Many of these road usage fees assessed on EVs greatly exceed the equivalent costs gas buyers pay. For example, Texas drivers pay $400 additional fee to register a new EV over what they would pay for a gas car. The gas tax is 20c/gallon. That would require buying 2,000 gallons of gas per year to equalize. That's like driving 60,000 miles in an average sedan getting 30mpg or 30,000 miles in a truck getting 15mpg. That's is absolutely punitive.

These numbers are for two different things. "Upper income" is just a measure of income. "Upper class" includes other factors that may influence a person's place in society. Someone making $170k (at least in 2022 dollars) is upper income in the context of Pew, but they would not necessarily have the indicators of being "upper class" (i.e. being in upper management or other influential position, significant property ownership, being close to political power) in a high cost of living area like Manhattan where that income might represent a blue collar couple. Class is impossible to measure objectively.

Manhattan (and NYC more broadly) is also a heavily distorted housing market due to subsidies and the fact that it was not a very expensive market until relatively recently (things started going up in the 1990s). There are a lot of middle class people living in Manhattan but they usually in rent controlled or public housing and don't pay market rates. There are also people who bought Condos/Co-ops 40+ years ago (or their parents did) who could never buy anything like the places they are living if they had to pay today's market prices.

It's doable above 120th. You can get a decent 2bedroom apartment for ~$3k/month north of 120th. That's doable on $130k.

People like to use "income" as a proxy for class, but it's really a much broader topic. For one, there's a social component that has nothing to do with income. For example, a doctor making $150k is treated differently by society than a plumber who makes $150k with a bunch of overtime. There are also social networks. You may only make $80k as a college professor, but if most of your friends are doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers who would have no trouble spotting you $1k, it's a very different position from a welder making $80k whose friends and family are mostly on food stamps. Finally, as you go up the ladder wealth becomes far more important than income. Someone with $10 million of assets and $100k income is in a very different position from someone with a negative net worth and $100k income.

At this point, living in a place like Manhattan is luxury consumption. Yes, $133k is a stretch in Manhattan (below 120th at least) unless you have subsidized housing, but New York City isn't just Manhattan. You can live just fine on $133k in the Bronx or Staten Island. Likewise, living in SF proper is a luxury choice, others live in lower-cost bay area locales like Oakland.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates are married.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates have children.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates live with their parents.

* In America.

Anyone charging hundreds of dollars per hour for their work had better damned well be doing it. Not only should they be sanctioned by the courts, but they should face criminal fraud charges. If the courts want to put a stop to this they had better get serious now and stop handing out slaps on the wrist. Multiply the sanctions by an order of magnitude and give opposing counsel a 30% finder's fee to encourage additional vigilance and it'll quickly stop.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

They will also be replacing the LED lighting in the schools with candles, and heat will be provided by hand-stoked coal furnaces.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

Or build them in parts of the world where people need to run some kind of heating for several months out of the year. If the heat can be used for something useful it's no longer waste heat. If you live far enough north (or south for the 10% of the population in the other hemisphere) than six months out of the year a BitCoin mining rig is an electric heater that helps pay for its own energy consumption.

You could do this if you had studied all of the different types of gloves that researchers had used so that the you could make a reasonable estimate of the extent to which microplastics present in their results were due to contamination from gloves worn by researchers. There are some serious difficulties with being able to do so. If the error bars are big enough due to uncertainty arising from how much of observed effect could possibly be explained by the gloves, then you take out a lot of studies. Did the researchers record what kinds of gloves were used or even have that information any more? If not, then estimating with certainty becomes difficult and anything but the strongest observed effects may be explained away by this new confounding factor.

The first thing that needs to be done is to develop some gloves without this problem. Once we have that, we can repeat past experiments to get a better idea of how extensive the problem actually is and make better determinations about which studies need to be rerun.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?