JunkMilesDavis

Not that we had much choice along the way, but you’re right, we were almost completely in the dark about how much anything was going to cost as it happened. Various groups were mailing us bills for the full amounts even before insurance had settled their portion. Nobody in the entire insurance and billing game is on your side.

Absolutely. Taking healthcare costs off our backs would go a long way. The birth of my first kid absolutely wiped out the savings I had built up since getting out of school, and that was WITH insurance coverage. Six years of careful planning and saving just flushed down the toilet in an instant. There’s just no financially-responsible way to manage the risk of a hospital bill that could range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands depending on what does or doesn’t go according to plan, not to mention the following 18+ years of unknowns. It’s kind of a wonder that people are still having as many kids as they are these days.

The news outlets do this with every experimental battery tech. Personally, I probably won’t even know when something effectively surpasses Li-ion for consumer applications until it actually hits the market, since I’ve been conditioned to ignore the headlines.

It’s frustrating because so many of the older city and town centers actually have decent walkability, even if growth made things a little more complicated. It’s mostly the later development surrounding the cities where the only thought during planning was how the cars get from point A to point B and then park, and now the barriers to fix that situation are enormous. Some of them will update their ordinances to require sidewalk construction during new development, but it’s not all that helpful when you end up with sidewalk stubs connected to nothing. It also doesn’t fix the existing arrangement of buildings and drives that makes everything so hostile to pedestrians.