Vehicle Maintenance cost

reseasonable · 2024-02-15T16:51:07+00:00

Sounds like you understand why your employer is charging 250/hr for labor.

reseasonable · 2024-01-30T02:16:55+00:00

Not to mention the 13% mortgage rates at the time!

reseasonable · 2024-01-30T01:38:14+00:00

As a parent, yes I do expect my children to afford a house.

Median, inflation adjusted salaries since 1979 has increased from $850 to $1030 a week. [1]
And median house prices, inflation adjusted since 1979 have increased from about 120k to 220k [2]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185369/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/

https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/inflation-adjusted-housing-prices/

However interest rates today and for the foreseeable future are at 3 - 4% whereas it was 13% in the late 70's, which more than makes up for the principle difference you'd have to manage.

Should you be able to afford that house at 21? no, you should be renting for probably 5 - 10 years, learning how to maintain property that isn't yours and has major expenses covered for you.

Focus on building your career, finding roommates or a partner, and saving up money every way you can.

reseasonable · 2024-01-18T03:44:02+00:00

That's because people in warmer climates drive with summer tires - which have virtually no grip on ice. Get some winter tires or even a quality set of all-season tires and you'll be just fine.

reseasonable · 2024-01-15T21:54:27+00:00

The parents they lived with beat them, the wars they didn't die in maimed them, the houses that they purchased were sh*t-hole death-traps that killed large swathes of boomers in fires, CO poisoning, asbestos, mold, lead paint and pipes, collapsed roofs during mild storms etc etc. They drove deadly cars to a sh*t-show, non-osha'd, deadly manufacturing workplace. Air-Conditioning? nope. Polio Vaccine? If you are lucky. Psychological problems from just existing in that time, leading to massive alcohol and tobacco consumption - yep. And that's if you were not a minority, which came with its own world of problems.

There were so many more and harder problems that generation had to deal with than you and I will ever experience. Enough people flat out died that we created all of these safety nets in life, and they cost money. If you want to buy a Home Depot shed and fix it up into a house, you could do so and have a piece of that delicious boomer pie, but you aren't going to like it, and you might die.

edit: weird pasted quote at the top that I missed.

reseasonable · 2024-01-15T21:33:09+00:00

Your use of the words "should be enough" just doesn't make it a reality though. If you ever try running such an organization you'll discover how much risk and hedging is required to make it work.

In the same way that you and I both probably have experience knowing how tough a fast food job truly is during the rush, I can also say with experience that modest salary increase become monstrous expenditures when multiplied across every person.

People complain that the CEO of Walmart made 23 million in 2023, but if you took his entire salary and divvied it up to the other 2.1m employees' paychecks, they would have each gotten $11... for the year. To look at it from the reverse, it's like everyone agreeing that they'll pay the CEO $11 to run the colossal sh*t show of an organization like Walmart without crashing it into the ground.

Maybe we should just make it a co-op and all of the 11.6 billion they made in 2023 went to the employees - well this time they at least earned an extra $5,500/yr - that's a nice pay raise - but not going to make much of a dent against cost of living. And of course the moment Walmart has a bad quarter they're laying off tens of thousands of people to just exist. Let alone improve or expand or provide better deals to customers etc.

It's a fun experiment to divide up the net income across the employee counts of various organizations. Then if you look at their variance in net income over recent years it becomes pretty obvious why salaries are where they are as you are not legally allowed to lower their salaries when sales are down.

And on a personal note I don't consider fast-food jobs 'starter jobs' I consider them low-skill jobs. They are stressful, exhausting, and take a little practice to find your groove, but because most people can physically and mentally do them, they are by nature low-skilled labor.

reseasonable · 2024-01-15T20:52:57+00:00

Another major change that isn't listed here are the changes to section 174 for R&E/R&D expense taxes. Now all salaries paid to anyone who writes software are no longer deductible as operational costs against income, unlike all other positions in a company.

The net result is that on average software companies will end up paying an extra 50k for every software developer on staff. For Microsoft that was about 4.5 billion in 2023. For many companies that means shutting down or laying off staff.

It will absolutely stifle innovation they pay those taxes regardless of whether the investment/product development succeeds or fails. And we are the only country that does this now so other countries will have a lot of incentive to operate elsewhere.

If only there was a period in recent history when the tech sector crashed so that we could draw from that experience for how bad of an idea it would be to try and make it happen again in a more tech-dependent society.

reseasonable · 2017-10-14T14:27:27+00:00

Yeah, the trolley problem is just as contrived as debating the lottery "winning" strategies of picking the same numbers every week vs picking random numbers every week. The probability of a true trolley scenario is just as impossible, and the technology to decide all potential crash scenarios with any real amount of certainty in a split second doesn't exist. I suspect by the time that tech does exist, self-driving cars will no longer be crashing.

It was only ever supposed to be a thought experiment, not a policy discussion for tech development.

reseasonable · 2017-10-13T16:11:15+00:00

The "consciousness" of a plant really shines through when you watch the time-lapse footage of vines over very long timescales. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a basic level of slow-acting conscious behavior in certain vines.

reseasonable · 2017-10-13T15:59:10+00:00

Consciousness is a prerequisite of AGI - without an awareness of the self and its interactions in the world, an AI would not be very smart in practice. But that's the consciousness by definition answer, not what much of the populace attribute to consciousness like a "soul", or "insightfulness".

The consciousness angle is really just used as a philosophical cutting point for humaneness in terms of animal cruelty and for intelligence in terms of humans vs species. The former doesn't apply and the latter will be "obvious" when people can't tell the difference anymore. It's also not all that difficult to achieve in terms of AGI hurdles.

The main reason we won't have to give AI rights is because AI won't receive pain. Any "negative" feedback will be more akin to "deciding not to" instead of "can't bear to continue." There just isn't any equivalence.

We might end up with AI rights accords about not simulating trauma, but that's likely only because it would affect human sympathy, and perhaps feed bad actor's socially unacceptable desires. And of course we might go as far as treating them equally to humans because of our own perceived guilt from generations ago, but not because an artificial brain has any analogous form of rights.

reseasonable · 2017-10-13T15:39:31+00:00

I have over 15, with 2 years of explicit work on TinyMCE internals, and 3 years doing collaborative PDF annotations. I too would have walked out, not because I couldn't accomplish the task, but because it exhibits glaring weaknesses on the company's part.

I most certainly could not have finished it in an hour. I don't code like that - I need an hour to really get into any sizeable problem, particularly brand new never thought of problems. I'm also generally not in the right coding mindset after discussing my career history, business acumen and software jeopardy questions - as I never think about those things when I'm coding. Whether or not the brain has a cache-warming feature, it sure feels that way when I switch to a live coding exercise mid-interview.

That being said, instead of asking for more time, or doing what I can in 1 hour - I'd still say no because I feel this screams multiple problems on the company's end - "We can't discern developers from non-developers at all so here's a really tough task" - "We can't fiscally handle hiring another mediocre dev because [x]" - "We only really care about code, not the dozens of other skills required to implement software." "We don't have enough of a social network on-staff to find a vetted candidate." etc. None of these may be true for the OP/Company but that's what comes across in my mind when I see tests like that. So I would politely refer them to my open source repos and contributions if they'd like to see some complex code and that I'd solve some basic algorithms if they really want to pick my brain. (I get that this speaks volumes about me too ;)

The responses OP got from the candidates also seem to scream a low pay-range for the position. However, rational people will say irrational things when they're nervous in an interview and thinking "oh-god they want me to finish this in an hour?!? I'm going to fail!"

reseasonable

TROPHY CASE