Except those jobs WILL come back if companies here can't find any other legal option.
Definitely not a Trump fan, and I'm not even a fan of tariffs. But we've essentially handed over a whole LOT of industry that we used to handle here in the USA ourselves, back when we got our on high-horse and decided "Our people have gotten too SMART to do laborious factory jobs! Give those to OTHER countries!"
Now, we've found out just how much we stand to lose when we let other people build our stuff and sell it back to us. All of our ideas (the "value" we supposedly have over the others because we're so smart) is lost as soon as nations that don't respect intellectual property rights steal and clone it.
If Apple felt forced to build iPhones in America? Meh.... you know what? They're in a better financial position to make that work than practically any other company. They've got loads of cash they're sitting on, so they can do the R&D to automate the processes they've relied on Asian workers to do. The prices might go up,but they CAN'T charge more than the market will bear. So $2000 for a phone? Probably not gonna fly. So they'll have to take short-term losses to tool up to build them at a more affordable price-point as they move forward.
Seriously, this one's a red herring. You've got all these advancing technologies that will really improve efficiency by taking humans out of the equation. Everything from the McDonalds kiosks so people can self-order food to the future of self driving trucks, removing the need for human drivers. Why complain about these improvements taking jobs away if other things you could do here are being held back on because of the fear we won't have enough people to do it?
IMO, as you bring back factories to America, you're going to bring them back in a modernized format. The idea Trump wants America back in the 1950's or whatever is kind of stupid. He just wants things to be produced here again, and our excuse for not doing it, to date, has been the flimsy one that 'It's just not profitable to make stuff here anymore, when nations like China can do it so cheap!" There's always been a major hidden cost in letting them build our products, though. That's been their tendency to steal our intellectual property and build knock-offs of whatever product we come up with. How much is THAT costing an American business in lost profits?
The bizarre thing here, IMO, is that so many App Store users would select this totally unknown app as their pick to spend $5 on to protect their systems from malware or virus threats?
If you really want a better picture of who Elon is, you might start with the article Wired magazine did on him in their U.K. edition recently. They interviewed a number of people who knew him in the past and worked around him. From that. it's clear to me the guy was/is a total workaholic who views sleep as the enemy. With regard to SpaceX, a rocket scientist they interviewed said when he first met Elon, the guy came off as very intelligent and interested in doing something with rockets, but had no real concrete knowledge of the science or engineering that goes into building one. Several years later (maybe 5 or 7?), he caught up with Elon again and by then, Elon had mastered all sorts of relevant knowledge and could legitimately be called an expert in that field.
When he decides he wants to pursue an interest, he goes all out to make it happen.
People like this tend to eventually crack under the pressure, giving themselves health problems and whatnot. It's not a lifestyle I recommend to anyone, but I think certain personality types can't help but live this way. For them, there's no other option that makes them feel accomplished.
That whole thing about him calling the diver a child rapist was blown a bit out of proportion, vs the Elon Musk we see interacting with people every day. As I read things, it was probably typed in an angry outburst because that diver was a harsh critic of Elon's attempt and money spent to devise a possible solution to rescue the trapped kids with the submarine tube he engineered. (If you cared enough about an emergency situation to pull a bunch of your people off of projects they were doing for your company, and dumped millions of dollars into trying to offer a possible solution -- wouldn't YOU be pissed off that some guy trashed your efforts as foolish, basically calling you a clueless idiot for meddling in something he knew nothing about?) And from some of the photos, that diver DID have a creepy look to him.
Agreed! We have 2 kids in high school who both need TI 83 or 84 series calculators for class, and it's kind of ridiculous how much money those things fetch, even on the used market, JUST because so many school districts have standardized on them.
At our oldest kid's high school, they supposedly provide loaners for the kids who don't have or can't afford their own, but it's become HIGHLY discouraged because so many kids were stealing the loaners and reselling them. (Even on Amazon, when you look at reviews of used ones sold by individuals on there, you often see complaints that one arrived with a "Property of XXX School District" decal stuck to the bottom of it.")
It's far cheaper to buy a TI 83 or 84 simulator app for a smartphone, or heck -- to even buy a cheap Android phone AND the app!
I've used several wallets but they've been on computers. I have an iPhone and traditionally, Apple placed a lot of limitations on crypto-related apps they'd allow on the App Store, so I never really bothered to try to use one on there.
I honestly believe the single biggest impediment to the public accepting crypto as an alternative currency were all the hacks and corrupt coin exchanges that took people's funds and vanished.
Crypto-coins had the promise of being extremely secure and anonymous, but we quickly saw that unravel as folks learned how to trace transactions back through blockchains and as all of the web site compromises and coin-stealing malware arrived.
It's still too complicated for the average person to take a payment or spend crypto-currency. The unique wallet ID, alone, is a big, long, messy string of characters that nobody can remember. So they have to pretty much launch their wallet app and copy/paste the thing any time they want to instruct someone else to pay them. So that's another big problem. But really, a lot of this stuff can be coded into a more user-friendly UI, if someone is motivated to do it. (I think that's one of the promises of the new project out there to let independent musicians get paid directly for use of their music, without needing a middle man.)
But we're far from seeing the whole thing get stable enough so folks have a good handle on just what a given crypto-coin is worth. Everyone I know hanging onto any of them does so with a hope of reselling them at a profit at some later point in time. They're not keeping them like folks collect spare change in jars at home.
I think I'd like a feature like this if it at least FORCES the signals to come on as someone is starting to turn, in case they were otherwise going to skip using them at all.
As others said, half of the purpose of a turn signal is to indicate you'd like to turn... hoping other drivers will cut you some slack and open up a space for you to begin doing it. Automatic signals will be totally useless for this.
So you wouldn't want to get rid of the signal lever here, IMO. But you might want the automatic functionality to kick in when you fail to use it manually.
Microsoft should have done this all along. Since it's subscription based, it really no longer benefits them to try to limit how many machines a person has the software installed on. It benefits them more if it exists "anywhere and everywhere possible", so the user will be more likely to maintain a paid subscription because it's "so useful".
Imagine if some service like Netflix did this, saying you couldn't keep the Netflix software on more than X number of devices at a time without paying for a second subscription? How would that make any sense?
Agreed! Since they went the route of making GTAV with the "online" mode, you could at least stream different music selections when playing it that way, as opposed to the "canned" tracks in the game for offline play.
Personally, I find GTAV both amazing and disappointing at the same time. There's clearly so much effort that went into creating an immersive, nicely rendered landscape to run around in. Plus the vehicles are pretty cool, and are one of the things they're constantly upgrading in the online mode. Unfortunately, the online gameplay is just cheezy. All of the new "missions" and features they keep adding feel like hastily slapped together side games that have little to do with the main storyline. I mean.... those uber-unrealistic stunt track levels or people vs. zombies missions where you switch sides when it changes between day and night? They become boring drudgery after the first 1-2 times you play them. Only motivation to deal with the stuff is the fact you can earn a lot of in-game cash for winning rounds in them.
As a massively multiplayer online world online, I would have rather they focused on making the game mechanics a lot better, and just let people run around and create gangs or clans that can fight or help each other. I can't stand the boneheaded flight controls in the game, and even the aiming of a gun has always been sloppy and awkward in the GTA series.
Are you telling me that struggles with climate change, scarcity of natural resources and so on will just vanish into thin air by embracing Socialism or perhaps a Fascist dictatorship, or Communist rule? These issues somehow ONLY cause problems for people living in Capitalist systems?
I've got some news for the Capitalist haters out there.... The majority of innovations in technology that will help the whole planet transition to cleaner forms of energy, and possibly even mitigate some of the climate change issues are being developed in Capitalist America.
If the American Capitalist system fails, it won't be for any of these reasons. It'll simply be due to our leaders constantly increasing the levels of our national debt, in efforts to extend and expand the role of central government into all sorts of areas it was never originally intended to get that involved with. The nation only generates so much wealth each year, and it's a recipe for disaster to keep spending more than what's sustainable.
That's a pretty ignorant statement, when you look at how many Macs were sold in the last decade or so, and are in active use.
Sure, I have no doubt Apple and Valve/Steam have butted heads over how to handle online sales. Apple has an online store, after all. But open source that you can compile and run inside OS X is somewhat immune to Apple's whims. Yeah, they might have a graphics API that's unique -- but that can be worked around (MoltenVK). The OS is Unix based, though, and should really require less software gymnastics to get something running in it than Windows requires.
They DO have a native Steam client for OS X that's actively supported, AND quite a few native OS X apps offered via Steam.
My experience with Linux is, the majority of its user-base is running it on older hardware that's deemed inadequate for a good Windows 10 experience. So those people aren't going to be doing much 3D gaming anyway. I don't believe the remaining percentage running Linux on modern systems with good graphics cards are really that much more of an audience than the total number of Mac users with machines that can run games?
One article I read said there was a good likelihood the bridge was constructed using less concrete than specified, because the mafia was heavily involved in bidding for these projects at the time. One of their favorite ways to win low bids for construction was skimping on the concrete used.
I take issue with this argument. I've had it before with people.... First off, "wage slavery" is a nonsense term. Slaves weren't paid wages at all and never entered into an employment contract with anyone. It trivializes the plight of real slaves, forced to do labor while owned as property by someone else.
Capitalism is a whole economic system that benefits all of its participants. The middle class or working class may not "own the means of production", but that doesn't mean they're not part of the Capitalist system. Owning the means of production does you NO good if nobody wants to buy what you're producing. The 0.001% can't just buy and sell exclusively to each other.
The system we have is about making voluntary choices and promises, for the most part. Government has mandatory taxation it throws into the mix, so that part is forced. But when I decided to buy a house, I was well aware that I was committing to 30 years of loan payments and a need to work for those 30 years to make sure I had the funds to keep making those payments. That's not wage slavery! That's a VOLUNTARY choice on my part. There's not even any guarantee I *have* to labor for 30 years to pay the house off. Many other things could happen, including my property value increasing enough so I can make money reselling it, to pay it off with a profit. Much less likely -- I could win a lottery of some kind and be able to pay it off that way. Or perhaps I'd come into an inheritance that helps pay it off? Maybe I decide to leverage it as a money generation tool, renting to people via AirBnB at some point?
I don't understand this flawed argument of yours that claims we're all just slaves to the system. It sounds like you want the ability to just be handed possessions and not have to pay for them?
Almost everything listed that people are becoming satisfied renting from services, as opposed to buying on physical media? They're all intellectual properties that the sellers/creators insist you don't really OWN after buying them. When you buy a music CD, you're not allowed to duplicate it and share copies of the content with others. When you buy a movie on DVD, it's illegal to decrypt the copy protection on it, even for the purpose of transferring the movie content to a different form of media so you can watch it on various electronics you own that can't play from the physical DVD disc.
When you shell out the $50-60 for a new video game for your console, it's subject to whatever usage terms and restrictions they want to place on it. Might have to buy a second one if you want to play the game online from two different consoles in the house, so your kids can play it against each other. Who knows?
I think that's a BIG driver of the change to a rental, on-demand model.
First off, no... my last sentence didn't "betray me" as somehow being for socialized medicine.
I'm saying that I'm for a free market... not the current one that pretends to be free, except for the legal limitations government places on things to benefit big pharma unfairly! (EG. If a company over in Germany or up in Canada starts producing a perfectly good version of one of the drugs under U.S. patent by a pharmaceutical firm based in America, it's illegal to mail order it into the country and issue it to patients, even if it's 1/3rd. of the cost and works as well as or better than the one under the legal patent protection here.) If you want to sell drugs in a Capitalist framework, I think that should mean it's a level playing field for all participants, including foreign manufacturers who want to export drugs to America.
Big pharma constantly bellyaches about the huge expenses involved in R&D of a new drug and claims it requires government protection to get exclusive rights to sell it for so many years before generic alternatives are allowed. Yet we can see by the huge profits they consistently make that they're not in any special need of these protections at all! "No risk, no reward" is how the free market is supposed to work. If you dump millions into R&Ding a new medication and then find you can't recoup your investment before everyone else clones your drug and undercuts your price on it? Too bad! Welcome to the reality of pretty much every other business in America! There's usually a lot of short-term profit potential for having a product out first, even without any government protection.... You exploit that "first past the post" momentum with the right marketing push, and you've got brand recognition everyone else has to really fight to compete with. You *should* be able to turn a profit if your product is any good.
The thing I find so disheartening is how many younger Americans reject Capitalism, in favor of a form of Socialism -- without realizing that this isn't as simple as an A or B pair of options. If you want Socialism, fine.... There are many places in the world actively practicing it, and you're welcome to move there. America was created as a unique experiment in the world, creating a Democratic Republic. IMO, it's proven itself not only viable but arguably superior to many other forms of rule by central governments. I wholeheartedly believe that as a U.S. citizen, I should do everything in my power to preserve this framework.
Obviously, we have a lot of flaws, corruption and other negatives. But show me ANY government that's perfect, except on paper.
IMO, what we need to be focusing on in America is how to move forward, to PRESERVE the Democratic Republic that our Founders created and made into a reality. Corporatism is really what most people are complaining about when they say they're anti-Capitalist. Corporatism is simply a situation where big business managed to collude with government to avoid being governed fairly by it. This can be addressed and mitigated without resorting to Socialism!
America has already done too much dabbing in Socialist practices to appease various groups. Even when it creates a "workable" solution to a specific problem? It weakens our whole system of government, because it means we took an "easy way out" or shortcut, copy-catting what other countries did, rather than finding an answer that doesn't go against the principles that built what we've got here.
Perhaps the place this "battle" is most evident, today, is the healthcare debate. Single-payer or Socialized medicine is something I just can't accept, even though I accept that it's ONE solution that basically works for other countries. If we stick to our core values and principles that defined America, I think we have to conclude it's unfair to demand medical professionals all get paid a fixed salary, as dictated by Federal government. I think we have to conclude that no, healthcare is NOT a right in America. You have every right to pursue better health for yourself, obviously. But as soon as you need medical care, you're demanding the services of another person or group of people who invested many years into education and training to be good enough to perform those services. They aren't your slaves, nor do you have a right to force other American citizens to pay their fees to treat you. We DO need to stop the collusion/ Corporatism that allows big pharma to get protectionist treatment by government for exclusive rights to sell medications, and to prevent competitors in other countries from importing their offerings here as legal alternatives.
Honestly, a lot of the new features added to iPhones, even several versions back, were relatively small UNLESS they affected you directly. For example, they added phones with the ability to use the additional frequency licensed to T-Mobile. That was a big deal for those of us on T-Mobile... important enough to justify reselling an existing phone and upgrading, even if nothing else had changed. (I mean, you're paying out all that money each month for the service, so any handset that lets you use more of the service's own capabilities is kind of important.) But anyone NOT on T-Mobile didn't care a bit.
At the end of the day? I carry my cellphone so people from my work can reach me, and for the conveniences it offers me like locating things using GPS mapping applications, or browsing the latest news while standing in line somewhere. It also doubles as my camera, whenever I didn't bring my big SLR along, and for talking to or texting my friends. Yearly updates really aren't necessary to keep doing any of those things with the device. Yearly updates were a sign of a marketplace that hadn't matured yet, so kept throwing more cool ideas out there left and right, as they realized things they forgot to add in previous phone releases.
I was part of the generation of kids who latched on to the early 8 bit personal computers and learned to program in BASIC because, well... that's what the manuals told you how to use them. As things got more advanced, I started a hobby of running my own computer BBS, and initially used software I wrote myself in BASIC. (By then, I was already hitting limitations of what the language would let me do, because BASIC had no way to collect input or produce output to and from my modem. I had to use a lower level assembly code driver program to handle the I/O. A friend of mine, who knew some assembly programming, helped code that and maintain it for me with updates for a while.)
By the time I'd done that for a few years, the Borland "Turbo" products for coding in PASCAL or C were becoming really popular, and friends of mine were modifying existing code-bases for PC compatible BBS packages using those languages. I was too invested in what I'd put together in BASIC to care about that, at the time.
When I finally went all-in on a PC clone (vs. my Tandy Color Computer 3) - I was sidetracked by other things in life, including learning to play guitar and playing for a while in a small, local band that some friends had put together, and taking college classes. When I re-visited software development for Windows, people were WAY ahead of me, using the visual development languages and object-oriented programming, which was a foreign thing to me.
I went on to a career in I.T., which I do to this day, but beyond your basic batch scripting, I really don't ever attempt to code anything. Truth is? There's SO much out there already, I struggle to imagine scenarios where I'd ever want to write something that hasn't already been done! It's a full-time job mastering several of the existing Enterprise-class products on the market that a given employer might expect me to be proficient in.
I think I understand what Jonathan Edwards is saying, because it's exactly what I experienced that drove me away from programming. But I'm not sure it's a "problem" anymore? The days of things like HyperCard are past us because the types of applications one would typically create with them are already readily available, and in the form of code that runs natively on the system without "helper" software interpreting it first. Even in my early days of using BASIC, I hit hard limitations on what it could do that forced me to use outside assistance (that assembly code device driver for modem I/O).
The expectations for the level of what applications, games or utilities do is high enough, today, that I think you need specialists, well versed in complex programming languages, to pull them off. There are times I really do missing coding in BASIC. To this day, I remember the commands and most of the syntax. But even with the "last gasp" of attempts to modernize traditional BASIC with those BASIC compilers they had for MS-DOS for a while? The language just couldn't DO enough to keep up with people's expectations.
I work at a company where we deploy Surface Pros as our standard issue Windows portable for employees -- so I'm quite familiar with them. I looked at the new Surface Go the first day they announced it, but I thought it was a little too small and under-powered. The low starting price only gives you a 128GB SSD for storage, too. That's just a non-starter to me for a Windows machine.
And really? The keyboard covers are a pretty big compromise with any Surface... I hate typing on them except for real casual use. In the office, everyone leaves them attached to a dock and uses full-sized keyboards, mice and dual displays with them. In that situation, they work quite well. You forget you're not using a regular desktop PC workstation. But this "Go" would be slow and limited enough so I doubt it'd even pull that off as well as a Surface Pro does.
Personally, I stopped using my Surface Pro 4 I was originally issued and switched to a Surface laptop instead. It's the same as a Surface Pro except with a normal laptop lid and keyboard. (You can still use the pencil on the touchscreen if you wish, with it.)
The people who are screaming about Tesla not opening up the repair info to the masses should also realize that almost none of their vehicles sold, to date, are old enough to be completely out of warranty. The Model S wasn't a thing you could buy until 2012, and they all got an 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty on their powertrains.
When you couple that with the fact that Teslas were never mass produced in the quantities the big-name auto makers produce? You start to realize that the number of Teslas out there in scrap yards from getting totaled in accidents or written off from flood damage are FAR too few to support the business of local garages or other repair shops who might want to specialize in working on them.
As a used Model S owner myself, I've done a lot of reading and research on the cars, because I wanted to know what I might be up against in coming years. The biggest issue facing Tesla owners today is an overall shortage of parts. Even if you have an authorized Tesla body shop repairing your car from a fender-bender, it's quite common they can't obtain a body panel or other trim part you need for 2-3 months. That's one of the challenges the company is still trying to overcome. (Again, they're nowhere near the size of GM or Ford or Toyota... and they didn't really have the money to stock large quantities of spare parts in warehouses. I'm sure they started out just making spare parts to order, as they had the need. And now they have enough cars on the roads so that's not workable, but their factories were doing all they could just to meet demand for the new Model 3 vehicle orders.)
Personally? I think there's a great money-making opportunity for independent shops who can stock specific parts that are known to fail somewhat regularly, and can do those specific repairs. Great example? Model S auto-retracting/presenting door handles. These are pretty complex components and had a couple of design flaws. (Tesla used a cast metal gear part that tends to develop a stress fracture over time and break into pieces. They also used regular copper wire where flexible silicone wire should have been substituted, so over hundreds of door handle cycles, the wire flexing back and forth snaps it.) Both of these issues have been addressed, at least to a large extent, with a newer handle revision. But my understanding is, Tesla didn't do that until 2017 and there's kind of a run on these -- since service centers will only replace an older revision broken handle with the latest revision. Clearly, this is a place where independent shops could re-work a broken, old revision handle and make it "better than new", for cheaper than Tesla's repair cost. (Tesla wants around $700+ per door handle for an out of warranty repair.)
Another example is the small 12 volt battery in a Model S. This is known to fail on a lot of people, and will leave you stranded if it does. (Luckily, you *usually* get some kind of warning on the dash that it's having issues for at least a little while before it conks out.) This one, again, was usually just a free warranty swap so far. But as these cars age out of factory coverage, it'll become a problem. There's a company on the net called BattMobile who sells an improved replacement battery with the necessary, proprietary battery connector points already on it. But it would be great if more shops knew how to swap one of these and could do it for people inexpensively. On a dual motor Model S, it's not THAT tough as job, but it's kind of a bear to get to it on the regular, single motor vehicles.
I know I took a while to respond here, but in case you're still following replies to your posts?
I agree completely with this other guy who replied to you on this. Buying old, cheap used cars is a fool's errand UNLESS you enjoy working on them yourself AND have the flexibility and free time to do it.
I spent a LONG time learning that lesson. (Screw those lying bastard mechanics that preach about it always being wiser and cheaper to keep your old vehicle running. That's the line they give you to ensure their pocketbooks stay well lined.)
I have friends who were employed as engineers in the auto industry, and they'll even tell you they're constantly paid to only engineer vehicle parts to last a certain target number of miles and years of use. If they make it more durable than that, it's considered "over-engineering" it and a cost liability that has to be adjusted by using cheaper/less reliable alternatives. For example, if a plastic gear will do for something like a power window assembly, you can bet they'll choose that over the steel gear that would clearly outlast it. It's lighter weight AND a bit cheaper. Both of those attributes are multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of vehicles they plan on building that way.
So many of the older cars you see on the roads, making up those statistics about "cars lasting longer these days" have back-stories about all the maintenance costs sunk into them to keep them going. Often, people have a certain sentimental attachment to an older car so they spend more than it's worth to keep it. Other times, they just believe that gamble that, "If I just do this ONE more big repair, it should be good for a while." But the fact is, every part in there is wearing out at the same time. Your 12 year old car that gets a brand new engine still has a 12 year old transmission, heating and cooling system, suspension parts and dashboard gauges and controls, plus sensors of all types. Even the frame/body is only designed to resist rust for so many years. It's likely getting "cancer" from the inside, out, in places like the lower door sills.
And depreciation costs? Meh... I always try to buy certified pre-owned so the first owner took that big initial depreciation hit, while I'm still getting a vehicle that's more or less in new condition. I've really never been upside-down on a car loan when I purchased one this way... but obviously, you have to also look out for ripoff dealerships who overcharge for one.
When I bought my Jeep Wrangler, in fact? I bought brand new and STILL came out with almost 0 depreciation after a few years, because Chrysler kept upping the price for the same vehicle year after year.
Same liberal/socialists who *always* think they can improve situations by limiting people's freedom to do what they want to do.
So the streets are congested? Ok... What else did you expect when you have a city that heavily populated in that relatively small amount of space? It's part of the package deal if you want to live in a place like that.
There's a good chance that every Uber or Lyft driver out there helps DECREASE congestion, vs. all of those people they take around opting to drive themselves. (A lot of people in large cities decide not to own an automobile at all, as long as they have enough transit options to make that doable.) If an Uber or Lyft or regular cab is too difficult to hail down ASAP, where you need it? It tends to motivate people to buy their own vehicles. Same thing if scarcity runs the prices up enough so you may as well just buy and drive your own.
Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)
What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.
I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!
Right now, our total household income (both wife and I work full time in I.T.) is nowhere near $250,000/yr. -- but we certainly qualify as "upper middle class".
My current mortgage payment is around $1,600/month and that's for a 2,200 square foot, 3 bedroom house with a 2 car detached garage, in Maryland.
If I looked at the extra income we'd have if we had $250,000 between us each year? I'd still be really hard pressed to sign on the line for any mortgage resembling $6,000+ per month! We pretty much live paycheck to paycheck on the current income, by the time you consider the costs of raising 3 kids and the (I think reasonable) decision for both of us to buy nice, newer model vehicles to drive around.
The tendency for lenders to loan money and make recommendations on "what you can afford" based simply on percentages of your total income is what got a whole lot of people in over their heads with home buying before the last economic crash.
There's so much else to consider, including the rising cost of KEEPING whatever home you buy as its cost increases. If you have more land, you have more yard maintenance to deal with. Did you budget the cost of all that landscaping in? (I have a bunch of trees and shrubs that grow over the property line on both sides of my house, requiring constant pruning back. If you slack off on that, they clog the gutters and lead to water problems in the basement -- multiplying your cost of dealing with it all. Last time I got a quote to trim back just one side of that mess? The guy wanted over $2,000 for his landscapers to cut it all back to the fence line and haul it all away.) If you have more square footage, you owe more every year in property tax AND more in utility bills to keep that much air space heated or cooled.
Even our basic bills for sewer and water have gone up exponentially. Clean water used to be something most people just received as almost a "throw away" bill. You know.... every few months you'd have to send the water company $30-40 to keep it paid up. Not anymore! The cost to treat the river water where I live is really high, and they have to pass it on to customers. Quarterly bills of hundreds of dollars are the norm.
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Except those jobs WILL come back if companies here can't find any other legal option.
Definitely not a Trump fan, and I'm not even a fan of tariffs. But we've essentially handed over a whole LOT of industry that we used to handle here in the USA ourselves, back when we got our on high-horse and decided "Our people have gotten too SMART to do laborious factory jobs! Give those to OTHER countries!"
Now, we've found out just how much we stand to lose when we let other people build our stuff and sell it back to us. All of our ideas (the "value" we supposedly have over the others because we're so smart) is lost as soon as nations that don't respect intellectual property rights steal and clone it.
If Apple felt forced to build iPhones in America? Meh.... you know what? They're in a better financial position to make that work than practically any other company. They've got loads of cash they're sitting on, so they can do the R&D to automate the processes they've relied on Asian workers to do. The prices might go up,but they CAN'T charge more than the market will bear. So $2000 for a phone? Probably not gonna fly. So they'll have to take short-term losses to tool up to build them at a more affordable price-point as they move forward.
Seriously, this one's a red herring. You've got all these advancing technologies that will really improve efficiency by taking humans out of the equation. Everything from the McDonalds kiosks so people can self-order food to the future of self driving trucks, removing the need for human drivers. Why complain about these improvements taking jobs away if other things you could do here are being held back on because of the fear we won't have enough people to do it?
IMO, as you bring back factories to America, you're going to bring them back in a modernized format. The idea Trump wants America back in the 1950's or whatever is kind of stupid. He just wants things to be produced here again, and our excuse for not doing it, to date, has been the flimsy one that 'It's just not profitable to make stuff here anymore, when nations like China can do it so cheap!" There's always been a major hidden cost in letting them build our products, though. That's been their tendency to steal our intellectual property and build knock-offs of whatever product we come up with. How much is THAT costing an American business in lost profits?
The bizarre thing here, IMO, is that so many App Store users would select this totally unknown app as their pick to spend $5 on to protect their systems from malware or virus threats?
If you really want a better picture of who Elon is, you might start with the article Wired magazine did on him in their U.K. edition recently. They interviewed a number of people who knew him in the past and worked around him. From that. it's clear to me the guy was/is a total workaholic who views sleep as the enemy. With regard to SpaceX, a rocket scientist they interviewed said when he first met Elon, the guy came off as very intelligent and interested in doing something with rockets, but had no real concrete knowledge of the science or engineering that goes into building one. Several years later (maybe 5 or 7?), he caught up with Elon again and by then, Elon had mastered all sorts of relevant knowledge and could legitimately be called an expert in that field.
When he decides he wants to pursue an interest, he goes all out to make it happen.
People like this tend to eventually crack under the pressure, giving themselves health problems and whatnot. It's not a lifestyle I recommend to anyone, but I think certain personality types can't help but live this way. For them, there's no other option that makes them feel accomplished.
That whole thing about him calling the diver a child rapist was blown a bit out of proportion, vs the Elon Musk we see interacting with people every day. As I read things, it was probably typed in an angry outburst because that diver was a harsh critic of Elon's attempt and money spent to devise a possible solution to rescue the trapped kids with the submarine tube he engineered. (If you cared enough about an emergency situation to pull a bunch of your people off of projects they were doing for your company, and dumped millions of dollars into trying to offer a possible solution -- wouldn't YOU be pissed off that some guy trashed your efforts as foolish, basically calling you a clueless idiot for meddling in something he knew nothing about?) And from some of the photos, that diver DID have a creepy look to him.
Agreed! We have 2 kids in high school who both need TI 83 or 84 series calculators for class, and it's kind of ridiculous how much money those things fetch, even on the used market, JUST because so many school districts have standardized on them.
At our oldest kid's high school, they supposedly provide loaners for the kids who don't have or can't afford their own, but it's become HIGHLY discouraged because so many kids were stealing the loaners and reselling them. (Even on Amazon, when you look at reviews of used ones sold by individuals on there, you often see complaints that one arrived with a "Property of XXX School District" decal stuck to the bottom of it.")
It's far cheaper to buy a TI 83 or 84 simulator app for a smartphone, or heck -- to even buy a cheap Android phone AND the app!
I've used several wallets but they've been on computers. I have an iPhone and traditionally, Apple placed a lot of limitations on crypto-related apps they'd allow on the App Store, so I never really bothered to try to use one on there.
I honestly believe the single biggest impediment to the public accepting crypto as an alternative currency were all the hacks and corrupt coin exchanges that took people's funds and vanished.
Crypto-coins had the promise of being extremely secure and anonymous, but we quickly saw that unravel as folks learned how to trace transactions back through blockchains and as all of the web site compromises and coin-stealing malware arrived.
It's still too complicated for the average person to take a payment or spend crypto-currency. The unique wallet ID, alone, is a big, long, messy string of characters that nobody can remember. So they have to pretty much launch their wallet app and copy/paste the thing any time they want to instruct someone else to pay them. So that's another big problem. But really, a lot of this stuff can be coded into a more user-friendly UI, if someone is motivated to do it. (I think that's one of the promises of the new project out there to let independent musicians get paid directly for use of their music, without needing a middle man.)
But we're far from seeing the whole thing get stable enough so folks have a good handle on just what a given crypto-coin is worth. Everyone I know hanging onto any of them does so with a hope of reselling them at a profit at some later point in time. They're not keeping them like folks collect spare change in jars at home.
I think I'd like a feature like this if it at least FORCES the signals to come on as someone is starting to turn, in case they were otherwise going to skip using them at all.
As others said, half of the purpose of a turn signal is to indicate you'd like to turn ... hoping other drivers will cut you some slack and open up a space for you to begin doing it. Automatic signals will be totally useless for this.
So you wouldn't want to get rid of the signal lever here, IMO. But you might want the automatic functionality to kick in when you fail to use it manually.
Microsoft should have done this all along. Since it's subscription based, it really no longer benefits them to try to limit how many machines a person has the software installed on. It benefits them more if it exists "anywhere and everywhere possible", so the user will be more likely to maintain a paid subscription because it's "so useful".
Imagine if some service like Netflix did this, saying you couldn't keep the Netflix software on more than X number of devices at a time without paying for a second subscription? How would that make any sense?
Agreed! Since they went the route of making GTAV with the "online" mode, you could at least stream different music selections when playing it that way, as opposed to the "canned" tracks in the game for offline play.
Personally, I find GTAV both amazing and disappointing at the same time. There's clearly so much effort that went into creating an immersive, nicely rendered landscape to run around in. Plus the vehicles are pretty cool, and are one of the things they're constantly upgrading in the online mode. Unfortunately, the online gameplay is just cheezy. All of the new "missions" and features they keep adding feel like hastily slapped together side games that have little to do with the main storyline. I mean .... those uber-unrealistic stunt track levels or people vs. zombies missions where you switch sides when it changes between day and night? They become boring drudgery after the first 1-2 times you play them. Only motivation to deal with the stuff is the fact you can earn a lot of in-game cash for winning rounds in them.
As a massively multiplayer online world online, I would have rather they focused on making the game mechanics a lot better, and just let people run around and create gangs or clans that can fight or help each other. I can't stand the boneheaded flight controls in the game, and even the aiming of a gun has always been sloppy and awkward in the GTA series.
Are you telling me that struggles with climate change, scarcity of natural resources and so on will just vanish into thin air by embracing Socialism or perhaps a Fascist dictatorship, or Communist rule? These issues somehow ONLY cause problems for people living in Capitalist systems?
I've got some news for the Capitalist haters out there .... The majority of innovations in technology that will help the whole planet transition to cleaner forms of energy, and possibly even mitigate some of the climate change issues are being developed in Capitalist America.
If the American Capitalist system fails, it won't be for any of these reasons. It'll simply be due to our leaders constantly increasing the levels of our national debt, in efforts to extend and expand the role of central government into all sorts of areas it was never originally intended to get that involved with. The nation only generates so much wealth each year, and it's a recipe for disaster to keep spending more than what's sustainable.
That's a pretty ignorant statement, when you look at how many Macs were sold in the last decade or so, and are in active use.
Sure, I have no doubt Apple and Valve/Steam have butted heads over how to handle online sales. Apple has an online store, after all. But open source that you can compile and run inside OS X is somewhat immune to Apple's whims. Yeah, they might have a graphics API that's unique -- but that can be worked around (MoltenVK). The OS is Unix based, though, and should really require less software gymnastics to get something running in it than Windows requires.
They DO have a native Steam client for OS X that's actively supported, AND quite a few native OS X apps offered via Steam.
My experience with Linux is, the majority of its user-base is running it on older hardware that's deemed inadequate for a good Windows 10 experience. So those people aren't going to be doing much 3D gaming anyway. I don't believe the remaining percentage running Linux on modern systems with good graphics cards are really that much more of an audience than the total number of Mac users with machines that can run games?
One article I read said there was a good likelihood the bridge was constructed using less concrete than specified, because the mafia was heavily involved in bidding for these projects at the time. One of their favorite ways to win low bids for construction was skimping on the concrete used.
I take issue with this argument. I've had it before with people.... First off, "wage slavery" is a nonsense term. Slaves weren't paid wages at all and never entered into an employment contract with anyone. It trivializes the plight of real slaves, forced to do labor while owned as property by someone else.
Capitalism is a whole economic system that benefits all of its participants. The middle class or working class may not "own the means of production", but that doesn't mean they're not part of the Capitalist system. Owning the means of production does you NO good if nobody wants to buy what you're producing. The 0.001% can't just buy and sell exclusively to each other.
The system we have is about making voluntary choices and promises, for the most part. Government has mandatory taxation it throws into the mix, so that part is forced. But when I decided to buy a house, I was well aware that I was committing to 30 years of loan payments and a need to work for those 30 years to make sure I had the funds to keep making those payments. That's not wage slavery! That's a VOLUNTARY choice on my part. There's not even any guarantee I *have* to labor for 30 years to pay the house off. Many other things could happen, including my property value increasing enough so I can make money reselling it, to pay it off with a profit. Much less likely -- I could win a lottery of some kind and be able to pay it off that way. Or perhaps I'd come into an inheritance that helps pay it off? Maybe I decide to leverage it as a money generation tool, renting to people via AirBnB at some point?
I don't understand this flawed argument of yours that claims we're all just slaves to the system. It sounds like you want the ability to just be handed possessions and not have to pay for them?
Almost everything listed that people are becoming satisfied renting from services, as opposed to buying on physical media? They're all intellectual properties that the sellers/creators insist you don't really OWN after buying them. When you buy a music CD, you're not allowed to duplicate it and share copies of the content with others. When you buy a movie on DVD, it's illegal to decrypt the copy protection on it, even for the purpose of transferring the movie content to a different form of media so you can watch it on various electronics you own that can't play from the physical DVD disc.
When you shell out the $50-60 for a new video game for your console, it's subject to whatever usage terms and restrictions they want to place on it. Might have to buy a second one if you want to play the game online from two different consoles in the house, so your kids can play it against each other. Who knows?
I think that's a BIG driver of the change to a rental, on-demand model.
First off, no ... my last sentence didn't "betray me" as somehow being for socialized medicine.
I'm saying that I'm for a free market... not the current one that pretends to be free, except for the legal limitations government places on things to benefit big pharma unfairly! (EG. If a company over in Germany or up in Canada starts producing a perfectly good version of one of the drugs under U.S. patent by a pharmaceutical firm based in America, it's illegal to mail order it into the country and issue it to patients, even if it's 1/3rd. of the cost and works as well as or better than the one under the legal patent protection here.) If you want to sell drugs in a Capitalist framework, I think that should mean it's a level playing field for all participants, including foreign manufacturers who want to export drugs to America.
Big pharma constantly bellyaches about the huge expenses involved in R&D of a new drug and claims it requires government protection to get exclusive rights to sell it for so many years before generic alternatives are allowed. Yet we can see by the huge profits they consistently make that they're not in any special need of these protections at all! "No risk, no reward" is how the free market is supposed to work. If you dump millions into R&Ding a new medication and then find you can't recoup your investment before everyone else clones your drug and undercuts your price on it? Too bad! Welcome to the reality of pretty much every other business in America! There's usually a lot of short-term profit potential for having a product out first, even without any government protection.... You exploit that "first past the post" momentum with the right marketing push, and you've got brand recognition everyone else has to really fight to compete with. You *should* be able to turn a profit if your product is any good.
The thing I find so disheartening is how many younger Americans reject Capitalism, in favor of a form of Socialism -- without realizing that this isn't as simple as an A or B pair of options. If you want Socialism, fine .... There are many places in the world actively practicing it, and you're welcome to move there. America was created as a unique experiment in the world, creating a Democratic Republic. IMO, it's proven itself not only viable but arguably superior to many other forms of rule by central governments. I wholeheartedly believe that as a U.S. citizen, I should do everything in my power to preserve this framework.
Obviously, we have a lot of flaws, corruption and other negatives. But show me ANY government that's perfect, except on paper.
IMO, what we need to be focusing on in America is how to move forward, to PRESERVE the Democratic Republic that our Founders created and made into a reality. Corporatism is really what most people are complaining about when they say they're anti-Capitalist. Corporatism is simply a situation where big business managed to collude with government to avoid being governed fairly by it. This can be addressed and mitigated without resorting to Socialism!
America has already done too much dabbing in Socialist practices to appease various groups. Even when it creates a "workable" solution to a specific problem? It weakens our whole system of government, because it means we took an "easy way out" or shortcut, copy-catting what other countries did, rather than finding an answer that doesn't go against the principles that built what we've got here.
Perhaps the place this "battle" is most evident, today, is the healthcare debate. Single-payer or Socialized medicine is something I just can't accept, even though I accept that it's ONE solution that basically works for other countries. If we stick to our core values and principles that defined America, I think we have to conclude it's unfair to demand medical professionals all get paid a fixed salary, as dictated by Federal government. I think we have to conclude that no, healthcare is NOT a right in America. You have every right to pursue better health for yourself, obviously. But as soon as you need medical care, you're demanding the services of another person or group of people who invested many years into education and training to be good enough to perform those services. They aren't your slaves, nor do you have a right to force other American citizens to pay their fees to treat you. We DO need to stop the collusion/ Corporatism that allows big pharma to get protectionist treatment by government for exclusive rights to sell medications, and to prevent competitors in other countries from importing their offerings here as legal alternatives.
Honestly, a lot of the new features added to iPhones, even several versions back, were relatively small UNLESS they affected you directly. For example, they added phones with the ability to use the additional frequency licensed to T-Mobile. That was a big deal for those of us on T-Mobile ... important enough to justify reselling an existing phone and upgrading, even if nothing else had changed. (I mean, you're paying out all that money each month for the service, so any handset that lets you use more of the service's own capabilities is kind of important.) But anyone NOT on T-Mobile didn't care a bit.
At the end of the day? I carry my cellphone so people from my work can reach me, and for the conveniences it offers me like locating things using GPS mapping applications, or browsing the latest news while standing in line somewhere. It also doubles as my camera, whenever I didn't bring my big SLR along, and for talking to or texting my friends. Yearly updates really aren't necessary to keep doing any of those things with the device. Yearly updates were a sign of a marketplace that hadn't matured yet, so kept throwing more cool ideas out there left and right, as they realized things they forgot to add in previous phone releases.
I'm glad to see it all slowing down.
I was part of the generation of kids who latched on to the early 8 bit personal computers and learned to program in BASIC because, well ... that's what the manuals told you how to use them. As things got more advanced, I started a hobby of running my own computer BBS, and initially used software I wrote myself in BASIC. (By then, I was already hitting limitations of what the language would let me do, because BASIC had no way to collect input or produce output to and from my modem. I had to use a lower level assembly code driver program to handle the I/O. A friend of mine, who knew some assembly programming, helped code that and maintain it for me with updates for a while.)
By the time I'd done that for a few years, the Borland "Turbo" products for coding in PASCAL or C were becoming really popular, and friends of mine were modifying existing code-bases for PC compatible BBS packages using those languages. I was too invested in what I'd put together in BASIC to care about that, at the time.
When I finally went all-in on a PC clone (vs. my Tandy Color Computer 3) - I was sidetracked by other things in life, including learning to play guitar and playing for a while in a small, local band that some friends had put together, and taking college classes. When I re-visited software development for Windows, people were WAY ahead of me, using the visual development languages and object-oriented programming, which was a foreign thing to me.
I went on to a career in I.T., which I do to this day, but beyond your basic batch scripting, I really don't ever attempt to code anything. Truth is? There's SO much out there already, I struggle to imagine scenarios where I'd ever want to write something that hasn't already been done! It's a full-time job mastering several of the existing Enterprise-class products on the market that a given employer might expect me to be proficient in.
I think I understand what Jonathan Edwards is saying, because it's exactly what I experienced that drove me away from programming. But I'm not sure it's a "problem" anymore? The days of things like HyperCard are past us because the types of applications one would typically create with them are already readily available, and in the form of code that runs natively on the system without "helper" software interpreting it first. Even in my early days of using BASIC, I hit hard limitations on what it could do that forced me to use outside assistance (that assembly code device driver for modem I/O).
The expectations for the level of what applications, games or utilities do is high enough, today, that I think you need specialists, well versed in complex programming languages, to pull them off. There are times I really do missing coding in BASIC. To this day, I remember the commands and most of the syntax. But even with the "last gasp" of attempts to modernize traditional BASIC with those BASIC compilers they had for MS-DOS for a while? The language just couldn't DO enough to keep up with people's expectations.
I work at a company where we deploy Surface Pros as our standard issue Windows portable for employees -- so I'm quite familiar with them. I looked at the new Surface Go the first day they announced it, but I thought it was a little too small and under-powered. The low starting price only gives you a 128GB SSD for storage, too. That's just a non-starter to me for a Windows machine.
And really? The keyboard covers are a pretty big compromise with any Surface... I hate typing on them except for real casual use. In the office, everyone leaves them attached to a dock and uses full-sized keyboards, mice and dual displays with them. In that situation, they work quite well. You forget you're not using a regular desktop PC workstation. But this "Go" would be slow and limited enough so I doubt it'd even pull that off as well as a Surface Pro does.
Personally, I stopped using my Surface Pro 4 I was originally issued and switched to a Surface laptop instead. It's the same as a Surface Pro except with a normal laptop lid and keyboard. (You can still use the pencil on the touchscreen if you wish, with it.)
The people who are screaming about Tesla not opening up the repair info to the masses should also realize that almost none of their vehicles sold, to date, are old enough to be completely out of warranty. The Model S wasn't a thing you could buy until 2012, and they all got an 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty on their powertrains.
When you couple that with the fact that Teslas were never mass produced in the quantities the big-name auto makers produce? You start to realize that the number of Teslas out there in scrap yards from getting totaled in accidents or written off from flood damage are FAR too few to support the business of local garages or other repair shops who might want to specialize in working on them.
As a used Model S owner myself, I've done a lot of reading and research on the cars, because I wanted to know what I might be up against in coming years. The biggest issue facing Tesla owners today is an overall shortage of parts. Even if you have an authorized Tesla body shop repairing your car from a fender-bender, it's quite common they can't obtain a body panel or other trim part you need for 2-3 months. That's one of the challenges the company is still trying to overcome. (Again, they're nowhere near the size of GM or Ford or Toyota ... and they didn't really have the money to stock large quantities of spare parts in warehouses. I'm sure they started out just making spare parts to order, as they had the need. And now they have enough cars on the roads so that's not workable, but their factories were doing all they could just to meet demand for the new Model 3 vehicle orders.)
Personally? I think there's a great money-making opportunity for independent shops who can stock specific parts that are known to fail somewhat regularly, and can do those specific repairs. Great example? Model S auto-retracting/presenting door handles. These are pretty complex components and had a couple of design flaws. (Tesla used a cast metal gear part that tends to develop a stress fracture over time and break into pieces. They also used regular copper wire where flexible silicone wire should have been substituted, so over hundreds of door handle cycles, the wire flexing back and forth snaps it.) Both of these issues have been addressed, at least to a large extent, with a newer handle revision. But my understanding is, Tesla didn't do that until 2017 and there's kind of a run on these -- since service centers will only replace an older revision broken handle with the latest revision. Clearly, this is a place where independent shops could re-work a broken, old revision handle and make it "better than new", for cheaper than Tesla's repair cost. (Tesla wants around $700+ per door handle for an out of warranty repair.)
Another example is the small 12 volt battery in a Model S. This is known to fail on a lot of people, and will leave you stranded if it does. (Luckily, you *usually* get some kind of warning on the dash that it's having issues for at least a little while before it conks out.) This one, again, was usually just a free warranty swap so far. But as these cars age out of factory coverage, it'll become a problem. There's a company on the net called BattMobile who sells an improved replacement battery with the necessary, proprietary battery connector points already on it. But it would be great if more shops knew how to swap one of these and could do it for people inexpensively. On a dual motor Model S, it's not THAT tough as job, but it's kind of a bear to get to it on the regular, single motor vehicles.
I know I took a while to respond here, but in case you're still following replies to your posts?
I agree completely with this other guy who replied to you on this. Buying old, cheap used cars is a fool's errand UNLESS you enjoy working on them yourself AND have the flexibility and free time to do it.
I spent a LONG time learning that lesson. (Screw those lying bastard mechanics that preach about it always being wiser and cheaper to keep your old vehicle running. That's the line they give you to ensure their pocketbooks stay well lined.)
I have friends who were employed as engineers in the auto industry, and they'll even tell you they're constantly paid to only engineer vehicle parts to last a certain target number of miles and years of use. If they make it more durable than that, it's considered "over-engineering" it and a cost liability that has to be adjusted by using cheaper/less reliable alternatives. For example, if a plastic gear will do for something like a power window assembly, you can bet they'll choose that over the steel gear that would clearly outlast it. It's lighter weight AND a bit cheaper. Both of those attributes are multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of vehicles they plan on building that way.
So many of the older cars you see on the roads, making up those statistics about "cars lasting longer these days" have back-stories about all the maintenance costs sunk into them to keep them going. Often, people have a certain sentimental attachment to an older car so they spend more than it's worth to keep it. Other times, they just believe that gamble that, "If I just do this ONE more big repair, it should be good for a while." But the fact is, every part in there is wearing out at the same time. Your 12 year old car that gets a brand new engine still has a 12 year old transmission, heating and cooling system, suspension parts and dashboard gauges and controls, plus sensors of all types. Even the frame/body is only designed to resist rust for so many years. It's likely getting "cancer" from the inside, out, in places like the lower door sills.
And depreciation costs? Meh... I always try to buy certified pre-owned so the first owner took that big initial depreciation hit, while I'm still getting a vehicle that's more or less in new condition. I've really never been upside-down on a car loan when I purchased one this way ... but obviously, you have to also look out for ripoff dealerships who overcharge for one.
When I bought my Jeep Wrangler, in fact? I bought brand new and STILL came out with almost 0 depreciation after a few years, because Chrysler kept upping the price for the same vehicle year after year.
Same liberal/socialists who *always* think they can improve situations by limiting people's freedom to do what they want to do.
So the streets are congested? Ok ... What else did you expect when you have a city that heavily populated in that relatively small amount of space? It's part of the package deal if you want to live in a place like that.
There's a good chance that every Uber or Lyft driver out there helps DECREASE congestion, vs. all of those people they take around opting to drive themselves. (A lot of people in large cities decide not to own an automobile at all, as long as they have enough transit options to make that doable.) If an Uber or Lyft or regular cab is too difficult to hail down ASAP, where you need it? It tends to motivate people to buy their own vehicles. Same thing if scarcity runs the prices up enough so you may as well just buy and drive your own.
Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)
What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.
I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!
Right now, our total household income (both wife and I work full time in I.T.) is nowhere near $250,000/yr. -- but we certainly qualify as "upper middle class".
My current mortgage payment is around $1,600/month and that's for a 2,200 square foot, 3 bedroom house with a 2 car detached garage, in Maryland.
If I looked at the extra income we'd have if we had $250,000 between us each year? I'd still be really hard pressed to sign on the line for any mortgage resembling $6,000+ per month! We pretty much live paycheck to paycheck on the current income, by the time you consider the costs of raising 3 kids and the (I think reasonable) decision for both of us to buy nice, newer model vehicles to drive around.
The tendency for lenders to loan money and make recommendations on "what you can afford" based simply on percentages of your total income is what got a whole lot of people in over their heads with home buying before the last economic crash.
There's so much else to consider, including the rising cost of KEEPING whatever home you buy as its cost increases. If you have more land, you have more yard maintenance to deal with. Did you budget the cost of all that landscaping in? (I have a bunch of trees and shrubs that grow over the property line on both sides of my house, requiring constant pruning back. If you slack off on that, they clog the gutters and lead to water problems in the basement -- multiplying your cost of dealing with it all. Last time I got a quote to trim back just one side of that mess? The guy wanted over $2,000 for his landscapers to cut it all back to the fence line and haul it all away.) If you have more square footage, you owe more every year in property tax AND more in utility bills to keep that much air space heated or cooled.
Even our basic bills for sewer and water have gone up exponentially. Clean water used to be something most people just received as almost a "throw away" bill. You know .... every few months you'd have to send the water company $30-40 to keep it paid up. Not anymore! The cost to treat the river water where I live is really high, and they have to pass it on to customers. Quarterly bills of hundreds of dollars are the norm.