You choose where you live and work, do the math for what makes you the most. Without going into depth here, check out https://www.mrmoneymustache.com

We mostly live well above our needs and can save much more.

Death of the middle class seems a bit drastic. Kind of clickbaity. More like walmart fails to keep middle class demographic.

I feel like Amazon is a big part of this. Amazon isn't always the absolute cheapest, but it is super convenient and easy. If you don't have to pinch every penny you might just do most shopping on Amazon and save the hassle of going to the store.

Target as well has always been the middle class version of walmart imo. Better kept stores and slightly higher prices(at least in my area).

Read the Pew study linked by the article. The decline in the middle class definitely seems to be a real thing.

Most of the people who do that seriously use a property management company that deals with all of that and finding new tenants when needed. Less profit, but makes it pretty passive if you want it to be.

Its going to be similar to the software running on airplanes, you expect it to be essentially bug free(airplane software is held to a much higher standard) since you are trusting it with your life.

Except AI code inside self driving cars isn't crafted by hand, but is a matter of training data as much as code. How can you determine that a training data is "bug free" ? It barely makes any sense.