4iuvosvjf23 (u/4iuvosvjf23)

4iuvosvjf23 commented on The quiet rebellion of a little life caitlynrichardson.substac... · Posted by u/durmonski

In my most recent job, I earned $160k. During my ~15 year software development career, I worked for a total of 4 companies, none overlapping, none that required more than 40 hours per week. I saved ~60% of my take-home pay every year, and invested it in a 60/40 mix of VTSAX / VTIAX. I'm married, and my wife made $8,000 last year. I had to save enough to cover our collective expenses, otherwise this timeline would've been even faster!

If you're unfamiliar, this is an excellent introduction to this concept: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

It's extremely simple. It's boring. It's slow (but much faster than the alternative!). And it works.

4iuvosvjf23 · 7 months ago

No kids right?

4iuvosvjf23 commented on Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17% newsroom.spotify.com/2023... · Posted by u/filleokus

CamperBob2 · 2 years ago

If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage

Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1 billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900 million goes into core business interests. You form a union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own.

What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year? Replacing you is a core business interest now, and so is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R&D budget will be adjusted accordingly.

If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

4iuvosvjf23 · 2 years ago

Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.

Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.

4iuvosvjf23 commented on Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17% newsroom.spotify.com/2023... · Posted by u/filleokus

CamperBob2 · 2 years ago

Quite a stretch from "This company hired too many people and ended up having to lay off some" and "Hmm, maybe we're not as irreplaceable as we like to think" to "Let's all make ourselves less attractive to our employers by threatening to gang up on them."

But I guess unionization is the universal solvent for every HR problem around here.

4iuvosvjf23 · 2 years ago

How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.

4iuvosvjf23 commented on If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

__MatrixMan__ · 2 years ago

I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side.

I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful:

1. Take classes part time (doing this)

2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work

3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field

Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better.

For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.

4iuvosvjf23 · 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.

4iuvosvjf23 commented on If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

mkaic · 2 years ago

This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful. I walked to and from the conference center every day, took the metro a few times, got to ride the high-speed rail from the station that's literally integrated right into Schipol airport, and witnessed more bikers than I've ever seen in one place. All of this while the city and its infrastructure was clean, quiet, safe, and beautiful.

Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars.

I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.

4iuvosvjf23 · 2 years ago

I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.

The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.

4iuvosvjf23 commented on If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

FooBarBizBazz · 2 years ago

Americans don't live in cities, or in towns, or in villages. They are farmed in facilities called "housing developments", where there are no stores.

A developer purchases large plots of agricultural land, and colludes with government to put a sprawling system of widely-separated four- to six- lane roads through it (often by widening and paving country roads until they are unrecognizable). Then, to hide this ugliness and block the resulting noise, they ring their newly-acquired fields with large earthen berms, which they cover with evergreen shrubs and chemically-treated wood-chips. At gaps in the berms they put gatehouses, with unarmed guards. Within these fortifications, they then build fanciful, curvilinear, branching systems of slower roads, like the endoplasmic reticulum of a cell, and around these fractal structures they put large, cheaply-constructed houses and driveways, which sell for $800k and above. Compared to the cities nearby, this is affordable.

Outside the berms, on the other side of the stroads, often without sidewalks, are, at best, strip malls, and, at least as often, are instead big-box stores surrounded literally by acres of blacktop parking lot. An "acre", you may recall, used to mean that which a man could farm in a day. Not this.

Now suppose you find yourself inside one of those houses inside the berms, and that you want to buy a vegetable. As the crow flies, it's possible that you are only a mile and a half from the nearest supermarket (not a very short distance, but achievable). But to get there by walking along the roads, you must first get to the gatehouse along the berm (which may or may not be in the direction of the store), and, to get there, you must traverse this fractal system of roads. The arclength may exceed the Euclidean distance from A to B by a factor of three or more. Either that, or you must violate peoples' sacred property, by cutting across yards and next to houses (which are not very far apart), and then finally scramble over the berm, amidst a shower of wood-chips.

Having achieved your escape from the "community", you must then find a way to cross four lanes of 45 MPH traffic (on a slow day). If you are lucky, there is a sidewalk, so you can walk half a mile to the nearest crosswalk. You do this separated from the whizzing death-machines by about the eight inches of grass that separates the sidewalk from the road. Do not let your mind wander. Keep your arms and legs inside the pathway at all times.

Upon finally crossing the street, you finally enter the shopping complex. It is surrounded by parking lots. Sweating and relieved that you have gotten this far with your life intact, you step into the air conditioning.

Then you buy that one vegetable you wanted for your supper, steel yourself, and conduct your return expedition.

Which, of course, is why you don't just buy what you need for today's supper. No, you didn't walk there at all. You drove there in a car, loaded the trunk with food for at least a week, and drove it home, to be preserved in your oversized fridge. Because venturing out in all that is a chore.

Back within your "community", there may be a nice, parklike atmosphere, full of what look like walking paths. But you may find that this is actually a golf course around which the houses have been built, and that -- ostensibly for safety from golf balls, or perhaps from golf carts -- these paths are often closed, in principle, to the "little people" who merely live there without additionally paying to whack a ball around. There are then petty conflicts between the golfers who have purchased special rights, and the simple pedestrians, who have the unseemly desire to locomote with their God-given feet.

An overwhelming proportion of the American landscape is like this. It can hardly be described as a culture or a way of life. It's just what people do when they have no identity and no ambition to create a worthwhile future. These people are deskilled, demoralized, and incapable of anything but consuming garbage.

A friend from Europe used to complain that, in America, the cows just stand there, whereas in Poland, the cows were mischievous and frisky. The process of domestication is further along in the US, and it degrades the people as much as it does the cows.

The good news is that these people will not have grandchildren and their houses will decay within 100 years. The bad news is that a shithole mess is going to be left behind.

Anyway, that's why they don't walk to the grocery store.

4iuvosvjf23 · 2 years ago

As someone who has become increasingly bitter about and alienated from the American lifestyle because of this issue, this comment made my day. Brutal, biting, hilarious. Thanks for writing it.