Healthcare is still by far the biggest cost difference most people will face but even if you add all these things up, they don’t represent anything even remotely close to 50%.

I beg to differ. For a family of four in Texas, we paid nearly $15,000 per year for insurance and that's deemed a "good policy" (not great) meaning that it has a good PPO, most docs are in network, and most medications are $10-$50. Insurance premiums don't scale with income and that's not accounted for if I read your arguments correctly. If we compare two families of four led by "a freelancer" (as we're talking about here) in Dallas and one freelancer makes $100k but another makes $200k, both have to pay the same $15,000 per year in health insurance premiums. For the $100k freelancer, his health insurance takes up 15% of his gross revenue - that's absolutely going to get him close to or above @ollerac's 50% figure. Maybe not so for the $200k freelancer who only has health insurance account for 7.5% of gross revenue.

I then looked at the videos - which is a fail if I have resorted to that. I'm 8 minutes into the first video and I'm still not sure when/why.

Perhaps my biggest frustration came on my 2nd scroll when I encountered this:

"Simple Cloud Programming

MBrace.Core is a cloud programming model simple enough to be explained on a single slide."

Surely I am not the only person who clicked the header expecting to see that slide? No slide...

You see this in game development a lot- users are trained in the first 1-2 levels "Here's a puzzle - look around for clues". When they later encounter a puzzle in levels 3-n, they often apply the same methodology despite the obviousness that another approach is called for.

You see it in chess development - an app teaches users, "Given a board with these positions, the best option is x". Later during growth, the same board positions may have different solutions yet the student continually applies the original.

Attitude isn't at play here; it's simply expectation.

Which is exactly how one would spin it so that the CEO of the roaster would buy into it...

I know - cynical.

Why, why would these commercial roasters allow a "news organization" to analyze the air? Maybe you allow - maybe - a scientific-based organization to do the testing but a news organization has an agenda. Full stop.

"Boss, can I go analyze the air down at Big Coffee Roaster's facility?"

"What for?"

"I read this comment on reddit about diactyl - it's supposedly really bad and most people don't know about it. I bet it's all over that facility and they don't know it."

"This could be huge - make sure you bring back something good..."