People talk about making a 401k for everybody instead of SS, which amounts to what you are saying. I am pretty sure the market has some limit to how much capital it can absorb and still give a good return. A company's stock doesn't go up unless they find a useful way to make even more money out of it. I think there must be a saturation point where companies cannot find additional useful ways to expand their business with more money, especially if everybody else is too. There is only so much passive investment gains (free lunch) to go around - not that the size of the pie has a hard limit, but diminishing returns.

Right, i.e. in a Waymo, not a Tesla.

Fair point. But whatever corrections we have done are far, far short of backing out what can be done with the resources we have. I.e. making a budget and sticking to it. (I remember when Al Gore campaigned on his SS "Lock Box"... and of course lost.)

I guess isolating these two markets with tariffs was a pretty disastrous move for US electric car-makers then. Tesla's market share in China is about 1/3 of what it was in 2021.

It's a funny name, I wonder if that's just a direct translation from Chinese, which might have a different idiomatic usage of the term, and not what it will be called in other markets.

Openâ'container laws generally prohibit open alcohol in the passenger area of vehicles on public roads. I suppose this is because the driver can so easily hand it back and forth with a passenger. For self-driving cars this makes no sense. So at some point they would have to change the laws to allow that half-bottle in the self-driving car, no matter how fully self-driving it is.

Thank you for your post, it is interesting.

Would I be correct in guessing that you are not a "senior citizen" as in 65+ ? Medicare for them is not means-tested.

Granted, Medicare B, C, and D are means-tested, but if you're destitute (e.g. SS only) you should receive them for very little, and the "Extra Help" program is supposed to apply.

Europe does not have a severe, long-term and possibly unrecoverable crash in its near future either.

Define "near term." Europe as we know it will not survive its population crash. Socialist programs are among the first become insolvent.

I guess this is what happens if you just do the math and adjust the program accordingly. That must be why we in the US don't do that. Hard to tell whether racking up debt instead will work out in the end though.

All American seniors already do have socialized healthcare.

The space shuttle is the boondoggle that just keeps boondoggling

That makes sense. I always wondered what, if anything, happens to people who just use the recycle bin as an extra trash can. As for the recyclables contaminated by that garbage in the truck, I suppose it is now all trash, mixed with greasy noodles and used diapers etc.

It's quite recent

https://www.roadandtrack.com/n...

I thought BMW's original iDrive with a knob you twist and click to control a digital display on the dash made a lot of sense. Yet it died. What went wrong?

Ironic when Intel cut its teeth undercutting IBM, DEC, Sun, HP, etc.