Honestly these days even the MCOL (medium cost of living) interior cities like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Charlotte, etc. would be tight on 85K especially with any dependents.
Our family lived in HCOL places like Boston and LA before returning to Cincinnati a few years ago. It’s still cheaper than those but wow… I remember it being a lot cheaper when I left. Since we returned it’s gone up even more. Some neighborhoods went up by as much as 25% in the last 5 years and are not coming down.
I’ve been convinced for years that the inflation numbers are cooked. Or at least “massaged.” I don’t understand how people with only near median salaries live. It’s amazing there aren’t riots.
I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.
I don't disagree, but history shows that people (and businesses!) can and will make such trades. Look at the privacy nightmare, and it's not just individuals. Large companies put all their Crown Jewels into things like Google Drive, gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Even governments do this. The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.
This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible.
Example: a modern mid-high end phone can contain this, a complete copy of Wikipedia, and a small LLM capable of understanding natural language queries and using tools. All on board, no connection needed.
Plus it an also carry most peoples' complete music and book collections and a meaningful chunk of most peoples' movie collections.
A mid-high end laptop can carry all of it and then some. Laptop and desktop storage is gigantic by previous generation standards. Mine is a higher end laptop but has 8TB storage. 512GB to 1TB is mainstream.
I'd say I generally agree that the privacy problem has no techno-fix and must be solved by regulation.
For example, we could extend HIPAA-style fines for leaked personal data to other forms of intimate data like location, biometrics, local documents, private chats, etc.
Leak someone's location history? That'll be one $$$ fine per incident where an incident is one person data point.
This at the very least converts this kind of data from an asset into a potential liability, incentivizing companies to not collect it, not hold it long, or thoroughly anonymize and aggregate it and then discard specifics.
Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option."
How many people would take it?
I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns.
Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.
A black hole isn't a magic cosmic vacuum cleaner. It's a dense piece of mass. An asteroid mass black hole the size of a hydrogen atom would be... an object the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid. You could orbit it and the orbital calculations, at a reasonable distance, would be the same as orbiting an asteroid. You just can't get too close or you get into that steep gravity well and "become physics" (spaghettification etc.).
It would have an insanely steep gravity well, but you'd have to get close to actually feel it. It would rarely interact with mass naturally. We could chuck stuff into it or fire lasers and particle beams at it to study it, of course, but to hit it we'd have to fire it at the right angle and velocity to negate the orbit and fall into it. Orbital mechanics still works the same way.
If a black hole this size flew through the Earth at high velocity, it might not even do anything. It'd be like a bullet being fired through a puff of smoke. It might leave some kind of trail if you knew exactly what to look for and where to look, something almost analogous to the trails left by particles in a chamber.
I've given this example multiple times because it illustrates the point well, I think.
If you could magically transform the Moon into a black hole of the same mass, you would now have an object of that mass about the size of a BB or a small marble orbiting the Earth right where the Moon's center of mass orbited. The tides would continue as normal, since its gravitational effects on the Earth would be the same at that distance. Probes and other objects orbiting the Moon would continue to orbit it.
You just wouldn't be able to see it anymore. If you focused a very good telescope on its location, though, you could probably see gravitational lensing of the star field behind it.
The only risk might be if a large object actually hit it, in which case the accretion disc might temporarily emit enough X-rays and gamma rays to be harmful to Earth. Not sure though. It might not be that harmful at that distance.
“Dark” matter and energy are placeholder names. “Dark” means “we don’t know” which either means we can’t see or detect it or there is an alternate explanation for the effect.
It’s like a comment in your code like \\ TODO…
I don’t see why that’s that hard, or why we’d expect to instantly be able to figure everything out.
The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that.
If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent size asteroid would have evaporated by now but anything that mass and above would still exist.
They are a dark matter candidate, and one that doesn’t require new physics. But even if they don’t account for a significant amount of dark matter they still probably exist.
The most exciting thing about PBHs is that one or more may exist in our solar system. They might have been captured over billions of years. Finding them would be incredibly challenging, especially if they are low mass, but if we did it means we could directly examine and experiment on a black hole.
It could be something with the mass of a large asteroid but the size of a hydrogen atom. We could only find it by its gravitational effects. It would be utterly invisible otherwise unless it encountered matter and even then there might only be a tiny gamma ray flash, a nano accretion disc that lasts femtoseconds. We might also find smaller objects that appear to be orbiting nothing and find it that way.
Directly accessing one could allow us to test theories of quantum gravity and things like string theory, and maybe more. A black hole could be like a Rosetta Stone of deep fundamental physics.
The film Interstellar involved using plot magic to visit a black hole and solve physics, but this would allow it for real. It would just be an itty bitty one.
Housing inflation cascades down into everything else too, since people require higher wages to afford housing... which drives up housing costs... which requires higher wages to afford housing...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.