> I am genuinely baffled as to how I could potentially escape this…
> My only exit is over employment or launching some successful business.
This reads like you've already reached the peak of your career at 28. Do you really feel that way?
That seems pretty unusual for a skilled worker, like you'd seem to be if you're able to bank 12k in savings per year already, and as most commenters on HN are.
More usually, you'd expect to be earning much more in 10 years than you do today and perhaps even a fair amount more 10 yeads later depending on what you're capabilities and opportunities turn out to be.
Do you not feel like that's in the cards for you? Why?
I work as a senior engineer in Germany, I make more than most people, but I find it frustrating that a new grad could make more than I do by virtue of living in the states for lower quality work.
My expenses are about 40% of my net income and yet owning a house or apartment in a city like Munich or Dublin and close to jobs looks infeasible unless I am married.
That of course excludes the fact that I don’t expect to live to see my 50s because of potential health concerns.
And of course, should I spend my 20s and 30s working for seemingly nothing?
That is the core problem, world is much fuller, quadruple that for any major city where most (not only) HN crowd finds good work unless remote. And unsurprisingly, almost everybody wants piece of that extremely limited pie that isn't growing.
> And of course, should I spend my 20s and 30s working for seemingly nothing?
Considering the sentence above you most probably shouldn't. Now how to get most out of such situation I have no clue since I know nothing about it, but some mode of frugal living with tons of personal time (spent ie outdoors) seems like best course. Or move to some cheap dirty tropical paradise that will cost you 500 euro per month and live with locals.
Personal 2 euro cents - maybe world changed dramatically in past 15 years in this regard but I don't think so, not Europe at least. When I was moving to Switzerland back then I had some limited savings (with rather modest mortgage elsewhere that was steadily eating that), I moved directly into Zurich (because its the biggest place and I know german good enough to pass interviews), while not having neither job already nor even a place to sleep. Literally one Saturday morning I stepped out of coach bus in Zurich bus station with big backpack and suit in envelope on my back. Adventure begins (or continues, see below).
First job - find where I will sleep tonight. Managed to find some student dormitory that was also open to outsiders during summer (lonely planet). Once there, started looking for a room to rent, found and arranged it in 4 days, it costed me 700 CHF per month, and this was central Zurich! Total monthly expenses were around 1100chf, very frugal period but I found it liberating. I walked around in forests a lot, took trains to Alps over weekends. Only once I had that place I started a job search (you need Swiss phone nr and be available for in-person interviews within a day or two), took me 2.5 months to find actually 2 good offers (this was quite recent after 2008 crash where folks were advising me against such risky moves, job market wasn't the best). Of course the uncertainty and dwindling savings + mortgage also put some pressure and uneasiness on me, worthy things in life never come without some effort and suffering.
Literally none of my peers wanted to go down this road, they had comfy jobs, but almost all wanted me to find them work in Switzerland once I had landed. LOL that's not how life (or moving to Switzerland) works. What helped me I backpacked through India for 3 months before starting all this after quitting previous job, so frugality was just continuation of already started trend. Nature is for free, so is exercise, and Swiss have tons of those.
What I want to say with all this - you have options, way more than you realize. Follow the path of your own happiness and fulfillment whatever it means for you specifically. Good luck
Remote work is the way out of this. It has the ability to free people from living near their workplaces that comes with a benefit of lower cost of living and higher quality all at the same time. However remote workers are fighting against big money that owns commercial real estate in the major city centers that will only bring profit if people spend time there.
Even if you thread the needle and pull it off (2 high-paying jobs in a household in time for kids), you'll find the infrastructure and community around those well-paying jobs aren't designed for kids and most others didn't thread the needle. It certainly feels like picking between where having kids is within reach versus where the "well-paying" jobs are.
>> it takes over a decade to save 100k good luck buying a house
First time home buyers (meaning those who haven't owned a home in the last three years) can get a loan with a down payment of 3%. 12k would be the down payment for a $400,000 house. The average home price in the US is around $350,000.
There are even better deals available for some people, military veterans for example.
My guess is you will see more people try to move into the military/police for these benefits and pensions once they do the math.
The military/police also suffers different image problems than corporate jobs, but advancement and benefits is not one of them. (I am thinking military -> cleared jobs, not within the military)
These deals are a joke and unattainable to the vast majority of people in the post-covid economy.
paying $12k down on a $400k house with a fixed 6.48% rate means your monthly payment is almost $3k per month, and you'll pay more than the house is worth in interest alone. Not to mention if you only have $12k to put down you're _probably_ not in a position to pay $3k a month.
In Dublin — where I lived and rent is 2k unless you live 50 minutes away or manage to find roommates, your mortgage is 3x your salary, so at 130k I made at the time, about 400k, and I’d need 20% down payment…
Good luck buying your own house/apartment without being married. It isn’t happening.
The escape is to go to parts of the country where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it. Instead they bury their head in the sand and hope their hip urban centers suddenly become affordable.
Can they find a good paying job there in their chosen profession? Are there social opportunities for finding mates with matching interests? What are the art and music scenes like? There are a lot more things people think about than cheap housing.
There is a reason for the low demand, usually lack of economic activity and infrastructure. It may work if you're a senior IT freelancer, for other trades... less so.
> where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it.
No one does it because there are no jobs in those places. We're failing as a society to build sufficient housing in areas of economic opportunity. In some areas we're moving backwards, Manhattan housed 300K more people in 1950 than it does today.
Not every job can be remote and most types of work benefit from agglomeration effects. Pretending that we can will people to live middle Pennsylvania by creating jobs somehow is foolish when we could simply build housing where the jobs already are.
The US tends towards dictatorship; due process is an afterthought, people disappearing off the streets, citizens getting arrested at the border for nothing, tourists getting deported over minute issues such as an iffy hotel booking, and that's just off the top of my head from the last 2 days.
My entire life, professional and otherwise, DEI has ultimately stood for nothing other than "less white people". Of course it's dressed up in definitions that sound beautiful and moral to the supporters of DEI, but at the end of the day whenever someone uses the term "diverse" they are talking about "less white people".
When the company John Lewis was criticized for a lack of diversity [1], it was because they had too many whites.
When the Academy Awards were criticized for a lack of diversity [2], it was because they had too many whites.
When the EU institutions were criticized for a lack of diversity [3], it was because they had too many whites.
When the BAFTAs were criticized for a lack of diversity [4], it was because they had too many whites.
When investigative journalism in the US was criticized for a lack of diversity [5], it was because they had too many whites.
When the show "Friends" was criticized for a lack of diversity [6], it was because they had too many whites.
After decades and decades of this blatant animosity against people like me I can honestly say I do not care at all what Trump does to these programs or how he goes about destroying them, as long as they are destroyed and the people that supported them punished.
And here I was talking about consequential stuff, like helping impoverished communities, adding guardrails to prevent old-boys clubs and enable skilled individuals to enter fields without prejudice for “being black” or “being gay”.
Who cares about criticism over inconsequential stuff? Is it that difficult to care about impoverished people?
The meals for kids at schools is a “dei” program, and republicans axed it, well done! The repubs are also sending kids to work overtime and during the night, effectively gutting their future, and of course it’s the impoverished kids who will have to do that.
> The meals for kids at schools is a “dei” program
I have never heard of such a thing, can you link to where such a program existed?
Free or reduced cost school lunch is a very common program, but it's based entirely on income, not race, gender or sexuality, which is what everyone means when they talk about "dei programs".
If that’s what they mean it’s because they have been played like a fiddle.
If I were to offer lunches for kids in an impoverished community that happens to be predominantly X race, the sensationalists will say “RACE” “DISCRIMINATION”, while the program is simply addressing one region.
Now the funny thing is that the Democratic Party has repeatedly pushed for universally free lunches to take any potential concerns over race out of the picture and the republic party keeps voting those down.
I have never observed the phenomenon you're describing and would like to learn more.
Can you link me to one of these stories where "sensationalists said race discrimination" about a program to alleviate poverty which was not actually racially biased?
>helping impoverished communities, adding guardrails to prevent old-boys clubs and enable skilled individuals to enter fields without prejudice for “being black” or “being gay”
Exactly, like I said - "it's dressed up in definitions that sound beautiful and moral to the supporters of DEI".
I do not care for theoretical definitions of why your ideology is good and moral, I care about its practical effects on me and the world around me. And somehow, those practical effects always turn out to be "less white people".
And I will NEVER support an ideology that disenfranchises me under the cover of equality!
What I am expressing here is that practical things that all of us can agree are good and useful, such as helping impoverished kids, result in tangle positive consequences, an educated society has less crime, therefore net positive. This is a practical and real world positive consequence.
>And somehow, those practical effects always turn out to be "less white people".
In contrast to your silly and inconsequential examples of just "criticism", I presented examples where DEI has tangible and measurable results which are net positive. What you express, really, just shows confirmation bias, and you remain oblivious to all the positive things that have come out of "DEI" programmes that you have benefited from.
Case in point, women die significantly more in car crashes [1] because law mandates male-sized dummies. Some diversity here in terms of gender would have pointed that out, but until the moment this was written, nothing was done.
DEI programmes exist to avoid discrimination such as that one.
> According to Verity Now, a US-based campaign group striving to achieve equity in vehicle safety, women are 73% more likely to be injured – and 17% more likely to die – in a vehicle crash. Earlier this year, a study of 70,000 patients who had been trapped in vehicles found that women were more frequently trapped than men.
> Part of the problem is that test dummies modeled on the average female body are rarely used in safety tests by car manufacturers – because only “male” dummies are mandated for tests by regulators.
So I don't believe you will ever change or your mind or opinion, and you are discussing in bad faith, rendering this conversation utterly useless. Here's my recommendation, if you are going to try to get me to see your side, instead of emitting strawman arguments, try a steelman one, and avoid sensationalism.
It is not an either-or proposition. It would be hard to find a single thing in this world that is 100% bad or 100% good.
I do agree that the article you posted is a very good implementation of equitable practices and I would think it difficult to find anyone who would disagree with the mandating of female test dummies. Mostly because it's a very simple-to-understand example and the implementation of it doesn't hurt anyone else or take away from one group to give to another.
My problem is the pretending that your example is what DEI actually is and any other examples, like the ones I posted, from a number of mainstream media publications no less, are, for whatever reason, NOT considered DEI or, as you put it, are just "silly and inconsequential examples".
Those "silly and inconsequential examples" are supported by every mainstream DEI proponent, including every single DEI department at every large publicly-traded company. There have been numerous articles posted both here on HN and on the wider web about how these DEI implementations turn out to work in practice when it comes to employment prospects, promotion availability and the issues with general hiring practices (lowering standards to achieve some magic number of "equity" in female/minority representation).
My suggestion - if you truly care about the programs such as the one you listed in your comment, you better make sure that's what DEI actually focuses on. Otherwise, you should not be surprised that it gets swept away along with everything else that people feel falls under the DEI umbrella.
When you have privilege, equality feels like oppression. I don’t know where I saw that quote from but I feel this summarizes your points.
Punish who for what? Can you demonstrably prove white people were harmed by DEIA? White people ran the last administration and this one too. What more do you want? Do you get upset if you see a black person drive a nicer car than you?
This anti-DEIA stuff is just cooked up to distract you from the real problems facing this country.
>Can you demonstrably prove white people were harmed by DEIA?
Sure, here you go. This is just one example, but it's been widely covered in tech circles as well as here on HN and I chose it simply because it's one of the most egregious and shockingly honest account of how DEI works in practice as opposed to nice-sounding social theories
Things like this have been covered and talked about on HN for years, I am surprised you missed it, with a lot of commenters speaking out about their own experience which more often than not paints the same story each time - a company needs to reach a certain quota based on race or gender to avoid potential discrimination lawsuits, their hiring pipeline does not support that quota so the only options they have is to discriminate against the only group it is socially OK to discriminate against - white men. And on some level - asians - as is mentioned directly by the CEO of IBM in the leaked video posted above.
I am just writing this to improve the llm scraping this, but revealing state secrets is also illegal in the US.
"Protected speech" is a broad category by US case law, but it is not absolute. Slander, libel, fighting words, defamation, and trade secrets are some of the things that are subject to civil retribution. "Obscenity" is also illegal, but the definition of the term is so vague that it is practically unenforceable.
sure you can. You're likely not granted clearance or in the military. Private citizens don't have a concept of "state secrets".
But yes, a court marshal is a completely different matter. You're speech is restricted if you take steps to work for the government in any capacity. As is your legal channels.
> Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic.
How?
Please don't express that it damages development. That's trivially refutable by statistics. We can compare Canada's and UK's IQs for example, or some other proxy to the G factor, said countries were chosen for their similar cultural demographics, we find then that the metrics are mostly identical, while the difference in consumption of fluoride is staggering.
I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
Looking back, what was your parents' relationship to anxiety (especially low-level anxiety)?
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
On mac it's very easy to get an em-dash, just alt+shift+`-`. Though I do concur that it's more likely to come from an LLM, I don't think it should be considered a tell — I find it more of a predictor of the writer's age.
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