> nearly every bug can be be exploited in a malicious way
This is a bit contextually dependent. "This widget is the wrong color" is probably not a security issue in most cases, unless the widget happens to be a traffic signal, in which case it is a major safety concern.
Even the line between "this is a bug" and "this is just a missing, incomplete, or poorly thought out feature" can get a bit blurry. At a certain point, many engineers get frustrated trying to pick apart the difference between all these ways of classifying the code they are writing and just want to get on with making the system work better.
Literally a couple decades like 20 years? I just don't think that could be true, at least not where I live.
Looking at the listings in a broad radius around me, there is still a lot of housing built in the 1960s and 1970s being bought and sold quite regularly, and some stuff even older. A house built in 2004 ("a couple decades") would absolutely not be worth the cost to rebuild.
Oh this is the oldest trick in the book. If you need to greenwash, then just burn the coal somewhere else. Easy.
Los Angeles has been doing this for decades - for years the largest single energy source for LAPW has been an 1800MW coal burning plant that they operated in Utah, which has very loose environmental regulations.
In principle, if you got everyone to agree to it (and this would be a big if), this would probably be an interesting enough ticket that it might just win. Maybe.
In practice, Romney is 77 years old and is ready to retire - and think how often age has come up as a factor in the presidential race recently. Romney isn't running for reelection, but if he had wanted his senate seat for another 6 years, I am quite certain it would have been his. So ultimately, I don't think Romney would go for it, simply because he wants to spend more time with his (large) family.
Your example is a poor one, and does not represent the actual risk of money market funds.
Customer assets at brokerage are required to be held by a 3rd party custodian. Customer assets
are not held at the brokerage itself and cannot be touched. An executive cannot merely "dip into customer funds" to cover a bad investment. Brokerage firms are regularly audited for this exact scenario. If your assets were to go missing, the SIPC would liquidate assets of the firm itself as necessary and cover the rest up to $500,000.
The actual risk is of a MMF "breaking the buck" and being unable to return your money. In 1994, a fund went under and was only able to return 94 cents on $1. In 2008 a fund went under because of its toxic Lehman Brothers holdings. This is why you should understand what is inside of that fund before investing in it.
For example, VUSXX is "is required to invest at least 99.5% of its total assets in cash, U.S. government securities, and/or repurchase agreements that are collateralized solely by U.S. government securities or cash." These are not unregulated funds either; the SEC has been significantly increasing the scrutiny and regulation of MMFs both recently and historically.
The question you really should be asking is whether you think US treasury bills are sufficiently safe, not whether Vanguard is doing something both obvious and illegal.
My landlord charges me $60/month for water/sewer. I pay about $120 for electric and gas combined most months. This is in an area of the country where it gets above 100F in the summer and can easily dip below 15F in the winter.
> moving costs
Stop moving so much? I know very few middle class people that would pay a moving company. Renting a truck and loading it yourself, or using one of the several pod type services is the norm for most middle classers. I certainly wouldn't qualify this as rent. A moving company is a luxury purchase. Ideally if you have to move for work, your company would pay for this if needed.
> tax
Eh? There is no tax on rent. Your landlord doubtless has to pay property tax, but they would have to make that up via the rent.
> extra months of rent you have to pay because of stupid 12 month lease systems
Once again, stop moving so much. A lease is a protection against your landlord raising the rent on you. If you don't like it, then go month-to-month and pay more.
> pest control, mold control
Depends on the state, but landlords are generally legally responsible for mold. It sounds like you had a specific issue with mold, because you keep talking about mold problems. There is almost always an underlying cause of mold that should be dealt with directly.
> cleaning costs
I do not expect my landlord to clean my toilet. If you are hiring a maid, you are by definition not middle class anymore. Middle class people scrub their own toilets. No, really, they do. Well, some of them don't, but that's a different problem.
> pests and bedbug-ridden furniture
I'm not okay with pests, and my total furniture cost did not come close to doubling my rent. I also don't buy new furniture every year, and I'm okay with using a bookshelf that is 5 years old.
Most middle class people are not frequently purchasing new furniture, and if they are, they are going into debt really fast.
> mold
Again with the mold. We're not all breathing in mold, okay? Paying $50/month for "mold" makes no sense. How much bleach are you buying with that? It sounds like you have a water leak.
> shitty internet access
Sure, get good internet, but that's still not going to double your costs.
> no moving companies
Yeah, that is how middle class people move. We rent a truck or a pod thing and ask nicely for our family and friends to help load the coaches. If you're moving for work, the company gives you a signing bonus to pay for moving costs. Once again, stop moving so much.
Adding everything up in your post, I suspect you live in a very high cost of living area with a limited amount of old generally poor quality housing stock in a humid area (mold mold mold), probably the Bay Area. If you choose to live in the Bay, then your experience has very little correlation with what the rest of the country is like.
At any rate, if you earn $500k/year, then you are by definition not middle class. That's probably why most middle-class people don't live in the Bay.
Seems like these job scheduling systems are a dime a dozen these days. Since we're an AWS shop, eventually my team ended up just building a system based on EventBridge and Fargate, killing off a previous system built on top of Quartz. Scheduling is all handled via Terraform. It's been solid for several years now, and costs next to nothing to operate. We can parallelize as much or as little as we want.
At the end of the day, I don't want more to run more dedicated boxes for yet another jobs systems. I just want to hand off a container to the ether and say "please run this container until it stops, and do this once an hour or once a day." I don't want to get alerts in the middle of the night telling me that the Quartz scheduler has had some esoteric failure, and I don't want Jobs A, B, and C to get killed because Job D started doing something dumb.
Having a nice UI is cool, but I would rather not have more servers and relational databases and Java-cron libraries that can do dumbness in the middle of the night.
> you can't buy [RAV4 Prime] unless you pay $10k markup
Quite frankly, many people can't buy a RAV4 Prime at any price regardless of markups due to availability. My local dealer just quoted me a wait time of up to 18 months for a non-pluggable RAV4 Hybrid because there are simply no chips to go around.
As someone that is currently in the market for a new car, I would love to get an EV, but I also don't have a good way to charge. Seems like most EV owners just charge at their house, but what about people that don't have access to a good power tap? (apartment dwellers, renters, etc.)
Sometimes it feels like there is a group of EV elites out there that are predicting the complete demise of ICEs while conveniently downplaying the problem of charging access. I live on the outskirts of a major metro area. I've looked at the charging maps, and there just aren't good chargers available right now. I really hope that chargers will become ubiquitous in my area in the future, but until that happens, I don't have a great choice.
And so, my next car is going to just be a standard ICE hybrid. I hope that will be the last ICE I have to buy, but for right now, an EV seems like it is just not quite practical for me.