141–150 of 349 posts
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A house is a very useful durable good. Like automobiles and refrigerators.
It's funny you mention automobiles, because nobody buys automobiles as a means of investment (since they lose a ton of value quickly). As a useful durable good, sure houses have value, but renting accomplishes the same purpose (of giving you a place to live).
This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…
>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…
Is this just because newspaper articles are biased towards the perspective of real estate agents and homeowners? Or are high house prices good because houses are investments? Would cheap 3-d printed houses (hypothetically) make the country better off or worse off economically?
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Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a p…
Companies will eventually be punished for acting irrationally, but, in the short term, they can be rewarded quite handsomely. This reminds me of an old trick I've heard used on multiple occasions. We've all read the Hack News posts about how no amount of programming can compensate for a poor personality. Image that you're looking at an applicant and their former employer tells you: "He was a good coder, but he had a…
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Yeah, we talk about "means testing" social security payments in this country, but little talk of "means testing" welfare recipients. I worked with people 20 years ago (at a burger king) who would turn down shifts because that extra $15 for a 5 hour shift would put them over a limit and they'd lose all their food stamp money. We're very keen on progressive taxation, but apparently progressive welfare is too far out of…
Would like to point out that many years ago with respect to collecting unemployment that it was clear to me (after speaking to the former employees) that the ss office in the state that we were in was purposely coaching employees on how to stay on unemployment as a way of regulating the labor supply which could only absorb so many people otherwise wages would be depressed. My point is simply that there could be multi…
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But doesn't your point #2 conflict with #1? This is obviously industry-specific but assuming you have the skills, doing contract programming requires only trivial up-front cost (a domain name and server, but most who work with the web would have that already) and it's certainly not a $15/hr job. As one of my siblings comments says, it's your responsibility to have a safety net of your own (6 months of all your expens…
Yes, it is industry-specific. Not only do software engineers have the necessary skills to do contract programming or start something up by default, they also make enough money such that building up a nice amount of savings is a trivial issue. Outside software however, things are quite bleak. Many people are stuck in that awful income range where they make too much to qualify for government aid, but too little actuall…
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My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.
This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…
>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…
It's really the older generation that promote this. If you're 35 years old, chances are your dad walked out of high school into the same large company that he retired from. Why would they need mobility when they had jobs for life?
The only younger people I know that share that view are close-minded and never see the point of leaving Smalltown, USA.
"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed." What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct…
I'm employed but but an issue like this is worrying for other reasons like the decision to take a break from the labor market and travel. What if I want to dip in my savings and travel for a year. I'm unemployed for greater than 6 months in such a situation but voluntarily so.
I regularly do help out on side projects or test out ideas with friends so they were more than happy to provide a reference for this period. In the 3 years since i've been able to climb from no income, to medium US income, to top 5% income bracket. Its hard, but not impossible to recover.
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There's also a market opportunity for "career incubators" that train people relevant skills, like that one organization in S.F. that was training Rails developers from the ground up.
Any particular reason you say that other than the existence of the aforementioned "career incubators?"