Tesla made a lot of their money selling carbon credits so it is likely some of their cars didn't break even.

Not just trucks. Almost all cars sell a lifestyle.

I find most people with critical looks at trucks have not looked at their own habits the most. Some have but I bet there are a lot of meat eaters here talking about how wasteful trucks are.

What you call slop others may enjoy. Calling stuff AI slop doesn't mean it isn't someone's art.

It has not been forever true that households have had two incomes. Now it is common.

Well, only because one of the household did a huge amount of unpaid labor. A lot of which now has been replaced with paid labor (child care, restaurants, house cleaners, and so on).

I meant it's been true forever that people with partners generally have a financial advantage over single people. (Even if they're not in a two-income household.)

What has changed is that dual income became the norm, and is no longer an advantage, but mandatory to compete on the housing market.

When single income was the norm, the norm was to put a family of 6 in an 800-1200 sq ft residence. That's still roughly equivalently affordable today.

The book the two income trap describes this. It talks about better schools etc but if you are competing with people that have two incomes as an individual you better have two incomes worth of salary.

The issues starts to arise that people with two income households are more likely to lose one of those jobs and that puts a lot of pressure on the finances if you need both jobs for your house payment.

The price of rent is set by local household wages.

If both partners typically work: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.

If AI makes everyone 20% more productive: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.

If minimum wages lift the bottom earners from $7.50/hr to $18.50/hr: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.

If you add more lanes to the interstate, people move further out, and the rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.

The only countervailing forces are:

* landlords not wanting as much money (unlikely, although it happens at small scales)

* rent control-type policies

* competition

And as far as I know competition is the only thing that works at scale. Although, people tend to emphasize intralocal competition as where this gets fixed. But I tend to think that the even larger issue is that so many places suck to live in (due to schools, jobs, culture, lack of prosocial governance...) that everyone with options congregates in the good ones.

There's an effect every larger than all of those, though, which is wealth disparity. If incomes differ by fewer orders of magnitude then prices can't vary as much across markets. At the end of the day when rich people can and do buy 2-5 homes and everyone else can barely buy one of course you're going to have problems.

We had two types of competition in the past that are much less common now:

- competition from new builds

- competition from different locations

The first was killed by restrictive zoning. The second still exists but is no longer useful. You can move to West Virginia for cheap rent, but you'll have to move to a location without jobs.

The combination of far less people moving across states and of jobs concentrating in expensive places to live is what killed that second type of competition.

I’d be interested in a study of moves; it feels to me like everyone used to move much further and more often for work, now it seems things are quieter. But that could all just be feels.

You don't need a study, it's part of the census data and widely available. It's down about half since mid century.

> Health insurance is heavily regulated to ensure that there are profit caps (think 80/20 rule) this means that the company is legally compelled to actually spend a certain amount on customers of said product.

This notoriously does not work at all.

Look up pay-vider structure and the type of manipulation of medical loss ratio it enables.

How does this help young people who want to move to a new city, but can't because all apartments are already rented because rents are far below market rate? This is reality in cities like Berlin and Stockholm.

You need more housing. Rents in Austin have collapsed because the city made it legal to build a lot more housing.

You should look at Vienna public housing then, rents there are typically less than 20% of the median monthly salary. Socialized housing works for the people that want to live and make a community with the limited time on this Earth they have.

It doesn't work for landlords that just want to extract wealth from others.

Relying on private developers that only want to build luxury housing is kinda how we're in this current mess. Expecting them to solve the problem we know, build more housing, is just silly. They didn't do it when money was the cheapest it ever was the last 15 years, they aren't going to start building it now.

This is why the government needs to step in and build more/better public housing.

It works for Vienna, this young chap even speaks about it at great length:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVuCZMLeWko

I sure hope he goes into politics, we need people with this type of imagination to better our society and give us hope for a better future which we can create now, not later.

Which led to insurers to purchase PBMs, hospitals, and doctor groups. The law of unintended consequences.

Landlords will get around this by raising other fees but not calling them rent, like pest control, garbage pickup, coffee room supplies, pets...landlords could do this all day long.

You need more than two incomes worth of salary in any country that does income tax bands. In the UK, two people earning 30k each will take home a combined 50k. A single person needs to earn almost 70k to take home the same. And for council tax you end up paying 75% of what an entire household would pay.

In the US, two moderate incomes see a similar federal tax bill to a single person, with things actually getting worse at higher incomes for the married couple. Is the UK tax code really that different?

Huh? In the US the married filing jointly tax brackets are exactly double the single tax brackets for every rate except the top 37% rate. A single person making 100k definitely pays a lot more in tax than than a married couple making 100k together. It's generally advantageous to be married filing jointly unless you're at the absolute top 37% rate, at the very bottom (where means tested benefits phase out), or both spouses make roughly equal incomes (in which case MFJ vs two single filers works out around the same).

Huh?

In your $100K scenario, that single person pays about $6K more in taxes, but has $36K more in take home pay per person, so that additional tax bill seems reasonable in light of their ability to pay it and pay for their cost of living.

You’re moving the goalposts. The point is the tax bill, not “ability to pay per person.” On 100k total, MFJ owes thousands less in federal income tax than a single filer at 100k because the standard deduction and brackets are basically doubled. That’s exactly why marriage is usually a bonus at moderate incomes. The “marriage penalty” shows up mainly when both spouses have high, similar incomes/phaseouts, not in the $100k total case.

It makes more sense to me (both from a personal, and the bank's perspective), that a single person on double income goes to zero salary when he loses his job, thus its riskier lending to him with his monthly payment being 25% of his income, than say 2 people at half salary, in which case one person's income share of loans jumps from 25% to 50%, a financially difficult situation, but temporarily manageable.

I agree in principle but I would venture a guess that number of two-income families that can deal financially with a loss of one source of income is very low.

the very first financial discussion I had with my wife (fiance at the time) was that we will always live off a single salary and 2nd salary will always go into future bucket (we tap in for larger purchases or fancy vacation here and there). I don’t think many families are setup this way though - in my limited personal experiences a loss of one source of income leads to sale of the house/condo and move (rent or downsize)

Another thing that is often not considered is that two salary households are sometimes similar salaries (both nurses or warehouse loaders, say) but often you have one high-paying job and another quite low - I could rattle off a whole list of teachers married to doctors, etc. Losing the lower salary will be noticeable but not hurt anywhere as much as losing the larger.

absolutely… after I read your comment I started thinking about every two-income family I know and none of them have similar salaries, always one (significantly) higher earner

In general the parties don't like the other party and insult each other. It is funny if you are trying to get someone to come over to your side insulting them isn't the best technique. If you are just trying to keep your base riled up insulting the other side seems to work.

That's a wide brush you're painting with. While I could be easily characterized as being on a particular side because of the values I hold, I abhor tribalism and hew to the truth of the values as I best understand them.

I've had extremely respectful dialog with others who don't embrace my values and I find their reasoning to be specious at best.

I have respect for old school conservatism that advocates for limited government but contemporary conservatives no longer seem to care about that (except if it's programs they don't like).

My initial comment still stands: the governmental action of the OP is intended purely to be oppressive and it will not be wielded with any sense of propriety.

If we are talking about the general political parties it is going to be a wide brush. To the original point there are some that hate the tribalism and some will join the protests just based on their own personal views. My opinion was that it is not wide spread though because of the insults that the political parties throw back and fourth making joining a joint protest unwelcoming. Friendships across the political lines is rare.

I don't buy the "both sides" argument anymore (except for corruption by party leadership). The fact that conservative stalwarts have left the GOP shows we're in new territory.

I abhor partisan politics and am more than happy to point out flaws on the Left but we've gone through the looking glass on the Right. It's literally a cult of personality and I take no pleasure in saying that.

While a two party system is not a good thing (George Washington warned us about political parties), having proper debate over policies and ideas is a good thing to have and we no longer have that. I've followed American politics for half a century and can unequivocally state that the situation we have here is not normal.

When I looked for a Plex alternative I settled on Emby. It still has some "premium" features but they're all just QOL, not necessary things. The base app is great and even has handy little features Plex doesn't, and so far, it runs on all the same devices with a much snappier UX on the client side.

Yes, my biggest current gripe is that infuse is a much better client than the first-party app. Otherwise, I'm very happy with it even if it lacks some polish of Plex.

I think that Infuse has better codec support than any other Apple TV (and possible also macOS) app.

Yeah thats exactly why Im on it. The frontend is fine, maybe a wash compared to Swiftfin last time I tried it out. But for my library, I had frequent issues with codec support on native client vs 0 times on Infuse.

Is the Plex app somehow able to play codecs on a AppleTV that Jellyfin's app can't?

Agendas are all how you frame them and a lot of time statements at a high-level can be misconstrued.

The left and right actually agree on a lot at a high-level but do not agree on how to tackle the problem.