shipman05

Inflation has been high enough that it messes with our perception of things, but I believe the data shows otherwise (at least in the US).

- Disappearance of cheap new cars: You can get entry level Chevys, Kias, and Hyundais for < $25k, which is about $14k in 2001 dollars and many more of those cars will last until 200,000 miles and have safety features only available on luxury cars in 2001.

- Massive supply reduction of used cars: I actually don't have good data on this, but it seems like there's pipeline is still borked from COVID era irregularities. That said, cars these days have much better quality and last longer. A car with more than 100,000 miles in the 90s was near the end of its life. That's a typical listing Facebook marketplace these days.

- Repair costs of old cars: Repairs can be expensive, but again, cars today are much more reliable than they were in the 90s or earlier. Even simple things like recommended oil change frequency changing from 3k miles to 10k miles for most models makes a huge difference in total cost of ownership.

- Gas prices: Gas prices have certainly spiked recently (gee, I wonder why), but the cost of gas in real dollars has been higher several times in the past 25 years (see the second chart here: https://www.macrotrends.net/4453/us-gasoline-prices) It peaked in 2008 over $6 per gallon in 2026 dollars.

The early 2010s, the age of financial bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, and two "forever" wars.

No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.

That's a cool idea. I'm no longer the right age for such things, but I'm glad people are trying to create unsurveilled spaces.

It feels doomed, though. Smart glasses wearers are being shamed today, but the tech will only get more inconspicuous. And HD cameras are so small and cheap that phone cameras are only one of many potential sources of surveillance.

With ubiquitous tiny cameras, quality networks (even in remote areas thanks to Starlink), cheap storage, and increased analysis capabilities thanks to AI, it feels like planet panopticon is here.

I think many social sites have tried to solve it, but in a world where anything is easily saved or screenshotted, it's still effectively a "universal room". Not to mention that properly implementing a form of role-based access control is a big ask for a lot users.

Not tying your IRL identity to online communications only solves one side of the problem. You can't use your anon accounts to communicate as yourself to family, friends, and colleagues and maintain your anonymity.

Not having accounts tied to IRL identity also allows AI bots to operate as equals to human users, which dilutes the quality of conversation in those spaces.

We've built an incredibly effective communications apparatus. It's a shame its only users are money-obsessed primates and the robots we've built in our image.

Took me a few reads, too.

I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.

It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder

Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.

It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)

Or we could just build trains (in the US, other wealthy places seem to already get this)

Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

RIMR says:

nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States

It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:

1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.

2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)

3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)

4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.

So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.

It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.

I'm (genuinely) curious as to what your idea of a less dangerous theology would be. I'm an atheist, but I find the inherent dignity of humans as beings made in the image of God to be one of the more appealing aspects of the Abrahamic faiths.

Some of the greatest horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries were committed by people who refuted that theology and replaced it with Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.

Such an interesting comment. I've commuted 1+ hours per day via bicycle for years and never once had a dog encounter. 3 per day is wild.

If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.

I remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver.

After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.

There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.

So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)

(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)

Touche, I was thinking of it more as 100 miles in length, not 100 miles in width running all the way down the coast, but your interpretation seems more correct.

IDK if pretty much everyone can exclude Florida and Texas, the second and third most populated states. (Or I suppose you could be excluding the Northeast Corridor instead of Florida)

I make it a point to have 5-10 minute ad-hoc conversations with my directs 1-2 times a week, feels a lot more natural than a scheduled 1-on-1.

I prefer the exact opposite, especially when working remote.

When I was a manager, I saved non-urgent topics for a weekly 1-1 instead of pestering busy people with "Quick chat?" or "Do you have a minute?" messages. I wish others would do the same.

We call that "pulling an Altman" these days.

That's the whole point. When people hear "the middle class is shrinking" they intuitively believe people are slipping down a rung and joining the ranks of the working poor. The data doesn't back that up. The middle class is shrinking, but more people are moving up a rung than falling down one.

Which isn't to say that you're wrong about wealth inequality increasing. The share of wealth controlled by the ultra wealthy IS increasing, but the specifics of how that is playing out are nuanced and, at times, counter-intuitive.

The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.

This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).

The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.

TBH, it seemed such an obvious point you're making that I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars, but from the (very little) digging that I did, it looks like that's not the case.

In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...

I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.

Everyone I know who studied astrophysics ended up in Fintech doing data science anyway. "illusion of choice"

There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.

Hard to believe that people who suffered the atrocities of the first half of the 20th Century were tremendously optimistic about the future, yet birthrates were MUCH higher across the world.

I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.

- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates. - "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.

"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.

Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.

I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.

The men and women who protested with MLK Jr. risked physical harm and death. Many of them paid the ultimate price. So it's hard to argue they didn't have much to lose.

I do take your point, though. Civil disobedience and a digital trail of "undesirable" behavior isn't compatible with a high-earning life in the corporate world.

I'd say irrational risk-ranking is a near-universal human weakness.

Parents fear kidnappers more than car accidents. The elderly fear whatever the news is telling them to fear more than heart disease or falling.

I think the info is even more outdated than that. The article is from August 2024 but it cites "a recent survey by Databricks" that from what I can tell isn't linked to, so who knows what data they're referring to.

I was deep into the big data ecosystem in the 2010s. Those numbers feel like they're from 2017 or so. Scala has been on a slide every since.

Yep. Totally agree. It's situational. IMO, a marginally prettier presentation is rarely worth the opportunity cost of what else I could get done with the time, but sometimes it is.

A text-based tool like this certainly puts a ceiling on presentation quality. Whether that really matters is situational. In most cases, content is more important than style once a certain threshold of "not hideous" is reached.

The same tradeoffs apply to a text-based diagram tool like mermaid.js vs more traditional diagramming tools like Miro.

My coworkers' Miro diagrams are prettier than my mermaid diagrams. But mine are composable and able to be versional controlled. I'm able to create complex diagrams many times faster using a text-based tool.

Ultimately, slides and diagrams are for conveying knowledge. If you're able to convey the same knowledge with significantly less effort, that outweighs the loss of "style points" in most situations (internal knowledge-transfer, meet-ups, etc).

"If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty."

I grant that, but I never claimed the contrary. I never suggested that banning advertising reduces ALL harm or preserves ALL individual liberty. I just believe an ad ban is a good compromise position.

I'm a former smoker. I would have been outraged had the government tried to ban cigarettes while I was addicted to nicotine. But there's a difference between allowing people to have their vices and allowing people to spend hundreds of millions in multi-media advertising campaigns convincing others to pick up a new one.