> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.

Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.

> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.

The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.

1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".

Under qualified immunity cops are all but completely immune to being sued.

They really aren’t. Qualified immunity is probably too strong, but litigants get past it all the time.

On the other hand, judges have absolute immunity for actions taken in the course of their judicial duties.

More accurate to call it the War for Terror at this point.

Sadly, or not, they still sell the best laptops.

A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.

They will fall in line as property crime increases.

Is it any surprise when wealth inequality has been increasing in the USA for the past 50 years? Globally the picture is even more bleak.

Universities are just as bad or worse on this front. They will buy up properties with no plan simply because they have the cash to throw around and don't have to pay tax.

People say that in Berkeley but usually the specifics of the deal they are taking about are incorrect, so I generally ignore such people. For example the properties owned by the U.C. wealth fund are taxed like any other.

It does kind of suck for Albany though that something like 10% of its population lives in the untaxable University Village.

Let's be real. Albany could double its tax base with duplexes, or any buildings taller than 10 feet, but they don't and don't want to.

That's also true.