I can see why you have that response to my post, and I apologize for not being clearer.

It's not that I am dead set against paying more in taxes, or that I am concerned about socialists coming for my money. I am fairly centrist, but I definitely don't mind paying more in taxes to help create a more equitable society. I lean pretty far left when it comes to social safety networks and such. I've been poor before myself, I know a thing or two about it. Which is part of why I realize how lucky I am now.

In any case, my main point is only that if you tax me at a punitive rate trying to pay for such programs, you will get nowhere near close to achieving it. The real money is clustered in about 0.1% of the population, and that is how we can create a more equitable future. The super elite don't typically have a job with a super high paycheck (although some do). They get a lot of their income through stock options, and preffered class stock shares. They thus only pay a max of 20% on their income because so much of it is "capital gains". See Warren Buffet's famous example of how his secretary pays more as a percentage of her resources in taxes than he does. And that is what I am against. It's inexcusable that someone making $10 million/year off investments might pay a lower percentage in tax than I am. I am privileged, for sure, but not so wealthy that I don't rely on my job and career to make ends meet each month. Lose my job and catch a few bad breaks and I am in a similar boat as you. Not true of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. I could afford to pay more, sure, but before you come after me, I want that loophole fixed. The real money is sitting there laughing their asses off as successful professionals get villified and squeezed, all while leaving them untouched.

Anyways, the whole point was in response to the question of "Gee, why do these wealthy tech professionals skew towards supporting a socialist money grabber that wants to crack down on tech companies?" The answer given by the OP, that I concurred with, was that we aren't "rich", and that we have much more in common with the working poor than with the soietal elites. We recognize that a couple of bad breaks could leave us right back at the bottom with no safety net. And we recognize that without a thriving middle class, everyone but the elties is toast, including us. So, generally speaking, we will support a candidate who seems to take that seriously.

Disclaimer: I am not a Bernie supporter, but I get his appeal. I'll vote for him in the general if he is the Dem standard bearer.

I also think Bernie has a good chance in the general. But if you parse the OP carefully, you will see that is actually exactly what his acquaintance is concerned about.

The compelling argument is not that Bernie winning is an impossible outcome. The compelling argument, as I see it, is that millions of centrists and former GOP members that either stayed home or held their nose and voted for Bernie will do so mostly out of spite for Trump, and will not be obligated to pull the lever for the Dems again. They may very well go out of their way to vote GOP in the midterms and again in 2024, leading to GOP super-majorities after Bernie overreaches and puts off a lot of the people that tacitly supported him. That's why the DNC wants a centrist like Buttigieg or Biden. They want to try and build momentum after the election and keep their gains into soccer-mom suburbia, not use them once and 'bern' the bridge.

I'm not sure if I agree with this analysis or not, but I can't dismiss it as an invalid concern.

Nail, meet head. You reinforce my long-standing idea about the upper-middle class. They are often viewed as "rich" by those making less than $100k/year. Now don't get me wrong, $150k+/year is not uncomfortable by any stretch. It's a decent life if you can stay at that level for your whole career. But the upper middle class can still look up and recognize, perhaps better than their lower middle class peers, just how wide the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else actually is. And they are keenly aware of how precarious their lifestyle actually is.

The "enemy" (if you want to view class divisions that way) are not "wealthy professionals" that have household incomes of ~200k/year, it is the guys that have net assets in the tens of millions and/or make 500k+/year. The solution is not to bring down the upper middle class so that absolutely nobody can afford to pay for their kids daycare and college. It's to narrow the immense gulf between the extremely wealthy class and everyone else so that more people can live that upper middle class lifestyle.

There's more to it than that from what I have read. He was married and had three kids and was raising them when most of the murders/rapes occurred. Got divorced in the early 90s, about the time the crimes stopped. Neighbors reported some epic screaming matches from the house that could be heard several houses away.

As further evidence, many of the surviving victims reported at the time that their attacker sobbed and would often talk about a woman named "Bonnie" while raping them. The guy they just arrested was engaged to a woman named Bonnie in the early 70s. They split up, apparently acrimoniously, and he married someone else. Then the rapes/murders started.

Moral? I guess if you are in such a toxic relationship that you have to go out and rape/kill people to chill out, you should probably get divorced before the 20-year rape and murder spree.

Thank you for the helpful link, I learned something today.

I will revert to my backup argument:
I am sure most places don't actually do that because of the time involved verifying every script, and I think the FDA has much much bigger fish to fry. It'd be the rough equivalent of a jaywalking crackdown. Also there is not much incentive for people to outright falsify a bogus prescription, unless of course you are a 'journalist' doing a hit piece on contact lens providers.

I'm not sure that they do... ANd even if they do, I imagine the FDA has much bigger fish to fry.

Consider the reading glasses you can buy at teh pharmacy for $5 a pop. They all have a little number on them. +1, +2, etc. That's the prescription number. If all you have is a +1 or +2 spherical prescription with no astigmatism (minorly farsighted), you can walk into any drugstore and buy them, no prescription necessary. If your eyes are much worse than that (mine are around -11), it really pays to go to the doctor and get the prescription correct. But I'm pretty sure that I can order glasses/contacts online and just enter my prescription numbers, assuming I know them. I'm really not sure what the problem is. If I get the wrong script and can't see, then it sounds like my problem and maybe I should go to a doctor to get it updated. Also, the whole thing is subjective anyhow. I can pretty easily lie to the doctor about which image is the "clearest" and get a bogus prescription from him if I really wanted to have crappy glasses for some reason. Actually, I do this. I have him write a script for glasses that is intentionally a bit weak. I find that they are better for reading.

Done. I doubt he was going to vote for it anyhow, but awareness is good. Thanks for the head's up. There are many things to either love or hate in the proposed tax plan, as is always the case when they want to do something to the tax code. But that's the final straw/dealbreaker for me. I've been out of grad school for several years now, but I couldn't imagine having to pay taxes on my tuition waiver. I simply wouldn't have been able to do it.

Holy crap. I hadn't heard that, but if that is true it will be a death knell for American STEM students. Depending on the cost of the school, you might even wipe out your entire stipend just to pay taxes. That's a horrible idea. Talk about squeezing blood from a stone...

Would mod up, but I already commented in here.

There are hundreds of universities in India and China, and some of them have no scruples and will do anything to get their grads accepted in the US, as it helps their reputation back home even if those students eventually crash and burn. I know that one of the schools I went to for grad school here in the US essentially had a "black-list" of foreign schools that they knew produced fraudulent test scores and/or transcripts. I was told that more than once they accepted an overseas student that supposedly got a very high score on the English component of the GRE, but then it turned out they barely spoke any English at all. You could say that was a red flag in the first place, but remember the caliber of people that are applying is generally very high. I am a native speaker of English, and I got a 600/800 on my GRE language section. But I knew a very bright foreign student that learned English in high school and got a 750. That kind of thing isn't the norm, but is very possible. And you don't want to turn those legitimate students away because of some bad apples.

TL;DR : There are simply hundreds of applicants from hundreds of overseas schools every year, and it can be something of a guessing game.

I call BS on the second one. Not saying you didn't hear that, just saying that I highly doubt that is a very common thing at all. First and foremost because the admissions for grad school in Engineering usually works the other way around. That is, the professors pick what students they want out of the pool of applicants and forward their recommendations to the Dean. Thus the professors get the students they want, and the school doesn't admit any students that completely lack funding. Win-win.

Anyways, for STEM, you really can't do much better than the American university system. Not saying that other nations don't have excellent schools. Oxford and Cambridge are probably both top ten in the world. But the sheer number of very good universities in the US is unparalleled. All of those universities have professors from all over the world who are hired to do world-class research. They get grants to do the research and then they 'hire' the students to perform the work. Grad school applications for STEM is really more of a low-paying job application. But the professors are under pressure to perform the research they promised, and write high-quality papers. So they want the best students they can find. In effect, it is a worldwide marketplace for the best scientific talent. If you insist that universities should only hire American Ph.D. students, or keep their levels to 50% or some other such arbitrary number, you will quickly see the quality of work crater. Not because Americans are dumb. But because we aren't inherently smarter than anyone else. India and China have about 1/3 of the world's population. If you really want the best minds in the world working on your projects, you'd be damn foolish to ignore that.

Cool. I mean, not so cool if you were a member of an underperforming Roman legion... But that is a really interesting factoid. Thanks for sharing.

Fair point. I don't know how much of their battery stuff is patented, but there will certainly be others coming around soon enough that have as good or better battery life/range. I think Tesla tries to differentiate itself with the autopilot stuff, and a bunch of ancillary features, like the supercharger stations. That may be what the coming war of the electric car manufacturers is ultimately waged on.

Again, I won't speak to how good Tesla's stuff on that front is compared to other brands, so please don't take that as a defense along the lines of an Apple fanboy muttering, "But, but, but Tesla has better stuff and is way cooler!!" Just noting where Tesla seems to be drawing the battle lines. As you say, the Leaf looks like a squished lump of clay.

Simpler and more basic than an ICE, absolutely agreed. Won't speak to their self-driving capabilities since I don't know exactly what they are and aren't capable of.

But is simpler a bad thing? In a complex mechanical system, such as a car, a simpler design can have a number of advantages in terms of serviceability, reliability, and longevity. The simpler the system, the less likely it is to have some critical component in the system break. The more complex, the more likely a minor defect can cause the whole system to stop working. A simple design certainly does not imply superiority. You can easily have a half-baked dead-simple design that sucks. That's usually called "oversimplified". But simplicity is not a flaw in and of itself.

I thought 'decimating' historically meant reducing by a factor of ten (i.e., 90%)? I could be wrong about that. I do agree that a 10% reduction is pretty significant at a time when they are supposed to be ramping everything up.

Well, the fancy computers which manage battery power and such are reasonably 'high-tech' for one. The batteries themselves could be argued either way, I guess, but let's just say that the technology for the battery storage and powering they are doing didn't exist 25 years ago.

I hadn't heard that they had reliability problems. In fact, I thought one of the chief selling points of an electric car, generally speaking, is that it should be much more reliable and require significantly less service than an ICE. Maybe Tesla has some issues, but sharing your source would be advisable.

I swear I'm not a Tesla guy. I just don't understand why people get so emotional and pick sides on this company. They took some federal money? So did every other car manufacturer... They are helped by tax credits? Who cares, and that's not their decision anyhow. If you think GM would object if congress gave people a similar credit on buying a new pickup truck you are terribly naive. Don't like the idea of a recharge taking an hour? Neither do I. That's why I don't own one. But that seems like something of a personal preference. You think it's not managed particularly well? I agree, and I don't own their stock.

Bottom line, they sell cars. A significant percentage of people seem to like them and are willing to pay for them. That seems like a foundation for a good business, whether you like their product or not. As it is, they can't seem to get manufacturing scaled up to meet demand, and the future of the company is up in the air because of it.

Personally, I don't like Sony stereo gear. But I don't go on the internet and knock them and spread FUD about them at every opportunity. And I sure as hell don't go into someone's house and call their stereo system garbage.