reader and showed up to answer questions and explain things after the trial and he revealed lots of information that probably never saw any print edition.
Your best luck is probably the Wall Street Journal. As explained by Hunter S. Thompson, the WSJ is read by people who are reading it to make money. If they bias the news, and somebody makes a business decision on that biased news, millions or even billions could be lost, and the readers would look for someplace else to get their news. Notice that they happily sit behind a paywall and get plenty of people willing to pay. Back in the day when HST explained all this, there was also the New York Times, but they have been caught not fact checking their articles as much as they should have and have lost a lot of prestige.
I have a dim understanding that modern physics believes that faster-than-light travel is not possible, full stop. I don't quite understand the equivalence, but FTL is the equivalent of time travel, and since we believe that time travel would violate causality, we believe that FTL is impossible no matter what mechanism you propose (teleportation, hyperspace, whatever).
Not as I understand it. FTL travel is not possible in acceleration in Minkowski (flat) space (which most of our observable universe approximates very well). This is also where there becomes time travel. In Reinmannian (curved) space, things aren't so simple. Because it is curved there are multiple light-like paths between the same two points and these can be of different lengths, so one path can be considered FTL by the standards of the other path. Wormholes are an extreme version of this and although travel through one may seem to be FTL by an observer in normal space the path through the wormhole is equally valid and has its own distance and time associated with it. It may be time travel also to the observer in normal space, but that is also dictated by the path through the wormhole. Hyperspace is a similar situation but different as it is not any time of spacetime as we know it, but rather a different type of space probably like all the extra dimensions that string theorists keep talking about. The idea is that one leaves this space, goes totally into hyperspace, moves and then comes out again into normal space. Again, there is a path through hyperspace as the two points in normals space time are related to it, but either the natural laws in hyperspace are different and allow for greater than c travel or the distance between the two points is shorter.
Those are hypothetical ways of FTL and time travel. Now, it could be that physics ends up showing that such things can't exist, but the general issue with FTL travel is with the special theory of relativity which only holds for flat spacetime (that's why it's "special"). Wormholes could be shown to be unstable and collapse anytime any information goes through them. There are things like time travel has talked about in real physics in things like "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" by Tipler, Frank (Physical Review D. 9 (8): 2203–2206) but has also been argued against by a paper by Stephan Hawking. As far as I know theoretical physicists are still making bets on such things and in any case, have not been experimentally verified.
I have to say that I get a lot of liberal noise, but I haven't seen anyone claim that Trump is literally Hitler or is going to murder people.
Murder? Naw, he's still working on registering them.
"Asked later, as he signed autographs, how such a database would be different from Jews having to register in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump repeatedly said, “You tell me,” until he stopped responding to the question."
Citation for the registration requirement, please.
Is this what you're looking for? Here's the NY Times
1. The Mainstream media (MSM) kept telling everyone HRC was going to win, so everyone in rural America and flyover country made 100% sure their vote counted, and wow, did it!
And yet, less Republicans showed up to vote for him than either McCain or Romey. His number beat Bush, but barely and I doubt he ended up with a higher percentage of voters. Trump won because Hillary couldn't get the votes that Obama got as 5 or 6 million people who voted for him didn't vote for Hillary.
I don't see that happening. And if it does, the manufacturing will probably come back here - and be done by robots. That's the only reason why it's still down there - Mexicans are still cheaper than automation (and of course the capital investment has to be recovered; which adds to the inertia of staying there.)
That is true, Trump promises to bring back jobs for completely uneducated people but many of those jobs will be taken over by robots even within his first term of office. If Trump really wanted to improve the lives of these rust belters that elected him he'd be promising them education levels that allow them to function in a future economy instead of goading them with toll barriers and bigotry.
If I remember the stats I saw earlier today, most of Trumps supporters are in the 45+ bracket. I doubt offers of education for future economies will really interest them that much. Still, every president I've seen in the last 35+ years has promised more jobs and a better economy, and I've yet to see anything yet that makes me think there is a sure fire way to do that besides dumb luck. I certainly haven't seen anything to make me think that Trump knows anything more than all the past Presidents that have failed to do so by their own actions.
I'd rather see a proportional split of each state's electoral votes personally. The electoral college has its place, namely as a concession to the smaller, less populated states so they don't get railroaded. Since most states benefit from this, I doubt it would ever be ratified, especially since it would also seem to hurt the ruling party in those states also since two of the last three times their guy got elected President, it was only due to the electoral college. Granting a states electoral votes proportionally to the voter's choices would give representation to voters in non-swing states. It might also allow for some third party bits if they were allowed to form coalitions for their votes in some manner. I'm sure there's a ton of things that could go wrong with that, but in a quick post, I'll throw that out there.
Insults like yours against the common person is what helped Trump take the election. I hope you're proud of yourself.
Hey, an AC post I agree with! Margins in the battleground states were pretty slim in some cases. I do wonder how many Trump voters got off their asses because they were called "deplorable"? Insulting in politics is much like bombing countries to break their moral. It rarely works and more often just deepens their resolve.
This has been something I've been asking about for years with no good answer. Namely, what evidence exists to prove that so-called "dark matter" is actually matter rather than a defect in our mathematical model of gravity?
It's like this. There are various evidence of something going on, such as galactic rotations, CMB patterns, gravitational lensing, etc. (These are described in the Wikipedia article on Dark Matter.) There have been, and currently still are, various explanations for these different evidences. Typically, we can do something like give each one a grade like the typical US grading scale of A-F. So far, the idea that there is matter out there that only interacts via gravity scores pretty highly A-C in all these. Other explanation such as MOND may score a B or even an A in one, but typically get an F in others. In the case of MOND, it doesn't even get an A in galactic rotations which seems a write in, because the resulting new law of gravitation would be so complicated that nobody has even proposed a hypothetical one that works in more than 2D solution, let alone addressing any of the other evidence on hand. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary support, and so far
It was the same approach with the origin of the moon. Lots of different theories but none really fit all the data until some serious computer simulations could be done in the late 80's to show that collision with another smaller mass caused ejection of mantle material was the best fit. Even then, it was added to as I think now it was ejection of two masses that later combined to form the moon.
Keep in mind that things like more normal matter, or MOND were first preposed 70+ years ago when the evidence was first seen. People have bene looking into them, testing them, coming up with different theories and after all that work, the current one for dark matter is the best we have to fit all the evidence. So, just because we leave out cat food and it disappears is not reason to think we have a cat we've never seen, but at this point, the cat food is being eaten, the litterbox is being used, cat toyed are being moved under couches in the middle of the night, and at times if we knock on the walls, we can hear something meow back at us. Still never seen the cat and can't proves it's there, but if it's something other than a cat doing all this stuff, the new answer is going to be a lot weirder than the explanation of a cat we've never seen.
How do you feel about Russia meddling with the elections?
You mean when the Russians gave the American people accurate information that America's own leaders were trying to hide? Is that the "meddling" you are referring to?
True, but how do we know that Russia will be fair and balanced?
Ah, so you'd have flushed the U.S. auto industry down the toilet during the last recession. Approx 1.5 million Americans worked directly the auto industry. Another roughly 6 million jobs are connected to it. They generate about $200 billion in state and federal taxes. The auto industry paid most of the U.S. government money back, as did the banks.
So you'd whack them all on the alter of Ann Rand. Let's let cut the U.S. economy because some misguided theory which has no use for humans or their offspring.
Sure, I base all my real world decisions on science fiction books I liked as a kid. While we're at it, let's only have voting for people who do Federal Service.
From the 1930s Keynes predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
These days, you probably could get a 15 hour a week part time job and live on that so long as you were willing to live at a 1930's standard of living. No car. No electric appliances. No phone. You might even get away with a 1950's standard of living. Sometime back at the start of the 2008 recession, I wondered how bad things would have to get to look like the Great Depression like people were saying. Anyway, I found a study on the standard of living in the 1950's of middle class families that studied actual metrics like how many suits the breadwinner had on average, how many weeks of clothes people owned, how many electric appliances they owned, how much of a percent of their money was spent on food and clothing, etc. It was very sobering. The average member of a "middle class family" (I never did get a definition of what middle class meant however, but apparently they studied what was considered middle class at the time.) had a little over a weeks worth of clothing. A family had and average of around three electric appliances total in 1950. The average husband owned 1.54 suit jackets. The father got the eggs and bacon and everybody else got oatmeal, because that's what they could afford. Overall, the 1950's were not that good a time, but rather a time of increasing standards. Salaries were going up, electric appliances were being bought, people could afford more clothing. If one wanted to live at those standards of living they probably could as at the time a major portion of their money went to food and clothing which have come down in price probably by an order of magnitude. Housing would be a sticky issue as many of the forms of housing that used to exist, no longer does. Homes have gotten larger and tend to have many more features, and seems to be going up.