Well,yeah, if $$$$ is your only criterion. Some of us value time off, lower stress, comfortable retirement, etc. over stock prices

Funny, I found that as I got more $$$ over time, I had lower stress, funded my retirement....and could afford time off somewhere nice.

I could also afford a nice single family home where I didn't share walls with neighbors, and had a nice back yard for my large offset wood burning smoker (BBQ is a big hobby of mine)....my ceramic grill....etc.

I like that with $$ I can fund all the hobbies that make me happy.

Indeed. Forcing somebody to work more than 10h/day and 50h/week counts as assault and can land you in prison in some countries in Europe.

Funny...that's not something I've ever run into my whole career.

There have been a very FEW long nighters here and there when we had to get something out the door, or maybe servers/database went off line....

But those were extremely rare occasions...which I could likely count on both hands all my life and still have fingers left.

No one holds a gun to your head to work outrageous hours in the US.

He is right that the gap between the US and Europe gets larger though: The US is losing its middle-class and everybody is getting poorer and poorer (excluding the rich).

But in the US, with so much opportunity...and sometimes a little luck, you CAN create your own business and do very well.

And like the article says, in America, you can try, fail, and try again....till you make it.

Just takes mostly determination.

Yeah this is definitely a "I'll know it when I see it" type of judgement but to be fair most of their customer base if presented with the question of "how would you feel about someone using an AI app to perfectly map your face onto a nude body and distribute them and most people will not know the difference or see it labelled as fake in any way" would have a negative reaction to that.

Well....if the resultant images made me much less fat, and a bit more ripped....I dunno...maybe?

;)

jk

Why is it that the propaganda outlets will only show crimes on black people committed by other black people lately, and they won't report at all on the much higher amount of crimes committed on black people by white people?

Because statistics and raw numbers show that this is simply not the case, by a long shot.

Check your numbers again on black/black crime, especially violent crime.

...while other US states are trying to ban EVs, solar & wind, etc.. Swings & roundabouts, mate. Swings & roundabouts.

Ugh...I fucking HATE roundabouts.

I've seen a couple pop up here and there in a couple states I've been in recently.

Shortly followed by a huge increase in penalties and taxes for anybody operating one of those things in California. I know it's a dazzlingly beautiful and tempting notion but Milton Friedman was right about one thing, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

You know, at some point, when life gets tough enough in CA, taxes get just TOO high (and I'd have to think it's close now)....the people will finally wake up and vote the politicians OUT of office that are making their lives so difficult with regards to income, taxes and transportation.

It was only a few decades ago that CA was a Republican state.

It has changed back and forth over the years.

Numerous US states are going to ban new ICE sales , eg california by 2035.

I wouldn't hold my breath or put down heavy bets on that just yet.

With current trends...EV sales dropping, etc....unless the battery tech gets better quickly, and there is more infrastructure....states likely will have to extend those deadlines just out of practicality....

Of course a lot can happen in 10 years, but also, as we've seen....a lot can just NOT happen in 10 years.

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

To be fair, half a percent is actually only slightly below the average for tech-sector stocks right now. AAPL is paying 24 cents quarterly on $170 (.565%), and the Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund (FNCMX) has a forward dividend yield of 0.64% annually.

On a discussion board I ran, I started a long running thread "Is this real, or The Onion?" challenging people to decide whether a headline was fictional.

It was hard. On one occasion it was both a real one and an Onion parody.

We are in Heinlein's Crazy Years, except he didn't foresee how weird.

Very little of an EV's weight comes from anything that's particularly rare.

The main components in a modern Tesla battery are lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Lithium is the rarest, at about .002% of the Earth's crust. There's "only" about a third as much of that as there is copper. Now think about how much we use copper. Iron makes up 6.3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fourth most abundant element behind only oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Phosphorus makes up about .1% of the Earth's crust (which is still 17x as common as copper, and only slightly behind hydrogen). And of course oxygen is the most common element in the Earth's crust.

The industry as a whole is built around a dealer network that depends on repairs and service charges to stay in business. Apart from stupid minor problems, EVs have far fewer major mechanical issues than ICE cars, so dealers don't really want to sell them. I would argue that there is every financial incentive for car dealers to ensure that EVs fail. Those dealers are the ones who help people decide what to buy, and if they're discouraging EV sales, you're not going to get any EV sales.

I believe that the word in all three cases is "won't" not "can't", for the reason stated above.

How do you figure? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023. And even in a really down quarter this year, they still made over a billion dollars in profit. That's not what I would call "struggling financially". Sales are down lately, but I think that's mostly the public's reaction to Tesla's really stupid and user-hostile design changes (e.g. no turn signal stalk, changing gears with the touchscreen, etc.) that they have made over the past few months, rather than because of anything specific to electric vehicles themselves. I love my 2017 Model X, but I wouldn't feel comfortable buying any car that Tesla is currently selling, and I doubt I'm in the minority here.

What efficiency problems? They're already vastly more efficient than ICE cars by any metric. Capacity problems? How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping? Endurance problems? Far fewer major mechanical problems than equivalent ICE cars also contradicts that theory.

EVs are already cost effective, and if Tesla would stop trying to be cute and f**king up their steering wheels in new and infuriating ways every year or two, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

They were making assumptions, the type which can often go against the average citizen and it should not be such.