What did you see as the central claim of the article?
To me it was that personal finance and budgeting is being marketed to low-income people as a way of getting out of poverty and becoming rich (doctor, lawyer or software engineer rich, not billionaire rich). And it is both misleading in ways that could actually happen and labels them "irresponsible" if they fail to budget their life from $15/hr to European cars and vacations.
I don't know how widespread this marketing is, but the article is clearly written in response to something. Maybe we on HN just don't notice it, because sensible budgeting and investing on a software engineer's salary actually does make you "software engineer rich".
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The comparison to dieting is probably more familiar and insightful for us.
Eat smaller portions, avoid sugary drinks and beer, maybe even eat healthy and exercise. Make that your lifestyle not a temporary hack and you will be fit. That works and realistic advice follows it.
But there is clearly a lot of fad diet, gadget and pill advertising out there. Just yesterday I saw an ad for an electric mattress that promised to give you a beach body in 3 months on the highway home. Marketing is selling fat people that they just have to suffer for a few months, after which they will have made it, and can go back to enjoying life (pizzas) of their dreams.
It seems that this article was written because there is a lot of personal finance content just like that out there.
I guess if the central thesis is that there are people dumb enough to believe that a mattress will make them fit then they are also dumb enough to believe that saving will somehow double income then that fits. I mean PT Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. However, the goal is to not be the sucker and to learn the better “lifestyle” choices.
There are some people who make so little that no matter what they do they will always be insecure and barely making ends meet. However, there are arguably many more people who are insecure, living paycheck to paycheck, super stressed out about money etc. who have no reason to be. They make enough that they could trade consumption for peace of mind if they wanted to/learned how to.
Eg. I now make almost exactly 8x what I made 14 years ago. But am only slightly less worried about money now as I was then because I was never that stressed to begin with. I always lived within my means and I was careful to save vs increase consumption. I still drive the same 2005 Subaru sedan that I did 14 years ago even though getting a Tesla etc. would be an unnoticeable financial decision.
As I read it, the argument is that "budget culture" blames the individual instead of systemic bias, and therefore all of the personal financial advice marketed toward the 99% is harmful.
There is some truth to it - Dave Ramsey does downplay/ignore systemic bias. And he focuses on the success stories where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But to then claim "budgeting doesn't work" is like saying "eating healthy doesn't work".
A budget is part of a healthy financial lifestyle, not a panacea. It can help people build momentum in the right direction.
I'm most familiar with Dave Ramsey's material, so I can't speak to the rest of the "budget culture". But the "baby steps" are not in the same category as fad diet. They're more like "stop drinking soda, eat more vegetables, get good sleep, make good habits" kind of advice.
Combined Heat and Power in Finland is very common, much more so than in rest of Europe. 80% of the fossil fuel power plants output both electricity and heated water. Compared to (quick googling) 8% in the US and 11% in EU.
In some European locales Excel switches from importing/exporting Comma Separated Values to Semicolon Separated Values with comma acting as the decimal point.
Which is no big deal compared to the alternatives of a) missing out on a $500m contract for the local shipbuilding industry or b) moving the entire shipyard downriver.
> superchargers in some locations/routes being at insane capacity that this will only make things worse
If that happens, Tesla should set a price for other EVs which makes it profitable for them, and then just build as many charging locations as there is demand for. Everyone wins.
> Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 IPO number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They don't do that much more today than in 2012.
They do.
In 2012, their advertising revenue was $5B. In 2020, it was $86B. They are "doing" 17x more now.
I don't mean that from your perspective of revenue leading to wasteful spending, but from an advertising product perspective. If you're making $86B in advertising revenue, then every junior data scientist whose entire job might be to optimise ad click-throughs for cat food in Mongolia by 3% is a net win for the company. If they are getting better at cat food ads, they are doing more.
That was my point. Revenue rises, and everything else grows with it regardless of need.
Whether or not the marginal junior data scientist is a net win for the company.... I suspect not at a company like FB. Efficiency is hard. Factories are efficient because margins are slim and capital costs are high. FB is the opposite. There's no external disciplinarian forcing managers to find ways of minimizing junior data scientist headcount.
FB profit margin this year is 37%. When margins are that high, there's not much incentive to cut fat. If profit margin is 3%, a 1% efficiency gain is a major win. At 37%... different game.
> they also don't have the tech that powers Uber/Lyft which allows anyone to hail a ride from their smartphone
Sure they do, as long as they just get an app built by a contractor and don't employ 5000 engineers building cool open-source infrastructure projects and unnecessary "growth" features.
Multiple taxi companies with ~200 cars in my city each have their own smartphone apps with all the features you actually need: ordering or scheduling a ride, GPS tracking, payment with credit card or business invoice.
Looks like these apps were last updated in mid & late 2020, but if it works you don't need a permanent tech team to keep the taxi business going.
It's understandable. Science journalism exaggerates results, even if the original researchers and their paper did not. And even the most promising scientific results can take decades to be applied in the industry and become available to consumers.
But at the same time, this is Hacker News, not Mature Consumer Product News. Here is the best place to discuss what tech in 2030 might look like, not what we can buy today.
this might be true for certain graphene stories (or paid advertisements where it's covered up who paid for those) but please don't say that "journalists" (meaning the whole group of journalists) have "zero morals". Because (real) journalists at least report more or less about the information that they receive and (yes) interpret it, that's better than zero morals (how much can be argued). Zero morals are what you find with certain politicians (or social media users or paid-for-studies-by-cartels) that pull their stories out of their behinds with no accountability whatsoever. Journalists still have a certain higher standard. And we shouldn't neglect this or say otherwise because this would lead to further erosion of trust in media. People should trust news sources more than social media posts because real news sources are still (!) more trustworthy than social media posts. Critical reading and thinking for thyself should be on the agenda everywhere, though.
> PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise
Depending on what you mean by "seriously". It's not that a crazy idea by a domain expert is certainly the future - but they might be right 1 out of 10 times, compared to a crazy idea by a nobody who might be right 1/1000. Given the potential large return of crazy ideas, it's worth the time to investigate in more detail.
To me it was that personal finance and budgeting is being marketed to low-income people as a way of getting out of poverty and becoming rich (doctor, lawyer or software engineer rich, not billionaire rich). And it is both misleading in ways that could actually happen and labels them "irresponsible" if they fail to budget their life from $15/hr to European cars and vacations.
I don't know how widespread this marketing is, but the article is clearly written in response to something. Maybe we on HN just don't notice it, because sensible budgeting and investing on a software engineer's salary actually does make you "software engineer rich".
----
The comparison to dieting is probably more familiar and insightful for us.
Eat smaller portions, avoid sugary drinks and beer, maybe even eat healthy and exercise. Make that your lifestyle not a temporary hack and you will be fit. That works and realistic advice follows it.
But there is clearly a lot of fad diet, gadget and pill advertising out there. Just yesterday I saw an ad for an electric mattress that promised to give you a beach body in 3 months on the highway home. Marketing is selling fat people that they just have to suffer for a few months, after which they will have made it, and can go back to enjoying life (pizzas) of their dreams.
It seems that this article was written because there is a lot of personal finance content just like that out there.