didgetmaster

It is difficult to know when you 'have enough' money because like death, you never know what is around the corner. Most of us earn, save, and spend money during our working lives so that we can retire comfortably; but it seems like there is no magic number for when we have arrived.

How long will we live? What will our health be like? Would we like to travel? Leave the kids an inheritance? Give it away? All of these can influence the number.

The secret to amassing wealth is to always live beneath your means; but don't forget to enjoy yourself as you make the journey towards retirement.

I don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished.

And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.

People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.

If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.

I didn't say only do air conditioning during the peak times. You can definitely adjust the AC so that it runs on full during the peak times and cools things down a few degrees below ideal, then back it off and allow the temperature to rise a few degrees once electricity becomes more expensive.

Again, if the incentives are there, people will adjust.

Renewable power tends to be sporadic. When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining brightly, they produce a lot of cheap power.

People think the solution is to build huge battery packs to store all that excess power during peak periods and drain them down during off-peak times.

That is certainly a solution, even if it is an expensive one. Perhaps a cheaper one is to get everyone to consume the power while it is being produced. Running air conditioners at full blast. Washing clothes and dishes. Charging electric vehicles. There are many things that can be shifted to those peak times, if the incentives are there.

Call me a skeptic (which I probably am), but the bar seems incredibly low. I am glad they are finally doing something about worthless college degrees financed by the taxpayers; but this feels like too little.

The colleges don't have to prove the degree is worth the price paid for it, only that it is better than nothing. If you go to some Ivy League school and rack up $100K debt, you don't have to show that you will earn enough to pay that back; only show that you make more than if you never went to college.

OP is probably referring to many engineering managers who think it is irrational to spend an hour in order to speed up a computing task that only shaves a few milliseconds off.

Even when that software is widely used so the few milliseconds add up to thousands of hours in collective time savings. 'We don't pay for user's time, only your's', is the attitude. Again 'irrational'.

I don't know if the term 'crash' has a formal definition (for me personally, I would define it as a 25% fall or more in less that 3 months); but I think we will experience a number of 'corrections' of about 10% within the next 5 years.

The vast majority of the homeless in the US, are homeless by choice. They are addicted to drugs and/or refuse to get a job.

You don't have to be able to afford to buy a nice house in order to escape living on the streets.

You might think that my story is tired, but literally millions of people in this country have done the same thing. Telling people who are struggling that they can't improve, certainly doesn't help.

I think we have all written some code that looks bulletproof to us. We run a set of tests with all the inputs we can think of, and it passes with flying colors (after several iterations of course).

Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.

Those numbers for 2026 may be right, but they absolutely do not mean that anyone who finds themselves in one of those categories must stay there.

While there are many people who are currently in the bottom 50% and will probably stay there; no one is a slave who has to stay there.

My original post (which is somehow unpopular on HN) points this out. I spent my first 30 years in that group and worked my way out of it.

Every discussion about the 'top 10%' seems to make the underlying assumption that the set of people who fall under that category are consistent. While there are certainly individuals who enter the top 10% (or top 1%) and stay there; there are large numbers of people who move in and out of those categories.

For me personally, I am in the top 10%; but a few decades ago, I was not.

..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians.

I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.

You equate 'consciousness' with the brain's ability to store long term memories. I'm not sure if that definition fits.

Has anyone been able to determine at what age the brain gains this ability? I have a few vague memories from my early childhood, but I can't remember just how old I was when I experienced them.

Every company, from the small business to mega-corps, needs to extract more value from their employees than the produce; otherwise it will likely go bankrupt.

Even within successful companies, it is a challenging task to figure out just how much value each employee produces. Some positions are required, but do not produce revenue. Sometimes whole departments are a sunk cost.

It is up to each employee at review time, to argue that the value they produce is far greater than their salary; in order to negotiate a raise. No one is automatically entitled to anything extra, just because the company had a good year.

Your post implies that every employee of a successful company is entitled to a share of whatever wealth that company generates.

As a career programmer, I worked for several companies. Each time I took a job, I negotiated what I thought was a fair salary for my wages. Some companies also gave me stock options and one gave me founder's stock. When a company had a good year, they often gave generous bonuses.

Only when I took great personal risk, did I expect to share the rewards that come with a successful company. I was always grateful when I got more than I agreed to work for, but I never felt entitled to it.

A janitor working for a 10x company should not feel entitled to 10x of the salary as another janitor working down the street for another company that is struggling.

Just because only 1 in 500 makes it to a billion, does not mean the other 499 are failures. Plenty of startup founders turn a few million into much more.

If someone has an idea that 'only' makes them 20 million, I would call that a great success; even if it takes dozens of years to get there.

We all learned this back in first grade. The kids that behaved in class and did their homework did not command most of the teacher's time and effort. It was the problem children who refused to follow the rules and needed constant praise for every bit of actual effort that they put into their studies; that got the teacher's attention.

Hopefully they were wrong.

Over a thousand years of history has shown that they were right.

Just like with politics, you see large numbers of people dividing up into two different camps. Pretty soon every statement that raises a legitimate concern about AI will be seen as 'hating AI' and every observation about how AI helped in a particular situation will be seen as coming from an 'AI fanboy'.

On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.

GPUs have been in high demand since cryptocurrency became a thing? Are you saying that something built for AI can't be used for other workloads?

Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.

But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.

What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?

I remember playing Digger on my IBM PC clone sold by AT&T (6300) back in 1987 or 1988.

I also remember that the game speed was set to some factor of the computer's clock speed. When I later tried to run the same game after I upgraded my hardware, the game went so fast, you could not even play it.

There are apparently 20+ million of them who entered the U.S. illegally, along with millions more who think it is a crime to deport them (even the criminals).

It is so nearly impossible, that somewhere between a half million and a million people have done it every year for the past few decades (including last year).

The whole immigration argument basically boils down to two schools of thought.

1) Those who believe that every human born on this planet has a basic right to move to and live in, any country that they want.

2) Those who believe that the people who are currently citizens of countries around the world, have the right to set strict restrictions on who is allowed to move there.

These two schools are fundamentally at odds with each other. Some members of both camps will go to the extreme to enforce their position and demonize anyone in the other camp.

What? For the record, I am not saying that you shouldn't ever use AI. Plenty of good programmers use it as a tool to boost their productivity or to validate things.

But if you are using AI to write all your code, I think you are missing a lot. It is like when you use LLMs to write your whole paper for you, rather than to check your grammar or offer critique of something you actually wrote.

Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like.

I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.

I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.