bpt3

Buy a house below the median cost if you want to live that specific lifestyle.

And don't rely on trashy websites for your snarky, invalid arguments: https://www.bls.gov/regions/mountain-plains/summary/blssumma...

Large portions of the rust belt, midwest, and deep south for starters.

There are many, many lists of the most affordable cities in the US. I see Buffalo, Dayton, and Wichita on them regularly as specific examples.

It's interesting that some restaurants (and businesses in general) seemed to figured out within the last few years that a surprising (to me) number of people don't want to make any effort to comparison shop at all.

The only way to stop it is to stop giving them money.

You're welcome to move to one of the many, many places in the US where it's still possible.

The same people who claim they're spending $68 for a 3 person meal at Popeyes or other similar establishments and that there is no alternative (i.e. people who aren't very good with money and/or willing to put even the slightest amount of effort into comparison shopping).

Or you can eat much better food all around for much less in other establishments.

Businesses charge what they can get away with, and you're actively wasting money if you're referencing prices you actually paid for those meals recently.

I mean I think it's exactly as revealing as I realize, in that I have again explicitly stated that unions are not beneficial to above average workers because they don't need external protections against job loss or substandard working conditions in modern society. To use your terms, they are best off self-insuring against these issues, as is the case with insurance against most forms of loss.

Fearmongering and/or hand wringing about what could get worse in the future doesn't change that reality today.

The big risk to a worker is that they overestimate their skill level, which absolutely does happen, but those people are not in the above average pool I'm talking about in the first place and would in fact benefit from a union.

So it's insurance against some nebulous, unspecified catastrophe that if it comes to fruition, unions will be effectively powerless to stop anyway.

If that's the best case you can make, they're even more useless to skilled workers than I thought.

Would you like to buy some insurance against aliens destroying the earth as well?

I'm not sure how it can be "likely factually wrong" that you are better off without paying a third party who does very little for you as an individual who is above average in your field than you would be if you didn't have that money. Concessions in indirect benefits often come at the cost of higher wages and the portability of earnings, the latter being one of the major downsides for skilled professionals.

All above average employees I know don't need to worry about staying on the better of average for some arbitrary metric. If the company makes a mistake and fires them, they can quickly get a job elsewhere. It's the people who have no better alternative than their current job who need the protection provided by a union contract, and they have no better alternative because the company made a mistake in the other direction when agreeing to employ them, and the union's job is to bar the employer from correcting that mistake.

And yes, unions successfully fought for improved work conditions 100+ years ago. What have they done to earn their keep during the careers of anyone posting on this site? Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one? It's certainly not going to improve my total compensation, and the people who did the hard work you mentioned are long gone so it's no benefit to them for me to pay dues into an organization they were affiliated with at some point.

And you can more easily take care of those needs yourself if you aren't required to subsidize your below average colleagues.

I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.

Why is it that so many union supporters point to entities like SAG and professional athlete unions in the US when advocating for unions, when they are a massive exception to the norm?

I would join a union like SAG. I have zero interest in being forced to make contributions to a political organization who has a passing interest in my well-being at best and is structured to benefit below-average workers.

What are the legal protections for collectively bargaining as non-employees with a corporation, if any?

It seems like there wouldn't be (and shouldn't be) any.

Have you filled out a federal income tax return in the US?

It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).

I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?

The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced?

As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.

I'm just anticipating the next version of “Community-based EBITDA" that sama rolls out in the latest attempt to convince everyone that spending >$1 to earn $1 is a good idea.

The rise of editors that will own your system just by browsing to the wrong folder without opening or running anything is relatively speaking newer, but I think most people in HN audience should be able to intuit some of the risks, especially when untrusted PRs and semi-trusted LLM bots are in the mix with your "trusted" codebase.

This is kind of my point. People are doing things that are objectively stupid from a security perspective on a daily basis, and actively rejecting the idea of protecting themselves because they keep doing it after either identifying some risk themselves, being told about it directly, or being told about how others were negatively impacted by the same actions.

And in my opinion, the benefits they get from these changes to their dev environment are negligible, and that's not even getting into how every file is potentially executable code to an LLM.

It's far from a blindspot. People have been yelling about this from the rooftops for the last several years.

No one cares about security. People used to care for a fairly short period of time after something bad happened to them, but even that seems to have gone by the wayside as breaches, leaks, and use of exploited code has become normalized.

What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?

99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.

Use value and exchange value are highly correlated for basically all goods other than collectibles and luxury items, and even then their "use" often is providing an emotional boost to their owner.

It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?

I'm not underestimating its impact.

Of course the recession that would likely occur if/when the AI spending merry go round comes to an ends would have a negative impact on the entire economy. In that scenario, would you rather own a stock that's going to zero, or one has taken a hit because of the other company going to zero but still has a viable long term business?

Would you rather have an unusually large concentration in a few very specific companies in your portfolio, or have increased diversity (and therefore lower risk) in this unprecedented scenario?

Maybe if you use the word collapse a few more times in your contrived and completely unrealistic example, it'll actually have some merit!

Medicare does have many problems and arguably isn't cheaper than our current private systems, but I would say a large portion of the uninsured also are part of the cohort most in need of health services (or they're young and healthy and cheap to insure/treat and largely irrelevant), which is why I think it would make sense to just roll them into some public plan instead of using EMTALA as a catastrophic insurer of last resort.

Demand for a magic box that solves your problems at a low cost will always remain extraordinarily high. Supply is the hard part, because it will never catch up.

Some people believed LLMs were that magic box for a time, and that time is coming to an end if the parent poster is correct.

The "almost" portion of your statement is the entire point, and re-balancing isn't going to cause "every other share price to collapse".

I am explicitly avoiding these indices until this exploit is fixed. The lack of diversity in SPY and the like is already bad enough without these pump and dump schemes being added to the mix.

Buy alternative ETFs with similar performance and low fees. VIG is one example.

AI is far from becoming an essential work utility, Anthropic will not be used by approximately 100% of the office workers in the developed world, and a price to sales ratio of over 5 for a company that is struggling to become profitable due to high operating expenses seems exceptionally high.

The problem with all these companies is that they are priced as if their training and inference costs are going to come way down, but somehow only for them specifically.

You can like your current healthcare and understand that the current system is inefficient. I am one of those people.

There's also many, many types of universal healthcare (including the very crude version we currently have in the US), some of which have more support than others.

I would support a system like Japan, Switzerland, or the UK, but not one where private insurance is banned.

We have done a number of things about it, most of which are more expensive and less effective than the very simple option of just adding them to Medicare, but expecting people to change from what they know and like to benefit less than 10% of the population is not a winning strategy.