There are plenty of people who simply make poor financial decisions.. there are also a large number of people out there that work hard and can never get ahead because wages have not kept up with inflation in a very long time.

Then there are those who make good decisions but are ruined by health care costs because one family member is diagnosed with cancer.

If our government wasn't so hell bent on siphoning even more wealth to the top, maybe we could re-create the middle class.

Doritos and Mt. Dew

My son took some coding classes in elementary school. In my opinion, it was a good method for teaching logic and how to solve more complex problems through planning. The actually coding was very minimal.

Learn to AI is dumb, I agree. If it's such a great technology, 5 to 10 years from now it will be extremely easy to use.

Very, very expensive health care/insurance.

A stupidly large segment of US households are one major medical incident away from going broke. Insurance is there to maximize profits and sponsor naming rights on arenas and stadiums, not to actually help people.

I sprained my MCL years ago and got a prescription for a knee brace. My insurance was charged $400 of which around $150 came out of my pocket. Little did I know I could buy the exact brace direct from the company for $85.

Health care in the US is good but it's a rip off

When I visit family, they have youtube tv. Of the 70 or so channels on the package, maybe I can find 1 or 2 interesting things but normally just settle on something "good enough". Of course there are benefits such as on demand, which I don't really use but for the "live tv" it's a waste of money.

When I cut the cord over a decade ago, rising cost was definitely part of the issue but it was mostly the crap reality tv model that most cable channels had moved to that really turned me away. Even the shows that started off somewhat interesting (Gold Rush, Tanked) eventually turned into more gimmick and less about the job they were doing.

For that reason, I'll never go back to cable. OTA and 1 or 2 streaming services at a time (at most). Currently paying about $25/mo and have plenty of shows/movies to watch.

Ok, I guess you live your life on a whim and an EV will never be good enough for you. Good Day Sir.

Where i used to live, if you were observed purposely avoiding a DUI checkpoint they could pull you over under suspicion of DUI (why else would you pull a u-turn just before the check point). If course if you had not been drinking most likely they'd just warn you and tell you to not act suspicious in the future.

It turned a 8.5 hr drive (one way) to a 10.5 hour drive. Either way it's practically the entire day.

I've also driven it 200 miles to one of our manufacturing facilities, stopping once on the way to charge for 30 minutes. Good opportunity to stretch out the legs.

I'll be the first to admit, when i'm on a road trip I want to get there as soon as possible. Sometimes it's not bad to get out and stretch and unwind a bit on the longer trips. Yeah, just sitting in the car for 30-40 minutes during a charge section sucks.. but charge near a store or restaurant and then it's no longer a chore.

Having taken my EV on an 1100 mile round trip voyage around the holidays to the mid west (below freezing) - I was able to make just fine with a bit of planning. It took a couple hours longer so I'll admit the convenience of ICE or hybrid vehicles but not like an EV hits a range wall when traveling away from home more than an hour.

It's true that someone may get more work done in a week if they are working 72 hours per week but there's no chance in hell they'll be more productive if you consider productivity is a function of work over time.

I'd like there to be a study done, at what level of wealth do you just become stupid. We have quite a few case studies to utilize right now.

Hope for the sake of the shoplifters they aren't those same drones Ukraine utilizes to negates those Russian tanks!

I don't know anything about the shooter and cannot make that conclusion. The MAGAs, on the other hand, were very quick to characterize the shooter.

I have a couple decades of experience in mass production supply chain. For something complex like an automobile, you could have 4 or 5 "tiers" of suppliers. Tier 1 suppliers are those who deliver directly to the production line, usually in sub assemblies. Tier 2s deliver to the Tier 1, and so on.

The lower in tier, often the more competitive the market can be because you're only supplying pretty basic components with no assembly. Increasing cost to increase profit margin could be the difference in winning a big contract or not. The companies bid on contracts that last maybe 3-5 years and are out in the future a couple of years. They operate on a very slim profit margin but are still making money.

You take that concept and add a bit more complexity for each tier it moves up until you get to the tier 1 where labor happens to be a big part of overall cost due to the sub assemblies they are putting together. If you're not producing anything, you're not selling anything. These companies are not sitting on a huge cash reserve.

Every slight change to the cost structure simply makes the end product more expensive, then you likely sell less vehicles.

So their part suppliers who probably have a very small profit margin should charge more? Then they would likely lose the contract bid.

Being down for days is a very big struggle, bring down a whole month can wreck the supply chain.

I'm not a fan of AI at this time because it has too much 'artificial' and not enough 'intelligence' to be of use to me. Other than changing the tone on an email, I'd found it to be less efficient at daily tasks than simply doing it on my own.

Robotaxis - honestly most of the places they would operate efficiently, society would be better off with increased investment in mass transportation.