The first stat is a little misleading IMO. While the median car cost has increased ~2x (inflation adjusted), an entry level car price has only gone up ~1.2x (1971 AMC Gremlin vs 2023 Kia Rio LX; $1.8k/$14.8k vs $17.8k) and that’s more important for measuring relative quality of life.

Of course add on to that the fact that there’s easy access to second hand car markets and the number of features included with that base model vs the 1971 AMC Gremlin and it doesn’t seem like things are much worse.

Basically, average car prices increasing could just indicate that people are willing to spend more on cars for whatever reason that may be (better features, more car-centric culture, etc.). For this reason I’d like to see similar stats but about entry level options within each category. Probably less sensationalistic but still interesting.

That being said, I bet stats for the housing market and others would still show a notable increase even at the entry level, but I’d still like to verify this before blindly jumping on the sensationalist bandwagon.

Formally speaking, it is not trivially apparent that if one side of a V formation, then there are more birds on one side of a V. If this were true then it would imply that birds always fly with a precisely consistent spacing such that there are never more birds on the opposite side just flying closer together.

So if the statement were true it would actually be a relatively novel observation, but I question the legitimacy of the claim.

Anyways, I probably shouldn’t be formally analyzing a shitpost about bird formations cross posed to a meme community lol

While Linus went overboard (as he has a history of doing, and as has also caused negativity to the community), this post is still very well liked because it appears to be a strong example of someone calling out the BS that a lot of developers like to throw around. No one’s going to join in a circle celebrating Linus picking on some first time contributor who didn’t know any better, but that’s how it sounds like you’re interpreting the post.

To add some context, there’s a toxic superiority complex that many developers have where they jump to blame others for issues that actually relate to their code. You can see this anywhere from developers who immediately blame users without investigating to software developers within companies who are quick to pass off issues as not their team’s problem.

So, in this example Linus is actually calling one of these developers out, which is why the post is very well-received.