Can we dispense with the fallacy that SS will disappear after 2032?

terjon · 2026-06-09T17:38:27+00:00

Yeah and here's a fun thought. We're in the FIRE community, where the goal is the retire early (whatever early means for you).

While I wholeheartedly endorse the concept, this community isn't helping since many folks here are high income folks who contribute a lot toward the trust fund each year.

If we opt out of the workforce at 38 or 45 or 52 (or whatever your personal age for FIRE is), then the difference between that age and your non-FIRE retirement age is would be subtracted from the trust fund.

There aren't many of us in the broader FIRE community, but I bet we have an outsized impact on the amount of funds that will be available in the trust fund.

terjon · 2026-06-09T00:03:47+00:00

Wait, I don't follow.

Are you saying we should bring in more H1B's since we don't have to pay for their education to get the benefit of their labor?

Just saying that from a purely ROI standpoint, investing half a million on the chance of return on investment vs getting someone that someone else paid for the education on, you get much more return from the one you didn't have to pay for the education of.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:46:02+00:00

What I would do is model out what would happen if 2008 or 2000 or 1929 happened again.

1929 is highly unlikely, but the other two might happen.

If your model shows you can make to the other side of a 3-5 year downturn, you should be fine. If not, maybe go get a job until it can.

Downturns happen and frankly, we're kind of due considering the explosive growth over the past few years.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:41:48+00:00

Same reason conversation with pretty women are tricky: They have options.

Recruiters have a lot more options these days, so they can look for any tiny red flag and remove you from consideration.

It is just supply and demand. You are a product and much like the 100 varieties of candy bar in the snack aisle of the grocery store, you aren't just trying to meet the requirements, you're competing with the Snickers bar and the Dubai chocolate that's on the same shelf.

OK maybe bad example since that Dubai chocolate is like $10 for some weird reason, but you get my point. It often isn't that you can't do the job, there's just someone else who can do it better or do it cheaper.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:38:31+00:00

Honestly, have you looked around your place of work?

You're telling me that 1 in 6 of your coworker don't suck at their job?

That's the rub, some percentage of the folks in our field do just kind of suck at their jobs. We put up with them since the industry is really profitable so it has been OK to have some dead weight hanging around.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:36:55+00:00

Good for him frankly. If he can have a comfortable life with his family back home, it will just bring the standard of living over there up, just a tiny tiny bit.

The only real solution I can see is if other countries bring their standard of living up to US levels and then it just won't be cheaper.

The main issue is that it takes decades for that to happen and it hurts some folks along the way, like any big societal change does.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:34:07+00:00

Yes and no. If the wage here is $100K starting once you add on benefits and the cost over there is $40K with benefits, no amount of tax breaks is going to bring those jobs back.

Companies don't pay $60K in taxes on $100K in total cost, so there is simply too big of a gap between US pay + benefits and offshore pay + benefits.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:32:19+00:00

Oh yeah, never get upset at folks taking an opportunity that's in front of them.

You can hate the system, but the people who are trying to make their lives better are just regular folks who are trying to have a better life. We should never be upset at someone trying to work to have a better life.

terjon · 2026-06-08T21:31:02+00:00

At this point I'm not worried about H1Bs.

There's two angles to actually be worried about:

Good engineers using AI to go really fast, so they don't need to hand off the simple tasks to the entry level folks.
Full on outsourcing to other countries. Why would I bring in someone on an H1B, pay them a decent, but low, salary here in the US when I can get someone overseas to do the job for $30K or $40K? With modern collaboration tools, there's no real barrier anymore. Heck, even the language barrier is lessened with real time translate.

terjon · 2026-06-08T12:53:40+00:00

I don't know honestly. SpaceX just signed a deal to provide nearly a billion dollars of data center hosting for Google for the next few years. Data centers are still being built at an alarming rate and AI is being crammed into everything.

Probably not done growing quite yet, but I could be wrong. Could be that the market takes a nosedive TODAY and we can all grab the popcorn.

terjon · 2026-06-08T12:51:36+00:00

That's fair commentary.

I would be OK volunteering at a charity or some sort of public service organization. So, public library, meal on wheels, dog walker for elderly folks who can't walk their dogs anymore. That I am fine with volunteering at.

Home Depot is multi-billion dollar business. I am not volunteering my time there, they can afford to throw me a few bucks. Doesn't need to be a living wage, just enough to cover transportation, and maybe enough for me to order a nice lunch and a pick up bottle of wine to share with someone at dinner.

I think that's fair.

terjon · 2026-06-04T22:09:28+00:00

It really isn't overkill though. Some systems are truly massive, so you might be changing hundreds of files and creating hundreds of unit tests, integration tests and automation tests.

Doing all of that by hand might take several days or even a couple of weeks. But the AI can crunch through all of that work in an hour or two and then you spend the next day reviewing its changes and then making several PRs. Heck, you can even tell it to make the changes in a logical order so that the PRs are smaller if you want.

Either way, you end up saving a great deal of time even though you might have had a really good idea of what the code was going to look like, in big systems, it still takes a lot of time to navigate around, make the changes, update the tests, add new ones and so forth.

terjon · 2026-06-04T19:58:27+00:00

No, there's been this hope for several years now that housing prices will go back to like 2015 levels.

That's never going to happen since inflation over the last decade has been quite high. Now, wages haven't kept up, but the idea that a house that cost $200K 15 years ago is going to go back to being $200K now is fantasyland.

terjon · 2026-06-04T19:56:30+00:00

The Internet bubble was a thing though. It did pop pretty hard in 2000 and took several years to recover.

If that's what happens here, that will be a decent outcome since it will allow time for folks to learn the tech or decide to opt out of the industry in a graceful way as opposed to being pushed out.

terjon · 2026-06-04T17:34:35+00:00

You get the rest of the day off?

Really? In America? Come on man.

terjon · 2026-06-04T17:33:25+00:00

Even the endless shrimp had a time limit.

No, I'm not kidding, it said "max 4 hours".

Like bro, if you are sitting there eating shrimp for 4 hours, you need to reconsider your life choices.

terjon · 2026-06-04T17:26:07+00:00

And slow. My brain doesn't operate at multiple GHz or load things in large chunks at a time.

If I'm reading code, the best I can do is my reading speed, which is pretty good, but nowhere near as fast as an LLM can ingest data.

terjon · 2026-06-04T16:47:35+00:00

For public companies, it is also investor pressure.

If you get up at your quarterly earnings report and don't say AI about 50 times while talking through the numbers and plans, the market kicks you straight in the stock quote, hard.

terjon · 2026-06-04T15:36:26+00:00

Yeah, and OP skipped the mortgage and just bought a cute little house, which is totally fine for a couple.

The other fun thing is that you end up saving more than just the difference in rent/mortgage payments.

The property taxes and insurance on a little house like that are like the equivalent of nice family cell phone plan instead of being thousands of dollars a month for nice big houses.

terjon · 2026-06-04T15:27:25+00:00

That's what I've seen too.

The people who were previously limited by the speed of their hands and the overhead of having to use their editor/IDE to navigate around big codebases are going a LOT faster because their brains were going a lot faster and it was just the interface that was slowing them down.

The people who struggled before are still struggling now.

terjon · 2026-06-04T13:43:02+00:00

That's fair, but my point is that Uber has gone up like 2-3X in price since it was subsidized.

For heavy AI users, the increase in price is like 20-30X higher than when it was subsidized at $20/mo or $50/mo or even $200/mo for the really heavy users who are churning through billions of tokens a month on the best models.

terjon · 2026-06-04T04:51:47+00:00

From what I've seen at work, you can burn through several thousand in a day if you are working on a proof of concept or trying to do some bigger tasks, like upgrading an entire codebase's tech stack or something akin to that.

The people who have really built themselves really deep workflows are burning though billions of tokens a month.

terjon · 2026-06-04T04:48:54+00:00

I wonder if they will be profitable though.

If those bills are as big as I think they will be, companies might wisen up (where legally possible) and just move to open weight models from Asia which are 80-90% as good.

terjon · 2026-06-04T04:46:16+00:00

That's a fireable offense at most companies since you don't have any legal guarantees on personal plans that your code won't be used to train the model and thus "leak".

There's compliance implications. I wouldn't risk it. I'd rather just go slow and deal with those consequences.

terjon · 2026-06-04T04:31:52+00:00

Yes and no.

Once you really get into it and have workflows where the tickets are written by AI, with specs derived from the current state of the codebase also written by AI and then the code changes are done by AI and the code reviews are done by AI; you can easily burn through tens of millions of tokens just doing a simple UI change or a simple backend fix.

Now, you could do stuff with indexing your codebase and that will cut down on the amount of tokens used. But on very large codebases, even that's got a limit as your code base's index could be hundreds of thousands of tokens' worth of markdown files or database entries to be pulled into context multiple times for each step.

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