cliglot

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CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692.

Rent alone will probably blow that. I live in a burnt out rust belt shithole city and I’m struggling to understand how rent is this high. I pay a good bit more than $692 to live in a slum just outside the ghetto right now and I have to feel gracious for that. It’s closer to what I paid in a decent middle class neighborhood in Florida. That was only 5-6 years ago.

This is in a city where the best people can say about it is: “well it’s cheaper”.

Hell when I lived in South Carolina from 2017-2019. My apartment there was closer to the stated inflation figure, but this was for a place that regularly flooded the downstairs neighbors and left me for weeks without AC in the peak of summer because of careless management.

Still not as bad as business rents. I’ve seen downtown business close because they’re being made to be $7000 for a shitty 100 year old property surrounded by condemned properties.

How you define “rely”.

I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.

Expecting to own a high end house in a dense metro are on its own, is a pretty insane expectation.

High salaries and an industry boom over the last decade created a sort of whiny arrogance amongst software developers, and particularly those of Silicon Valley. They desperately want to see themselves as the elite.

Of course the elite get their mansion where they want. They are entitled to it.

I may have ended up that way if I hadn’t gotten into software as a teenager. Luckily a did and the timing was right for me to make some sort of decent career out of it.

I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.

We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists

Right wing populists are nearly as useless as left wing populists now. The people they put into power and now betraying them for monied interests and they’re powerless to stop them. Fools thought they were the harbinger but in reality they were just the vessel.

It’s why major populist characters like MTG and Massie are giving up and getting slaughtered by puppets in a suits in primaries. It’s why Trump has been friendlier to the neocons that spent years insulting him than populists that helped propel him to power.

The real ghouls on the right that need to be stopped are the neo-reactionaries. I knew we were headed for strange times when the Silicon Valley elites simultaneously opened their pockets for the second term. It was purely a power play and it’s seemingly been effective.

I suspect the populists, right and left will care no more for the world they envision than they would for the status-quo even.

Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.

Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.

I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.

i think you need to catch up

Likely futile though. The way to get jobs now is through network and connections. If OP doesn’t have those already, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to “catch up” in a reasonable amount of time.

after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled

I’ll add: after these people spent years whining about “unelected bureaucrats”.

I’ve been in a bit of creative/intellectual rut the last few years, but before that there were a handful of things that intrigued me in the last 5-10 years.

Most recently, I became interested in the field of photonics/optics, particularly in the field of novel optical communications research.

I’ve had mild interests in things like Biology and History since I was a child. The latter particularly hooked me a few years back.

Neuroscience is a pretty cool one as well. The human brain is of course one of the most fascinating pieces of hardware in existence and understanding it (to whatever level we currently can) is incredibly interesting to me.

At one point I thought about going into security research, but now that everyone and their mother is headed that direction, it’s become less feasible.

Unfortunately I don’t even have a bachelors degree, and most of the fields are research heavy and not very accessible to hobbyists, so my actual interaction with these things remains relegated to reading papers/pop sci articles/etc.

There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.

Instead the “Economic incentives” go to the Chinese owners who then learn that Americans are not interested in working in a sweatshop and instead rely on third parties to supply them with illegal workers and engage in white collar crime.

I’m suspicious of “re-industrialization” pushes because everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s resulted in at best a foreign company given massive tax breaks to create a few hundred low paid button pusher jobs and maybe a handful of better paying technician jobs.

I just wait till I feel I have too many and just nuke them all at one lol.

This paints everyone as right or left, which I don’t find accurate or helpful.

I’d argue it’s incredibly helpful.

I live in a state with a couple contentious elections coming up. Something I’ve noticed is no one seems to have anything to say regarding these elections.

It’s fucking bleak. Every discussion I see ends with swaths of old boomers stating how they know absolutely nothing about the candidate, their positions or views, but intend to vote for them simply because of the associated “blue” or “red”. It’s “vote blue no matter who” or “trvst the plan” low IQ idiocy.

I hate the left/right, blue/red, whatever dichotomy. I think it’s weak and it’s rarely held when having real discussions with real people, but when it comes to voting I don’t think anything but that dichotomy matters anymore.

I recall a story some years back of a tank plant in Ohio that was producing tanks that went straight to a landfill.

The military just did not need so much tanks for their modern conflicts. However that tank plant was the one major employer in this town and losing that could cost a career politician his seat!

I’m so glad that the lack of term limits allows for such long term thinking and political expertise.

Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.

One thing I’ve noticed more and more is all the “cool” jobs require you to already be an established domain expert.

Another things I’ve noticed, and this is probably mostly just my opinions evolving, but all the “cool” stuff that catches my interest these days is not in software. Software is boring.

I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.

Culture. The Uber for Dogs idiots will gulp down the kool-aid like they’re dying in the dessert.

I agree this is a fine compromise. Sadly the zealots in my state won’t end there. They’re going after plain leaf powders too.

I've used kratom for 10 years for pain management and it was my best option at the time.

Any weird side effects. My girlfriend and I tend to use Kratom for the mild stimulant effect.

The worst is ever done for me is make me nauseous enough to vomit, but I live in a state trying to ban all kratom now and the discourse around it is full of anecdotes of people claiming withdrawals as bad as heroin.

Now I’m not a big heroin user, but I’ve been mildly addicted to certain substances (nicotine, weed). I don’t think I’ve ever had withdrawals from Kratom or really felt any craving for it.

I’m really just hoping the busy-bodies don’t get their eyes on Kava.

Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)

Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.

I gave up with a dreams of returning to school when I realized in my early 20s, despite paying my own rent, bills, taxes, etc, the financial aid system considered me a dependent of my father still and lumped his income in with the calculations done to determine what I get/don’t get.

I'm not trying to gatekeep or belittle the author, but there's something funny about this genre of articles that assert with utmost conviction what it takes to be successful in business. Of course, we all have opinions, but this piece doesn't say "here's what I think". It says, more or less, "here's how you succeed".

A difficult lesson I’ve struggled to come to terms with is that it’s socially advantageous to appear confident that you’re right than it is to actually be right.

The government has had no qualms in the past using the army or national guard to break strikes.

often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.

Or just technology. Almost every “50 year old cold case solved” I see is because advancements in DNA processing .

I guess the Chinese are also hacking people’s power company and hacking their bills up.

Maybe if these jackasses want data centers so bad, they should build it next to their own neighborhood. Having these people been hoarding land recently? Let people with more means than myself subsidize it.

Perhaps one day we’ll have a government not made up of dementia patients who can’t seem to remember what they just said and did the previous week.

Probably because they’re too stupid to see all the wonderful things that have now. You can buy a massive flat screen TV for under $400 at Walmart! Computers are so cheap that everyone can be a gambling/porn addict now. Who cares about high beef prices, just eat the livers you peasant. It’s not like you’re going to starve.

Your grandpa could afford a house and family, but he’d never have been able to afford something so wonderful and life changing! US consumers should stop complaining and realize that those starving children in Africa can’t afford such TVs and they should shut up and be happy with what we give them.

If only mobile devices had better external monitor support.

What I don’t get is modern phones are impressive. My iPhone from several years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and certain older Total War titles. So clearly the raw compute power and control limitations aren’t an issue (I doubt game companies care much about the latter at all now that RTS games made it consoles)

Yet I don’t see many interesting games available for mobile. It’s all copy/paste puzzle/gambling/idle/gacha crap.

I see this as more or less analogous to the DevOps shift of the mid 2010s.

Ugh, I desperately need to find an exit soon.

but ultimately what they seek is "fame and glory" (literal quote).

lol how old are these people? You have better chance at fame and glory if you started a stupid YouTube channel.

What if one’s entire existence doesn’t revolve around the role they play in capitalist systems.

Quit playing for a little bit. Quit working. See how quickly people derided and devalue you. If I don’t work, I don’t eat, I don’t get a place to sleep, etc. and “the role I play in the capitalist system” determines exactly how much of those things I can have.

I find it similar to “it’s not useful to compare yourself to others” adage. In society, you’re constantly evaluated or compared against others: when trying to find work, when trying to find a home, etc.

Sure maybe you can fuck off and try and live like Diogenes, but you’ll more likely to just collect a string of arrests or unwanted conflict with junkies.

You are entirely defined by your role in the capitalist system because you cannot exist outside of it.