charlesu

In your case, it won't. You would be better off renting and investing the extra $2k in assets that are productive rather than speculative. This should be obvious, but the West as a whole has bought into the housing as a form of wealth and can't let the music stop now without ruining millions of lives.

Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.

You’re not underpaid but you could make more by switching companies. Some companies simply pay more than others for the same role, level, and responsibilities because they’re engineering driven or better funded or more successful or operate at greater scale/profitability.

Any hot tech startup or FANG company or newish enterprise SaaS (Snowflake) or previous unicorn (AirBnB, Lyft) can pay those numbers total compensation for a SWE with 4+ years experience. Apply to all of them and see what you can get.

Who said these people aren’t working? I see a lot of people retraining, pivoting, and taking care of others. That’s work. Just because it doesn’t pay doesn’t mean it isn’t work or valuable. Being a stay at home parent doesn’t pay, but it’s clearly valuable.

Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.

Why would you need to label someone by their ethnicity in daily life? This stuff really only comes up in two situations:

1. Forms where the person in question just fills it in themselves (generally the option is Black/African anyway)

2. Discussions about groups of people in which case the labels are descriptive and fairly easy to navigate.

I’m not reducing anyone’s ethnicity because Black one ethnicity and Igbo is another.

So Blacks aren’t a “real people”? Is your actual argument that African-Americans don’t exist as a distinct ethnic group? If that’s your argument you should say so.

Let’s bring in an academic to this discussion. Someone already linked the AP guidelines, but I’ll quote an actual professor with a background in this kind of stuff.

Here’s quote from an article written by John McWhorter, a prominent Black conservative who happens to be a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford the subject[1]:

“But what about the black business districts that thrived across the country after slavery was abolished? What about Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Thurgood Marshall, none born in Africa and all deeply American people? And while we're on Marshall, what about the civil rights revolution, a moral awakening that we gave to ourselves and the nation.”

“My roots trace back to working-class Black people - Americans, not foreigners - and I'm proud of it. I am John Hamilton McWhorter the Fifth. Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I can feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not Sierra Leone.”

“So, we will have a name for ourselves - and it should be Black. "Colored" and "Negro" had their good points but carry a whiff of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Bull Connor about them, so we will let them lie. "Black" isn't perfect, but no term is.”

Are you better qualified to say whether Black should or shouldn’t be capitalized than a Black English and linguistics professor at Stanford? Is your take more academic than his? And if so on what basis? Because it doesn’t seem to be based context or history or what Black people call or have called themselves.

My claim and one his claims is simple: there is a culturally distinct group within America that is called African-American and Black and that the B should be capitalized. Whether The better is Black or African-American is up for debate but only within the African-American community. It’s our right to determine what the proper term is. In the meantime, the consensus is that you should capitalize the B in Black when referring to black Americans who descended from black slaves in America.

[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/why-im-black-not-af...

Black when capitalized doesn’t refer to a race. It refers to an ethnicity. It’s not a retcon to capitalize ethnicities. We’ve been capitalizing ethnicities for a while now.

Black is an overloaded term. It’s a race and an ethnicity. If you were to write about black people in Africa, it would be nonsensical to capitalize it because black doesn’t communicate any shared identity in that context. The right granularity is national, ethnic, or tribal.

But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.

Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.

It’s common to capitalize ethnicities and Black is an ethnicity in the United States. White is considered a race. Is your issue that Black is capitalized or that white is not capitalized?

I’ll go back to the office when they give me my own four walls and a door.

Because the alternative is to starve?

You can take advantage of people when they’re in dire straits. That’s not indicative of some greater truth about the price of labor but a fact of exploitation.

What jobs have natural job security? Either you’re protected by a union, a professional association, or having a rare and valuable skill set. The unions have been busted, professional associations are exclusive by their nature and most people definitionally do not have rare and marketable skills. As a result, an increasingly large fraction of jobs are gig work, part-time, or on contract. That includes work in law and software engineering. Precarity is the natural state of an unregulated, de-unionized job market and it is not a bug but a feature. It has little to do with our public schools.

Speak for yourself. I’m in no way concerned about remote work depressing wages. Competition has always been global.

The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?

Exactly. Not only should we "Give the parents choice of schools" we should make every school a good choice.

I actually discussed this very topic elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296242

I won't repeat my claims here, but I'll add that at this point, at least part of that overrepresentation is self-perpetuating. Many people expect the next Michael Jordan to look like Michael Jordan. That's why Armon Johnson was almost a first round draft pick in 2010 while Jeremy Lin got passed over completely despite the fact that Jeremy Lin is clearly talented by any objective measure.

I'm also uncertain that: 1) cognitive and physical development have the same inhibitors and 2) those inhibitors affect cognition and physical development to the same extent. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that lead hurts the brain more than the rest of the body.

Add ending the drug war and socialized medicine that provides for mental health services to the list.

Having two parents at home is important, but having a social worker and psychologist can do wonders too.

We can't fix everything but we should do all we can to give ever child a fair shot and a fair shot is more than free primary education.

Getting rid of advanced classes does nothing to solve the real problem: different kids have wildly different resources/home lives and those differences often cut across racial lines. Want to fix large difference in racial makeup between regular and advanced classes? Implement universal pre-K. Give all children free breakfast, lunch, and dinner that's healthy. Give parents $700 per child. Mandate that all homes have safe drinking water free of lead. Put social workers, psychologists, and nurses in schools. Tackle the material circumstances that tend to stifle a child's development and the rest will follow. Canceling classes doesn't do anything for anyone.

People are different and they have different aptitudes. There is some thinking that if we don't have ALL categories/jobs/promotions with the same population proportion it is because "systemic racism".

I am still waiting for at least 53% of NBA be white.

People are in fact different and have different aptitudes, but there's no reason to believe that those differences cut across racial lines. When you see wildly different racial/socioeconomic/gender representation in a field, you should look at it more closely.

Consider basketball. It's predominantly black today, but it wasn't always so. Basketball was at one point more closely associated with Jewish people than blacks people. In fact, not long ago, people called basketball a Jewish sport [1]. And here's a fun fact: the first non-white NBA player was Asian [2]. There was a point in history where Jews and Asians were better represented in basketball than black people.

So why is the NBA 80%+ black today? Let's look at outside factors. During the Great Migration, blacks moved to from southern towns to northern cities and transitioned from a largely rural population to a largely urban one. In a city, basketball is the perfect sport for a poor/working class kid. It doesn't require a field. It doesn't require a lot of equipment. It can be played on pavement. It's easy to pick up but has a high talent ceiling. So if you're a kid in the city who's interested in a sport and you don't have a ton of resources, you're probably going to end up playing basketball for reasons that may have less to do with your natural interests and aptitudes than your situation, environment, and (eventually) societal expectations.

This dynamic cuts both ways. Jeremy Lin was one of the best high school players in the country in 2005 but wasn't nearly as a heavily recruited as he should have been based purely on his stats. UCLA wanted him to be a walk on. If he were black, he would have gotten an athletic scholarship and been on magazine covers. I wonder how many other Asian basketball players are underrecruited simply because they're Asian. Whether it's 1 or 1,000, the sport is poorer for it.

Sometimes what appears to be the consequence of "different aptitudes" can suggest something systemic instead. That doesn't mean that we should enforce a quota, but it does mean that we shouldn't take differences in representation to be the result of differences in aptitude.

You can see it on your own family with siblings. Same "genetics" but very different aptitudes and skills.

I'm not sure that siblings have the "same genetics" or that it's fair to compare differences in populations to differences in individuals. It's obvious that individuals are different due to genetics. It's not obvious that the distribution of those individual differences should differ across racial lines.

[1] https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/when-basketball-was-j...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wataru_Misaka

Does it say she kept her old salary? The going rate for a design director is probably a lot higher than that of an entry-level software engineer.

but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity.

Isn’t this true of almost everything?

Most people who attempt [x] will never be at a good at [x].

Technical fields aren’t special in this regard. Replace [x] with running and it’s just as true despite the fact that just about everyone attempts to run at some point. And yet the vast majority of people aren’t proficient runners in any shape or form. But just about any activity could replace running and it’d be just as true.

Attempts aren’t worth much. Intention and dedication are what make most people at least OK at their craft.

While this is entirely anecdotal I have observed a LOT of time theft by employees.

Are these employees paid hourly? If not, it’s not really time theft if the work gets done on time.

That was 1997 at a conference. There was no social media or cancel culture.

My point is that you can be fired for insulting the wrong rich or the wrong anybody if it’s caught on camera and gets enough views and it brings shame to your lord. You’re not free when you clock out or leave the office. As an employee, you’re a representative of your company 24/7 whether you like it or not.

Outside of work I certainly live in a free society. I can walk up to a rich person ("a lord") and insult him to his face and nothing will happen.

If you really think that’s true, do it on camera. Upload it to YouTube. Let it go viral. See something happens.

The way to combat mistaken beliefs is to allow them to voice their views, then refute their arguments, not to call them liars and suppress their views. And even if they do not accept the refutation, the arguments should be left up for people to read and make their informed choice.

I don’t think this a good approach.

It takes real effort to refute a bad faith untruthful claim, but just it takes a single breath of air to make one. Lies scale better than the truth. And the people making bad faith arguments know this.

Maybe ridicule isn’t the answer but it’s something more than just facts and truth. Perhaps shame?

You’d think that’d be the case, but many of the post-mortems are pretty high level too. Most SEs don’t know HTTP from top to bottom. And they’re mostly fine.

Is that the case? I don’t remember Roosevelt ushering us into full blown anti-utopian autocracy with his Square Deal.

No, we can just give people used phones. We have such a surplus of some things that we can actually redistribute them in a non-zero sum way.

$1500 a month for an apartment is a ton. In most places, you’d need to make $60,000 to meet the minimum income requirement. That’s a lot of many for many people.