In America we made different choices. We can fight about which choice is better (Merica!), but they're not going to change for anyone's convenience. So, reality being what it is, savings are a good thing. Heck, the only world in which savings are a mistake is on where you expect social collapse, either anarchy or the government seizing all your savings. Plenty of Americans are stocking up ammo instead of investments, but history says that's overly pessimistic.
In the past, a single house hold earner could provide for a family. Now it takes two.
What's changed? THAT'S what we need to look at....
Increased consumer materialism.
Yup, we wanted more stuff. Oh, sure, there's also been some added income inequality quite recently, but the 1950s was a long time ago. We want each kid to have his own room. We want each adult to have a car. We take color TV, an electric refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a washing machine for granted. Back when "single house hold earner could provide for a family" those were all considered luxuries to be aspired to. And it's not like this is frivolous stuff, but we have raised our expectations and there's a cost to that.
Anyway, which do you (you the generic slashdot reader, not sycodon specifically) have control over: the unfair income distribution in the US, or the amount that you. personally, save? Which can you personally fix, and which can you only shout about on the internet? Not that you have to pick one, of course, do both! But shouting "life is unfair" on the internet is not a retirement plan. It is really easy, though, and doesn't require sacrifice to make it happen, so it's a distraction from the hard thing you know you need to do. We humans like our distractions.
It can only be your responsibility to provide for your financial safety. It seems many people misunderstand that word: "responsibility". It does not mean blame; it means you can't count on someone else to fix it. Sometime in your life, likely more than once, something financially horrible (and possibly horrible in other ways) is going to happen to you. It probably won't be your fault, but it will be your responsibility to carry on.
Shit's going to happen, so be as prepared as you can. For most of the time sine WWII, excepting the recent "great recession", six months expenses as savings would carry your through a layoff. Maintain medical insurance, and that amount will also see you through a medical catastrophe, or at least contain the debt to something manageable. Don't voluntarily take on debt and you've won half the battle.
If your under 50, don't expect social security to be worth enough to matter. Sucks, but yelling about it won't pay for your retirement. The younger you are, the more you'll get advantage from a 401K or IRA. Especially if you're in your 20s: sticking money away in a broad-based stock index fund and ignoring it for 40 years has amazing leverage, and that young you should plan on no useful assistance of any kind.
The lack of someone else providing you a safety net will suck. But you know that's how the world works, so plan accordingly, as best you can given your circumstances. You can't fix the overwhelming national debt ($178,000 per taxpayer!), but you can avoid carrying debt, and save what you can.
You've never advocated banning hate speech? I forget your exact position on the Brexit vote, but tell me how much you object to the EU's approach of just having nations vote on the same initiative every couple of years until "the voters finally get it right".
or sometimes feel symphatic with the crowd that regularly gets excluded from voting.
I'm also sympathetic to illegal Mexicans, but they should certainly be excluded from voting in the US.
Man, WTF? Does your ISP send you at gunpoint to a forced labor camp? Does it have mobile execution vans for its convenience? Can it actually in any way stop you from buying groceries? Your false equivalence is such obvious BS. (Plus, you know there are also big companies in China complicit in this shit, right? It's not an either-or.)
OK, I'm assuming you're just an idiot, but maybe I've got the wrong end of this: even though because you're posting with a low UID, you could still be working for the Chinese government. It's not like a Slashdot account is hard to hack.
From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
The terrifying bit is when the government limits your ability to buy food based on your social credit score. Criticize the government? Let's see how you do without food for a month.
They already do this with access to public transport, which is many people's only way of getting to work.
I was in Shanghai last month, and I saw a camera about every 100m or so. That might have been one for every 10 pedestrians on the street, but no where near one for every 10 people in the city.
Yup, those were the cameras you saw. You might also ponder whether the biggest city in the world is a representative sample. (And that's not even counting all the smart phones.)
But the important thing is to keep saying positive things about China and it's government, assuming you wan't to keep visiting. You know they're reading your posts, and you know they know who you are.
Most places just raise rents once they're sure there will be takers. As new rent money proves itself, they spend to make the place nicer so they can raise rents more, and repeat. It would be quite risky to throw everyone out, spend millions improving the place, then hope that you can rent for twice what you used to - easy to lose everything by just being wring on the timing, and needless.
The term "death spiral" is specific. It refers to a tipping point where your price goes past the optimum on supply/demand, such that raising prices means less overall money once people substitute alternatives, or simply do without.
In this case, people have clearly been doing just that in NYC, as total ridership has been dropping. Raising fares is unlikely to increase that, right? Cutting routes won't increase riders either, right?
It's fine to be skeptical of some internet article, but do read the MTA's own report.
Plan is balanced through 2019 using "one-shots," and the deficits for 2020, 2021 and 2022 have increased to $510 million, $816 million and $991 million, respectively
Meh. I hate taxes as much as the next 3 guys, but it's more than that. Look at medical care: almost 20% of workers in the US work in health care and related fields, vs almost no one in many countries. No matter how you slice it, that's going to make living here a lot more expensive. Of course, we get something for that. (Now, if we had single-payer, all that cost would in fact be "taxes", but that's sort of beside the point: 20% is 20% regardless).
Never thought that liberty prime would post on slashdot.
Hah, nice reference.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I don't know any conservatives that believe anyone is an "inferior", but lots of people are "idiots". Cultures and economic systems OTOH are often judged as inferior on the basis that they consistently produce shitholes, but that doesn't attach to the people from those cultures (though if they can't see the causal connection, they're "idiots", but still not "inferior").
JS dev was certainly a dark art back in the day, and far more skill required than today. However, "web developers" who had read one book on the internet were a very common thing (and actually employed all over, before the bust). It was a very different world, looking back, given it's only 20 years ago.
Not really an amazing coincidence. They probably lowered their expectations until they found anyone.
No, they merely stopped over-sampling immigrants at the start of the funnel. Amazon has a very strict process to avoid filling reqs by lowering expectations, the strictest of any place I've heard of. Every hire must be approved by an interviewer unrelated to the hiring team who's only job is to make sure the team doesn't lower the bar to get someone mediocre instead of an empty seat.
It's the only bit of Amazon culture that's positive IMO: there's never any sense that any of your peers were let in to meet some quota. They work their e.g. gender hiring targets at the front of the process, not the hiring decision.
Don't conflate "white" with US-born. I've worked with plenty of good people from Canada, Israel, and Russia (and South Africa: BTW I don't advise telling them they're not "African-American"), and OTOH good American-born Chinese, and Canadian-born Chinese for that matter, and pretty much any other mix of race vs nationality that's around.
Believe it or not, "immigrant" is not a code word for "non-White", and race is a poor proxy for immigration status.
I only have anecdotes, of course, but I worked at 6 companies in Silly Valley and Seattle, so it's a reasonable sample. Of those, only Microsoft was more than 20% native-born.
That's typically only at the end of the process. Often, gentrification starts with houses, either homeowners doing high-budget remolding or a developer buying cheap and building. You'll also get condos early on. Apartments, especially renovating existing apartments, tend to come at the end, once all the risk has past. Apartment owners are a pretty risk-adverse lot - they're not going to throw money at something in the hopes that it might become valuable.
The big companies seem to be more like 80% (talking about developers, not employees). Not going to give my job history on slashdot, but one small company I worked at had, before I was hired, no native-born tech people of any kind, excepting the VP of development. At the time they got bought they had 30 US employees and about 100 in India (devs etc, not talking about support), and 2 of us were born in the US (plus one technical non-dev). The acquiring company forced out everyone senior who wasn't Indian in the most blatant racism I've yet seen. Even the Nepalese guy got pressured out.
In the large company I worked at before that the numebrs were about the same: 30/100 US/India split, with 2 US-born devs (plus 2 managers).
When I worked at Amazon (which was Seattle, not Silly Valley) our group of 50 or so needed 3 people who could get top secret clearance. Problem was, we only had 3 devs who were born in the US, and I wasn't interested. Amazingly, the "we're trying to recruit US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" hiring process suddenly found another 3 qualified US devs over the next 6 months. Amazing coincidence, really.
No, businesses did it to benefit themselves of course. It's been happening since about 1980,
That's true. But it's also been happening since about 1580, and the early trading companies were brutal. Heck, the first recorded "corporation" was about 580.
You probably didn't intend it, but you are echoing some very unpleasant people with those phrases.
There's no one less pleasant than a communist, and you sound like those people often.
When I worked in the valley, at a variety of places, there were never more than 5% of workers born in the US. 95% immigrants. Yeah, I think that affects wages just a little bit.
And don't forget, in the late 1990s you had "webmasters" and "HTML developers" who were fare less skilled than JS guys.
I think you've got that backwards. Slumlords live far away from their shitholes. Gentrification is driven by people who want to live somewhere despite the current neighbors, because the scenery is nice or the commute is short.
Capital flight has alays been a thing, throughout history. It used to be completely physical: when the government went nuts or collapsed, you'd flee the country with your valuables, and if you were a wealthy trader you likely knew how to smuggle yourself across the border.
These days "valuables" are mostly journal entries in a purely digital world, and the governments have the borders locked down tight. It's the new panopitcon that calls for new ways of smuggling valuables across the border. And that's been the #1 use of BitCoin for years now. I suspect the primary driver for the fall in value in BTC is the Chinese government being ever more successful in stopping capital flight.
Slashdot Mirror
In America we made different choices. We can fight about which choice is better (Merica!), but they're not going to change for anyone's convenience. So, reality being what it is, savings are a good thing. Heck, the only world in which savings are a mistake is on where you expect social collapse, either anarchy or the government seizing all your savings. Plenty of Americans are stocking up ammo instead of investments, but history says that's overly pessimistic.
In the past, a single house hold earner could provide for a family. Now it takes two.
What's changed? THAT'S what we need to look at. ...
Increased consumer materialism.
Yup, we wanted more stuff. Oh, sure, there's also been some added income inequality quite recently, but the 1950s was a long time ago. We want each kid to have his own room. We want each adult to have a car. We take color TV, an electric refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a washing machine for granted. Back when "single house hold earner could provide for a family" those were all considered luxuries to be aspired to. And it's not like this is frivolous stuff, but we have raised our expectations and there's a cost to that.
Anyway, which do you (you the generic slashdot reader, not sycodon specifically) have control over: the unfair income distribution in the US, or the amount that you. personally, save? Which can you personally fix, and which can you only shout about on the internet? Not that you have to pick one, of course, do both! But shouting "life is unfair" on the internet is not a retirement plan. It is really easy, though, and doesn't require sacrifice to make it happen, so it's a distraction from the hard thing you know you need to do. We humans like our distractions.
It can only be your responsibility to provide for your financial safety. It seems many people misunderstand that word: "responsibility". It does not mean blame; it means you can't count on someone else to fix it. Sometime in your life, likely more than once, something financially horrible (and possibly horrible in other ways) is going to happen to you. It probably won't be your fault, but it will be your responsibility to carry on.
Shit's going to happen, so be as prepared as you can. For most of the time sine WWII, excepting the recent "great recession", six months expenses as savings would carry your through a layoff. Maintain medical insurance, and that amount will also see you through a medical catastrophe, or at least contain the debt to something manageable. Don't voluntarily take on debt and you've won half the battle.
If your under 50, don't expect social security to be worth enough to matter. Sucks, but yelling about it won't pay for your retirement. The younger you are, the more you'll get advantage from a 401K or IRA. Especially if you're in your 20s: sticking money away in a broad-based stock index fund and ignoring it for 40 years has amazing leverage, and that young you should plan on no useful assistance of any kind.
The lack of someone else providing you a safety net will suck. But you know that's how the world works, so plan accordingly, as best you can given your circumstances. You can't fix the overwhelming national debt ($178,000 per taxpayer!), but you can avoid carrying debt, and save what you can.
You've never advocated banning hate speech? I forget your exact position on the Brexit vote, but tell me how much you object to the EU's approach of just having nations vote on the same initiative every couple of years until "the voters finally get it right".
or sometimes feel symphatic with the crowd that regularly gets excluded from voting.
I'm also sympathetic to illegal Mexicans, but they should certainly be excluded from voting in the US.
Man, WTF? Does your ISP send you at gunpoint to a forced labor camp? Does it have mobile execution vans for its convenience? Can it actually in any way stop you from buying groceries? Your false equivalence is such obvious BS. (Plus, you know there are also big companies in China complicit in this shit, right? It's not an either-or.)
OK, I'm assuming you're just an idiot, but maybe I've got the wrong end of this: even though because you're posting with a low UID, you could still be working for the Chinese government. It's not like a Slashdot account is hard to hack.
You still carrying that torch? "AI" just means "algorithm". That's what everyone means. No one uses "AI" to mean "sapient computer" outside of SF.
From the package of grapes, to the pregnancy tests, foreign purchases... everything purchased will be categorized, and probably calculated into your social media scores.
Not a bit terrifying?
The terrifying bit is when the government limits your ability to buy food based on your social credit score. Criticize the government? Let's see how you do without food for a month.
They already do this with access to public transport, which is many people's only way of getting to work.
I was in Shanghai last month, and I saw a camera about every 100m or so. That might have been one for every 10 pedestrians on the street, but no where near one for every 10 people in the city.
Yup, those were the cameras you saw. You might also ponder whether the biggest city in the world is a representative sample. (And that's not even counting all the smart phones.)
But the important thing is to keep saying positive things about China and it's government, assuming you wan't to keep visiting. You know they're reading your posts, and you know they know who you are.
Most places just raise rents once they're sure there will be takers. As new rent money proves itself, they spend to make the place nicer so they can raise rents more, and repeat. It would be quite risky to throw everyone out, spend millions improving the place, then hope that you can rent for twice what you used to - easy to lose everything by just being wring on the timing, and needless.
The term "death spiral" is specific. It refers to a tipping point where your price goes past the optimum on supply/demand, such that raising prices means less overall money once people substitute alternatives, or simply do without.
In this case, people have clearly been doing just that in NYC, as total ridership has been dropping. Raising fares is unlikely to increase that, right? Cutting routes won't increase riders either, right?
It's fine to be skeptical of some internet article, but do read the MTA's own report.
Plan is balanced through 2019 using "one-shots," and the deficits for 2020, 2021 and 2022 have increased to $510 million, $816 million and $991 million, respectively
It doesn't look good.
Trials by jury are considered archaic and primitive by most states of law.
Things America values and you've spoken out against:
* Soap box
* Ballot box
* Jury Box
* Ammo box
We think we're more important than our government. You disagree, I get it.
WTF does SpaceX's safety have to do with Musk's state of mind? He has almost nothing to do with day-to-day operations.
This is political payback for something we haven't seen. Some senator is pissed with him, probably for something personal.
To grossly simplify it: because taxes.
Meh. I hate taxes as much as the next 3 guys, but it's more than that. Look at medical care: almost 20% of workers in the US work in health care and related fields, vs almost no one in many countries. No matter how you slice it, that's going to make living here a lot more expensive. Of course, we get something for that. (Now, if we had single-payer, all that cost would in fact be "taxes", but that's sort of beside the point: 20% is 20% regardless).
Never thought that liberty prime would post on slashdot.
Hah, nice reference.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I don't know any conservatives that believe anyone is an "inferior", but lots of people are "idiots". Cultures and economic systems OTOH are often judged as inferior on the basis that they consistently produce shitholes, but that doesn't attach to the people from those cultures (though if they can't see the causal connection, they're "idiots", but still not "inferior").
I rather suspect those stats are for "workers", not "developers", which especially for Amazon measures something different.
JS dev was certainly a dark art back in the day, and far more skill required than today. However, "web developers" who had read one book on the internet were a very common thing (and actually employed all over, before the bust). It was a very different world, looking back, given it's only 20 years ago.
Not really an amazing coincidence. They probably lowered their expectations until they found anyone.
No, they merely stopped over-sampling immigrants at the start of the funnel. Amazon has a very strict process to avoid filling reqs by lowering expectations, the strictest of any place I've heard of. Every hire must be approved by an interviewer unrelated to the hiring team who's only job is to make sure the team doesn't lower the bar to get someone mediocre instead of an empty seat.
It's the only bit of Amazon culture that's positive IMO: there's never any sense that any of your peers were let in to meet some quota. They work their e.g. gender hiring targets at the front of the process, not the hiring decision.
Don't conflate "white" with US-born. I've worked with plenty of good people from Canada, Israel, and Russia (and South Africa: BTW I don't advise telling them they're not "African-American"), and OTOH good American-born Chinese, and Canadian-born Chinese for that matter, and pretty much any other mix of race vs nationality that's around.
Believe it or not, "immigrant" is not a code word for "non-White", and race is a poor proxy for immigration status.
I only have anecdotes, of course, but I worked at 6 companies in Silly Valley and Seattle, so it's a reasonable sample. Of those, only Microsoft was more than 20% native-born.
That's typically only at the end of the process. Often, gentrification starts with houses, either homeowners doing high-budget remolding or a developer buying cheap and building. You'll also get condos early on. Apartments, especially renovating existing apartments, tend to come at the end, once all the risk has past. Apartment owners are a pretty risk-adverse lot - they're not going to throw money at something in the hopes that it might become valuable.
The big companies seem to be more like 80% (talking about developers, not employees). Not going to give my job history on slashdot, but one small company I worked at had, before I was hired, no native-born tech people of any kind, excepting the VP of development. At the time they got bought they had 30 US employees and about 100 in India (devs etc, not talking about support), and 2 of us were born in the US (plus one technical non-dev). The acquiring company forced out everyone senior who wasn't Indian in the most blatant racism I've yet seen. Even the Nepalese guy got pressured out.
In the large company I worked at before that the numebrs were about the same: 30/100 US/India split, with 2 US-born devs (plus 2 managers).
When I worked at Amazon (which was Seattle, not Silly Valley) our group of 50 or so needed 3 people who could get top secret clearance. Problem was, we only had 3 devs who were born in the US, and I wasn't interested. Amazingly, the "we're trying to recruit US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" hiring process suddenly found another 3 qualified US devs over the next 6 months. Amazing coincidence, really.
No, businesses did it to benefit themselves of course. It's been happening since about 1980,
That's true. But it's also been happening since about 1580, and the early trading companies were brutal. Heck, the first recorded "corporation" was about 580.
You probably didn't intend it, but you are echoing some very unpleasant people with those phrases.
There's no one less pleasant than a communist, and you sound like those people often.
When I worked in the valley, at a variety of places, there were never more than 5% of workers born in the US. 95% immigrants. Yeah, I think that affects wages just a little bit.
And don't forget, in the late 1990s you had "webmasters" and "HTML developers" who were fare less skilled than JS guys.
I think you've got that backwards. Slumlords live far away from their shitholes. Gentrification is driven by people who want to live somewhere despite the current neighbors, because the scenery is nice or the commute is short.
Humans survived the last ice age with no technology at all.
Capital flight has alays been a thing, throughout history. It used to be completely physical: when the government went nuts or collapsed, you'd flee the country with your valuables, and if you were a wealthy trader you likely knew how to smuggle yourself across the border.
These days "valuables" are mostly journal entries in a purely digital world, and the governments have the borders locked down tight. It's the new panopitcon that calls for new ways of smuggling valuables across the border. And that's been the #1 use of BitCoin for years now. I suspect the primary driver for the fall in value in BTC is the Chinese government being ever more successful in stopping capital flight.