[The Toecutter]

It sucks that this happened.

It is the perfect excuse to make an electric velomobile though.

I'm all too familiar with the growing disparity between prevailing wages and living costs. A minimum wage earner in 1968 was able to afford as much food/housing/utilities/transportation per hour of work as I was able to as an electrical engineer in the 2010s making more than 3x the minimum wage. And it's only getting worse. Throw in education and healthcare costs, and the minimum wage earner of 50 years ago possibly had things better than me. When I was gainfully employed, I lived in the hood and deprived myself of nice things to pay my student loans off, and this is after scholarships covered the overwhelming majority of my tuition. The Consumer Price Index is gamed with "hedonic adjustments" so thoroughly that it fails to accurately represent changes within the economic/financial reality that people within the U.S. are living. The middle class and rich, combined composing the wealthiest quintile of the population, have been mostly insulated from this and it seems that most of them readily believe whatever the media/government tells them about the economy. The bottom 80% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck and many of them are in crippling debt to pretend they are middle class(IF they are among the better paid half of that demographic who make enough to even service said debt! The rest scrape by an existence in their urban ghettos and rural methvilles one medical emergency/car breakdown/job loss/arrest/missed paycheck/ect away from destitution).

My velomobile requires no insurance, no registration taxes, no titling fees, no fuel taxes, no license and its associated fees, and is cheaper than a moped to operate while being faster, more comfortable, and better-suited for inclement weather. In terms of travel time, it is comparable to a car on city streets while obeying the speed limit. I can go 50 miles on less than $0.05 of electricity. My single most expensive operating expense on a per-mile basis are high-quality bicycle tires, which cost me about $0.01/mile. Including the build cost of the vehicle, the total operating/ownership costs so far in more than 52,000 miles of use has been about $0.07/mile(rounded up to the nearest cent), although admittedly, almost 50,000 of those miles were purely as human powered transport before electric conversion and about half of those miles were as a trike without a body shell. Cars are really something for the well-off. This is greatly cheaper than as well as more convenient than even public transportation!