See my other comment, but the situation was very different 20 years ago. Building a kit cost you a lot more in time than it did money. This is no longer the case.

Believe it or not, going back a few decades, personal flying (a real, certified, manufactured airplane, not a kit-built) was extremely middle-class attainable. I knew a couple of blue collar guys (would be age 70-80 now) who owned their own planes in the 80s.

Experimental aviation hung on a little longer and people were able to affordably build their own planes a couple decades after the price of a new Cessna or Piper got a bit steep. Like everything else, inflation, COVID, social media, and corporate greed ruined that too. Now Lycoming will charge you 50-100k for just an engine. Not including prop or actual plane. Even if you could build the plane part, the engine is unaffordable. Larger engines for a larger plane, or without a “builder” discount are even more eye-watering, they come with a years-long waitlist, and the quality control seems to actually be worse than historically. The price of engines has doubled in the last 5-6 years alone and they pump the price quarterly. Pure greed.

EDIT: to elucidate the greed part a bit more you can pin a ton of it on the rise of corporate jets, private equity rollups, opportunistic big-money flight schools, and market consolidation. If I want to build, buy, or rent a hangar at the local airport, I’m in competition with someone who can drop $5m on a turboprop and write it off as a business expense. These kinds of people aren’t really hobbyists, and most of them have a hired pilot. Airports and airport services managed exclusively by private for-profit companies are implementing service fees that are meaningless to rich people flying in to see a sporting event, but keep out the riffraff hobbyists in their little bug smashers. The pursuit of profit is essentially elbowing-out people who are passionate about flying.

The demand for single-engine trainers is insatiable because there was a gold rush post-COVID when influencers sold the fantasy of flying yourself around in the backcountry, or dropping your boring tech job to become a sexy airline pilot. The number of new pilots per year increased about 2.5x, and they are all sharing the pool of airplanes that pretty much stopped being made in large numbers in 1979. Now instead of a new Cessna costing $100k (what you would expect, indexed for inflation) they cost $500k. Because Textron (owns Cessna, Lycoming, Beech, and Pipestrel) is a publicly traded company that must make line go up forever. And because they would rather sell one Cessna a year for a billion dollars than have to run a production line for something they don’t care about. They prefer the margins and unit price on their bizjets.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I love general aviation flying and I hate what has happened to it.

I’m not sure how much either of these things cost, but I can tell you that these opportunities do not exist for any 10-12 year olds that I am exposed to.

Not anymore, but 20 years ago those things were extremely affordable. An old Cessna 150 was cheap as hell. The fact that her grandfather gifted it means he likely owned it for a long time and it would have been even cheaper going back a decade or two. I assume it was unairworthy or neglected meaning it would have had negligible residual value. Kits used to be cheap, too. Just a bunch of sheet aluminum with pre-drilled holes.

Like everything else, inflation, COVID, and social media ruined it. Building a kit in 2026 is extremely unaffordable for a middle class person.

I’m going to get into the weeds here as someone who has a lot of interest and experience with aviation:

It’s easy to verify that she never earned a pilot certificate using the public FAA airman registry. She’s listed as a student pilot.

The plane she’s pictured with elsewhere in this thread looks like a homebuilt Zenith 601 (could be a similar variant) which may have borrowed the engine from the Cessna 150 mentioned in the Snopes article. This airplane is “experimental amateur-built”, and building one is not a trivial amount of work. Notably, she does not have a repairman certificate for this plane (according to the airman registry), so either someone else is considered the primary builder (parent? grandparent?) or she never bothered to apply for the certificate. I was able to verify that her dad holds the repairman certificate. Not sure if that’s because she was a minor at the time of completion or not.

Could be her academic interests and career took off before she could finish doing those hobby things, but as someone involved in experimental aviation, it looks a lot like she helped dad or grandpa build a plane. Whether she’s intentionally taking credit for that, or being incorrectly assigned credit is a question I can’t answer.

EDIT: I found a youtube video of her talking about building the plane with photos of her working on it. It’s quite possible she did most or all of the work, but I’m basically certain she is not a licensed pilot. She did a student solo in the plane at 16 (must be 17 to get a license) and must have dropped out of flying sometime after that.

The airplane itself is easy to look up by the tail number: N5886Q. Flightaware suggests it hasn’t flown in 4.5 years, which is sadly typical of experimental airplanes. Many people love to build them but grow bored with flying them. The data could also be an error and it hasn’t flown in even longer than that. Maybe her dad aged out.

It’s worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn’t much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.

What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.

I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.

The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.

I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.

One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.

Another point I’d like to sneak in is that there’s almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today’s equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn’t working the way we expect. The same opportunities don’t exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.

Edit: and it’s not just houses, it’s the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.

I’ve seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you’re rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don’t have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.

Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with “wealth” may not have to work at all.

People don’t become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn’t really classify as normal income.

Edit: It’s like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it’s not classified as income. Meanwhile you’re going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don’t or can’t tax wealth.

Edit2: we’ve got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you’re not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.

Totally agree. Income isn’t wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of “millionaire” when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn’t even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly “six figures” income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.

That’s what I’m talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.

That’s a good way to put it - it’s laziness. Maybe it’s laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can’t be modernized with society. I’m not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.

I’ve heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there’s no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they’re on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.

That’s the issue I have with the justice system - it’s much too loose with facts because it’s designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn’t have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn’t in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you’re right in the eyes of the law. It’s bullshit.

Edit: if you’re a physician on trial for malpractice, “A jury of your peers” would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don’t operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.

Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn’t have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can’t.

Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn’t be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying “how do we prevent population contraction” - that’s insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we’re all fucked.

Believe me when I say I’m not on corporations’ side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.

PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it’s not my field and I haven’t looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I’ve seen firsthand the family’s emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.

That’s interesting, thanks.

I don’t mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?

It’s not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who “just know” that that MMR vaccine caused their son’s autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage “must have” caused his cancer - because it’s less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn’t do anything to cause it.

Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.

That’s an oversight on my part. I didn’t look at tonight l Tokyo specifically