Note that an 80% literacy rate is not good at all, since literacy is defined generously and has been over 99% for our lifetimes. I'm sure a 5th grade reading level would be considered literate. Rather than a class full of high school students reading at the 5th grade level, though, it's more likely that a lot of the would-be students weren't in class at all. High school attendance rates in the first half of the 20th century were a lot lower.

Most areas didn't get electritcy until after WW2.

70% of USA households had electricity by 1930. (source)

Refrigerators didn't exist you had ice boxes maybe if you were wealthy.

I'm pretty sure most people had an icebox. I can't find exact numbers but: "By 1884, one writer noted that refrigerators [meaning ice boxes] were as common as stoves or sewing machines in all but the poorest tenements. The use of ice in the home was growing to keep food longer and to cool drinks." (source)

Unemployment rate right now is 5.4%. Unemployment rate in 1932 was 23.6%. In relative terms, there isn't a problem.

3) How not to destroy all life in the universe when magically altering the shape of the universe on cosmological scales.

Even if you hit land, the odds of it being inhabited land are extremely slim.

Speaking as a poor American, the idea that it would be better to be poor in India is so ludicrous that it's impossible to take anything you say seriously. Especially in an article about pollution.

Management may produce negative value, but they're paid far more than those producing the value.

I don't see anywhere on your linked page indicating the age of the vehicles. Trading in a 10 year old truck for a new truck doesn't help significantly. Trading a 30 year old truck would help (and there are plenty of those on the road still spewing fumes).

Everyone making over about $14K/yr pays federal income tax -- that includes full time minimum wage workers -- except for the wealthy who have accountants to get around it. I know this for a fact because I have paid federal income tax in years when I was around $14K (no, not just social security tax).

The poorer you are, the less likely you are to be able to afford to live close to work.

The poor have fled the inner city for the suburbs because they couldn't afford to live close to work? Nope, if you're poor you're much more likely to live in a city and use public transit and quite unlikely to be able to afford the huge gas costs of a 20 mile commute.

The last couple years of Kubuntu have been kind to me, before 15.04. I do recall similar messes when they switched to KDE 4 though.

Actually, Michael Jordan was still a better baseball player than 99.99% of the population. Let's see you hit .200 and drive in 50 runs in AA pro baseball.

Clearly we must solve this problem by hunting down all open source hobby developers and giving them various disabilities.

What should really happen is that a company like Red Hat which sells to business should pay its own developers to improve accessibility.

It's not that being outsiders is the goal, it's that being popular isn't the goal. If a change will make things better for grandma and not affect me, then fine. If it'll make things better for grandma but affects my workflow negatively, then to hell with grandma, let her use Windows or Mac.

(Personally, systemd doesn't affect my workflow so I'll let others argue about it... but if you start talking about something like hiding configuration options and advanced features, I'll be objecting.)