As thousands of people remain unable to leave the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert after heavy rains inundated their campsites with ankle-deep mud Saturday, authorities say they are investigating a death at the event.
Attendees were told to shelter in place in the Black Rock Desert and conserve food, water and fuel after a rainstorm swamped the area, forcing officials to halt any entering or leaving of the festival.
The remote area in northwest Nevada was hit with 2 to 3 months worth of rain – up to 0.8 inches – in just 24 hours between Friday and Saturday mornings. The heavy rainfall fell on dry desert grounds, whipping up thick, clay-like mud that festivalgoers say is too difficult to walk or bike through.
For the most part: they’re doing better than you’d expect (ie homeless) given that they’ll generally be living somewhere rent controlled.
They’re still in abject poverty by comparison. It’s like somebody living in a trailer park on 5k a year.
But no matter how you shake it out and keep whataboutisming people the fact is that 100k a year is the new 50k in a lot of US cities where average rents are well above 2.5k/mo.
The national median rent is 24k/yr.
In 2016 that was 11k/yr
100k doesn’t mean what you think it does anymore. In nyc 100k means you can maybe live alone in a 1br (2.7k/mo) without a car, but not downtown (4.1k/mo). You’ll be commuting 45ish minutes and be able to have a rainy day fund. You’ll pocket about 60k/yr after taxes, after rent you’ll have 24k/yr to spend on food in the most expensive city in the USA. You’ll be able to shop at discount stores to make that money go a bit further. You’ll go to dive bars to try and get $5 drinks instead of $15. You’ll make your own coffee. You’ll do your laundry at a laundromat because it’s too pricey to rent a place with a washing machine.
It’s a nice life. If that sounds like rich to you then the billionaires have brainwashed you. It’s a middle class lifestyle.
The brainwashing is real. So many people are so poor that they don’t believe you can be poor unless you’re absolutely destitute and on the edge of homelessness each month. This 100k/year lifestyle should be afforded by minimum wage, tbh.
You guys keep bringing up cost of living like it’s some cool trick that lets you claim poverty while making nearly three times the local average salary.
If Bill Gates spent most of his fortune to live like a college freshman in a space station would you be calling him middle class? It would cost him several times an average Americans yearly salary just to eat puréed meats and shit in a closet, so clearly he couldn’t be considered rich anymore.
Who the fuck claimed poverty. I claimed it’s a middle class lifestyle.
It’s not rich.
More whattaboutism and strawmen
Yeah man any attempt to illustrate a point with hyperbole and metaphor is clearly just whattaboutism. Do you think middle class people aren’t seen as rich to people who are below middle class?
No one in the comments above yours has said that $100k/yr is poverty. They are making the claim that someone making $100k/yr is not rich. There is a difference between poor and rich.
To me being rich is being able to afford practically anything. An annual salary of $100k does not buy that. In the US, a $100k salary affords you a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle. In San Francisco, a $100k salary qualifies you for subsidized housing. Location and COL matters. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t deliberately move to lower cost of living places where they can afford more and better things.
“Poverty” means not having enough money to meet basic needs. “Cost of living” is defined as the minimum money needed to meet basic needs. It’s not just relevant to the discussion, it is the discussion.
Someone living in Idaho can own a house on $70k. Someone living in NYC is homeless on $70k.
If the local average is four times lower than the cost of living in a local area, the people making three times the local average are still feeling the effects of poverty. It’s not a competition to see who is “more poor,” it’s a fight for a living wage regardless of where you live.
It’s not a complicated concept.