It blows my mind that UpWork does so well as a platform. I have never had a good experience using it. And I don't know anyone who says good things about it.
I think there is a real market opportunity for a startup that can provide a way to connect businesses who need short-term or specific project work (i.e. they don't want employees) with freelancers who want to work in that mode while (and this is important) avoiding the creepiness and flaky nature of UpWork. Conversely, it would also need to avoid being too similar to having the middleman as an employer.
I probably know 50 people who would jump on a platform that hit this sweet spot in a heartbeat.
I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared and willing to sell everyone else out so they can pay their mortgage? Are there efforts internally to try and stop them from centralizing everything? What's going on here? I know only a couple of people who don't think Google is a real problem today.
I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective:
The difference is trust:
These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.
The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:
Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.
The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too.
That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.
> it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.
Couple of points from someone who survived working for the Evil Empire when the entire technology world wanted to see "M$," "Micr0Squ1sh," "MacroSloth," and many other clever puns crushed under the weight of first the Department of Justice and later Netscape/Mozilla and Apple and Google.
First, you get used to it, especially faster once you realize it's not personal. The people making the comments are just seeing your company and what you do from the outside. They don't know your personal or professional reasons and, sometimes, rationalizations for those decisions. But you still really should come back and read the words and maybe even rebut them when you feel like it. Why? Because...
Second, there's a reason people are making these comments. Are they good reasons? Maybe. Are they your customers and do they, quite literally, hold the fate of your paycheck and continued good fortune and success in your hands? Damn right. Hiding from the negative feedback is just as much a "bubble" as negative feedback is on HN. You know what sucks worse than negative words on Hacker News? Negative words spoken at friendly social gatherings by people who aren't emotionally and financially invested in the technology industry because once those happens, your company is SCREWED.
You can't stop people having the feelings they do about your employer but you can ask why those feelings exist and what you can do to change them. Sometimes there's nothing but, often, there really is something.
That post was both an answer to the OP's question and a refutal of the idea that the only way here was evil.
I think it's important for people to recognize an echo chamber and to realize its ramifications. At the same time, I agree that it's important for employees to understand how their products/actions will be perceived (even those of us who don't work on projects that get written about here).
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm
developers into using their framework, or to funnel all
traffic through Google
TBH it doesn't matter what their intent was, it matters what the results of their actions were.
The packaging thing doesn't seem like a "fix" to the URL issue so much as a "let's add a feature to Chrome that lies to users and then make it a web standard".
The trouble is that trusting individual developers at Google is fine, but I don’t trust the overall flow of how things are moving. AMP is one possible response to “websites are slow”, but it also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace and makes things worse for people that try to opt out of the ecosystem. Which is a shame, because it needn’t have been like that.
> also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace
How? If they had gone the Apple News route of making publishers integrate directly with them, that would have been consolidating power. Instead, they ask publishers to output pages that any link aggregator can use, and many other link aggregators do use.
> I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.
I don't question the intentions of the team. I question the intentions of Google.
> for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem
Yes, which is a thing I object to even more than I object to AMP.
But, truthfully, here's my real problem with AMP: I genuinely hate AMP formatted pages, and they are increasingly being foisted on me. Every time I have to manually copy/edit/paste a URL to get the real page, I get a little bit angry, and I'm having to do that increasingly often. If there were some way I could opt out of getting AMP links, I wouldn't be quite so emotional about it.
There are a small handful of things about the web that make my suspect that I'll generally just stop using the web at some point, and AMP is one of those things.
> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework
Regardless of their intent, Google IS strong-arming publishers, by:
* Pushing publishers to do something effectively none of them want to do (and making them pay for it)
* Limiting lucrative Google search real estate if they don't
* Not having any publishers or content makers on the technical steering committee of AMP (3/7 are Google employees, another 3 are platform people who exploit content (Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest)
You know how I know that Google is strong-arming publishers?
Because none of them would implement AMP if they weren't being strong-armed.
Logically speaking, if publishers wanted to make their sites faster, and considered it cost effective, they would have already done it.
>The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution
The simplest way to do this is to boost the rank of small-foot-print/fast-loading websites. That would mean websites with little-to-no-ads-or-shitty-JS-scripts will get ranked higher up. Tweak the base offset till the required performance numbers are reached.
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people ..
Why on earth would you assume this, so obviously contradicted by the evidence?
The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid
The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy. It's not a matter of 'everyone' being malign, it's that we live in a society (which often, and tellingly, mislabels itself an 'economy') carefully designed to place the worst people in positions of power.
Most people understand this now (even if they're not sure what to do about it yet). It's perhaps unsurprising that the news takes a while to filter through to those benefitting most.
> The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy.
Molochian[0], not Darwinian. And it's not just placing the worst people in positions of power, but ensuring that people in any kind of decision-making position are the worst people they personally can be.
> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google.
Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP).
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less.
I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them.
For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.
You might be amazed how easy it is to rationalize such concerns away for $250k (or more) per year. The first sentence of the internal response of a Googler will be, "You don't understand."
Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired.
To work at Google has to be an ethical decision by now. If you are not at Google internally working against its evil tactics subverting it wherever you can and work against its taking over the web, then you are probably working for the evil machinery. For an entity spying on people wherever it gets the chance, seducing uneducated people into helping them to track as many people as they can online and shred their privacy, while trying to come up with "new standards" all the time, trying to make others jump on the bandwagon to unfree Internet.
So in general, a person with ethical concerns should avoid working for Google, no matter how good the pay.
It's very possible they genuinely think they're doing the right thing and helping the world. Meanwhile, many, many people outside of that bubble think they're doing the wrong thing. (If only they talked to their users... but I say the same thing about every tech co in general.)
It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off.
I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions.
How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?
Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot.
> engineers still sign up i
A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.
I worked there for about two years. Afterward I described it as, "It felt like I was kidnapped by aliens and have just returned to Earth."
The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people.
Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy:
One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left.
No one mentioned it.
He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work.
I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.
I think you have to look deeper at the draws people have to work certain places.
I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.
They're people who value the rewards reaped by working there more. The prestige from working at a business like this can make positive impacts far beyond the period of your employment there. Heck, just getting to in person interviews are statistically rare and an indication of exceptional ability.
When the morals of a company with a supposed high value of prestige becomes bankrupt (morally), when does the prestige of working there diminish? Ever?
Disclaimer: I do not work at FAANG. Having said that, if you are sincere in trying to understand, consider the following:
1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy.
(I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more).
2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this.
From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace.
The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades.
I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees.
Local effects matter more.
Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.
This is a very good response, most people who have worked in corporate America, know exactly what you're talking about.
Also, there's some "just following orders" and "what could I possibly do about it" mentality. Bad things tend to happen to "troublemakers", and your only option is often to leave; but you're comfortable, and there's no guarantee that the next company will be any better, so you start asking "how bad is it?"
You can make an argument that Google is a threat, but it's certainly not obvious. It requires a complex analysis to explain why Google leaning on AMP is different than Oracle and IBM leaning on ANSI SQL.
It's possible to get otherwise ethical people to write unethical code by telling them that "it's to make the Web faster" and "it's 'open'" (even if it isn't truly open technology). It also seems like parts of Google are starting to rot from group think.
What I don't understand is why people don't band together and simply refuse, collectively, to pay bills that are well known in the culture to be unreasonable. In particular, student loans. But also a few other things. My god, I know so many people who are struggling that it seems like everyone is struggling. I know people making six figures who are worried about losing their homes. In fact, I've known so many people who have either lost their home, almost lost their home, or are worried about losing their home that it makes up probably a majority of the people I know. Did we forget somewhere along the line that a home is just a patch of dirt with four walls and roof thrown on it? Should it really be that precarious of a thing? How many people do you think go to bed every night worrying about becoming a homeless person? We've turned into a culture that literally has a market that gambles on whether or not people will be able to keep their homes! For christ sake! What kind of sick shit is that? And the whole thing is predicated on people accepting the idea that they have to pay all their unreasonable bills and stressing themselves out willingly over the process of paying them. At what point do people throw their hands up and say "fuck it, this is unreasonable"?
Only if we're also collectively telling people not to take them in the first place. The current culture telling everyone to go to expensive private colleges, then bitching that they're burdened with loans and not pay them, is pretty toxic.
Its should be a multi step thing.
- Tell people how bad student loans are and how they shouldn't take them if they don't have a plan to pay them back.
- Educate people on alternative, like trade schools, apprenticeships, etc. Stop glorifying bachelor degrees beyond what they are (that should and often happens even in countries where education is paid by the gov!)
- Then, yeah, start doing something to reduce debt burden on those who were affected before the previous two steps were in place.
Otherwise, if we keep pushing for school loans but then tell people not to pay them, or forgive them, it's basically free education (a good thing) without actually collectively agreeing on making education free (which is kind of sketchy)
I get what you're saying. I agree that college and university should be looked at differently going forward for a lot of people. It's just that there is a problem that exists right this minute, with an entire generation of people who already took the loans, not realizing the outcome they would face. I'm just looking at all the wreckage and sense of instability people have all around me right now, and it seems to make sense that some collective action should take place. Unless we just want to punish people until they are middle aged or older for not being financially savvy when they were 18 years old.
But my point wasn't really to pick out just student loans. Not just due to people being burdened with student loans but a wide variety of other issues... We're more and more seeing people who hope to be able to save their own lives with GoFundMe campaigns because they can't afford to stay alive. We're seeing the idea of owning a home fade for giant swaths of the population. One third of the country is currently "subprime" in the eyes of financial institutions. And my understanding is that percentage is expected go up. The Dollar Store's massive growth is predicated on the forecast of "a permanent underclass in America". I'm seeing, hearing, and reading about so many people having a hard time every single day. And I'm reading about the country readjusting to accommodate the situation as a permanent reality. If the institutions cannot help, then I do think it's probably reasonable for the people to force the issue, given how prevalent we are seeing these problems become.
Yup. Thats why I think all 3 of my points above need to happen at the same time. Working toward forgiving debts while still handing them out is counter productive.
Only semi related, but I also take issue about how we got there in the first place.
"Lets make college free!"
"No, this is AMERICAH!~ People should pay for things!"
"Ok, then lets give out loans! Gov will insure them, so its win win! People get to go to college but it doesnt cost anything!"
"Ok, lets do that!"
"Waaaah! People can't pay back, lets forgive their loan"
"Err, wait a minute...didn't we say they were gonna be loan exactly so it wouldn't end up with the gov paying for it?"
Its even worse than if it had just been made free straight up, since infinite loans basically made education prices skyrocket mostly unchecked. This bullshit happens everywhere in the US (see: healthcare). And this is the worse of all world: you have "free market" problems, unbound pricing problems, AND the government picks up the tab. Fail on all counts.
But that's a different issue. For now, yes, lets do something about all the people who are fucked, BUT AT THE SAME TIME lets tackle the root cause.
I don't disagree with any of these points, just had a tangentially-related thought: wouldn't making college "free" be a forcing function to tighten admission criteria, further stratifying social classes? Schools can be a bit loose today since basically anyone with a pulse can get student loans.
Just thinking out loud; I suspect looking at other countries who do this would be informative...
> The current culture telling everyone to go to expensive private colleges, then bitching that they're burdened with loans and not pay them, is pretty toxic.
These values aren't pushed by the same people.
The people telling everyone to go to college and take out the loans are the people enriched by the status quo.
The people telling everyone that this is bullshit are the ones who aren't. The people saying the latter are specifically trying to counter the former. There's no single monoculture that's pushing both ideas at the same time.
And pushing debt forgiveness as a policy to support is a pretty good step, in my mind, towards changing the incentives for the folks who are pushing and profiting the loans...
Debt forgiveness punishes people who worked their ass off to pay their loans off. Every single person who took out a student loan consented to the terms of the loan. Why is it okay to just mindlessly take out a life ruining amount of money to pursue a degree in something of absolutely no marketable value to society? Why are taxpayers suddenly encouraging the continued subsidization of educations which have been proven to have been valueless to society? In fact, I would argue that the majority of these valueless educations are actually worse than valueless, they're ideologically indoctrinating with a divisive and destructive set of principles.
Stop federally backing loans, change the culture to move away from defacto bachelor's degree, and reign in the absurd admissions for public universities. It is not morally justifiable to suddenly foist the collective horrible decision making of a generation onto the larger society.
If we're really at the point where people are incapable of providing real market value to society, we need to talk about UBI. What we shouldn't be talking about is financially incentivizing behavior that is not desirable.
> Debt forgiveness punishes people who worked their ass off to pay their loans off.
So we should just continue burdening people into the poorhouse (or worse)? I feel for everyone burdened by ridiculous student loans (I am one of those people), but I would gladly take on everyone else’s debt forever if it meant people could have their education and be debt-free. Should we talk about my friends who have to decide if they pay their rent or their student loans every month? Does your righteous indignation do anything to help them? “I suffered so you have to suffer too” is toxic; it’s basically frat hazing.
As for why it’s okay to take out a ruinous loan, I was 17, and I didn’t fucking know any better. Everyone told us to go to college or else we’d wind up destitute. And they were partially right, at least if you managed to get a “profitable” degree. My high school-educated friends have shitty service jobs and alcohol addiction now. I have loans, and I’d rather not, but at least I have any hope for a future. That’s more than I can say for a lot of my other friends.
> It is not morally justifiable to suddenly foist the collective horrible decision making of a generation onto the larger society.
That would be the Baby Boomers, right? Because I’m pretty sure they (and their parents) are the ones who all voted to end state funding for universities. They also voted for politicians with ties to the financial industry, so conveniently the same people making it necessary to take out loans are also shareholders of large financial institutions.
No, what’s morally indefensible is bankrupting someone for getting an education, and then berating them for making a bad decision when they were 17, a decision practically guaranteed by a rigged system. What’s also morally indefensible are the attitudes that this is someone their faults, because at the end of the day, we all still have student loans, and no amount of your pedestal-sitting is going to change that.
> that this is someone (I assume somehow) their faults
They certainly don't take zero blame, especially if it happened in the last decade. The student debt crisis has been front and center for a while now. If in the last few years someone did that, and they don't know any better, they're seriously living under a rock.
The system should change, and Im not even against forgiving debts because it might just be straight up better to do for society, but saying the people who take on those loans and sign at the bottom have zero responsibility? They turn 18 long before they're completely crushed with the debts, and if I was to tell an 18 years old that they can't make decisions they're responsible for, I'd get an earful.
It’s about incentives. We were told in no uncertain terms that as a 17 year old making this life changing decision: do it, or be poor forever.
Now. I personally didn’t listen properly, dropped out after two years and did something else. But I don’t blame those who didn’t. Everything in modern middle class society and schooling was based around it.
So focusing on the individuals responsibility above and beyond that of the broken system that we have no choice but to join seems, well, cruel to me — even if I did personally follow your advice.
Treating degrees as only being useful if they teach a direct marketable skill is a shame, I think, but with how expensive it is now I understand why there’s a push towards it.
>The current culture telling everyone to go to expensive private colleges
"Everyone" doesn't go to expensive private colleges. Of those who continue on from high-school at all, 75% attend a publicly owned institution, usually community college.
Are state colleges not also publicly owned? Those ain't nearly as affordable as community colleges.
When I was in high school, being railroaded into prioritizing CSU or UC admission requirements over graduation requirements was the norm even for students (like me) who had effectively zero chance of getting into one of those schools immediately after high school (let alone getting a scholarship or meaningful financial aid or any other way to avoid a predatory student loan).
I didn't say go to expensive private colleges, I said TELLING people to go to expensive private colleges. And of course, "everyone" is an hyperbole in this context.
Perhaps it could start with, yeah I don't need that unreasonable brand new car with a 72 month payment plan, or I can take these college courses for 1/10 the cost at a community college rather than a more unreasonable expensive school, or I don't need that unreasonable 5500 square foot McMansion in that fancy neighborhood, or I don't need that unreasonable 10th pair of jeans, that unreasonable new iphone, etc. People bury themselves with debt - and not because they can't do math, but because they DON'T. Instead they make impulsive, emotional decisions. Hardly anything good ever comes from them. Unreasonable bills usually come from unreasonable decisions (Medical bills being an obvious exception).
I can understand this sentiment. And it certainly applies to some people. But honestly I don't think the majority of people struggling are driving fancy cars or living in McMansions. Most of the people I personally know (which is a lot of people) drive an average car, live in an average home or condo, and don't live lavish lives. Most are just saddled with some combination of common factors like high cost of housing, student loans, unexpected medical bills, etc. The majority of people are just trying to live average lives but are constantly having to walk a tightrope for just that.
What's your definition of average? Because a $30k Mazda should not be average. It's way too expensive for most people. Also, you probably don't need one for each member of the family.
A 3,500 sq ft house with granite countertops and hardwood flooring for 4 people should probably not be average either.
With the exception of a few markets with very expensive land, we have a consumption problem. We have a keeping up with the Jones problem.
You don't have nearly as much worry about losing your home if you spend below your means.
I have spent a lot of time with a lot of families from wildly varied economic backgrounds. I'm not talking about people with brand new cars and 3,500 square foot houses (that would be a McMansion, I believe). I'm talking about Hondas and weather-worn Dodge pickups parked at a condo or a very modest house in a working class neighborhood.
Sure, the keeping up with the Jones thing is happening with a lot of people. But that does not appear to be the bulk of the problem. Heck, just drive through the country and tell me if you spot more McMansions or more McShacks.
I feel my 3300 sq ft house for me, 2 kids and a dog is reasonable. Even townhouses these days are huge. I consider McMansions to be excess of 4000 sq ft.
But then, are some of these things really needed? I don't have a car, I have a basic smartphone, and old basic laptop, not much in terms of clothes, and I don't travel abroad for holidays (all this because I cannot afford something better without getting into debt) and I get by fine (and I'm 40). Most millenials have at least a car (even a cheap one) or nice phones with nice data plans, or clothes, or travel to nice places at least once a year. Most of their debt is self-chosen.
Would you mind putting in concrete examples the sentence "most Americans do not live in areas where you could reasonably live without a car". It's not a critique, I'm not american so I don't understand how could this be, given the level of development of the country and the proliferation of cities that you are supposed to have.
* The stores are generally large big-box stores that is often kilometers from ones' house; there are no small corner shops and restaurants, because they are illegal.
* If you're still determined to walk, you probably need to cross large, high-speed roads with short crossing times, and your origin and destination are probably separated from the road by a large parking lot. And you may not even have sidewalks or crossing facilities. Example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Panera+Bread,+143+Alexander+...
* Public transit in American suburbs is a joke. Because it's so hard to walk around, ridership is very low, making frequency hard to justify, causing even lower ridership. And this is before you consider that
Americans are anti-tax
American suburbs have an associated history with white flight post-segregation, so people often object to transit because it'll let "criminals" in
keep in mind, DiffEq is responding to a post that mentions people making six figures who are struggling to keep their homes.
there are certainly a lot of people out there who would be feeling the squeeze anywhere, but if you're making six figures and you're in danger of losing your home, you are probably doing something wrong. your house is too big, you live in the wrong place, or both.
right now I'm living pretty comfortably spending <$30k a year. I understand salaries and COL vary in different places, but most people who make six figures in an expensive area could certainly take a more humble job in a less expensive region and live a fine life.
The people loaning them money bear some responsibility, also. If it’s obvious to you that it’s a bad loan it should be even more obvious to the bank, but they shield themselves from their poor decision making by wrapping the debt into instruments that they unload onto some other poor sucker.
certainly the banks fail to do their due diligence on a lot of these loans, but in some cases they are actually required by the government to issue them, even if it goes against their better judgment.
I don't think you can say concretely that this would be stealing. That would be an extremely simplistic view. Remember, I'm talking about "bills that are well known in the culture to be unreasonable". For example, we can firmly say that the price of higher education has been inflated beyond reason and certainly beyond its actual value. Many have said it. Papers, articles, documentaries, and so on have been produced about it. The current popular theory is that the government guaranteeing the loans incentivized the colleges to hike up the fees drastically, screwing an entire generation by gouging them unreasonably. And if you want to say that students didn't have to make the choice to go to college, well, then you're ignoring the fact that people have been drilling it into young people for quite some time that they won't be able to make it in future America if they don't get a higher education degree. I know parents today who are extremely cash-strapped who nonetheless feel they need their kids to go to college so they won't become serfs in the future economy. I even know parents who have gotten divorced purely so that their kid could receive some form of financial aid (only one parent income shown) so they would be able to afford college. So a ton of students and parents felt like they had no choice but to accept these loans if they wanted to make it in America's future economy. And this idea continues today, though it's slowly starting to receive some pushback. On the whole, these people didn't go to college purely because it would be a fun way to study creative writing. Essentially, the colleges rode the wave of fear and hiked up the price, bolstered by the government guaranteeing they would get paid no matter what. One can ultimately argue that the colleges stole from the students who have historically felt like they had to go if they wanted to make it and be able to secure a middle class position in society.
Unreasonable price inflation combined with a sense of necessity or even physical necessity (health care) exists elsewhere in our economy as well. You can argue that our current political situation is due largely to people who are mad as hell over their life being impacted negatively by these things.
As for what life essentials they'll spend the money on, well, we can ask the burgeoning van dwellers movement (people who live in their cars) as well as those people who are running GoFundMe campaigns so they can afford medicine or a medical procedure. You can ask people who are moving out of the country because they can afford a better life in places like India (I just read about this the other day). You can ask the people who just marched to Canada to buy insulin at a reasonable price.
> Did we forget somewhere along the line that a home is just a patch of dirt with four walls and roof thrown on it?
The cost of home is largely the right to live in a certain location and have timely access to certain places. That's what everyone wants. No only walls but clean water, air, safety, culture, groceries, jobs, parks, entertainments, infrastructure, government protection, good schools, and so on. There are probably thousand little things that make the cost of a home, all of which are highly desirable everyone.
There are many who would argue that the willingness of a 18 year old to shoulder enormous financial responsibility to gain benefits largely denied to them by the way modern American society is constructed is not a real defense of the reasonableness of student loans.
Sure, but that opens up a lot of other difficult topics, all of which are very nuanced. If we're not going to consider 18 year old's adults, we need to re-visit the age limits on voting, military service, and other large financial contracts.
In the end, it always comes down to (some degree of) personal responsibility. Just because the government (or your job, or your family, or some guy you met on the street) offers you a new and novel way of ruining your life, it doesn't mean you have to take it. If the choice is pay your student loans and keep your credit score, or pay your rent and avoid being homeless, well, that's a terrible choice to have to make, but the answer is obvious, and the manner by which someone ended up in that situation is also pretty obvious.
But is that the type of society we want? One in which a rather large percentage of the population is dealing with those terrible choices regularly? And the rest of the population says "you should have been smart enough to not fall for it"?
Personal responsibility matters for sure. And to have freedom we have to allow personal responsibility rather than try and protect everyone from everything. But if someone comes up with a clever way to put a massive number of people in debt by leveraging common human failings, to the point that it threatens their ability to have shelter, do we not do something about it rather than allowing that clever someone to just become king (metaphorical)? Not to mention, wouldn't we want to head off both the growing apathy by some and the growing anger by others towards the rest of us lest it eventually threaten the country itself and its character?
I disagree massively with your last point, on the manner by which someone ended up there being obvious. Our current children are being raised by parents who grew up in a very different time, and the world has never been more complex. The tradeoff isn’t as simple as an educated adult making a bad financial decision, it’s actual children taking on huge burdens with little to no guidance in complete accordance with what society is telling them to do to get ahead, cause thats what worked 30 years ago.
> taking on huge burdens with little to no guidance
I don't know if this is still the case but when I took out student loans nearly two decades ago I had to go through "entrance counseling" and "exit counseling", explaining very clearly and meticulously what I was getting myself into.
Sure, not legally, but relative to the life experience required to even somewhat competently navigate the complexities of the modern world, 18 year olds are functionally children. Your entire life to that point is school, for many people, sheltered from the harsher realities of life and finances.
That entrance and exit loan counseling is a privilege for sure. I just graduated from a top 25 ranked private school and was never given loan counseling, and none of my peers were either. Thankfully I picked a high paying field, succeeded in it, and had parents with a ton of financial knowledge to help me effectively plan how to pay for it all, but the vast majority of my peers had no such luck on those three fronts. It’s especially telling that you went to school two decades ago, as no one going to school right now legitimately thinks the college student loan process is clearly presented in terms that are easy for the AVERAGE 18 year old to understand. Meanwhile, the costs have gone up...I don’t know, at least 100% since you went to school? Shit, tuition went up 4 grand while I was still in school.
> as no one going to school right now legitimately thinks the college student loan process is clearly presented in terms that are easy for the AVERAGE 18 year old to understand
I went to university nearly 30 years ago, and I didn't take out any loans the first few years. I did the last year, and even then I didn't think the process was remotely understandable. I remember getting a check and there was a pretty hefty fee that had been taken out, reducing my net by a moderate percentage. I couldn't find any good explanation of this, nor anyone at the school who could explain it.
> That entrance and exit loan counseling is a privilege for sure. I just graduated from a top 25 ranked private school and was never given loan counseling, and none of my peers were either.
Entrance/exit counseling is required for any federal student loan. Perhaps your loans weren’t federal?
> Meanwhile, the costs have gone up...I don’t know, at least 100% since you went to school? Shit, tuition went up 4 grand while I was still in school.
UCLA, one of the top schools in the world, costs $13k in tuition for the year for residents. Think about that, a world-class education for a little more than $1k/month.
Nope, I had federal loans. No counseling. Not sure what to tell you. A quick search of my student email account reveals a "required" exit counseling session, which I was not aware of until searching for it in my email at this very moment. No other attempt to contact me to get the counseling, and I very much successfully graduated without going. So seems the school at least doesn't really care too much.
As for your last point, I'm not sure how that matters? By my count, 14 of the top 25 universities globally are American private institutions. Not all of us were lucky enough to be raised in states with the caliber of public universities of California, and for us, the chance at a better life was one of those top private universities. That was a dream sold to me by the educational system my entire primary and secondary school life, and while it did work out for me, it's not working for thousands of young people and needs to be changed.
There are lot's of other options than taking out massive loans. Community College for two years then transferring to a state school is still fairly affordable and won't impact the vast majority of individuals in post-college job searches/careers.
It's just a lot less fun than going to a Big 10 school or the big name school.
Well-endowed private schools often offer more grant-based financial assistance than public schools, to the extent that the net cost for people who aren't upper income can be less than CC plus state school, as well as providing much better career prospects.
I would add medical bills to that as well. Some emergency room bills have asinine charges, and many aren't itemized very well. For example, you could have a bill that says:
And maybe you just went in with chest pain from asthma where they took some quick labs and an x-ray, sent you home after breathing treatment and no prescriptions for anything, and now you have a $7,000+ bill after spending 13 hours in the ER. Most of that time was spent sitting around staring at a wall.
The debt-owners have spent a lot of money lobbying politicians to pass laws that make it harder to declare bankruptcy.
The debt-owners can hire much more expensive lawyers than you can. The debt-owners have gotten you to sign a contract that says any disputes will be handled by an arbitration bureau, in person, in a state where the laws are most in their favor.
The debt-owners have the cops on their side.
What are you doing about this? Who do you vote for, who do you give money to? Both in terms of political or charitable donations and in terms of who your landlord's giving money to, what the entertainment corporations you patronize are giving money to, etc.
(Not just you: everyone who agrees with this. Including me. I know I'm sure not dropping everything to fight the creeping economic injustice that's burning the Earth alive and concentrating more and more money in the hands of fewer and fewer people.)
"In fact, I've known so many people who have either lost their home, almost lost their home, or are worried about losing their home that it makes up probably a majority of the people I know."
Doesn't seem to match up with
"Did we forget somewhere along the line that a home is just a patch of dirt with four walls and roof thrown on it"
I guess these people aren't struggling to afford a hut on a patch of dirt. I also guess you aren't condemning the majority of people you know as spendthrifts. So how are you reconciling the 2?
>What I don't understand is why people don't band together and simply refuse, collectively, to pay bills that are well known in the culture to be unreasonable. In particular, student loans.
Or taxes, when they are being used to recklessly loan so much money.
Try building your own house or your own car and then you might have some respect for the amount of work and expertise that goes into it. A house is not dirt with four walls and a roof... that's a tent. I've built one solo, banging nails and cutting wood. Buying one or renting one lets you skip a lot of work.
What will happen is that some very unpleasant men will come by and take things from you until you have paid it off or are so miserable you will start paying again. These guys are essentially paid to take things from you, so it's not like they'll stop either.
I respect the Irish in this regard when they refused to pay for a water bill that was introduced. They collectively managed to have it reversed as far as I can remember.
I don't know which roads the vigilantes are focusing on. But my guess is they aren't concerned with the less frequently used roads on the hillsides. They're probably more concerned with the ones that should be obvious to city officials to fix sooner rather than later. The ones that impact people significantly near the higher concentrations of homes and places of business.
The road conditions in Oakland have been this way for decades. And whenever you talk about a problem like this in Oakland, it calls forth the general condition of Oakland, which very much is a moral problem (both due to the alleged corruption that keeps it from changing as well as the fact that you can barely enter the city without being confronted by extreme poverty and people with severe mental health problems who are just left behind). The holes in the road have at least one thing in common with the overall state of the city: neglect.
Oakland is a disaster. If I recall correctly, someone from the U.N. went to Oakland a year or two ago and declared a humanitarian crisis or something to that effect. I remember the wording was quite strong, saying that it matched conditions in third world countries they've been to which are in crisis. How people can just step right past so many homeless people and so much obvious city disrepair and human brokenness for years on end is beyond me. Yet Oakland and nearby Berkeley are home to a lot of people who are considered "progressive" and "caring" and who supposedly want a better world. If you can't achieve positive results for the people in your immediate vicinity (which the people of Oakland and Berkeley very much have the power to do, especially with things as simple as potholes), then do you get to count yourself as a person who can say they are working towards a better world? Thumbs up for these so-called vigilantes. They talk less and act more. I just hope they don't let the mayor co-opt their efforts by letting her go around saying she's all about it.
I remember reading a story by a motorcyclist who had ridden around the world. He had ridden through the most inhospitable places - some because of nature, some because of warfare.
I believe he was going through a US city and slept under a tree with his bike parked nearby, and he was woken and told it was too dangerous to do that. I thought it was Oakland, (but I might have misremembered and it was some other dangerous urban area).
I've spent many months cycling and walking throughout the US, mainly in the 2000s; it was striking to me to learn how scared some people are of the world around them.
I could imagine your story playing out anywhere - someone saying "it's too dangerous to do that here", doesn't actually mean much about the actual danger.
Yeah, well... my parents won't let me walk home after dark in my tiny Canadian home town because it's "too dangerous", while it is objectively two orders of magnitude less dangerous than the large American city in which I now live (and routinely walk around after dark). People exaggerate danger, I've found.
Because the old people who dominate local politics literally scream and talk over you when you try to do anything that would address a few big root causes (housing prices, prop 13 & property taxes).
That’s an exaggeration. Oakland is actually a nice place.
My observation is that, in the eyes of progressives, working class folks and politicians, the city government and services are first a source of jobs, and services are secondary.
Oakland was just ranked as one of the 5 worst-managed cities in the United States based on the following factors: 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution.
And then there's this...
"A United Nations expert on housing explicitly singled out San Francisco and Oakland as the only two U.S. cities that are part of a 'global scandal'". "[The U.N. Special rapporteur] cites SF and Oakland along with worst slums in the world", calling the "'cruel and inhuman' treatment of the homeless 'a human rights violation'". She went on to say “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen”. "In several respects, she said, the situation in California's cities [she was speaking from Oakland] is worse than other parts of the world"
"In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [the U.N. Special rapporteur] said. "They had no running water. They stole electricity." The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland"
"Every person I spoke to today [in Oakland] has told me, 'we are human beings,'" said [the U.N. Special rapporteur] about her conversations with camp residents. "But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong."
There are a lot of homeless people here for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the 'progressives' you call out aren't making homelessness illegal. They aren't making laws against pan handling, and sleeping on sidewalks. They're not trying to bus these people away to other cities.
Oakland and other cities are doing their best to own the homeless problem and provide support to these people where they are. They've built 'tuff-shed' communities, set up sites with showers and services, recently opened a space dedicated to people living in RVs...
Are they perfect? Do they solve the problem? No. But the city of Oakland is trying to solve a problem that should not be reasonably expected to be solved by a city. This problem is bigger than Oakland - and I think the city should get credit for making the investments they do to try and help.
If every other city was doing the same thing, homelessness would probably not be the big problem it is.
How crazy is it that we allow companies to take a percentage cut of EVERY transaction we make? How often do you NOT use a credit card or some other payment system with a middleman? It's become so commonplace that the idea of replacing cash entirely seems normal to people. And yet this normal state of things involves a middleman taking a cut of EVERY transaction!
Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.
The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.
Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.
(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)
Or, rather, it cannot collect additional legal penalties for nonpayment of debt for the time period after a tender of payment in legal tender is made. A business may refuse payment offered in exchange for goods and services that have not yet been provided.
This is my experience with older skilled programmers as well. For the most part, I notice when there are technical folks in their 40s and 50s on a project, the "gee whiz" is thankfully tempered by the benefit of experience, and the projects have a more concrete results-driven character. "There is nothing new under the sun", as they say. And when you've seen the signature of a pitfall before, you can spot its many variations. Less chasing after chimeras. More driving at the actual business goal.
The heavily youth-driven focus of tech hiring has always struck me as ultimately very dumb. And I think this is also reflected in the god-awful interviewing practices that everyone is familiar with. I don't see older engineers promoting those practices that are talked about so much in the industry as being borderline absurd.
And as a counterpoint, I've worked with a number of Senior-level programmers more than old enough to be my parents and seen them behave in some of the most god-awful ways. Resume-Driven-Development, Not-Invented-Here syndrome, refusal to write new tests, refusal to maintain existing tests, breaking the build, deploying broken code. All because of the insidious little "because I (don't) want to."
I'm less convinced that age has anything to do with good outcomes these days as is the discipline to do the responsible things, regardless of how little we wish to do those things.
Yeah at any age you can have problematic developers, but in general the problem is just being prejudice towards an age segment. I think that if the person has proven to be competent they should be given the opportunity and at the same time treated accordingly if they behave like the example you gave.
> I'm less convinced that age has anything to do with good outcomes these days as is the discipline to do the responsible things, regardless of how little we wish to do those things.
The age might also act as a filter, since the best developers are often promoted to the management roles in their 40s and 50s, and are no longer writing much code themselves.
In my experience, people who got promoted to being managers were done so mostly because of their extraversion and people skills - and it makes sense, as these traits make managing easier for them. Unfortunately, not all of them were competent technically - in such cases, the smart ones try to heavily leverage the technical chops of their teams, and just focus on purely managerial duties, such as running interference with the rest of the company etc.
Interesting thought, but I know many programmers (ages ranging from 40 to 70) who refuse to go into anything managerial. I suppose love-of-the-game muddies the waters for that kind of filter.
I believe there are many great developers who refuse other positions and still code in their 50s, but an average developer in his 30s could be better than an average developer in his 50s, because many successful developers might transition into higher paid leadership roles or start their own companies when they hit 40s. For instance, Joel Spolsky was still writing software in his mid-30s.
I assume he was better than an average programmer, since he was responsible for designing Excel Basic at Microsoft. I think the very best programmers keep coding in their 40s and 50s, because there is simply nothing they could be better at. It's the "upper-middle class" of programmers, who often transition into new roles at around 40, because they no longer feel the progress in their careers. How many years can one spend being a Senior Engineer at Google?
I know of senior engineers at Google in their late sixties, and I’m sure there are folks in their seventies there. Some of them are top people in their fields. Donald Knuth is 81 (10000 in ternary) and he still codes for research all the time. My understanding is that Spolsky’s job at Microsoft, which was his first job, was to spec out the then nascent macro language for Excel, he wasn’t a programmer himself, perhaps ever professionally. He does have a lot of opinions on what a great programmer should look like, and isn’t too shy to share them.
I think there is a real market opportunity for a startup that can provide a way to connect businesses who need short-term or specific project work (i.e. they don't want employees) with freelancers who want to work in that mode while (and this is important) avoiding the creepiness and flaky nature of UpWork. Conversely, it would also need to avoid being too similar to having the middleman as an employer.
I probably know 50 people who would jump on a platform that hit this sweet spot in a heartbeat.