In many expensive and high tax places $133K would not afford you traditional middle class things like a house, two cars and two kids.

Fight the good fight. Despite being early adopter of Gmail, I moved away from everything Google after they demanded I perform age verification. Thankfully I've seen it coming and they were unable to hold my data hostage.

I don't trust Google, therefore I suspect this is about loading ads and claiming they were displayed even if user never got to see them.

You are past having an ideologically driven opinion and now well into intentional blindness. No, what you say is not at all true. People can afford cars and alternatives to cars are often prohibitively expensive. Driving is not optional for most of the country, especially in rural places where they grow food. Also, most real jobs, like growing food, cannot be done remotely.

They can't afford any of your "solutions".

What about people in the bottom 50% of wealth/earnings?

So what you are saying that all engineering improvements over past many decades, from tire, suspension, and brake technology to all electronic safety features that monitor, warn and often intervene do not matter at all, because reaction times is what matters during normal driving. All I have to ask after this - have you driven a car before?

As usual, you are arguing in bad faith. Address the point I made instead of attacking a straw man. If car safety constantly improves, and speed limits are about safety, then why are speed limits are not being increased?

Yes, lets talk about that reason. A reasonable approach to setting speed limits would be engineering - what would it take to for a modern car to stop in set distance modified to account for bad weather. As tire technology, automotive safety systems, etc. are implemented you would think that speed limits would be constantly increasing. The reverse is true - with some notable exceptions of highway speeds in some states - speed limits keep getting decreased. Why?

My answer to that is that speed limits have nothing to do with safety, this is just a pretext. Instead, they are set to maximize fine collection. It is a way to raise taxes on population with minimal political blowback as you can pretend this is done to punish wrong-doers.

A few years back where I lived they installed speed cameras. Municipality contracted speed camera installation to private firm, which calibrated them to ridiculous speed limit +2. Then they municipality started lowering speed limits. According to official statistics, by the end of the program about 40% of population got a speeding ticket in a given year. This resulted in political pressure to shut the program down. Thing is, before, during, and after there was no measurable effect on accidents. It didnâ(TM)t even work as a safety measure.

Employers are using your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you will accept.