yompers888

I should have been more diligent by including suburbs in my comment. Furthermore, you're very right that the water and sewage is even more important than roads, and that overbuilding happens in the suburbs. But you may also have an overly optimistic picture of rural areas, because I can think of quite a few four lane highways where I grew up that go out into relative nowhere, and do so at huge cost. There's a town of 20k people there that has a beltway!

I was saying that you help Them, not the reverse. And if they're completely unclear, but I think they've put some effort into making some statement that just isn't coming across, I just ask. Something like "could you clarify? I don't see what you mean by somethingsomething in light of othersomething." Granted, I don't win many online debates that way, but really all I'm trying to do is get the person to consider some other way of looking at the picture.

And that is why people move to cities (yes, I know that MS has cities). What point are you trying to make?

why OP highlights high tax Democratic States, no doubt that is what they are, but it is not applicable applied to Federal Income Taxes where everyone, regardless of State, is subject to the same progressive tax rates.

The poster above highlights not the tax rates, but ratio of receipts vs. expenditures of federal taxes in given states. Poorer states get well over one dollar in federal program spending for each dollar they contribute, while richer states have a net outflow, subsidizing the poorer states' programs.

I recommend erring on the side of helping people understand their misconceptions.

I think the effect of this is most insidious in infrastructure spending. And I'm not talking about major highways, which naturally go through rural and poorer areas while actually serving the urban areas they connect.

The urban areas tend to have people who insist upon higher taxes, while the people in the rural areas commonly want the reverse. Meanwhile, because of those taxes being redistributed in the way they are, money that could go toward mass transit in cities is instead being funneled to road projects in rural areas. With all that money, the rural areas are able to secure funding (but not in any way, shape, or form afford) oversized infrastructure so they can turn their places into post-apocalyptic wastelands of Walmarts and car sewers.

Rural towns may develop in horrendously bad ways, but at least if they were less well-fed by federal and state programs they might come to meet the reality that their development patterns are completely unsustainable.

As a mountain Virginian, let me add that even the coast is a completely different story from the great place where I live.

It's very common (a) for 7% to be an unrealistic return for pensions, given their allocations; and (b) for pensions funds to estimate even higher (8 or 9%) growth rates.

I can't speak to the majority of pensions funds, but there are State funds that assume 8.5% returns while having 50-60% of the fund in bonds. Those are the Minnesota numbers, and they tend to be pretty good for a State. They're ~75% funded, and that makes them 19th best in the country. If you face the reality that their assumptions are insane, then you have the wrestle with more realistic projections of how much they've really funded.

In most places around the country we need substantial decreases in infrastructure projects, scaling down of what already exists, and a much more thoughtful (does it fit the place, as well as fitting the urban road code?) application of the funding we do maintain.

We may be agreeing, but I'm always a little worried when people vaguely argue for more infrastructure. We pursue such enormous and unproductive road-building in this country in the name of growth. Induced growth is a siren's song to our governments; they've already driven us onto the rocks, but it would at least be nice if we'd address the problem before we sink the country anymore with huge debts, public and private.

It's my understanding that he's been putting his own people in high military positions for a while now. So it's not surprising that he could have short circuited the coup mechanism.

Having said that, I stayed up watching the whole thing, and it never felt very real. There's no way you're going to fire on people in the streets with a helicopter but not shoot down the president's plane. Hell, they didn't even arrest the Parliament.

Are credit unions not available to you? The only banking fees I've ever paid in my life were foreign transaction fees at ATMs in China and Spain.

If the article is posed as a question, the answer is almost surely no. Having read the content of the question as well, I now have two reasons to come to that conclusion.

Rowing, too. It's substantially harder to win races when your school isn't allowed to import eastern Europeans for that purpose.

Another front page thread tonight has multiple people saying it's 0.4 hereditary at childhood, rising to 0.75 by adulthood. Height is 0.8. I take those numbers with healthy skepticism, having not read the source material, but they aren't out of thin air.

It's like you're dangling a pinata and yanking it away at the last second. If you want to talk about your particular backwoods place, name it with greater specificity. If you want us to focus on labor force participation rates vice unemployment stats, offering those up would be similarly wise.

For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.

It's worth keeping in mind that distributions of males tend to have longer tails than their equivalents for females.

We might have to define success

In my family, we had four boys swimming competitively. So that's club fees for four, plus 20000 calories/day total if you figure each parent at 2k and each kid at 4k. My parents also paid for car insurance, which may as well be paying college tuition when you've got four young male drivers in the house.

So those are some ways. Paying for phone plans (my parents didn't) could also get expensive, as could clothes if they don't have to buy their own.

Parent strongly suggests that they don't live in US.

The utilities thing was what I found crazy. I was paying about 1-2% of take home pay to utilities at my place in California, despite making what I assume is far less than most people here.

So maybe hold the cash and short-term assets you feel compelled to have, and index the market with the rest? It may decrease in value for a time, but if you avoid realizing those losses, it'll likely bounce back. If you think the whole economy is in for a serious contraction with a decade+ horizon for recovery, you could go into previous metals, but you may just be screwed either way.

I actually do believe that the US is in for serious contraction due to the unsustainable infrastructure and development patterns. I'm hanging out in the market anyway, because the federal reserve and misplaced public trust in municipal bonds will kick that can decades further down the road before we ever face the facts.

Until then, I know that I don't have the forecasting ability of large banks, so I play the game with the only advantage I've got: patience.

I believe Ford actually released very disappointing figures in the past few days, so you can move that from the 'speculative' column to 'concrete'.

The rich get richer, and the poor get children.

There's a book I read recently that I thought did a good job looking into the demographic and social shifts associated with women having high workforce participation. It's 'XX Factor' by Alison Wolf, in case you're interested. She gives a convincing tour of some thorough data, but also makes it into a manageable narrative. She also did a decent Podcast interview on Econtalk, if you want a short version.

Because the incompetence of municipal governments (in most of the US) is in overbuilding infrastructure to serve unproductive areas so that maintenance obligations come to consume ever larger portions of the budget unless they can achieve the Ponzi scheme of paying for it with the taxes from new growth. That would be terrifying to compete with.

It's most likely that people with authority in the organization refuse to acknowledge the scope of the problem. People get upset about having to reset passwords, so imagine how they feel about being told to reformat or get entirely new machines. And frankly, those may not be viable options, because a competent and well-backed adversary will probably find their way in, even if you set them back at the starting line.

I recommend searching "sharks eating the internet"so it can become part of your Google history. I searched and found some videos of sharks biting, and some people discounting it.

I'm not going to defend all defense spending (and I don't know much about healthcare, though I expect it's similar), but much of the cause of huge expense for defense projects is that they're buying standard deviations. A lot of the stuff is manufactured to shockingly small tolerances. Same reason you spend $10000 for a PLC with less functionality than a $35 RBPi.

Anecdotally, I have an instructor whose teaching I can't stand, despite her excellent teaching style, because her voice feels like it's hitting the resonant frequency of my head, and I get a headache after 40 or so minutes.

They actually used to be thinner, especially at shallow depths, but they had to add some extra sheathing because sharks were attracted. They'd go down to fix a break and find shark teeth embedded in it.

The problem with this is the expectation of a 5 star review for adequate performance. A lot of reviewers view 3 stars as "I didn't like it, but at least customer service didn't screw me and it didn't burn my house." I'm aware that this is terrible because it leaves no room for superior delivery, but it's just the way of things.

Would you care to elaborate?