I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..
What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.
Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.
I think this is one important reason that marriage is not as common, since the society is aligned towards that is should be possible to manage on your own if you absolutely need to.
I can't find a proper number but anecdotally I think maybe 50% of first time parents are married in Sweden.
And yes obviously this is paid by higher taxes, but seen an an investment to keep the demography (reasonably) sane.
The birth rate in Sweden is low and falling. Whatever they're doing to keep demography sane doesn't seem to be working. Like most developed Western countries, their current approach relies more on high levels of immigration. Essentially they have outsourced the hassle and expense of having children.
Relatively to the rest of Europe is still on the upper echelons so some of the policies do work.
The issue is: without hope for the future there's not much the State can do to push people into having kids. We live in an age of hopelessness, I don't have my parents optimism from the 80s, I'm starting to approach 40 and every 5 years something happen to chip away on the little hope I still have.
It is true. But that also means that the cost will not be there.
I'd claim it did work for some time (from the 1970s to the 2000s) because it allowed the transition to a society where women did not have to choose between children and a career.
I am not sure what is the reason for lower birth rate now. Maybe that young people have gotten used to that you always have a choice.
> As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.
Obviously $100/month covers a tiny fraction of the total cost of running a childcare service in Sweden. I am curious how much does state pays to cover the rest.
The structure of the Swedish society is somewhat different in the sense that most families leave their children at daycare starting around 2 years old.
Unless you have more children, where you are allowed to leave the older child in daycare for a few days per week at that cost.
The economy behind this is rather obvious. It is better for the economy as a whole to leave children with professionals taking care of 4-6 children per teacher and let the (supposedly educated) mom work with what she is or will become specialized in.
Mentioning moms here, but the ambition is to have fathers stay as much home with the children as their mom, but this is comparing to e.g. USA.
And not mentioning the other reasons to want to raise your children full time, there are obvious and understandable reasons for that, and you are obviously free to do that and many do. But there are also good reasons for letting them meet other children in a well run daycare too.
The ~$21/hr minimum wage, 1:2 staffing ratio, etc required by law in Seattle puts a very high floor on the cheapest possible daycare. Just being a bare minimum legal daycare business has a cost floor of at least $2k/month per infant.
It sounds crazy, but it only applies in one case: a home-based childcare where the license holder has less two-years of experience and all the children are under 2 years of age and none of them are walking independently. For more experienced primary licensees, and older children, the ratios are higher. [0]
For childcare centers, the ratios are also higher: [1]
For infants (under 1 year) the required ratio is 1:4 with a group size of up to 8, or 1:3 with a group size of 9
For toddlers (under 30 months) the required ratio is 1:7 with a group size of up to 14, or 1:5 with a group size of 15
For preschoolers (under 5 years) the arequired ratio is 1:10 with a group size of up to 20
For school age children the required ratio is 1:15 with a group size of up to 30.
Also not accurate. I have a 2 year old in daycare in Seattle and the ratio is 8:1. I believe it’s 6:1 or maybe 4:1 for infants. I’ve never heard of 2:1 that would be absurd
Seattle is crazy expensive. It's why I moved to Tacoma half a decade ago. I was already working remotely anyways. Less money to own a 3k sqft home in a nice neighborhood (under $600k), and I can do a 45min or so reverse commute to Seattle for entertainment on weekdays.
And Tacoma has a lot of great restaurants, bars, and entertainment itself too.
I'm guessing there are lots of similar choices around Seattle. Or were - it feels like people got wise in the pandemic and started to take advantage.
I also suspect these are reasons people give because they feel more concrete and defensible.
I suspect a more significant but harder to concretize cause is that certain social changes have lead to the majority of young people being unable to form healthy attachments and pair bond.
The causes ranging from a high percentage of kids growing up in single parent households and forming avoidant personality styles, social media leading to higher rates of narcissism, dating apps setting unrealistic standards and a perception that there’s always a better option etc
I met my now-wife after smartphones existed but before dating apps were really a thing. I am sympathetic to how hard it is to date nowadays - it seems very weird.
Tacoma has gotten much much nicer over the past 20ish years and the aroma jokes are mostly vestigial at this point.
My best friend moved down there a few years ago (a family member sold them their house under-market and the price was too good to pass up). We all made our jokes but I’ve been down a lot and I actually really like it. It’s not that much harder to get to than west Seattle
> I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning)
What makes you feel uncomfortable with this? Is Seattle particularly dangerous, moreso than a few decades ago?
There's hardly any place which is really "friendly" towards professional families with infants. For safety reasons, daycare centers have to maintain staffing ratios so it's always going to be extremely expensive (unless you're poor enough to qualify for subsidies).
As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?
1. Seattle is quite safe. Friendliness is different than safety
2. It all comes back to housing density/supply. As you say, daycare costs are dominated by staffing ratios/wages - which are a function of cost of living. The surge of high income earners + housing supply deficit = pricing out daycare workers (and daycares).
Seattle has a higher homicide rate than New York or LA and it is running well above its own historical rate; in 2014, the entirety of King County had fewer homicides than the city of Seattle did in 2024. It is safer than many other US cities, but US cities are quite dangerous by first world standards which is why many people opt to raise kids in suburbia.
The required staffing at daycare isn't driven by "crime safety" but an overprotective sense of protecting kids from themselves and each other. These are the required ratios. As low as 1:4 for < 1.
A 4:1 ratio for infants seems quite reasonable and not overprotective. Children that age require a lot of attention. By the time you've fed and changed diapers for 4 babies it's about time to start the cycle again.
Having had kids and cared for them as infants myself, and previously worked in a (very much unlicensed) home-based daycare, the 1:4 ratio for childcare centers and 1:2-1:4 (depending on primary licensee's experience) ratio for home-based daycares for infants are not at all unreasonable.
Yes, most of time that's going to seem excessive -- but it is not a cloud system with on-demand autoscaling, you have to set your capacity by peak demand, not average demand.
Really? Most countries? Do you have a list of those?
Some countries do manage to keep daycare somewhat affordable through huge subsidies (as well as lower wages for the daycare workers). I'm not opposed to increasing subsidies but that has to be balanced against other priorities. Elder care facilities face the same basic economic issue.
People are such predictably complainers. When Google provided lots of benefits including daycare it was because “they want you to live there and have no life outside” and “the next step is company scrip”.
Now, it’s because they want you to give up everything.
Man, you can make millions working for big tech. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own self.
Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta").
The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices.
I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear.
This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.
I've been issued a five year bar for visiting someone in the US while unemployed. My immigration lawyer told me it's the weakest case he had ever seen. It took two years for the appeal to be approved. I had worked in the US on TN visas twice before, and never overstayed. It felt like they were just trying to meet a quota.
Edit: I had applied for a GC years before this happened, so I think the officer thought I didn't want to leave. This was not the case however. The case had been approved but not processed.
The officers were "dirty". They brought me in a room to do an interrogation where one officer asked questions and the other took notes on an old computer. I literally told them: "I am not going to stay past my return date" and the officer asking questions told the officer taking notes to not write that down. They asked who my parents were, how much money I had, my employment history, what I did in the US while working on my previous TN, if I was in danger, etc.. They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
For those of you who go through that, don't agree to the statement if they modified it, like mine. There's no cameras or recording devices so they can be dirty, and they abuse that fact. You have no rights at all at the border, and your assumptions on decency and honesty are not correct.
My assumption to this day is that they thought I was trying to work illegally, but this is not the case.
>They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
So you told them that you were there for visiting/tourism, and they alleged you were coming to the US to work, on the basis that you're applying to jobs in the US?
Why? I have a hard time believing the engineer at Google see Wiz as innovative. The front page of Wiz.io reads like a bunch of sales bullshit. I built a security posture dashboard for a competitor and I would not say it's worth anywhere near 1b. Is Google such shit now that runtime scanning in a k8 cluster is worth billions?
Alexa listens to more then the wake word. I've had this recommend products on Amazon while my wife and I were having a conversation at the dinner table. It also recommended calling 911 while I was talking about fire.
It's a spying device people willingly put in their homes for the convenience of a timer you can active with your voice.
Edit: It could be that it activated mishearing "Alexa". I don't have hard evidence of mass spying. I think this wouldn't be hard to prove intercepting the data using something like Wireshark. Even if it's encrypted, you could tell by the data size. The recommending products while chatting with my wife anecdote happened multiple times tho, which convinced me to relocate the Alexa device in the garbage. It seems unlikely to me to not mine the voice data to generate ads, or to do law enforcement.
Let me float an idea based on this study: it doesn't need to listen for more than the wake word (and some variations of same) in order to activate pretty regularly. The study indicates that just watching TV in a room w an echo device will cause it to wake 1-4 times per hour with half of all wakes resulting in at least 4 seconds of recording and virtually all recordings being sent to the cloud for processing. Even absent any "secret wake words" the device activates regularly enough that it will occasionally react to things you say in conversation as though it's secretly listening.
Also, just thinking like someone who is simultaneously evil and competent, if I were building a device like this that listened for secret keywords I wouldn't have it announce the fact that it heard one.
I have Alexa and a few Siri devices next to me and I just said a bunch of phrases indicating fire, choking, that we should call 911 etc and nothing triggered. So yeah - this is just internet bullshit until proven otherwise.
it both is and isn't secret bullshit. there's no evidence that there's a list of secret keywords Lord Bezos is listening for, but there's plenty of evidence that these devices active unintentionally all the time and that those unintentional activations lead to you being recorded and that recording being sent off into the cloud
I don't think it's any secret that the device can unintentionally activate in certain circumstances (and whether or not that's due to it thinking it heard its name is another debate)... but my problem with OP's statement is that they seem to frame it as if it's intentionally and maliciously listening more often than it should, and I just don't see any evidence to support that claim.
What I'm saying is that intentionality doesn't have to be relevant to this discussion. All you need to do in order to be maliciously spying on someone, given that you have this bug in the first place, is to
1) not fix the bug
2) quietly remove the option to opt out of remote processing
and then all of a sudden you've got a situation where of course no one is actively spying because We Would Never(tm)(c)(r) but there's a really reliable pipeline by which recordings of me talking to me family in my home end up on a remote server somewhere where they're used to train AI and maybe even automatically scanned for certain keywords that might indicate that I'm some sort of troublemaker and need flagged for additional "attention". It's a plausibly-deniable panopticon. In fact having it activate by purposefully unremediated mistake rather than by keyword makes it a better spy. You can discover a list of keywords and avoid them but ambient noise causing the device to randomly sample and exfiltrate recordings means you can never know when you're being recorded and thus have no choice but to always act like you're being recorded, just in case.
I'm not sure whether it's listening to more than the wake word, but I've seen Siri wake up quite often when I very definitely haven't said anything approaching "Siri", and see it occasionally on other people's devices too. I remember listening to a BBC podcast in the car once and there was once piece of audio from it that would reliably activate Siri. I was a bit nonplussed by it and rewound it four or five times to check, which it did every time. I think accidental activation is a much more likely explanation, which is still dreadful from a privacy perspective.
Corpos can't resist not to spy when it's at their fingertips, too irresistible to them, they just can't help it. That's why we should take our privacy back and offer no benefit of the doubt.
That's always been my perspective. The incentive for busting Amazon on this is so high, if it were provable then someone would have done it and the press would love to share that.
Everyone carries a little snitch on them. Even if you opt out of using a mobile device, the chances of the person you are talking to having it on them is effectively 100%. And I am nearly certain that one way or another 'they' have voice biometrics on all of us. Thank god we live in a country with strong checks & balances...
Every starlink station (and probably) tesla, scoop up every mac address they ever see. This is one is unique in that it puts all that data into a single actor's hands.
Of course starlink stations scoop mac addresses. They are in this way equivalent to and on par with every other wifi router.
A Tesla vehicle could also scoop up visible mac addresses, and is equally as capable of doing so as every other wifi-enabled device with closed source firmware.
Privacy-wise, Tesla is shitty but not extraordinarily shitty. Their surveillance capabilities do not differentiate them from among the multitudes. Let's assume maximum maliciousness. Assuming you don't own one, could Tesla track you particularly better than, say, Square? Or Google? Or Palantir? Or Comcast? Or any cell phone company? Or whomever it is that owns the cameras at each traffic light intersection?
The person in charge is irrelevant. If you think that the other companies I mentioned aren't in the business of selling surveillance on you as well, your head is in the sand. It's the primary business model of several.
if people really think Musk is a Nazi, this would be like literally putting mindless order-following gestapo right in your house.
Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.
If there’s one thing about AI, it’s that you cannot avoid it. The idea that individuals can just “opt out” of plastic, sugar, artificial ingredients, factory farms, social media and all the other negative extrnalities the corporations push on us is a fantasy that governments and industry push on individuals to keep us distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
On HN, people hate on Web3 because of its limited upside. But really look at the downside dynamics of a technology! With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside. Millions of people who never got a crypto wallet and never sent their money to some shady exchange never lost a penny.
Now compare that to AI. No matter what you do, no matter how far you try to avoid it millions will lose their jobs, get denied loans, be surveiled, possibly arrested for precrime, micromanaged and controlled, practically enslaved in order to survive and reproduce etc.
It won’t even work to retreat into gated communities or grandfathered human-verified accounts because defectors will run bots in their accounts and their neuralink cyborg hookups and meta glasses, to gain an advantage and approach at least some of the advantages of the bots. Not to mention of course that the economic power and efficiency of botless communities will be laughably uncompetitive.
You won’t even be able to move away anywhere to escape it. You can see an early preview of that with the story of Ted Kazinsky — the unabomber (google it). While the guy was clearly a disturbed maniac who sent explosives to people, as a mathematician following things to its logical conclusion he did sort of predict what will happen to everyone when technology reaches a certain point. AI just makes it so that you can’t escape.
If HN cared about AI unlimited downsides like it cared about Web’s lack of large upsides, the sentiment here would be very different. But the time has not come yet. Set an alarm to check back on this comment in exactly 7 years.
Never mind "proving", there are plenty of low-effort steps they could take to foster trust (as outlined elsewhere in this thread) that they choose not to do. They choose not to meet even the bare minimum.
We are in a thread that is literally about how Amazon plans to disable the option to not send voice recordings. I get playing devil's advocate, but at some point logic has to prevail, eh?
Should not the burden of proof be on Amazon to prove it's not always recording?
In 2025, it feels like we're 5 to 10 years past the time a consumer should default to assuming their cloud-connected device isn't extracting the maximum possible revenue from them.
Assume all companies are amoral, and you'll never be disappointed.
They have a lot of ways they could’ve built trust without a full negative burden: which of them, if any, are they doing?
Open sourcing of their watch word and recording features specifically, so people can self-verify it does what it says and that it’s not doing sketchy things?
Hardware lights such that any record functionality past the watch words is visible and verifiable by the end user and it can’t record when not lit?
Local streaming and auditable downloads of the last N hours of input as heard by amazon after watchwords, so you can check for misrecordings and also compare “intended usage” times to observed times, such that you can see that you and Amazon get the same stuff?
If you really wanna go all out, putting in their TOS protections like explicit no-train permissions on passing utterances without intent, or adding an SLA into their subscription to refund subscription and legal costs and to provide explicit legal cause of action, if they were recording when they said they weren’t?
If you explicitly want to promote trust, there are actually a ton of ways to do it, one of them isn’t “remove even more of your existing privacy guardrails”.
On the first two, if you already think they're blatantly lying about functionality, why would you think the software in the device is the same as the source you got, or that it can't record with the light off?
It's not at all unreasonable for consumers to demand vendors--especially those with as much market power as Amazon--to take steps to foster trust that, though they may not rise to the level of "proving a negative," still go some ways towards assuring us they are not violating our privacy.
The fact that they don't take any of those steps (and the fact that we are in a thread about they're disabling this privacy feature in the first place!) goes to show that consumers have every right to be skeptical and indeed to refuse to bring these products into our lives.
I think it's inane to complain that consumers are placing an impossibly high standard on Amazon when Amazon themselves choose not to meet even the lowest of standards.
It's their product and their code, there is no reasonable way I can responsible for knowing what it does as opposed to Amazon, who is in complete control of the device and system. I can't even believe I have to explain this.
At the very least, they can provide a full log of all interactions and recording in an audit log. Have that verified with researchers conducting their own analysis on dial home activity and I think we'll be significantly closer to a good answer here about generalized mass capture of customer sensitive data. This still wouldn't be enough if you're worried about targetted spying, because we can't know when bad actors flip your device into spy aggressively mode unless you're auditing the device while targetted).
Okay..but then why should I trust that Alexa isn't listening? That's clearly a pretty valuable thing for Amazon to provide to their customers. Is it impossible? If it is..then yeah people should just light these things on fire or have a hard switch on them at least.
Only in circles that don’t understand technology and frankly logic. To prove that it’s happening _one_ hacker needs to show that there’s constant flash drive / network traffic while the mic is enabled that also correlates with the entropy in the audio.
I have personally verified that my device most certainly does not send constant internet traffic... however I think we can't rule out the possibility that it might buffer the data and send it later.
We can, in fact, rule it out by dissecting the device and monitoring chip traffic. That’s my whole point - people who understand technology know that it’s nearly impossible for Amazon devices to routinely spy on conversations in people’s homes without detection.
Literally dim the light source until the probability of two showing up within the time scale of the measurement is low enough. This is not impractical. For instance there are many kinds of detectors that can be set up to discriminate single photons or particles.
I get recruitment emails for a startup some people from Uber are making called Cloud Kitchens. Basically kitchens that can scale based on demand. The company provides ingredients and the kitchens make the food. Share resources make it more productive. I think restaurants themselves are unproductive.
> I think restaurants themselves are unproductive.
You think one of the staples of all commerce for basically all of time are unproductive?
I would imagine basically any form of sustainability for them has been tried. Sure patterns change; but, I mean literal millennia of food service is something to not ignore.
I think kind, industrious, and smart people make great teams.
I once took up a lot of space to be a super productive engineer and only ended up being isolated. The business saw that some engineers were saying things worked great and were easy, so more responsibility was thrown on me and the other engineers moved to another project that needed headcount. Me and another guy ended up building on and maintaining what used be a reasonably sized team. It got on me because I made sure to know everything so I could make it as great as I could. This sounds good, but this particular business didn't care about me at all, I was just another gear.
I've met "productive" engineers that got things done really quickly from the business perspective, then moved on to being awesome somewhere else. But, they also took shortcuts, didn't write documentation, and made things unmaintainable. When I joined the team after they were being awesome somewhere else, I had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and where things were running..
The people I've liked working with the most have been parents. The boundaries are more clear, they value stability, and aren't heros.
> I had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and where things were running..
This isn't the worst thing in the world. I'd rather inherit something with little/no documentation that followed the standard business practices (e.g naming conventions, nothing crazy bespoke) and have to do an afternoon of investigation than have to read documentation that's inaccurate. Of course the best option is full documenation but due to the nature of business that isn't always possible.
What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.
Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).