Yeah I had thought that it was (probably, in some ways or places) easier than it had ever been before with the internet and rampant unchecked capitalism. but history has many vicious twists and dark moments not recounted through time and people have almost certainly been much cheaper or sold in far greater numbers into slavery in prior centuries. so maybe we are continuing to soften up as a world shaping apex species and gradually becoming more considerate towards one another as our concept of a “tribe” or “in-group” continues to widen.
Did you literally just use "there are fates worse than death" as some kind of comeback to someone saying that not being able afford necessities leads to "losing" (death), as a way to argue that a society that allows this should be improved?
What are you saying? That people not being able to feed and/or house themselves is fine, because there are worse kinds of "loss"?
What the fuck is point of "one-upmanship" around the baseline of suffering? And how is "people not dying" not a pretty good place to start when it comes to what society should try to achieve?
What? What the hell do you even mean by "baseline"?
Again, what are you saying? You replied adversarially to someone who was making the point that society should be improved so as to not allow things like people starving to death, or becoming homeless. Are you agreeing with them or trying to shut them down?
Are you saying society barely doing anything to help people in such situations is fine, because you survived it? Because that is what it seems like, and my reply is in response to such an utterly insane take.
Society should prevent death and suffering as much as the available resources allow. Who the fuck cares where you draw the line for "good enough"?
Well, if you look at the average salary across the whole world, an overwhelming majority of people doesn't make enough money to survive, so there's that
No. If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right.
Average
noun
a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.
The term average, inherently refers to at least three different ways to calculate the central value in a data set. What you're talking about is mean, but it can also mean mode, or median, and there are other, even, more complicated calculations than those depending on your context.
So yes, average, is an inherently vague and hard to define term.
Idk, generally people mean the mean by average and the median by median, but I get your point. (But I think the term average salary can be ambiguous for other reasons, not disagreeing there.)
Average salary (that is, the mean) isn't that good of a metric even if you account for region, industry and so on, because just one outlier can easily skew your entire statistics. Median is much more useful in that regard.
Source: me, someone who writes tools for processing and gathering large amounts of confidential employee data, including salaries of wide range of companies across multiple countries.