There's a lot of hand-wringing about fertility because it implies a lot of changes coming in the future. But overall it is a good thing. Lower birthrates presage less pressure on natural resources, fewer conflicts, and better lives for each individual. The biggest problems will revolve around dealing with the aging population. Traditional social pension schemes will struggle without a large base of young workers. Care will be harder to find. But countries like Japan have been dealing with this for a decade now and have managed to stay desirable places.

It's mostly the megalomaniacal billionaires and religious fanatics that are so concerned about the drop in fertility. This is because they are worried it may impact their individual power. Billionaires need wage slaves and religious leaders need followers (much easier to raise children into a religion than convert adults). But for the rest of us, it means less need to slice the pie.

I don't think we are anywhere close to the maximum carry capacity of the land. China and India have 3x the population packed into less land (including less airable land). We are collectively far wealthier, so it's not that we can't afford it when India can.

Places like Hungary have done it, and it hasn't done much to boost fertility. Even if money is no object, most people like the freedom of not having a house full of kids when given the choice.

I've never owned a laptop that needed a display panel, keyboard, or motherboard replaced.

I don't think I've attempted to repair a laptop in 20 years. Few laptops these days are very serviceable. They are also sufficiently reliable that it's pretty rare for anything to break unless they are physically dropped.

It's every year.

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.

True, although there are different Shahed versions. The Shahed 238 is jet powered and much quicker.

The Shaheds are similar in capability to the v1 rockets of WWII, albeit with much better guidance systems. v1s were widely shot down by fighter planes of the period and Ukraine did in fact use low speed prop planes armed with machine guns against Shaheds for a while. They've now been superseded by interceptor drones, which is why Ukraine is talking with the Gulf states about assisting in air defense.

But the problem with the high-volume fast-moving missiles is that we can't probably protect everywhere, especially if the high-volume missiles move to fast for cheap interceptor drones.

One question (which I honestly don't know the answer to) is whether measures like chaff, the phalanx, directed energy, etc. work well with missiles traveling at hypersonic speeds at high volumes. They must have some limit to how many targets they can engage at one time.

Besides that, it's not just U.S. warships, but any target the U.S. cares about (including those of foreign allies/trading partners). An aircraft carrier may be able to defend against a massed attack of these missiles, but it makes the air defenses in places like Dubai useless (at least as currently strucutred). Stories have already come out about them using multiple Patriot missles to shoot down a single cheap "Shahed" drone, which is far slower and easier to hit than a missile described by TFA.