I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:

> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.

We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.

You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.

There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.

It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?

It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.

I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.

It seems the author fed a list of documents and points to an AI, asked it to write an argument on it, then the AI hallucinated quotes and tried to badly extrapolate from real data. I think the original point might be true, but it is hard to trust tbh.

The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.

If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.

[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.

[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.

I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.

Cheap phones like a year old Moto G are under $100. There's no reason that shouldn't last two years. They do everything necessary. If you're near poverty, you don't get to use "normal" amounts of data, streaming shows and Spotify and YouTube. You need enough data to get by, and 5GB will easily load every website you must access in a month, never mind that the plan includes all the talk/text you need.

I really do pay $15 a month for my phone plan. I've never hit my 5GB data cap.

I do have $30 home internet. So even if we assume two adults and home broadband, we're talking $70 including hardware, not $200, but there's nothing I do on my home WiFi that I absolutely need and couldn't do from my phone while staying under the data cap. But I'm not financially struggling, and it's an expense I'm happy to pay. It's not something I need.

Yeah the author makes a classic mistake of over arguing the point (potentially because the article was AI generated).

Laser focusing on housing and childcare would have been enough to make the point. Throw healthcare in and it's a solid argument. Get into the weeds on individual expenses and you open yourself up to a lot of nitpicking, which is all over this comment thread

He also way overshoots the target. I absolutely believe the current poverty line is way to low, but trying to argue it should be $140,000 a year is insanity. A lot of people will disregard the overall point of the article just due to that claim alone.

What's your estimate for hardware costs? You can't get phone+service for $20/month. What if they have limited or poor credit?

You can get a year old Moto G for under $100. There's no reason it shouldn't last two years (or 25 months for easy math, $4 a month). And you can get an MVNO plan for $15 a month that covers all talk and text and 5GB data. $19.

Those are the actual costs of my phone plan. I've never once come close to the cap because I don't stream music/video on my phone. It's not a need. I can load all the websites I must access and look up maps everywhere I need to go. And it's a pre-paid plan. No credit check required.

People who are really struggling simply do not NEED to spend more than $20 for phone service.

I think you’re underestimating the age you can leave kids to fend for themselves while you’re at work.

I don't think I am. Twelve? You don't need your own phone, never mind a smartphone with accompanying data plan, before you're 12.

The best small talkers say very little. We just ask interested questions about what you've already said. An easy cold opener at parties is, "So how do you know the host?" Then inquire about whether they're still doing that thing, or how long ago it was, or where they did it, whether they learned any cool things--the point is to keep asking questions.

Most people love talking about themselves and things they like to do. If you can keep them doing that, they'll remember fondly the "great conversation" you had.

Fair warning: It won't get you past the third or fourth interaction, at which point you probably actually need to have something in common, but it's an easy way to get through parties.

You might think so, but a lot of people can tell when you're ELIZA-ing them to death, and they will learn to avoid you.

There are a lot of people on HN who want a technical manual for how to party, and a lot of them keep telling each other that the art of conversation is about attentive listening. Can you imagine a conversation between two people practicing attentive listening on each other?

Yeah if an awkward person does it they can be called out as if they are interrogating or interviewing. I actually remember trying these tactics when I was teenager... and that is how it came off. I tried so many weird things because I was so unhappy with my social performance.

Usually safer way is making observations rather than directly asking or at least continously asking things over and over as if to desperately try to keep the conversation going.

But even then if you are awkward, it will still come off awkward and people will try to excuse them out of that situation no matter how much theory you might read online.

The "will learn to avoid you" part is what I was getting at in my warning at the end. This only gets you through a few interactions.

The point of small talk is to get to medium talk. It's not directionless. Medium talk just means you've found a topic that both of you are interested in enough to talk about it for five to ten minutes without getting bored. That you both know the host is one of the few things it's culturally safe to assume anymore. Both of you met the host doing something you like well enough to associate with a person you met doing that thing when you're not doing that thing, so if either of those things happen to be an appropriate subject for medium talk, great. Now you're out of small talk and just "talking to this person I just met at this party about a thing we both like." If you're lucky, it's something you both actually like a lot, and then you have a basis for large talk, and large talk opens the door to casual friendship.

If you don't happen to draw a medium or large talk topic out of the gate, that's when you poke around the edges of the small talk, looking for things that could be fodder for medium talk. If you try looking for three or four and aren't getting anywhere, you've still filled the appropriate 5-10 minutes not to seem like a jerk, and now you need a snack, or a drink, and a new conversation partner.

It helps a lot if you're genuinely interested in a wide variety of things, enough that you can ask intelligent questions about them, because it increases the likelihood that you can find a shared interest with this person you've just met. That's not just "attentive listening." It's "finding out why someone cares about something interesting to them because you sincerely want to know."

If the other person isn't engaging with you at all, isn't trying to find one of these topics with you, they actually just don't want to talk to you. That's how people communicate this. It's not usually personal. They haven't known you long enough for it to be really personal. They may not even consciously realize they don't want to talk to you, but it's still true, and you're doing them a favor when you recognize that and excuse yourself.

You (and everyone else ostensibly affected) have had like 7 years to sue over this if you could prove it.

Plus, even though YOU obviously know better than to post a screenshot of your Coinbase balances on social media, (tens of?) thousands of their customers do not.

With the analysis you provided of the email, your report definitely deserved to be taken seriously, but Coinbase could easily get dozens of emails reporting "compromise" of the personal details you provided that were obtained by good ol' fashioned OSINT and poor personal privacy practices.

If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10. That's not "some clever ways." That's so basic it's absurd. They don't know how many things you're going to buy. They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy. There's no way to game the entire system for every combination of things people might buy.

Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

If there is no rounding down, it could amount to more.

Hypothetically if you incur 10,000 transactions per year with the max rounding up of $0.04 per transaction, you're out $400.

This doesn't make a huge impact to individuals, but it absolutely will to large volume businesses.

For large volume businesses, $400 / year is what we usually call.. a rounding error.

A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.

The percentage change is the same for everyone. If a consumer pays 10.05 instead of 10.03, they pay 0.2% more.

If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it would probably take a miracle of data engineering and behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.

Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double digit price increases.

Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional complainers.

Your hypothetical 4 cents per transaction is inflated but it’s still only 4 cents per transaction. Credit card fees dwarf that even for very large volume business.

No CEO is rubbing their hands together salivating over the idea of 4 cents per transaction. This likely won’t even show up on an earnings report because it’s literally going to be rounded away.

You’re arguing about nonsense scenarios. Hypothetically every business could also tack a “convenience fee” of $20 on every purchase like TicketMaster and make 200k off this imaginary customer.

Also even if a business rounded up every transaction, the expected benefit is 2 cents per transaction vs fair rounding, not 4 cents.

But there would be rounding down, so how is this relevant?

What's even to say anything will be rounded down? If Walmart says "we're going to round anything from $0.01 to $0.04 up to $0.05," do you think the free market would put them out of business out of principle, or would they get away with it? I think they'd get away with it.

Nobody has to round down. There's no government rule.

I would expect many businesses to implement ceil()-flavored rounding.

> Most likely they will tune for increased volume as people spend more to avoid losing a couple of cents.

Why would they ever tune for that? “Uh oh, turns out customers are intentionally spending more money!”

I don’t understand how this same train of thought comes up every time eliminating pennies is raised. This whole train of thought collapses if you consider the scope we’re talking about (literally a couple of cents max per transaction) and how stores actually behave today. Stores are happy to drop a couple of pennies to make prices look better. But in this hypothetical world stores are going to calculate the optimal prices to round in a way that rips off customers for a couple of cents. This makes no sense. They give up a penny on nearly every item today for the sake of “pretty” prices.

Edit: Oh, I see you’re arguing that they would tune to encourage spending up to “save” the couple of cents, rather than retuning in response to the hypothetical increased spending. No doubt they would like to do this. I doubt they actually would because this is not trivial and it would require ruining the pretty prices.

> Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

"In cash" is entirely separate from the rounding debate and is just the "people use cards, anyway" argument. It's not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is about cash. I do buy single items at stores sometimes.

> If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10.

Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently totaling a few cents?

> Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently totaling a few cents?

Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

> Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit?

Take this year's tariffs as an example. As you may've heard, UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment; identical shipments sent via FedEx or DHL are only charged a few dollars for the service of customs brokerage, so we know UPS's actual costs for providing that service aren't that high. They saw a situation where consumers would be confused about prices and took advantage of it to make a lot more money by simply charging a lot more than they need to.

"But where's the law saying they couldn't have just raised their prices by hundreds of dollars without tariffs? Where's the law?!" There wasn't one, they could've raised their prices for international shipments before the tariffs happened. But consumers would have noticed a lot more and accepted it a lot less. They took advantage of the situation because the situation allowed them to get away with it.

> Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You admitted the $0.99 number has a psychological effect that outweighs the $0.01 gain of charging the extra cent. That would be the reason they don't do that. It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

> UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment

To reinforce this point... UPS just does this all the time. I had to have a number of personal effects[1] shipped up from the US to Canada that I requested self-declaration forms for them and never received them - UPS decided to brokerage the shipment themselves. We then spent the next three months fighting a six hundred dollar charge[2] that should have never existed.

UPS is going to defraud customers on brokerage fees regardless of the scenario - it's just what UPS does. You've got bigger problems to worry about - the impact of dropping the penny will be unnoticeable in the sea of general corruption and fraud.

1. Items that you own in one country and are shipping to Canada for personal possession are exempt from most normal tariffs.

2. To really add icing to outrage - this was more than double the original shipping price and, considering we delivered an itemization with the shipment for customs UPS could calculate their BS fee upfront and show the actual cost to the customer but they don't because the US doesn't force them to.

>You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit?

That's not the point. Businesses are obviously happy to raise prices under the confusion of other changes, but I find it very hard to believe "accounting fees" are a plausible way to do so. People know that the register machine can do the calculations easily - it already does so. And there is a good reason for businesses not to introduce such fees, because they are directly visible to the consumer who is going to complain and shop elsewhere.

The UPS example is apples to oranges. Tariffs are poorly understood, and consumers rarely shop around for shipping - they tend to take the service given by the merchant. The agency people will show on 2 random cents on every shop is way higher.

>It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

It's very relevant. How are consumers going to react to a price like $1.03? Especially since that's almost certainly something that would previously have been priced at $1.

Wouldn't they have to crack the private key by the time the block is mined? Otherwise that transaction would already be sent to another address? I don't have a good idea how long it would take supercomputers to crack a single private key, so I don't know if 13,000x faster would be fast enough, but I don't think it would.

The private key is a 256-bit number. I don't think even 13,000x faster than supercomputers is going to get your cracking time under the time for a 10-minute block. 2^256 is a really, really, really big number.

Sometimes there is no valid hash found for any nonces in the 2^32 space and the timestamp and/or the extra nonce in the coinbase transaction in the block header have to be updated and tried again, so at least it's not quite that simple (simple, as distinct from easy).

I had to have contrast to diagnose a simple cyst, which is entirely asymptomatic and was discovered by accident in the background of a cardiac MRI (family history of SCD, but my own heart is fine).

You're making me feel lucky about what was otherwise a very unpleasant experience!

It's also the case that there is a bewildering variety of things that get sort of lumped together as "IBD." Crohn's and ulcerative colitis are two of them, but there's no particular reason to assume inflammatory bowel diseases all have the same set of causes. Pretty much all of them are made worse by an e. coli infection, though, so a drug that can target just those bacteria is helpful!

During my own IBD journey, I've managed to stump the heck out of two different teams of GIs. I had been diagnosed with UC by biopsy during colonoscopy, and then at my last colonoscopy, despite not having been on medication for more than two years, they determined not only that I don't have it now, but that I never did. They told me "remission" would look different from "this bowel has never had IBD." But they also insisted I had not been misdiagnosed.

And yet they told me with a straight face that it is incurable. I had it in the past, confirmed by pathology. I don't have it now. And it's incurable. I give up.

In the end, I don't care enough to fight them about the contradiction, because the part I most care about is the "I don't have it now" part, and we're all in agreement on that.

(Note for any who are interested: I stopped medication after successfully reducing my inflammation markers within normal limits by eating the exact same thing for every single meal for 20 months with no cheating of any kind. They told me that shouldn't have been possible either, but it worked. And yes, it was as miserable as it sounds, but less miserable than living with UC.)

Sounds like you first decimated the bacteria with antibiotics, and then made it heavily disadvantaged by eating something that preferentially feeds other gut bacteria. What was the food, out of curiosity?

Actually when I medicated it, it was with mesalamine, not an antibiotic. I didn't do anything to attack the bacteria.

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.

It's possible it still had some antibiotic properties, lots of commonly used drugs interact with our gut bacteria in varying ways. And indeed a quick search suggests that this might be the case: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5514548/

Even so, a 1.2g dose, which was what I was taking, isn't enough to obliterate my existing gut bacteria.

Great to hear this worked for you! What was in the the meal? And how did you decide on exactly that meal?

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.

I wanted it to be soft/easy to digest, but also nutritious. This was at least a wide enough variety of nutrients that I didn't feel miserable (just bored).

As someone with IBD who is on their fifth trip to the toilet since midnight (BST) I'd love to get the recipe. I've got a few months of steroids ahead and anything more long term and high impact is of enormous interest.

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice in a pan until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Salt to taste, but it's never gonna be delicious. It's tolerable. It's even fairly enjoyable once or twice. It's not a bad meal. But boy is it a tedious one after awhile.

Interesting, what was the reasoning behind it?

I wasn't aware of any diet that excluded these things for reactivity reasons, and once boiled half to death, they were so soft as to be practically "pre-digested." I was trying to make it as easy on my gut as I could manage.

Which markers? What meal? Why that meal?

Note it also could return; looks can be deceiving.

CRP and fecal calprotectin. The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Picked things that were very soft/easy to digest, with at least some nutritional value, because it didn't bother me. I just wanted to buy time for things to calm down.

It was meant to be an elimination diet with reintroduction, but every reintroduction attempt failed miserably for 20 months. Then, suddenly, it was fine.

I still mostly eat food I would recognize in its ingredient form instead of highly processed stuff, but if everybody's going out for pizza, I can have a couple slices and be fine. I just can't do that all the time.

Or it was never there to begin with.

Any hypothesis for why eating only one thing would solve IBD ?

Would that select for a particular biota / micro-fauna environment ? or cause less mechanical / chemical inflammation ?

glad it worked in your case.

Not the person you're replying to, but my own IBD went away completely after I did keto for an extended period. This was a decade ago and it hasn't come back even as my diet returned to normal.

In my n=1 experience, it seems maybe significant dietary changes can perturb the gut ecosystem out of whatever state corresponds to IBD.

I had a similar experience, i.e. strict keto for 9 months and fully came off meds with no signs of UC or asthma. UC came back after around 2 years and I don't remember how long before I had to start asthma meds again. I can no longer do keto though, each time I try I get palpitations now after around a week.

Yeah my asthma went into remission as well, though this was also a period of my life when I was very physically active and in the best shape of my life, so it's hard to say what was the cause there.

They sometimes can, but most properly gut-adapted microbes only have their relative prevalence reduced by diet changes, by and large people unfortunately tend to snap back once diet is discontinued.

Ideally, you'd combine that with doing a stool transplant first, since it's the main thing (other than just antibiotics) that causes permanent compositional changes.

I'm not a scientist on any level, so my theory only went as far as "stop irritating the thing and let it heal itself."

When they started talking about putting me on immune-suppressant drugs during a pandemic, I thought that didn't sound like a very good idea, but maybe my body could sort itself out if I gave it the opportunity.

Not a terribly sophisticated take, but it works for things like not popping blisters or picking at scabs, so it seemed worth a shot.

i do the same, eating same thing for 2 years. While i don't have big IBD symptoms, i cannot now introduce new food, every time i try to introduce even very very small doses, i get a strange disproportionate reaction of my gut.

Gosh, I'm sorry. It does suck. For me, it was like that until it suddenly wasn't anymore. Nothing obviously changed. I kept "testing" reintroducing very small amounts of other food to try to end the elimination diet, like a bite every two months or something, and after 20 months, suddenly it went fine.

I say that just in hopes of encouraging you that healing might be right around the corner and you just might not know it yet. I certainly didn't know it was about to be over when it ended.

Doctors are the only people I’ve encountered who are ready to inform you of their poorly supported contradictory conclusions with full confidence, and are fully ready to meet any pushback with gaslighting or the dreaded “difficult patient” label.

They approach the phenomenon of dropping trust and respect for their profession in much the same way.

It’s really frustrating. I don’t get why they feel entitled to acting this way when no one else does.

After making you wait 40 minutes later than when your appointment was supposed to start, I’ve looked at your chart for about 2 minutes and have spoken to you 60 seconds I’ve confidently diagnosed you with X. Here’s a prescription, let’s see you back in 6 months.

My favorite is the "bless your heart" head tilt that strongly implies you're just too damn stupid to follow what they're saying, when it's obvious on its face that they're contradicting themselves.

"I was correctly diagnosed with it before." "Correct." "I do not have it now." "Correct." "It is not 'in remission.' I just do not have the disease." "Correect." "But it isn't curable." "Correct." "So if it wasn't 'cured,' what did happen to it?" {head tilt} "You tell me. Follow it through. You used to have it. You do not have it anymore. It's not in remission. But it also hasn't been cured. What does that leave?" "#$%^! I don't know! That's why I'm here, asking you! As far as I know, all it leaves is contradiction and impossibility!" "Now, now. There's no need to be difficult."

(This is almost word for word the last conversation I had with my GI. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not paraphrasing. I went through it exactly like this, and she responded to me exactly like this.)

My trick is to learn the terminology/jargon of the specialists by buying meds students used textbooks. It completely changes the conversation dynamics even if initially it appears to slightly confuse them.

Sometimes it angers them but then it's a clear signal that you must see someone else ASAP. When we grilled my wife first oncologist on his protocol, he broke down and said that he was not up to date on the latest research. We requested someone else, he was a much better fit and most importantly she is still alive, her metastasis disappeared and the latest scans and bloodworks results are still NED (no evidence of disease).

I actually tried this once and it quickly led to hostility. Thanks for your insight and I’m happy your wife is doing well, take care.

Same happened to me. It was a "How dare you try to speak my language?" type of response.

They were almost as offended as the people in Barcelona when I ignorantly tried to speak to them in Spanish.

Awesome for you and props! Let me tell you, doctors will gaslight patients who cure themselves because it is some kind of mental disorder they have I cannot figure out. They said THE EXACT SAME THING to my friend who also cured his UC with diet. "Well, you never had it because if you did you could not cure it." He is a Dentist and he literally yelled at them because he knew how unscientific it was what they were saying.

I am a FUT2 non-secretor who suffered with IBS-D for years. I had to cure myself as well. Very strict diet and high seaweed (it contains fucose (not fructose)). Not one doctor cares. I tell you, it is a mental disorder.

Yes, that was one of the inflammatory markers they checked. At diagnosis, I was in the mid-400s. After medication, I was in the low-200s. After 20 months of this elimination diet, I was in the 20s.

Multiple doctors told me it would not be possible to decrease the score without medication, one of them even while holding the results in his hands proving that I had done it.

Have you no interior life at all? Nothing that matters to you even if nobody else knows or cares that it does?

This is one of the bleakest, most discouraging comments I think I've ever read, and it's hard for me (in a sad way) to believe anyone might actually mean it.

There is nothing bleak or discouraging in what I said. This is true for even inanimate things on Earth or in the Universe. There is hardly any absolute existence of anything. Try to describe an alien life form. All your description is nothing but list of relations between that life from and things that you know about on the Earth. Things like, size, color, weight, shape - everything is a relation to some referential unit or frame. Things come into existence by relating themselves to the already existing worldly things.

If a thing can't be described, it simply doesn't exist.