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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • the “anonymous” surveys everyone knows are totally trustworthy.

    management and HR will swear up and down they are anonymous. Even on web forums… but the reality is you get a really obvious idea of who said what on what teams because management band together to figure out who would have said something based on their attitude, opinions and perspective.

    You can and will be singled out by management for saying negative things. Managers will be required to address the criticism… by choosing strategies behind closed doors, perhaps after having a “group discussion” where they report what they want their boss to hear to their boss, and then tell said boss what the plan is to change to address things is later. It will not be a change that affects the leader except to show they did something worthy of a performance bonus or a promotion though.

    All results that ask for more pay are basically ignored. They know why the departments with high turnover have high turnover. It’s a decision to keep those workers paid less because there’s no value to paying them more. Usually the highest turnover roles are treated like commodities. Sales person with strong ethics? Fired! Sales person caught doing illegal stuff to get sales? Fired! Sales person who gets away with selling doctors on drugs for unapproved indications? Big bonuses!

    The moment the bosses and the owner decided they wanted to get paid more than the workers was the moment any sense of equity vanished.


  • What do you mean by independent young adult. Is that even possible to be any more?

    Yes

    I was born into a poor family, single mom with mental illness. I never had air conditioning, we spent many years without a hot water heater lugging water boiled on the stove into a bath tub to wash up. My family drove beaters. Moved out at 14. Dropped out of high school. Spent a few years figuring out my shit. Got an associates at 25 at a community college. Got a job in IT support making 50k… ten years later at 100kish.

    Today the same thing can happen but entry level pay is 10-15k higher. Renting just a room is still doable on that entry level pay. Community college costs are still effectively 0 if you have 0 expected family contribution. I did work retail while I was in community college part time, offsetting cost of living expenses only. Avoid education loans at all costs imo, you can’t declare bankruptcy and dump them if the worst case scenario happens and a degree is not a guaranteed job.

    I never gambled health, safety or finances. I didn’t do drugs or get involved in something that could fuck my life too hard. I never spent a dollar I didn’t have in the bank unless it was absolutely necessary and still live that way because I grew up knowing how valuable money is, and how much it sucks when you don’t have it.

    Nowadays even around Boston on public transit lines (no car expense) you can find a studio apartment for 1500/mo with nothing included. Once you’re making 60k you can squeak by living alone. You can instead save probably 1k by having roommates/a girlfriend and splitting bills. After five years and two job changes you’re gonna be able to bank a lot more money than you’d think.

    People want it to be easy to live a high quality lifestyle but it just doesn’t work that way. Most people had parents struggling when they were growing up but they still managed to make it. If you get a bachelors degree in a higher quality major like analytics you can make way more money than I do.

    One big mistake early and you’re fucked though. Babies, major health accidents, lack of dental maintenance all can hose you for a huge portion of your life. If you choose to live near family far away from jobs and opportunities you’re fucked. I have a ton of friends with child support payments that eat most of their take home pay.






  • Considering only 30% of the people in this survey from ages 18-34 are working full time, i’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t an accurate representation of independent young adults.

    26% are in school and 16% are unemployed for a total of 42% not really making money / are using loans for housing or are living at home.

    28% are working part time and are unlikely to be living on their own - it’s rare to find a part time gig that can afford housing.

    So 22% think housing is the highest cost issue… and only 30% are employed full time… sounds about right to me! I’m guessing it’s not 30% because those 8% got mortgages during the 4% or lower interest rate era.




  • Same deal almost everywhere… but firsthand experience is that a significant portion of all drivers have their phone out.

    Would love to see some proportional crash rates of autopilot use vs not autopilot use too. People focus on things like crash totals or death totals. 17 deaths is a tragedy to be sure.

    That being said when the US has over 40,000 auto deaths per year… and this article is telling me only 17 deaths are in any way involved with Autopilot since 2019… I really wonder why this is somehow more outrageous than the ~240,913 other vehicle deaths in the US since 2019. Given that Tesla is about 5% of all autos in the US, I would expect tesla deaths to be about 12,000 deaths in that period, or 5%.

    Are so few people using autopilot? Shouldn’t the autopilot death toll be something closer to the 2000 deaths per year one would expect statistically from Tesla Drivers?

    Is autopilot much safer than human drivers? Is it more dangerous?

    Is Autopilot + Attentive safer than just attentive?

    Is the 40k deaths per year not something that should be considered simply because people stop thinking of so many deaths as a tragedy and just think of it as a statistic?

    Is the outrage and focus on car self driving just an extension of human phobia of technology and articles allow for people to have anecdotal confirmation bias?






  • PPP falls apart when you consider the price of consumer electronics, electricity, gasoline, airfare…

    In the Dominican Republic you can’t get completely stable electricity. It just doesn’t happen without generators/batteries. Generators aren’t suddenly cheaper in DR. It’s 20DOP for 1kwh of electricity in DR, or $0.34 USD/kwh. I pay less in the greater Boston area. Wages there are way, WAY below 30k/year. The thought of having air conditioning at home is practically impossible for almost all who live there.

    I love how you nitpicked the chile reference (with no counterpoint whatsoever) but it’s true across Latin America. Imported goods to poorer nations generally cost way above and beyond what the US pays…unless it’s prescription drugs because almost all other nations negotiate those prices to be much, much less than what the US pays (and only just started negotiating… for JUST Medicare.) I’m sure there are other examples as well. The PPP is so far apart on imports it’s insane. Often times things are sold in the US even if they are made locally because the price in the US is way above and beyond what the locals can afford.


  • The real rich

    What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.

    In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.

    If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.

    When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.

    There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.




  • weird, my single mom driving beaters could afford short driving trips (2 hours is short to me.) We did mostly go to a campground that was less than 15 minutes drive away from home though.

    We heavily used food pantries though, literally every single week. No air conditioning, bunny ears on our simple tv, school bus rides to school. We even went a couple years without hot water when our hot water heater broke down just boiling water on the stove.

    Everyone’s experience is different though. Though I was in one of the poorest families in my hometown. None of my aunts, uncles or parents own their own home today and they’re 50s and 60s now. The sacrifices of growing up in a wealthy middle class town will enable me to buy a house. Going to see an open house in 35 minutes!


  • Campgrounds are everywhere and one in under a 2 hour drive is very doable throughout your whole life for a family vacation. You won’t lose access to that.

    Housing costs will swing back. We’re around the point where we were in the last housing market crash. Prices are at the edge of affordability for the middle class. Mortgages are higher than what can be rented. One market course correction and a ton of people lose their houses and the market collapses again.

    They’re doing everything they can to try and stop the collapse but homes are still increasing in price way more quickly than wages. Just a matter of time.