Especially since January 2025...

I've got the keys to their Rivian!

Well, it is definitely a politically-loaded question... but it doesn't seem totally unreasonable, at least based on population percentages. They said "middle class" not "rich"; this is for a family of three, which nowadays means two incomes in the majority of cases; and $133K was chosen as the very bottom of the "upper middle class" window.

Pew is considered rather less politically biased than the Wall Street Journal; but in 2022 they gave the following broad-brush definitions for a family of three:

Lower-income (28% of US population): Under $56,600 per year
Middle-income (52% of US population): Between $56,600 and $169,800 per year
Upper-income (19% of US population): Above $169,800 per year

There are certainly a lot of political side questions one could ask, like - should we really consider it to be "middle-class" if a person can't afford to buy a house?

I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

Another YouTube "epic reaction" video! I can't wait to see how this three-plus-hours-long one differs from the 37 billion other epic reaction videos!

Yeah, I was gonna say... it's probably not Gnome itself that's the memory hog, it's almost certainly the demands from the web browser and / or email client. *

We have a computing lab which runs Linux + Gnome. Students are in the GUI almost all the time, but they're mostly running various engineering applications - they're not checking their personal email, and typically they're not randomly browsing the web. If there's only one or two students on there (remote access does get used a lot), htop typically shows < 2GB of memory usage - and almost no load.

* Not that I particularly want to defend Gnome; I think, design-wise, it's become a rather user-hostile window manager.

I think I understand why he never got anywhere with these. And no, it wasn't because of the web...

Apparently Waze exists for the sole purpose of avoiding speed traps.

I never knew that... guess I've been using it wrong all these years. I use it to minimize the time I spend on my daily commute.

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

I mean, that's what people said about Michelle Obama when she proposed a lot of this stuff a decade or more ago...

"Skyrocketed" above 5%, you say?

"As this shocking graph indicates..." (sorry, I couldn't find a larger image)

They tried that with Apollo 13. And.... that actually did work, sorta.

Their toilet isn't working.

I was thinking along the same lines...

I'd say let the CEO do it. And when it goes south - which it will - make sure the CEO is held personally accountable for any misdiagnoses and deaths.