Anecdotal but I know 4 Boomers who retired during covid. I also know a lot of younger folks who opted in to the gig economy instead of working at a store/restaurant, including 3 of my nieces and a nephew.
DoorDash went from 850ish million to 2.6Billion dollars in 2020 with over a million dashers and they account for about 45% of food delivery in the US.
I hopped into a Jeep Cherokee that I thought was mine and drove it down the road for a minute before realizing I was not in my vehicle. Keys are funny like that.
You'd think keyfob security would be worked out by now (just look at the prevalence of skeleton key software defined radios amongst the grayhat crowd). There's probably a limitation in security complexity due to limited power availability in the keyfob.
Ah, cool. Sounds like there's no excuse. My mistake.
I mistakenly assumed you'd need some kind of cryptographic key signing handshake via active electronics from within the keyfob to achieve secure comms with the host vehicle, and that such a requirement may have been some kind of implementation limiting factor, security-wise.
I'm 99% anxiety free after I learned to manage my allergies and diet!
I make light of the situation now but at one point in my life I was confused and freaked out because of the symptoms you mentioned and everyone including the doctors thought it was stress. After thousands of dollars in medical all I really needed was Benedryl, a better diet and a new primary care physician.
I'm not saying that it's the case for most land, I'm just saying that the land that people live and work it's not uncommon. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.
I grew up with my sisters in poverty. I didn't eat at a restaurant until I was 14 and paid for it myself. I started baking crackers, biscuits and pancakes that my younger sisters and I would eat for dinner with government peanut butter or cheese when I was 11. Having no utilities was a regular occurrence. Christmas was socks, underwear and a winter coat. Shoes were a touchy subject and I would have to have pretty big holes before they would get replaced. School hot lunch and food drives were awkward.
I decided what I wanted out of life in my mid-twenties and pursued it and now in my 40's I am doing better than I could have ever imagined. Everyone I know who was poor and wanted to better themselves was able to get out of poverty. All 4 of my sisters are middle class or better. Thats 5/5 that succeeded. All my friends across the states I had lived are homeowners and seem happy. All the people I met who bitched and didn't do anything to better themselves are still poor or dead.
I didn't get lucky and neither did my sisters and friends. We each made personal decisions and planned our way out of poverty. It didn't happen over night. A lot of set backs happen and everything is hard. Transportation and unforeseen expenses are the largest hurdles and access to credit is also difficult because of the length of time it takes to repair.
SF does have a huge homeless population. Yes it go's to homeless shelters and other charities/programs. We sometimes forget that not all homeless are chronic homeless which is what most people associate as homeless.
Someone may be having hard times making rent and go to a church or other organization for financial help and other services. Battered women, at risk children also exist and may require a shelter with more security or women only shelters - which are funded too. There are many other services that exist that use that funding.
I didn't see waste. Actually, I would go so far as say most charities that receive federal and state funding rely on reporting to receive those grants and funding and things are very transparent. HMIS is the tech side of things that build the systems to track and report on everything.
I do it maybe a dozen times a year. Most of the younger bay area people I know go at minimum once or twice every winter. It is definitely one of the perks of living here along with all the other cool nature.
Because flying to CO or somewhere like that for skiing is even more of a pain the arse than driving to Tahoe.
Tahoe is a nightmare of traffic, terrible winter-weather drivers and crowds. 20 years ago it used to be a decent getaway for the weekend. Now, not so much -- it's basically a guarantee that you're going to spend a full day driving to/from there, and gods help you if you leave friday afternoon and try to drive back on sunday -- everyone, their dog and grandma included, are going to be doing the same exact thing.
Once or twice a year is not implying accessible -- it's implying that it's inaccessible. It's somewhere that people do want to go, but the effort required to do so limits most. If it wasn't worth going, people wouldn't be trying to go every winter, and if it was reasonably easy to get to, perhaps people would go more than once or twice a winter.
That's the wonder of tiny percentages of huge numbers -- they're still big numbers!
If only .01% of 35,000,000 people go to Tahoe every week, that's still 3500 people a week that are visiting. Thats a lot of cars on the road, a lot of people waiting in lines, a lot of hotel rooms and vacation rentals taken up. I made up these numbers of course, but the point is with a state like California, even a tiny fraction of the population visiting at any given time, it's still an overwhelming number of people to deal with. And its not even just Californians that go to Tahoe -- plenty of folks from other states visit, and plenty of international visitors too.
So back to
> Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded
Yep, practically speaking, a tiny fraction of people that can go to Tahoe at any time actually go -- a rounding error -- 'nobody'. But it's still too damned crowded because Tahoe can't handle the rounding error anymore.
People that live in a place like Salt Lake City can hit the slopes a dozen times in 2 weeks without taking a day off of work. I know people that work at tech companies in Park City, about 3 miles from The Canyons resort. They can literally go skiing during their lunch break.
You are still surrounded by people with the same ideologies, it's just harder to hear us because of the noise. The people who are pro-censorship and regulation have never been a friend to the internet or its philosophies.
Since when did "high quality" become impossible? lol. Thats news to me. The fact you think Sears was "high quality" is telling. Maybe you have never bought or been exposed to "quality" in the first place?
I totally disagree with your assessment. 20 years ago it was harder to find quality products than it is today. I am a person that buys "quality", I support local & US companies whenever I can. There are so many excellent boutique companies for just about everything outside of shitty mass produced electronics. I just do not see your world at all, but then again, I don't mistake garbage retailers and company branding for quality.
I think you'd find it helpful to compare the quality of Sears Craftsman tools from 75, 50, 25 years ago and today. Unless you're either old enough to know first hand, happened to inherit older Craftsman tools, or have ties to people who are deeply interested in hand tools, you wouldn't know that at least that part of the Sears brand wasn't always associated with cheap garbage.
In general I find the degree of belligerent defensiveness in your post inexplicable given the topic at hand.
There was more labor sunk into the tooling to make those old tools, fancy forging dies and whatnot to forge fancy tools that are thin, light, etc.
Modern metallurgy is soooo much more consistent for equivalent or better outputs though. Thanks to modern electronic process control the dumbest dolts on 3rd shift in some factory in China can hit the spec they were told to hit and they can hit it for pennies.
Plastics, electronics, mechanical assemblies, hydraulics, everything, same story. Modern automation and process control has made the "high quality" of decades past something attainable on a budget.
So your Harbor Freight junk will generally hold its own against grandpa's Craftsman and Snap-On but it won't look good or feel good doing it and you white box wheel bearing will roll your tractor along just as well as the one it replaces.
I'm old enough and Sears was never good and there are a lot more specialized and cheaper tools now from harbor freight. I doubt you had good tools either if you considered them high quality, they were good for the warranties, not for their quality. You'd return the screwdrivers after using it to mix cement.
I'm curious what Sears tools you considered high quality.
DoorDash went from 850ish million to 2.6Billion dollars in 2020 with over a million dashers and they account for about 45% of food delivery in the US.