esoterica

> The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.

Timezones are political, there are many cities and countries that are an hour or more west of the timezone implied by their longitude, which is equivalent to permanent daylight time, even if they don't call it permanent daylight time.

The quality of life improves for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders when parking and car lanes are converted to bike and bus lanes. Drivers are not the only stakeholders who deserve consideration.

Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.

People with long commutes spend most of that time on highways, which are not affected by traffic calming measures. A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day on non-highway surface streets, which literally nobody does. You are exaggerating the impact of traffic calming measures.

Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.

Judges are also unelected bureaucrats, and they are less subject to democratic oversight since they have lifetime appointments vs agency heads who are appointed by the executive branch and can be effectively "voted out" if voters choose a different president who replaces them.

Removing Chevron deference moves authority from the administrative agencies to the courts, who are not only also unelected bureaucrats, they are more insulated from democratic forces since they have lifetime appointments. Agency heads are political appointments and change with every president.

Congress is broken and structurally incapable of passing laws under this level of political polarization because there are too many veto points (bicameral legislature, the filibuster, the presidential veto) for any law to get passed even if it's supported by the majority of legislators and the majority of voters.

The seatbelt sign tells you whether or not you are allowed to get up and move around. Unlike the no-smoking light it has actual informational content.

Tesla is not the leader in self driving, they are pretty far behind both Cruise and Waymo, which have or used to have driverless vehicles legally operating on public roads. If you're betting on driverless tech why would you go with Tesla and not Google or GM?

Facebook, Apple and Google are very big companies which hire a lot of very well paid engineers. We're not talking about being an NFL quarterback or something where only a small handful of people will reach that level. Being a big tech engineer is probably the easiest and most achievable path to $500k/year on the planet.

A pension is not worth 150k-200k a year in compensation. Also taxes are higher in most of Europe, even taking payroll taxes into account (I assume that's what you mean by social security pay in).

Most programmers are $90k/year code monkeys. The $400k+/year jobs are very heavily concentrated in a small number of tech hubs, and mostly in the bay, and that’s the relevant statistic that should inform your decision making if you want to make that type of money.

Are you seriously insisting that the average product has gone up in price by 850x since 1960 and that gasoline is a huge outlier that has appreciated much much less than everything else?

Did you read the article at all? Unless you were buying meat with personal loans the issue of whether or not interest expenses should be included in CPI has no relevance to correct measurement of food inflation.

You are completely mathematically illiterate if you think that annual inflation is 3-5 times higher than the reported value. The average annual inflation since 1960 is 3.7%. If the real annual inflation were 3x that (11.1%) then we would have seen 85000% cumulative inflation since 1960. A gallon of gasoline cost $0.30 in 1960, so it would cost $250 in 2024 under 850x inflation. In reality a gallon of gas costs $3.60 today, which is not far off from the 10.5x inflation the CPI measures over that time frame (the same CPI you claim is massively understated).

You're running around this thread smugly declaring yourself too smart to fall for the government's lies while failing to spend a few seconds doing the trivial arithmetic that would disprove all of your deeply held beliefs. Which of your other political or economic beliefs will fall apart with a little bit of middle school math?

There are zero recent examples of a large American company ordering a hit on someone. Be serious.