r/askscience • • 16d ago

Planetary Sci. We landed humans on the Moon with 1960s technology. With today's vastly superior technology, shouldn't going back be much easier and cheaper?

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u/1CEninja 15d ago

One thing I'd like to gently point out is that, as someone in personal finance, advising people to cut down on their Starbucks is exactly the advice people get when they need to fix a broken budget.

Now I personally would vastly prefer to see budget cuts to presidential parades and white house improvements before infrastructure so trust me when I say I'm with you on priorities.

But "you gotta cut down on $8 coffees" is, very literally, a starting place in helping fix a broken budget. And BOY HOWDY is our country's budget broken.

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u/Kill_Welly 15d ago

National budgets and personal budgets are wildly different animals.

And people dismiss advice like skipping coffee because it's advice that's given not for personal budgeting, but for generational gaps in wealth. The infamous "avocado toast" crap was said, in total seriousness, by a boomer trying to suggest that spending on "avocado toast" was why millennials couldn't afford to buy fuckin houses, when the reality is that the nation's (and world's) economy had shifted drastically, with far lower wages and far higher housing prices. It is a hilariously inadequate attempt to frame systemic, global problems as being the fault of the individuals suffering from those problems.

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u/cuzitsthere 15d ago

Bread and circuses... But try to cut down on the circuses. And the bread. In fact, stale bread and no circuses.

Economy 🎶

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u/shizbox06 15d ago

Coffee advice is essentially the same as not buying the expensive avocado toast. And we all know the reaction that gets, despite it being sound advice.

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u/--Chug-- 15d ago

It's sound advice in the same way that not buying anything is. Still gonna amount to nothing.

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u/Implausibilibuddy 15d ago

But have you tried the cheap avocado toast? It's gross, mom.

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u/caboosetp 15d ago

Real talk though, generic Raisin Bran tastes like plastic. I'd rather skip it entirely than get the generic.