Anecdotal but I know 4 Boomers who retired during covid. I also know a lot of younger folks who opted in to the gig economy instead of working at a store/restaurant, including 3 of my nieces and a nephew.
DoorDash went from 850ish million to 2.6Billion dollars in 2020 with over a million dashers and they account for about 45% of food delivery in the US.
I hopped into a Jeep Cherokee that I thought was mine and drove it down the road for a minute before realizing I was not in my vehicle. Keys are funny like that.
I'm 99% anxiety free after I learned to manage my allergies and diet!
I make light of the situation now but at one point in my life I was confused and freaked out because of the symptoms you mentioned and everyone including the doctors thought it was stress. After thousands of dollars in medical all I really needed was Benedryl, a better diet and a new primary care physician.
I grew up with my sisters in poverty. I didn't eat at a restaurant until I was 14 and paid for it myself. I started baking crackers, biscuits and pancakes that my younger sisters and I would eat for dinner with government peanut butter or cheese when I was 11. Having no utilities was a regular occurrence. Christmas was socks, underwear and a winter coat. Shoes were a touchy subject and I would have to have pretty big holes before they would get replaced. School hot lunch and food drives were awkward.
I decided what I wanted out of life in my mid-twenties and pursued it and now in my 40's I am doing better than I could have ever imagined. Everyone I know who was poor and wanted to better themselves was able to get out of poverty. All 4 of my sisters are middle class or better. Thats 5/5 that succeeded. All my friends across the states I had lived are homeowners and seem happy. All the people I met who bitched and didn't do anything to better themselves are still poor or dead.
I didn't get lucky and neither did my sisters and friends. We each made personal decisions and planned our way out of poverty. It didn't happen over night. A lot of set backs happen and everything is hard. Transportation and unforeseen expenses are the largest hurdles and access to credit is also difficult because of the length of time it takes to repair.
SF does have a huge homeless population. Yes it go's to homeless shelters and other charities/programs. We sometimes forget that not all homeless are chronic homeless which is what most people associate as homeless.
Someone may be having hard times making rent and go to a church or other organization for financial help and other services. Battered women, at risk children also exist and may require a shelter with more security or women only shelters - which are funded too. There are many other services that exist that use that funding.
I didn't see waste. Actually, I would go so far as say most charities that receive federal and state funding rely on reporting to receive those grants and funding and things are very transparent. HMIS is the tech side of things that build the systems to track and report on everything.
You are still surrounded by people with the same ideologies, it's just harder to hear us because of the noise. The people who are pro-censorship and regulation have never been a friend to the internet or its philosophies.
Since when did "high quality" become impossible? lol. Thats news to me. The fact you think Sears was "high quality" is telling. Maybe you have never bought or been exposed to "quality" in the first place?
I totally disagree with your assessment. 20 years ago it was harder to find quality products than it is today. I am a person that buys "quality", I support local & US companies whenever I can. There are so many excellent boutique companies for just about everything outside of shitty mass produced electronics. I just do not see your world at all, but then again, I don't mistake garbage retailers and company branding for quality.
I think the simple answer is we are mammals and feed our newborns milk and since they usually don't die from their breast feedings we equate milk to being good & nutritional. The fact is, we've discovered clay feeding vessels with nipples that contained animals milk from 2000bc near infant graves. The horn was a popular material for feeding bottles during the middle ages.
We've been giving infants and kids milk for a very long time to supplement their diets because the dairy industry was able to reach that far back in our timeline. I think we all understand that the dairy industry has been lobbying and marketing, to get a spot at the table, but so has every other commodity thats available in a global market.
Do you shower at the place you are walking or riding your bike? Just sweat your ass off all day long and hope everyone around you doesn't mind? You have about 1-2 minutes before your sweating through your clothing in Houston. It's 95F and ONLY 60% humidity right now.
Im in a smaller company of a few hundred employees. We had the option to go back to the office this week. Exactly 3 people are in the office, the same 3 who have remained at the office the entire time. Everyone else chose WFH until it is mandatory to go back to the office.
How? Why would a developer want to lose money housing as many people as possible? At the end of the day your looking to sell or rent for the highest $ per SQ FT possible in your market, with the least amount of risk. If your rent to 50 @ $500, your gross monthly rent income is 25,000. If you rent to 10 @ 2,500 you have the same totals. You are much less profitable with 50 units @ $500 because of maintenance/repairs, tenant issues & labor. It takes a whole lot more to keep 50 units operating than 10.
I worked in HMIS for years and the chronic homeless are almost ALWAYS "mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual suffering from both problems." Additionally, you make a choice to support yourself however you want but "Why the hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?" is nothing more than entitlement and wishful thinking. There are a bunch of other things that I do that make money, make sense for me, but dont pay the bills, so I adult and find work that does support me.
Property is a decent investment, commercial and industrial you can expect to see nice returns and all expenses are pushed to the tenant. When renting homes, its usually about getting your tenants to pay off the mortgage and then you have excellent monthly recurring revenue streams, of course you can then sell your 100k+ assets whenever you want.
For the time you spent typing this comment you could have created a return and had UPS come pick up your package or in my experience, Amazon wouldn't have even required you to return the item and would have just sent you a replacement.
Also, I see your rationale and think you are really missing the point. You may have a small hourly rate of $60 and use that as justification but its complete garbage. I do better than that and I work with guys who literally make 10's of millions a year. Taking a preventable loss that only requires a phone call or a chat is foolish, even if it is $7.00.
I bet you are technically correct, because support roles are the majority of the positions available. The guys who join a combat arms MOS sign up to fight. I signed up for a 19D slot in 2006.
My 10 year old can start a fire, create a shelter, gather/sterilize water, hunt, trap, clean game and cook it. Humans are scary smart compared to other life and can easily pickup survival skills, manipulate their environments to suit them, even as a child.
The concept is national security. Credibility is a non issue, same with which administration is in power. This is done because of national security concerns and it absolutely makes sense to reject a foreign powers communication equipment and at the same time continually push for access to hardware being developed in country or abroad.
I would assume that they setup shop prior to hunting and it was a whole group/village affair to process and preserve the meat. When I grew up we would hunt and process all the deer killed together as a family. I started around 6yrs old, my duties were removing the "silver skin" with a fillet knife and doing any other menial task like manually cranking the meat grinder. Everyone had tasks, and it was a pretty great family/bonding experience with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was the same for all the other food we would harvest and preserve. I miss those times.
That is total nonsense. I buy nearly everything either made in the US or Europe. Kitchenware, tools, outdoor equipment, clothing, furniture and just about everything else except my phone, tv and computers. It's always excellent, durable and unfortunately, expensive.
For the most part it doesn't matter in a lot of "web development", most web devs education is critically lacking when it comes to databases in general.
The moment you or your customers need business intelligence and complex queries, you quickly realize how important FKs and indexes actually are. I firmly believe that you should always have FKs and indexes, referential integrity at the db level is a great thing to have and is cheap and easy to implement.
This strange conspiratorial angle you have going on is ridiculous, there is no narrative and no convincing needed. Look at the facts and educate yourself.
Do what ya need to do on the coasts; Destroy personal liberties and freedoms, regulate and outlaw everything, have fun with your social experiments, but please leave me out of it. People tend to be pretty shitty, when your surrounded by millions all on top of each other I guess I can see how you believe its getting close to the end of the world.
Your utopia is my hell.
I prefer smaller cities, personal vehicles, the outdoors, good schools, the space and freedom where the only thing I really bitch about with the local gov is the road construction and how it takes me a couple more minutes every once in a while to run an errand.
2003 TJ here. I would be terrified of water and dirt intrusion along with corrosion, wear and tear. It would also be terrifying coming down hard on such a large battery, even with a skid. I inspect everything after a weekend of wheeling, I have no idea how I could do the same with a BEV and feel safe.