It's worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn't much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.

What's far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I'm from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you're walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can't possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it's normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They're oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.

I've seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you're rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don't have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.

Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with "wealth" may not have to work at all.

People don't become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn't really classify as normal income.

Edit: It's like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it's not classified as income. Meanwhile you're going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don't or can't tax wealth.

Edit2: we've got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you're not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.

Totally agree. Income isn't wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of "millionaire" when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn't even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly "six figures" income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.

Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.

Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.

https://newfastuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fxy2rtr1ec651.png

And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.

I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it's worth making this point: "NIMBY" as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:

There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into "low cost housing" or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.

These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don't like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.

Do you oppose development? NIMBY!

Do you support development? NIMBY!

Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.

I think it's bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I'm sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a "NIMBY", I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.

I do have developer mode on, but don't keep activities is off

This is a great idea, I'm going to try it

Edit: messages is a system app, battery is set to unrestricted, still reloads with blank screen and big messages icon at the center while it does so.

More of an environmental Skyhawk, actually

I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you're making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I'm experiencing the "real thing" based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that's what you seem to have implied.

I agree that we probably don't have a common definition of good or bad transit.

I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.

That was a great watch - it's cool to find out the history.

I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).

I'm not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it's so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don't think that's a very popular opinion.

Whatever your views on it, it's the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.

It's approved as of last fall, but the FAA spent well over a decade stonewalling it with unnecessary bureaucracy.

Now we're left with the chicken-and-egg problem of the market, where nobody will offer unleaded because it's more expensive, but it's expensive because it's not widely used. The feds should subsidize it down to $4/gal for 5 years to get it off the ground.

Yes, some light planes have fuel economy similar to efficient cars (which is very impressive considering how fast they are relative to cars). If you consider the advantages of direct, straight line routing, it's not hard for planes to do better on fuel economy.

We're not talking about jets here, though some of those do very well in mpg on a per passenger basis.

I gave up kids to have flying!

Worth noting that the amount of aviation fuel burned annually should make it a negligible contributer to environmental lead contamination compared to widespread automotive use (although I'm sure it contributes on airport grounds).

Edit: All the pilots I know want to use unleaded, and it was recently approved after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare process, but market forces may make it hard to adopt.

It was caught in FAA-Bureauctatic hell for 15+ years and just approved last year. It will be still be slow to become available and adopt for reasons that are complicated, but amount to bureaucracy, economics, and an insane degree of risk aversion. The vast majority of pilots want unleaded and it's also much better for the engines.