Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

I buy the Samsung A5 series. Last one lasted 5 years, my current one comes with 5 years of updates so expect it to last 5 years as well at about 1/3 the cost of Apple.

Then I would argue you didn’t fulfil your obligation to society.
Reproduction by intelligent people is super important. Who is going to keep the country running when you are old. and immigrants is only a temporary solution, as they will also stop having kids once they adopt the countries culture.

That remains to be seen. At heart is the question of the "algorithm" by which the publisher decides what to publish. This is similar to subliminal messaging in the sense that viewers aren't aware of the speech they've just heard (going from what you said, that the speech is editorial decision about what to show). But it's different in that with subliminal messaging an objective third party can see what the speech was, but with the "algorithm" no one can see what it was.

Subliminal messaging was ruled NOT to be protected by First Amendment in a Judas Priest case in 1988, but that overruled in 1990. The overruling however (1) sanctioned CBS for failing to disclose the masters, which is closely analogous to ByteDance failing to disclose its algorithms, (2) the overruling was because they didn't prove the subliminal was intentional and didn't prove the subliminal messages were the case of harm, both points on which I think there's clear paths to distinguish TikTok from CBS.

So: I agree it does go to the heart of the First Amendment, but the answer is by no means clear cut.

It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

The lack of clear English isnâ(TM)t the frustrating thing with modern day customer "service". I have lived in non-English speaking locales and can roll with a language barrier. The problem is outsourced customer "service" ain't empowered to do a damn thing except read from a script and by the time I'm frustrated enough to make a call it's invariably for a problem too complicated to solve with a script. AI will not fix this problem. It will just leave you yelling at a disempowered computer rather than a disempowered human being. The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

The OS is the worst part of Meta Quest. It has to be rebooted often or it gets frame drops or outright freezes. Our house reboots every time you use it just to be safe. Whenever you switch accounts it forgets your home environment and your boundary. Lots of features look like they are untested experiments because the UI makes no sense. (ex: It displays instructions right over top of the things you need to click on). The browser is flaky.

Great hardware, awful OS.

Airlines are required to tell you in the EU of your EU261 rights.

And the offer they have to make includes either a refund or rerouting at the earliest opportunity via a comparable means, which includes using competitors.

The compensation is in addition to the refund or rerouting.

That is why its not “automatic” in the EU - you still have the right to choose the option, the airline cant simply dump you and give you your money back, if you insist on getting to where you need to go then they need to book you on a competitor to get you there.

EU261 is easier to enforce in Europe, as their national enforcement bodies usually have direct ability to enforce, rather than having to rely on the ability to sue to enforce (which is how enforcement is often done in the US by government bodies).

Which means that yes airlines can attempt to get out of it, but the enforcement body can just say “no, pay up” and its the airline that then has to sue the enforcement body and prove its case in civil court. Which means that EU261 court cases are few and far between.

In general, EU261 has been a massive positive for the public travelling by air in the EU, despite some attempts to get around it.