OT: The new first world annoyances thread

Florida man swallowed by sinkhole under bedroom feared dead
This article is more than 10 years old
Rescuers in Florida put engineering equipment into the sinkhole but fail to find any signs of life
Associated Press in Brandon
Fri 1 Mar 2013 20.33 EST
117
A Florida man screamed for help and disappeared as a large sinkhole opened under his bedroom, his brother said on Friday. No signs of life have been found.


Jeff Bush, 37, was presumed dead on Friday, the victim of a sinkhole a hazard so common in Florida that state law requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger.

The sinkhole, estimated at 20 feet (6 metres) across and 20 feet deep, caused the home's concrete floor to cave in on Thursday as everyone in the Tampa-area house was turning in for the night. It gave way with a loud crash that sounded like a car hitting the house and brought Bush's brother running.

Jeremy Bush said he jumped into the hole but couldn't see his brother and had to be rescued himself by a sheriff's deputy who reached out and pulled him to safety as the ground crumbled around him.

"The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother," Jeremy Bush said in a neighbour's yard. "But I just couldn't do nothing."

He added: "I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him."

Officials lowered equipment into the sinkhole and saw no signs of life, said Hillsborough County fire rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico.

A dresser and the TV set had vanished down the hole, along with most of Bush's bed.

"All I could see was the cable wire running from the TV going down into the hole. I saw a corner of the bed and a corner of the box spring and the frame of the bed," Jeremy Bush said.

At a news conference on Friday night, county administrator Mike Merrill described the home as "seriously unstable." He said no one can go in the home because officials were afraid of another collapse and losing more lives. The soil around the home was very soft and the sinkhole was expected to grow.

Engineers said they may have to demolish the house, even though from the outside there appeared to be nothing wrong with the four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, built in 1974.

Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because there are caverns below ground of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water. A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 400 feet across in 1981 and claimed five sports cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954, according to the state's environmental agency.

Why most Japanese people don't want to live past 100
Michelle De Pacina
Tue, April 18, 2023 at 1:39 PM PDT

Most people in Japan do not want to live to or beyond 100 years old, according to a new survey.

In September 2022, a research firm commissioned by the Japan Hospice Palliative Care Foundation in Osaka conducted an online survey with approximately 500 men and 500 women aged in their 20s to 70s nationwide, asking them if they would like to live beyond 100 years old.

According to researchers, 72% of male respondents and 84% of female respondents said they “don’t think” they would like to live that long. When asked why, 59% of respondents said they did not want to bother their families or others

A new grocery store opens tmrw at 6AM. I’m going to be there. I want to push a brand new grocery cart for the first time. At almost 40 years old, I want to feel those smooth running wheels and speed down an aisle without it pulling to one side, or having a wheel clonking throughout the entire store.

Still, the Pew Research Center has done commendable work turning census data into meaningful benchmarks. In an April 2022 report, they found that the median income of middle-class households in 2020 was $90,131 — up 50% from $59,934 in 1970, as measured in 2020 dollars.

Using 2018 figures, Pew defined class-income breakdown in 2020 like this, based on three-person households, adjusted for the cost of living in a metropolitan area:

lower-income households had incomes less than $48,500;

upper-income households had incomes greater than $145,500;

middle-income households fell into a range between those two numbers