371–380 of 418 posts
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Not paying taxes is a drain on society
It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's. I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s
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Might be surprising but I am kinda willing to believe it. Since we bought our house, we had quite a bit of work done by professionals. But whenever I can I do things myself. Like I had multiple companies quote me $300-500 based on the job for things that take me maybe 2-3 hours total to do, including learning about it (will be faster next time), getting the materials, and doing the job. When you have a few of these a…
>When you have a few of these a months they add up If these jobs really number in "a few of these a month", then your inclusion criteria must be absurdly broad (eg. changing your lightbulb), or your home is on the verge of falling apart.
There are a lot of people who don't understand this stuff to a degree where they don't even know whether a repair is dangerous or not. My family member was afraid that if they messed up installing the toilet arm they'd flood their house.
Those people are very capable of having a few repairs a month, just on random stuff. Cabinet hinge screws wore out their hole and just needs a bigger screw, shower curtain mounting is loose and needs new anchors, an outdoor light fixture with a bulb cover needs a new lightbulb and they can't figure out how to get the cover off, etc.
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Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
>You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an ac…
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I am yet to find any "blue collar worker" who would do this properly and actually give me an invoice or (god forbid) would take a bank transfer to a company account or maybe even a card payment. Literally every single person I have ever interacted with for fixing my house was like "mate it's cash only or the taxman is going to get me". Recently I even needed my rims redone on my car, went to a big autoshop in my town…
This is a bit surprising to me, but I've only ever rented in Europe. In the US, though, it's common to get discounted pricing for paying cash, usually 2-3% reduction in price as that's what they pay for card processing, otherwise anyone will take a card and everything is done with free estimates in writing up front, signed contracts, and payment due on completion. I can't imagine what you're describing in this thread…
I wish this was a singular occurance, but every trader I ever worked with behaves like this. They are all allergic to paying tax on the money they make.
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Yes-Anding you, if one developer is suddenly 3x more productive and does 40 hours of work in 15 with AI tools, any reasonable manager would still want the same three people to keep working at 3x productivity. I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can…
The concern isn't that a dev sees 3x. Rather that at some point devs become a pointless middleman in the workflow. If the manager/PM can just tell the computer what they want, why do they need the dev in the middle to do it for them? Will we ever achieve that world? Who knows. We've heard these promises before, with things like COBOL and 4GLs. Yet we're still here coding.
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Yes. This user should know that upvotes ebb and flow, and you should just wait a bit before crying about someone being "downvoted into oblivion".
This is a conversation from 17 hours ago and was written in the context of that time. Threads are living conversations, and taking the effort to complain about discussions occurring at that specific time (over 17 hours ago) seems equally unneccesary as well.
> The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.
If you're going to participate here, you need to stop poisoning HN like this. People have worries about their future wellbeing as a result of the dramatic changes currently happening in the industry. We can debate the validity of those worries without trashing the community, which is specifically against the guidelines. The guidelines, and the work that many people put into upholding them, are the main reason this site has ever been anything worth defending.
The guidelines you're breaching in this case are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
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Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be…
Right now blue collar work can pay much better than white collar work (in the Netherlands). Not all of course, but construction work and electrician type work, certainly. The labour shortages in construction and the energy transformation are huge. And it can't be solved with immigration because there is no housing.
This could be said of literally anywhere except a ghost town, and it's only true in a very narrow sense. The problem is not housing supply. It's zoning, which is a political decision.
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Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be…
> Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. Yes, this is called Baumol's cost disease.
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Yes. It’s relatively straightforward to work on a fixer upper house during which time you are drawing no salary relative to that, and then you can turn around and sell it (or just enjoy being in a nice house which otherwise would have cost hundreds of thousands).
But if you're not drawing a salary/wages, how the heck are you buying groceries or paying the mortgage? You'd need to turn houses over very quickly/regularly for this to work...? I'm not debating that tradespeople can make good money - that absolutely can. But, that's the exception not the norm... The average plumber or electrician in the US earns about $65k/year... that's about 2/3 (or less) of an entry level progra…
It's pretty bonkers.
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> That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money why then do they all have those interview rounds where you have to talk about what really attracted you to work at this boring company and how you would love to do that kind of work? They evidently haven't gotten the memo.
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