I guess you have high IQ, as well as a good balance of the hormones that regulate willpower (high levels of dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and leptin, and low levels of cortisol and ghrelin), all the while living in a time period and geographic location in which this combination of factors makes it easy to find good, high status, well-paying jobs.

Confusing one's genetic luck with merit is something people who got lucky in the genetic lottery tend to do quite regularly, as attributing one's success almost exclusively to luck is hard on the ego. So much so, in fact, that when confronted with this basic fact most of them lucky ones promptly start rationalizing (and oh, how easy it is for high IQ people to rationalize!) and grasping at the tiny non-genetically determined straws of their biographies, to then justify their luck exclusively on these.

And presto, ego preserved.

For me it's a few things:

* I can run a real version of Firefox with plugin support
* I can still get a phone with fingerprint unlock
* I can still get a phone with a headphone jack

You don't need to spend it all in one year. You probably couldn't anyway. Finding $3 billion per year for the next 10 years is probably more reasonable.

Yeah, I think the change here is that you now have the right to be compensated for the inconvenience of flight and luggage delays in addition to your Montreal convention rights.

China may be the place where all of that continues. Unfortunately. The fact they're an almost-totalitarian dictatorship and their tyrants have a focus on hard, real technological growth, coupled with what you wrote, has a high likelihood of causing them to get the lead. Not because China, can all other things being equal, do it faster than the US, for freedom to innovate almost always beats top-down impositions. But because the US, as a whole, has decided to make things unequal in the worst possible way -- for themselves, at least.

That's simply not true. It's full of language like "no person shall be..." and "the government shall not...". No mention of citizens. When the constitution is talking about citizens only it very specifically calls it out.

Flagship console games have proper HDR and wide gamut support, which is where I play any game which is a graphical showcase.

What if you are quitting because your pay is shit?

"violating privacy and enjoying monopoly" is bad and all, but it is in a whole other category from aiding and abetting a genocide.

The whole point of protest is to disturb the normal flow of things and disrupt the thing you are trying to stop. That's why people engage in civil disobedience: you go into it knowing that you are putting your freedom and/or job on the line because you believe strongly in the cause. "expressing those concerns in a way that doesn't disturb the office" is like saying "if you want to change the status quo then vote". That's fine and all, but it is the absolute minimum and probably won't change anything significant without further action and conflict.

No they aren't. Last year, 86 civilians were killed by cops in traffic stops alone, with over 1,200 documented killings overall (there is no central database, and NGOs that do this reporting rely on state by state reporting or news reports, so this is a lower limit). In contrast 136 cops died or were killed on the job in total, this includes things like traffic accidents or just keeling over at your desk, not just shootings -- there were fewer than 50 fatal shootings.

In fact, cab driver is a more dangerous job than being a cop by more that 2x. There are 8 cab driver deaths per 100k workers vs 3.5 for cops. Construction work is even more dangerous at 9.6 deaths/100k. Hell, fast food employees die at a rate of 1.8.

So while being a cop is slightly more dangerous than the average job, it's far from one of the deadlier occupations and the level of danger is greatly exaggerated: I wouldn't call "almost twice as dangerous as working at McDonalds" taking your life into your hands. It in no way justifies the level of violence they inflict on the rest of society. If the goal of the police is to maintain a high K/D ratio, then they are doing great, protecting the public from violence: not so much.

If at least one c-level executive responsible for those safety lapses had gone to jail I might be ok with it, but they didn't so I'm not.

I'm a guy and am in that camp too. I love coding. Been doing it since I was 7. But I already do it 40+ hours a week. I love my job, but no hobby is worth that much of my time unless I'm being paid to do it. I don't have any enthusiasm left to do it in my spare time much. I have other interests I want to purse as well and children, friends, and a spouse I want to spend time with.

All the houses I've ever lived in have had mostly cast iron sewer pipes and copper for water coming in.There's probably some lead in the solder, but that is only usually a problem if you let the water sit for a long time. Just run the water for a few minutes after coming home from a vacation. Neither of my kids have ever tested positive for lead exposure.

Most plastics do break down, albeit slowly due to exposure to UV and other natural processes. These actually sever the bonds in the polymer chains, eventually decaying into simple hydrocarbons.

PFAS, on the other hand, while they may be broken into arbitrarily small particles, basically never degrade at the molecular level naturally.