Not really, my parents voted for him twice, and will vote for him again, but they are very careful around me to act like they would not.

We need to implement ranked choice voting for all of elections. A third party candidate should not be something scary we hide from.

Intelligence is a collection of multiple things. Curiosity is a contributor, but far from an integral part.

Someone can be a brilliant mathematician, capable of computing complex equations that would stump most computers (metaphorically at least), but they may utterly lack creativity and curiosity. In any definition of intelligence we would consider them highly intelligent.

On the flip side someone may be completely filled with curiosity about the world, but lack the intelligence to read or write.

Technically that is a learned skill, this is why intelligence is really a fairly useless measure. What is intelligence? Memorizing lots of facts? Having loads of education? A built in understanding of the world that others lack (common sense)?

I think what really matters is that you find the thing in life where you fit, rather than worrying about how we measure up. I have known very intelligent people who were worthless human beings, and simple minded people who made the world more special every day. We focus too much on being smart, it is one of the least important attributes.

Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).

https://theminimalistvegan.com/types-of-vegans-and-vegetarians/

A quick google search puts the middle class between $50k-$150k a year for a 4 family income. We’re closer to the top end of that but don’t have a lot of disposable income.

• we live in a relatively small 3 bedroom house with a very tiny yard.
• we buy used cars and keep them for ever. We just replaced our main car that we had for 20 years, with a 2017 model.
• we typically go camping twice a year for vacation.
• we give 15k away to charity every year
• all our stuff is old, the one tv is 15 years old, we have a Nintendo switch for gaming, and our phones are 6 years old. We don’t remodel the house or buy new furniture.

Our two luxuries are not thinking about money every day, and eating out more than we should. We both work so cooking is tiring.

With all of that our savings is nothing to get exited about. Especially now that we have two kids in college. It is less than 10k.

We could pay $10k a year to college without making a radical change, but it would be a real struggle.

I’m not sure you know what middle class looks like, I think your assuming were rich. Obama has an interesting show on Netflix that looks at a few businesses and profiles the lower, middle, and upper class employees. It is an interesting watch and does a good job of showing just how much or little the middle class has.

Finally I feel that low cost or free child care would be one of the best things the government could do. My wife wanted to stay home with the kids, so we struggled financially but did not need to worry about child care (we both made the same amount at the time, it cut our income in half). But we had plenty of friends struggling to pay the daycare. Being able to go back to school or work when you have kids would be a big plus to the economy, as well as a great way to help lower and middle class people get a small leg up. A great investment in my mind.

In our state schools spend around $10k a year to keep a kid in public school. My guess is that kinder and daycare cost about the same. They only add a few extra years of schooling, so we’re talking a 20% increase in the school budget to let everyone have daycare after the first year.

I did not read the story, but I am upper middle class with two kids in college. I don’t know that discriminates is the right word, but college is a huge burden on middle class families. If your income is low enough then you qualify for federal aid, and the vast majority of scholarships are class/race/gender based so it is difficult to get much support for middle class students.

My kids did qualify for a small merit based scholarship that the collage provided. But in spite of having very good grades, and very high SAT scores, neither got any other assistance.

The reason I don’t call it discrimination is two fold.

1. the assistance is there to try and help make it possible for lower income students to go to college. This is not a bad thing for our society and we should not be turning on each other crying unfair.

2. the real problem is that college is unaffordable. If it cost $10k to get a 4 year degree then middle class parents would have little trouble paying for it. When it is closer to $50k-$100k, then that is out of reach and no one can really bear the cost.

We need to focus on making colleges more affordable (probably by making them simpler, with less “perks”), and not focus on who gets the smaller slice of the pie.

I was a young programmer during the dot com boom. Old school companies like sears and newspapers were scared of the internet. They would occasionally try something small and half hearted on the web but never really tried to figure it out.

Sears is a great example. 20 years before the web they had a functioning mail order service with stores and warehouse all over the US. They were very close to what a modern Amazon is, without the web presence or rapid delivery. If they were brave they could have been Amazon, selling online and delivering to there extensive store network.

Newspapers had a very busy classified section. That could have been moved online easily enough. But they wanted to charge for there classifieds, while eBay or Crageslist let you post for free, making money off of add revenue or a broker fee.

They also were very popular with local advertisers, and could have transitioned there newspapers online for free with the same local advertisers. Instead they tried to charge or resisted being online at all, leaving room for other services like yahoo (later Facebook and Google news) to fill in the news business.

Finally if they had been smart they could have made a news sharing service among the papers (nexus, etc) that could have forced Google news to pay a small fee every time they shared a story, providing a steady revenue service.

I see a time in the future where traditional papers fully die, and something new rises from the ashes. My guess is it will be a return to local news, but with a very small staff running the whole show online.

My grandparents grew up on the depression. They had a very simple life. They had a tv on wheels that lived in the closet and only came out once a month or so to watch a football game. They had a radio they turned on to listen to classical music while working. And they had a newspaper and magazine subscription.

They woke up early, tended to there chores and to the garden. Then they would eat a leasurly breakfast with lots of little plates and saucers (egg cups, juice, coffee and water glasses, etc), basically it was an activity that took an hour. Then more chores.

My grandma always had a project going, making cookies for a neighbor, helping someone find a job. My grandpa would spend most of the day in his workshop repairing lawnmowers or building fun inventions (solar ovens, bird houses, etc).

Lunch and dinner were also big presentations that took an hour. It was not always a lot of food, but they took a lot of time with it. After diner they would sit in two chairs side by side reading books or more often than not just sitting quietly. Neither talked much, they were just content to be.

They ran some errands occasionally, but there only big event for the week was going to church. I don’t remember them ever going out to dinner or even to a friends house, though they did have friends who stopped by.

Mostly they were content to do very little. They were never bored, or at least they were content to be bored. I think the one big negative all technology has brought us is that we’re restless if we can’t find something to do. We don’t enjoy just sitting and listening to life.

Yes and no. Newspapers could be read the next day, after the original purchaser was done with it. And it was easy for a restaurant or business to share newspapers among many clients. Plus of course radio still provided free news that was quality.

The big problem now is that the best news sources are the most locked down. And the worst news sources are the most open. So it is difficult for a quality piece to make the rounds. Even if a link to an article could be shared for free, even if the website was locked down, things would be a lot better.

Finally newspapers charged for the cost of printing but made money off of advertising and classifieds. There is very little cost (per view) to digital publishing. If newspapers had embraced the Web 20 years ago they could have been Facebook or eBay, rather than having all there core revenue fall away.