Money

'$75k is a fantasy amount of money to me': The salary argument nobody can settle

Same paycheck, wildly different lives.

Ask young Americans whether $75,000 a year counts as poor, and you'll get an answer that sounds less like a budget and more like a biography. Some hear the number and picture a comfortable, roomy adult life. Others hear it and laugh. "$75k is a fantasy amount of money to me," one twentysomething wrote. "I can't even imagine what it's like to make that much money a year."

Both camps have receipts. As Adam Albright-Hanna reports, $75,000 can stretch surprisingly far in New York City if you have a roommate and no car, while in other pockets of the country, a single person earning under $80k is already classified as low income. Nobody in the argument is lying. They're just describing different countries.

The most upvoted answer settled it in two sentences, and it helps explain why an entire generation keeps getting told it's bad with money when the real variable was never just the spending.

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And what did we learn?

Last week we shared the expert-approved approach to confidence - the alter ego.

Which alter ego should GOOD readers adopt in an emergency? Almost half of you said none at all.

• Beyoncé-grade stage persona (7.0%)

• Batman, but for boring chores (12.7%)

• A pundit who says what I won't (32.4%)

• No mask, I run on pure adrenaline (47.9%)

GOOD reader J. M. Power, apparently also known as Noni, is with the plurality here. “It helps to always be prepared for an emergency. My family jokes about the fact that my pocketbook contains just about everything!! “Ask Noni, she probably has some.”“

Pop Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy

Public Good

There's a name for what his friend did, and 4.6 million people watched him do it

One military tradition, one empty spot in the crowd, and one guy who noticed.

Airman Joel Usher already knew before the ceremony started. He would finish United States Air Force training, stand in formation with everyone else, and when it ended, he would be the one standing alone. No family was coming.

There's a ritual at military graduations called "tapping out." At the end, family members or close supporters step forward to officially greet the new graduate and walk them out. It's brisk and orderly by design, but it's also the emotional hinge of the entire day. All around Joel, rows dissolved into hugs and cheering. His row had nobody in it.

Then a guy he'd met during training started walking toward him, phone already up and recording. In this story by Mark Wales, you can watch exactly what Usher's face does in the half second he realizes what's about to happen, a milestone moment that flips from lonely to something else entirely. He never saw it coming.

On August 17, 1982, workers at a Philips-owned PolyGram plant in Langenhagen, West Germany, pressed the world's first commercial compact disc. The album they chose was ABBA's The Visitors, a record released the previous autumn by a group that was already nearing the end of its original run. A near-farewell album became the opening act for a new era.

Philips and Sony had spent years hammering out the format, and one detail has passed into legend: engineers reportedly settled on roughly 74 minutes of playing time so a single disc could hold Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without interruption. Whatever the real reason, the result was an album you could play start to finish with no flipping, no hiss, and no needle to drop.

Sony's first commercial CD player arrived in Japan that October, with about 50 discs on the shelf and roughly 150 titles pressed by November. Within a few years, CDs had overtaken vinyl in major markets, and the same shiny-disc technology evolved into CD-ROMs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. And the first commercial disc off the line belonged to Björn, Benny, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid. 

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💬 From the group text…

Two moose! Meese? Mooses? Anyway, I just can’t keep the scale of these things in my mind. They tower over cars, but no matter how many times I have my impression calibrated, I somehow forget until I see a video like this one.

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