Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
Says the unlucky sod
Also says this very lucky sod. I have made numerous mistakes in my life, including flunking out of college for not attending classes and was still working as an assistant manager at KFC at the age of 24. I pulled my life back together in my late 20's and made a $150k salary by the age of 35 as a software engineer living in a Midwest suburb. Ultimately my own internal motivation pulled me out of my poor circumstances, but it would be ignorant of me to think the advantages of my birth weren't a significant enabler of my success.
The biggest factor is that while most kids get a desire to play/watch sports or hang out with friends from their parents, I got a love of learning from mine. They may not have done a good job of imparting respect for formal education, but they did make sure I knew the value of being educated. I was bought two different encyclopedia sets during my childhood (World Book and then Britannica), was taken to the library weekly, was bought Math textbooks when the speed of education in grade school frustrated me, and was bought programming books when I took an interest there. I had multiple computers as gifts before I was old enough to build my own, and was never significantly punished for taking apart family computers / VCRs / etc just to learn how they worked.
I was also born smart. There is an argument that my reading made me smarter, but overall I have probably had an easier path in life not through hard work but because of genetics. Even if it was my early reading which made me smarter, I enjoyed it so I still don't think I deserve much more credit than another kid who spent his time playing sports. It's not like I felt I was preparing myself for a future career; I just liked reading. That almost certainly has more to do with my environment or genetics than my own free will. Being smart has made many parts of my education and career far easier than most other people. It's not something I have necessarily earned but I certainly reap the rewards.
I also look like both a software engineer without being over the top "nerdy". I can easily just repeat the ideas of my female / minority coworkers during meetings and be given credit for them because I "look" more like someone who should know this stuff. When I explain my 20's to my peers I am more likely to be considered a Bill Gates type who didn't need college than a thug with no respect for authority.
I still had to work hard to get where I am, but no where near as hard as most people would have to if they made similar decisions in life. I am very gracious for the advantages I have been given, and for the opportunities I will be able to give my daughters. I just hope I will not raise them to be ignorant enough to deny their white upper middle class privilege.
it would seem the financials could work out for televised robot fights if they actually became entertaining to mass audiences
We had this decades ago; it was called Battlebots and they showed it on Comedy Central. As I remember the optimal robot fighting design turned out to be a souped-up blender spinning some metal blades and shredding its opponent. Pre-Mythbusters Jamie was one of the competitors IIRC.
We didn't have what I was describing decades ago because it wasn't close to entertaining for mass audiences. Those robots cost closer to $10k than $10 million. It would probably take Hollywood movie-like budgets to create the robots necessary to get millions of viewers. I am close to Battlebot's core demographic and even I thought their fights were boring.
Agreed. I became far less interested the moment I read the robots had human pilots. Any hopes of this being a fight until one of the robots are inoperable was gone. This will probably be paintball / laser tag but with large slow maneuvering robots.
I guess it is one step closer to a real giant robot battle. If these robots can be built with half a million dollars, and champion heavyweight human boxers can make over $10 million for a fight, it would seem the financials could work out for televised robot fights if they actually became entertaining to mass audiences. Or at least we are getting closer.
Birth control is not just for one night stands. Sometimes wedded couples decide they have enough kids at whatever number they have and would like birth control that doesn't make the wife throw up and allows them to have sex. A LOT of married men would gladly take birth control over expensive constant buying of condoms.
And they all have that option already: a vasectomy.
I'm surprised that your cat "loves fruit and vegetables."
Plenty of cats, if not most cats, enjoy many types of fruit and vegetables as treats. But they have the same nutritional benefit for cats as Skittles do for humans. They are just tasty treats, not part of a nutritional diet for cats.
Untrue. Cats eat plants in nature. There are even plants named for them, ie. cat grass and catnip.
My own cat loves to nibble on spearmint, cat grass and catnip plants. He also loves puree of pumpkin.
Cats do eat plants in nature, but they don't get their nutrients from them. Plants are more of a treat. You can give your cats many types of vegetables, such as carrots and pumpkin, but they shouldn't be more than 10% of their diet.
Cats eat meat. Meat based protein and fat makes up nearly 100% of their nutritional needs and it cannot be replaced with plant based substitutes. Cats can have other treats, but meat is the core of their diet.
The Tesla isn't built by a company that swallowed a bunch of taxpayer money in a big government shell game to survive...
Oh wait...
Every company takes advantage of government programs to exist. Public roads, public education, intellectual property protection, military protection of sea lanes, etc. Tesla probably owes its existence more to our universities for producing its engineers than it does to tax incentives.
Has been out for awhile and nobody is buying it. What's better about the Model 3?
I can't speak for everyone, but the two reasons I am buying a Tesla Model 3 is the better performance and the over the air updates. Most car models have all their features on day one and any new updates are only for future year models. This is not the case with Tesla. I'll give my money to Tesla for almost no other reason than to support a company which does this.
Borrow whatever you have to do but I want my Tesla 3. I'll do my part by spending an unnecessary amount of money on a supposedly entry level car, just make it happen.
it's buying hardware and services to set up the production facility... big difference burning cash would be spending it on things that don't do anything for the company, such as distributing dividends and cash executive bonuses...
Considering the terminology for how much they spend each month is their "burn rate" I don't see how burning cash is that inaccurate of a description. Probably evokes some misleading connotations but these are the terms the industry is using.
Regardless, the fact that the Trump admin lets him go knowing that it's going to make them look bad is actually encouraging to me. When you make a mistake and instantly correct it, that's YUGE. Most government officials at that level tend to double down.
You could probably find a silver lining when buried under 50 feet of shit. Just because a bad mistake blows up in your face immediately does not mean fixing it after the fact is laudable. We have seen from both the Flynn and Scaramucci situations that the Trump administration didn't do anything until things had gotten quite bad already.
You implied your kid got a paid internship to get into her 300 level courses, which would mean the internship was before her junior year. The article is not referring to the benefits of paid / unpaid internships before graduation, it is referring to graduates who take unpaid internships after they have a degree.
I agree the study is pointless, but not because it is ignoring internships taken before graduation. If unpaid internships after graduation are a real thing (I had never heard of them) then it something worth studying. It just needs better control groups than this study.
in the States you use unpaid internships to help get into your 300 level courses
This story is studying graduates who take unpaid internships, not students who take unpaid internships. Those are very different things. This study is looking at people who couldn't find work after they graduated and had to settle for unpaid internships, and then seems surprised these students make less money down the line.
For this study to have any relevance, they would have to look at graduates who had an offer for a paid position but chose to take an unpaid internship instead. Then look at their earnings 10 years later as compared to those who took the paid gig (after adjusting for the quality of the original paid job offer). I would still expect the ones who took the paid position to win out, but at least then you would have something interesting to discover.
If you buy a Tesla 3, you are kinda making a bet that Tesla will be providing Level 4 autonomous capabilities very soon. Musk is claiming you will be sleeping in the driver seat by the end of 2019. I don't have much confidence in that figure but it doesn't sound outlandish. By that time the dashboard screen is just for watching the morning news on the way to work.
If you don't believe Level 4 autonomy is coming any time soon, then the design decisions behind the Tesla 3 are certainly less than ideal.
Note: If you doubt the $17K price, you haven't driven a Ford Fusion lately. What they sell for $17K is impressive.
Based on the price you gave I assume you mean the Ford Focus, and Tesla is clearly targeting a more fun to drive car than a Focus. The Focus RS compares favorably to the Tesla, but it is a $37k car ($55k if you add the extra cost in fuel vs electricity between it and the Tesla).
It is very possible Tesla will eventually create a 9s 0-60 car which is closer to $20k, but that if probably a decade from now.
You can always pay more. Please do. I prefer not to contribute to the water and corruption. More government money does not equal better outcomes. You are free to pay more. And I have no problem if you do, but I have a big problem of you force others to be equally foolish.
I challenge you can name a developed country, or any large successful country in history, which was primarily funded by voluntary donations. You can't do it because it is not a reasonable funding method. The tragedy of the commons helps describe why this strategy is a fools errand. Whenever you have a situation where each individual sacrifice only hurts the individual, but collective sacrifice helps everyone, mandatory sacrifice is the only legitimate strategy.
Call it what you will, but $150K puts you firmly into the top 10%, and most of that $150K-$300K range will put you well into the top 5% of income earners. Most would consider the top 5-10% as "rich"...
Most would consider the top 5% to be rich. But that is because most people don't have a very good grasp on money and income distribution. The average American thinks the average manufacturing CEO makes 20 times more than their factory workers while they actually make 354 time more. The average American thinks the top 20% richest among us have 59% of the wealth, while they actually have 84% of it. I agree that your opinion is what most people believe, I'm just telling you you're wrong.
Someone just barely in the top 5% of family income makes $215k per year. This income level is far more comfortable than a standard middle class income, but it does not come close to affording the type of lifestyle people describe when they think of rich. You probably don't own a yacht or a private jet. You probably don't own a second home and if you do it probably isn't that nice. You probably don't have a $100k+ car. You probably don't have a $1+ million home. You probably make sacrifices when planning a vacation instead of just doing whatever you want.
They certainly have a much more comfortable life than a median income family, but the upper middle class resemble the middle class far more than they do the wealthy.
Well, mission accomplished. We're all arguing about whether $150K is rich or middle class - and not talking about the fact that the pain stops at $300K - which, coincidentally, is probably where the most egregious tax inequities start.
Nearly the entire Republican party is built upon a foundation of people who resent professionals (engineers, doctors, lawyers, managers) but idolize the wealthy. People are more likely to see $600k McMansions near where they live and resent those who can afford them, but they more rarely see the $6 million dollar homes of the rich. They assume those who gather extreme wealth are the best among us and deserve every penny, but those in the upper middle class are just pompous liberals who never had a hard days work in their life.
Class warfare is alive and well, and the wealthy are winning by a large margin.
I have never understood this. I can't sell part of my property to pay my real estate taxes. When I retire, and my income drops dramatically, I am forced to sell my home (and go where?) because that's how I am expected to pay for someone else's child's high school education? This seems fundamentally unfair.
Let the people who have kids pay for them, or make local taxes a percentage of income (or both), so at least I am not forced to live on the streets because of someone else's lifestyle choice (i.e., parenthood).
Having kids is not just a lifestyle choice. It is what creates the workforce which will keep growing your food, selling it to you, providing your health care, funding your social security, upholding the value of your personal investments, and so on as you age. The act of raising a child, whether your own or adopted, creates hundreds of thousands of dollars of human capital in our society (much more or less depending on the quality of parenting). You could save billions to fund your retirement, but without other people's kids that value would all evaporate. And in a modern economy, it is the kids in those pricey school districts who will be doing most of the heavy lifting (figuratively) in keeping the future economy running.
Not everyone has to have children to keep the economy running, but someone does have to make that sacrifice. Complaining about doing your part to fund the creation of future generations is asinine.
This is a story about raising taxes on the wealthy. Which is the Democratic Party position. So in fact the 60 million "dirt poor" that voted for Trump would be helped.
Do you see how your bullshit post just fell apart?
This is a story about raising taxes on the upper middle class to enable tax breaks for the wealthy. But the dirt poor are hurt the worst by Trump's policies since he is so keen on cutting programs which benefit them.
Now that it's the micro-handed crotch grabber's policy more taxes are bad? What happened to "I like paying taxes" and "taxes pay for civilization herp derp?"
As one of the people in the $150k-$300k range, I do feel I should be paying more taxes. The problem is if the increase tax burden is hitting the upper middle class harder than it is hitting the upper class. Just as I feel my tax burden as a percentage of my income should go up more than those in the middle class, the tax burden of the wealthy should go up more as a percentage of their income than mine does. Federal taxes are the primary form of progressive taxation in the US and one of our few tools to combat wealth inequality.
Defining what is "rich" is all semantics. Economists put $150-$300k household incomes into the upper middle class. This class has a very different life experience from people in the middle class, but an even drastically different experience from those who are wealthy.
Yes, I know, you whine about the cost of living when you chose to live in a rich neighborhood. Howeveer, that's your choice for living in a rich neighborhood.
And people in the middle class choose to live in a country with running water while there are people who live on $1 a day in other parts of the world. It is all relative. Everyone's standard of living tends to grow with their capability to pay for it. Having to carefully budget housing, food, schooling, health care, entertainment, retirement savings is pretty similar between the middle and upper middle class, just with a different scale. The poor and wealthy are on a different order of magnitude in either direction.
Yes, it would be great for people without family connections to a place wouldn't it? Or to simply not care about your family. Many have obligations to family and cannot move.
Then they will have a somewhat limited amount of career options. Almost no one really has access to 100% of all possible careers, regardless of what your kindergarten teacher might have told you. If your family provides you enough enrichment that they are worth more to you than the career you could have if you moved, then live with that decision. I'm certainly not going to tell people their priorities are wrong. But some choices in life have consequences. My choice to have two children, and my choice to live in the best school district in my state (aka most expensive housing) limits my career options (no going back for my PhD). It may be a bummer at times, but I doubt many people would feel sorry for me. And they shouldn't, because these are the choices I made and continue to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
Says the unlucky sod
Also says this very lucky sod. I have made numerous mistakes in my life, including flunking out of college for not attending classes and was still working as an assistant manager at KFC at the age of 24. I pulled my life back together in my late 20's and made a $150k salary by the age of 35 as a software engineer living in a Midwest suburb. Ultimately my own internal motivation pulled me out of my poor circumstances, but it would be ignorant of me to think the advantages of my birth weren't a significant enabler of my success.
The biggest factor is that while most kids get a desire to play/watch sports or hang out with friends from their parents, I got a love of learning from mine. They may not have done a good job of imparting respect for formal education, but they did make sure I knew the value of being educated. I was bought two different encyclopedia sets during my childhood (World Book and then Britannica), was taken to the library weekly, was bought Math textbooks when the speed of education in grade school frustrated me, and was bought programming books when I took an interest there. I had multiple computers as gifts before I was old enough to build my own, and was never significantly punished for taking apart family computers / VCRs / etc just to learn how they worked.
I was also born smart. There is an argument that my reading made me smarter, but overall I have probably had an easier path in life not through hard work but because of genetics. Even if it was my early reading which made me smarter, I enjoyed it so I still don't think I deserve much more credit than another kid who spent his time playing sports. It's not like I felt I was preparing myself for a future career; I just liked reading. That almost certainly has more to do with my environment or genetics than my own free will. Being smart has made many parts of my education and career far easier than most other people. It's not something I have necessarily earned but I certainly reap the rewards.
I also look like both a software engineer without being over the top "nerdy". I can easily just repeat the ideas of my female / minority coworkers during meetings and be given credit for them because I "look" more like someone who should know this stuff. When I explain my 20's to my peers I am more likely to be considered a Bill Gates type who didn't need college than a thug with no respect for authority.
I still had to work hard to get where I am, but no where near as hard as most people would have to if they made similar decisions in life. I am very gracious for the advantages I have been given, and for the opportunities I will be able to give my daughters. I just hope I will not raise them to be ignorant enough to deny their white upper middle class privilege.
it would seem the financials could work out for televised robot fights if they actually became entertaining to mass audiences
We had this decades ago; it was called Battlebots and they showed it on Comedy Central. As I remember the optimal robot fighting design turned out to be a souped-up blender spinning some metal blades and shredding its opponent. Pre-Mythbusters Jamie was one of the competitors IIRC.
We didn't have what I was describing decades ago because it wasn't close to entertaining for mass audiences. Those robots cost closer to $10k than $10 million. It would probably take Hollywood movie-like budgets to create the robots necessary to get millions of viewers. I am close to Battlebot's core demographic and even I thought their fights were boring.
Agreed. I became far less interested the moment I read the robots had human pilots. Any hopes of this being a fight until one of the robots are inoperable was gone. This will probably be paintball / laser tag but with large slow maneuvering robots.
I guess it is one step closer to a real giant robot battle. If these robots can be built with half a million dollars, and champion heavyweight human boxers can make over $10 million for a fight, it would seem the financials could work out for televised robot fights if they actually became entertaining to mass audiences. Or at least we are getting closer.
Birth control is not just for one night stands. Sometimes wedded couples decide they have enough kids at whatever number they have and would like birth control that doesn't make the wife throw up and allows them to have sex. A LOT of married men would gladly take birth control over expensive constant buying of condoms.
And they all have that option already: a vasectomy.
I'm surprised that your cat "loves fruit and vegetables."
Plenty of cats, if not most cats, enjoy many types of fruit and vegetables as treats. But they have the same nutritional benefit for cats as Skittles do for humans. They are just tasty treats, not part of a nutritional diet for cats.
Untrue. Cats eat plants in nature. There are even plants named for them, ie. cat grass and catnip.
My own cat loves to nibble on spearmint, cat grass and catnip plants. He also loves puree of pumpkin.
Cats do eat plants in nature, but they don't get their nutrients from them. Plants are more of a treat. You can give your cats many types of vegetables, such as carrots and pumpkin, but they shouldn't be more than 10% of their diet.
Cats eat meat. Meat based protein and fat makes up nearly 100% of their nutritional needs and it cannot be replaced with plant based substitutes. Cats can have other treats, but meat is the core of their diet.
I can't speak for everyone, but the one reason I am buying a Tesla Model 3 is I'm a moron.
Fixed that for you.
Proper grammar helps when you are calling someone a moron.
The Tesla isn't built by a company that swallowed a bunch of taxpayer money in a big government shell game to survive...
Oh wait...
Every company takes advantage of government programs to exist. Public roads, public education, intellectual property protection, military protection of sea lanes, etc. Tesla probably owes its existence more to our universities for producing its engineers than it does to tax incentives.
Has been out for awhile and nobody is buying it. What's better about the Model 3?
I can't speak for everyone, but the two reasons I am buying a Tesla Model 3 is the better performance and the over the air updates. Most car models have all their features on day one and any new updates are only for future year models. This is not the case with Tesla. I'll give my money to Tesla for almost no other reason than to support a company which does this.
Borrow whatever you have to do but I want my Tesla 3. I'll do my part by spending an unnecessary amount of money on a supposedly entry level car, just make it happen.
it's buying hardware and services to set up the production facility... big difference
burning cash would be spending it on things that don't do anything for the company, such as distributing dividends and cash executive bonuses...
Considering the terminology for how much they spend each month is their "burn rate" I don't see how burning cash is that inaccurate of a description. Probably evokes some misleading connotations but these are the terms the industry is using.
The hard part is to code so you do not have to use locks. Let that simmer for a while.
I'm not sure if time stamp based concurrency is inherently harder to implement than lock based. Both can be quite challenging.
Regardless, the fact that the Trump admin lets him go knowing that it's going to make them look bad is actually encouraging to me. When you make a mistake and instantly correct it, that's YUGE. Most government officials at that level tend to double down.
You could probably find a silver lining when buried under 50 feet of shit. Just because a bad mistake blows up in your face immediately does not mean fixing it after the fact is laudable. We have seen from both the Flynn and Scaramucci situations that the Trump administration didn't do anything until things had gotten quite bad already.
You implied your kid got a paid internship to get into her 300 level courses, which would mean the internship was before her junior year. The article is not referring to the benefits of paid / unpaid internships before graduation, it is referring to graduates who take unpaid internships after they have a degree.
I agree the study is pointless, but not because it is ignoring internships taken before graduation. If unpaid internships after graduation are a real thing (I had never heard of them) then it something worth studying. It just needs better control groups than this study.
in the States you use unpaid internships to help get into your 300 level courses
This story is studying graduates who take unpaid internships, not students who take unpaid internships. Those are very different things. This study is looking at people who couldn't find work after they graduated and had to settle for unpaid internships, and then seems surprised these students make less money down the line.
For this study to have any relevance, they would have to look at graduates who had an offer for a paid position but chose to take an unpaid internship instead. Then look at their earnings 10 years later as compared to those who took the paid gig (after adjusting for the quality of the original paid job offer). I would still expect the ones who took the paid position to win out, but at least then you would have something interesting to discover.
If you buy a Tesla 3, you are kinda making a bet that Tesla will be providing Level 4 autonomous capabilities very soon. Musk is claiming you will be sleeping in the driver seat by the end of 2019. I don't have much confidence in that figure but it doesn't sound outlandish. By that time the dashboard screen is just for watching the morning news on the way to work.
If you don't believe Level 4 autonomy is coming any time soon, then the design decisions behind the Tesla 3 are certainly less than ideal.
Note: If you doubt the $17K price, you haven't driven a Ford Fusion lately. What they sell for $17K is impressive.
Based on the price you gave I assume you mean the Ford Focus, and Tesla is clearly targeting a more fun to drive car than a Focus. The Focus RS compares favorably to the Tesla, but it is a $37k car ($55k if you add the extra cost in fuel vs electricity between it and the Tesla).
It is very possible Tesla will eventually create a 9s 0-60 car which is closer to $20k, but that if probably a decade from now.
You can always pay more. Please do. I prefer not to contribute to the water and corruption. More government money does not equal better outcomes. You are free to pay more. And I have no problem if you do, but I have a big problem of you force others to be equally foolish.
I challenge you can name a developed country, or any large successful country in history, which was primarily funded by voluntary donations. You can't do it because it is not a reasonable funding method. The tragedy of the commons helps describe why this strategy is a fools errand. Whenever you have a situation where each individual sacrifice only hurts the individual, but collective sacrifice helps everyone, mandatory sacrifice is the only legitimate strategy.
Call it what you will, but $150K puts you firmly into the top 10%, and most of that $150K-$300K range will put you well into the top 5% of income earners. Most would consider the top 5-10% as "rich"...
Most would consider the top 5% to be rich. But that is because most people don't have a very good grasp on money and income distribution. The average American thinks the average manufacturing CEO makes 20 times more than their factory workers while they actually make 354 time more. The average American thinks the top 20% richest among us have 59% of the wealth, while they actually have 84% of it. I agree that your opinion is what most people believe, I'm just telling you you're wrong.
Someone just barely in the top 5% of family income makes $215k per year. This income level is far more comfortable than a standard middle class income, but it does not come close to affording the type of lifestyle people describe when they think of rich. You probably don't own a yacht or a private jet. You probably don't own a second home and if you do it probably isn't that nice. You probably don't have a $100k+ car. You probably don't have a $1+ million home. You probably make sacrifices when planning a vacation instead of just doing whatever you want.
They certainly have a much more comfortable life than a median income family, but the upper middle class resemble the middle class far more than they do the wealthy.
Well, mission accomplished. We're all arguing about whether $150K is rich or middle class - and not talking about the fact that the pain stops at $300K - which, coincidentally, is probably where the most egregious tax inequities start.
Nearly the entire Republican party is built upon a foundation of people who resent professionals (engineers, doctors, lawyers, managers) but idolize the wealthy. People are more likely to see $600k McMansions near where they live and resent those who can afford them, but they more rarely see the $6 million dollar homes of the rich. They assume those who gather extreme wealth are the best among us and deserve every penny, but those in the upper middle class are just pompous liberals who never had a hard days work in their life.
Class warfare is alive and well, and the wealthy are winning by a large margin.
I have never understood this. I can't sell part of my property to pay my real estate taxes. When I retire, and my income drops dramatically, I am forced to sell my home (and go where?) because that's how I am expected to pay for someone else's child's high school education? This seems fundamentally unfair.
Let the people who have kids pay for them, or make local taxes a percentage of income (or both), so at least I am not forced to live on the streets because of someone else's lifestyle choice (i.e., parenthood).
Having kids is not just a lifestyle choice. It is what creates the workforce which will keep growing your food, selling it to you, providing your health care, funding your social security, upholding the value of your personal investments, and so on as you age. The act of raising a child, whether your own or adopted, creates hundreds of thousands of dollars of human capital in our society (much more or less depending on the quality of parenting). You could save billions to fund your retirement, but without other people's kids that value would all evaporate. And in a modern economy, it is the kids in those pricey school districts who will be doing most of the heavy lifting (figuratively) in keeping the future economy running.
Not everyone has to have children to keep the economy running, but someone does have to make that sacrifice. Complaining about doing your part to fund the creation of future generations is asinine.
This is a story about raising taxes on the wealthy. Which is the Democratic Party position. So in fact the 60 million "dirt poor" that voted for Trump would be helped.
Do you see how your bullshit post just fell apart?
This is a story about raising taxes on the upper middle class to enable tax breaks for the wealthy. But the dirt poor are hurt the worst by Trump's policies since he is so keen on cutting programs which benefit them.
Now that it's the micro-handed crotch grabber's policy more taxes are bad? What happened to "I like paying taxes" and "taxes pay for civilization herp derp?"
As one of the people in the $150k-$300k range, I do feel I should be paying more taxes. The problem is if the increase tax burden is hitting the upper middle class harder than it is hitting the upper class. Just as I feel my tax burden as a percentage of my income should go up more than those in the middle class, the tax burden of the wealthy should go up more as a percentage of their income than mine does. Federal taxes are the primary form of progressive taxation in the US and one of our few tools to combat wealth inequality.
$150K-$300K isn't middle class. That's fucking rich.
Defining what is "rich" is all semantics. Economists put $150-$300k household incomes into the upper middle class. This class has a very different life experience from people in the middle class, but an even drastically different experience from those who are wealthy.
Yes, I know, you whine about the cost of living when you chose to live in a rich neighborhood. Howeveer, that's your choice for living in a rich neighborhood.
And people in the middle class choose to live in a country with running water while there are people who live on $1 a day in other parts of the world. It is all relative. Everyone's standard of living tends to grow with their capability to pay for it. Having to carefully budget housing, food, schooling, health care, entertainment, retirement savings is pretty similar between the middle and upper middle class, just with a different scale. The poor and wealthy are on a different order of magnitude in either direction.
Yes, it would be great for people without family connections to a place wouldn't it? Or to simply not care about your family. Many have obligations to family and cannot move.
Then they will have a somewhat limited amount of career options. Almost no one really has access to 100% of all possible careers, regardless of what your kindergarten teacher might have told you. If your family provides you enough enrichment that they are worth more to you than the career you could have if you moved, then live with that decision. I'm certainly not going to tell people their priorities are wrong. But some choices in life have consequences. My choice to have two children, and my choice to live in the best school district in my state (aka most expensive housing) limits my career options (no going back for my PhD). It may be a bummer at times, but I doubt many people would feel sorry for me. And they shouldn't, because these are the choices I made and continue to make.