Chalk up one more nightmarish facet of modern life almost soley attributable to housing costs. I'd love nothing more than to work a part time job and practice the Sitar all day. But now that equals homelessness.
As a man at 25, start to think seriously about settling down with someone if you want a family. Men and women exist on different timelines. While you may think "Oh I'll wait until 30-35 for that stuff", you'll look around at that point and realize you've missed the boat. Of course plenty of people still get married and have kids at that age. But the vast majority of women are either married, engaged, or in long term relationships heading toward marriage by 30, and you won't realize that until it's too late.
Well aware of this and proactively working towards it.
The timelines part is really hits. Many people have told me to wait until 30-35 but the issue is the women that you're interested in are not going to wait for you...
FWIW, this is the exact opposite of what my most important advice would be. Don't settle down in your 20s. Your life ends as soon as you have kids. You do get a new life, but it's radically different from the life you had, and not really yours.
Also, when you're 35, you will likely have a much better understanding of what really matters to you, and what kind of partner you really want for the long haul.
It's often said that "60 is the new 50" — and it is, if you do it right — the corollary is something like, "25 is the new 19". That's a gift! Take advantage.
>Also, when you're 35, you will likely have a much better understanding of what really matters to you, and what kind of partner you really want for the long haul.
Indeed you will, and she'll be married with kids at that point.
>It's often said that "60 is the new 50" — and it is, if you do it right — the corollary is something like, "25 is the new 19". That's a gift! Take advantage.
Again, it certainly can be for men if you're willing to date younger. But human biology has not changed. Women are well aware of the fact that their fertility drops off a cliff starting at 30. Plan accordingly.
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.
this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
The broader impact is that it creates a lot of uncertainty around valuations in the market. This is probably the most impactful (on valuations) policy change made by Valve in the history of the market. Now there is an increased fear that more similar such changes may be coming down the pipeline.
Yanis Varoufakis is now writing and warning us about digital feudalism, seemingly based on his learnings at his Valve tenure.
Valve, as a digital feudalist, generates funds, practically for free, from both transactions of items and the lootboxes. It operates the markets on which digital goods are traded, taxes all sales occurring on these platforms.
You might want to search him, though. As far as "highest levels of economic decision making" goes, he's not a bad choice - not uncontroversial, perhaps, but definitely qualified for it.
History suggests the US is pretty good at acting when it perceives existential threat.
I suspect that is a truism the current administration is attempting to leverage. Unfortunately / inconveniently for them, instead of focusing on actual existential threats (climate change), they've tried to rally people behind a pretend existential threat (immigration). The people smell the rat and it seems to be back-firing.
Why they don't do the obvious thing and co-opt the green energy initiative, get into a space-race equivalent with China on solar panels and wind turbines, is a mystery to me.
We were willing to spend money doing things. The whole moon landing program cost something like $300 billion adjusted for inflation. Artemis is on a relative shoestring.
>So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.
Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.
It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.
>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.
Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since we have zero class solidarity, and are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Haha, funnily enough they said the same thing before 1918. They also said a bunch of Vietnamese farmers could never beat a world class military. Have faith in your fellow workers and hold on to the hope that a better world is possible.
As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.
There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.
Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.
Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.
It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.
The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.
Do you not think the same thing would apply in the US? If we were having serious domestic conflict there would be veterans on both sides, not to mention that other countries would certainly train officers to help their preferred side. The real point is that "technical superiority" (air power, artillery, mechanized equipment) is not on its own sufficient to win a war when the populace is opposed to the occupying military presence, and that military is not willing to totally butcher that populace.
There are similar biases there about the technological sophistication of what the Americans were up against. The image of a Taliban soldier rarely includes an engineer with a spectrum analyzer on his back to probe US jamming signals, or plasma cannon IEDs, but they were a big part of that conflict.
Sure, but this time it's not different. The play has always and forever will be to try and force most of the population into a peasant caste be removing education and welfare, as well as setting up nice circular infighting.
It will inevitably end up as it always does. Or we'll all die horribly. You know, either way.
Who is trying to remove education and welfare and how are they accomplishing it? I have high doubts people actually want those things removed, especially in a country as great as the US.
Did you not see them firing thousands of people from the department of education and trying to fully close it (at the federal level)? They put Linda (*@&#$ McMahon (yes, from WWE wrestling) in charge of it..
As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the vietnamese, the cubans, etc it is very difficult to defeat a population that doesn't want to give in even if you have fancy toys and a huge kill ratio.
The Vietnamese and Cubans were funded by the Soviets trying to expand their empire. They were proxy war fighters for a nuclear power. Sure they were kind of rag tag but only because the Soviets considered all soldiers to be disposable.
The out of work tradesman going into the Fairfax VA or Berkley CA Whole Foods (IDK if either of these places have Whole Foods, but they seem like they could) in the year 2030 and dusting the avocados with anthrax won't care whether the anthrax is funded by China or Russia, just that it winds up in the lungs of the people who've run his country into the ground.
While I think terrorists should care who is using them and why, that wasn't my point.
My point was that the parent comment's examples weren't of a difficult to defeat determined population. They were warlords helping imperialists establish nuclear bases so the Soviets could project power. Everything else is just a fairy tale.
They tell all sorts of fairy tales to get soldiers to march into certain death and have throughout history.
My understanding is that historically, popular uprisings only succeed when part of the established power allows it to happen or tags along for their own reasons. This includes the military.
I would be happy to be pointed at some exception to this.
I think as people get further squeezed there is only one way to go and that is mass strikes. It’s likely things have to get worse before people are forced into the only realistic option.
> Try creating a GUI in C++ without using any libraries.
This is more or less my response to anyone who complains about CSS; just consider the alternatves. CSS is, by an order of magnitude, the most powerful, flexible, accessible, and maintainable paradigm for UI development in existence. In some cases you're talking hundreds of native LOC to implement what a single CSS rule in a class can do.
I just can't understand who is buying these cars. As a single person with a 90th percentile income and zero debt or dependents, I literally can't even comprehend having a $1,000 car payment. How anyone else is affording this just doesn't make sense.
8 or 10 year loan. Then you roll that remainder into the next loan when you get another car.
It's absurd, to be honest. We financed our last vehicle, because we got a price discount via financing. The FIRST payment term they brought us was 8 years. And this was for a 19k vehicle.
People aren't looking at the terms, they're just looking at the payments. They're paying more for cars than they are for houses, monthly. I don't get it.
> It's absurd, to be honest. We financed our last vehicle, because we got a price discount via financing. The FIRST payment term they brought us was 8 years. And this was for a 19k vehicle.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess it was a Nissan dealership. Nissan can’t sell enough cars without subprime lending, that’s my guess as to why you were offered a 96-month term lol.
With a prime credit score, Toyota offered a 3 year term loan to me which I changed to 5 years (2.5%, it’s free money)
I could afford it, but I’d much rather put that money into my mortgage, pension, or an investment account. But then I don’t get much pleasure out of cars. If I loved nice cars then I might think it’s worth spending disposable income on one.
Completely agree here. I came from a family that loved its fancy cars, but the practical difference between an average car and a high-end luxury model is pretty minimal. Until you need to fix the latter.
> ... but the practical difference between an average car and a high-end luxury model is pretty minimal. Until you need to fix the latter.
You're right: broken gearbox on mine was a solid 15 K EUR at least. But... I paid zero.
My solution is simple: I buy a high-end luxury car used (four to five years old) but I then religiously pay every year for the official extended manufacturer warranty.
I pay 1400 EUR per year for that warranty but then any yellow or red light on the dashboard, any issue (sunroof not opening, sound system speaker broken, NAV issue, anything really), I bring it to any official dealership, in any country in the world and they fix it (it's already been at least to dealerships in Belgium (various little issues), France (gearbox but they didn't fix it: they didn't believe me it was broken), Germany (gearbox replaced), Spain (wipers broke down after a 1700 km road trip under heavy rain: like... it was just too much for the motor 15 hours non-stop), Andorra (yellow light, forgot what it was) and Poland (headlight was getting old and cranky, this summer)).
Car is now 12 y/o and 115 000 miles / 190 000 km and I just renewed the warranty for another two years, unlimited mileage.
For that's the thing with high-end luxury cars too: you have fancy stuff like a warranty valid until 15 years old and 350 000 miles / 400 000 km if you want (if I were to bring it in two years in Sep 2027 with 400 000 km and a broken engine, they'd be forced to replace it just like they were forced to replace the gearbox).
And that warranty is valid in any country in the world. And they give you a spare vehicle. And you've got assistance taking care of everything should you be stuck. For 120 EUR / month on a used car to me it's a no-brainer.
And in two years I'll just sell the car for 15 K EUR or something and buy another high-end luxury car, used (four or five years old), again.
I think for people who enjoy high-end cars but don't want to deal with the stress of having an engine or a gearbox breaking, a used high-end luxury car with an extended warranty is a good solution.
Practically I give to you that it's still just metal on four wheels.
The business model of most higher-end makes has evolved: the first customer leases the car for 3-4 years and then returns it to the dealer, who turns around and sells it to a customer with a full warranty for another 3-4 years.
So modern lux cars are actually pretty well-made and pretty reliable these days. The only catch is that they’re designed with the assumption that all maintenance will be done at the dealer and that the driver never sees a bill.
Once you exit that - do maintenance elsewhere or not under warranty, the costs become ridiculous and people start skipping necessary items. So the car breaks down and the repairs are even more ridiculous. So off to the junkyard it goes.
Stay inside the dealer+warranty bubble and you have a pretty good time, although many people will question your sanity buying an expensive extended warranty for a 12-year old car ;)
Not to mention that insurance is crazy with such high vehicle values. Easily another $200-300 a month, and that's if you're a good driver over 30 with no accidents.
I had a > $1000 car payment, but the interest rate was only 2.5%, not to mention I overpaid, so it was paid off early. I'll keep the car for at least 10-15 years.
Just looking at the "blue book" site suggests that a 5-year-old Accord with 50k miles can be traded for $20k and a 10-year-old Accord with 100k miles can be traded for half that, but a 2005 model with 200k miles is virtually worthless. So there's a cliff somewhere, but neither the 5 nor 10 year old example are negligible.
One point of annecdata to backup your figures: I traded my 2018 Accord (7.5 years old, 97k miles) this past weekend, was offered $11k and negotiated them up to $15k. So, trade ins are definitely worth more than nothing.
They've been snookered by American culture into believing that the bicycle is useless, and/or they've become trapped in an American exurb where the bicycle is in fact useless. I have a car but it mainly just sits there and like you I refuse to buy anything that costs more than about $30k. I drive a Honda Insight which at the time was the cheapest car Honda was selling in this country. The new Civic Hybrid annoyingly has 18-inch wheels so if I was looking at cars today I would probably favor the Corolla Hybrid. It blows my mind that people will by a Rivian.
>Biggest crash in the history of crypto. I'm surprised this isn't on network news.
In dollar terms sure, but it's a meaningless blip percentage wise. The NASDAQ shed more than its entire market cap in the 2000s this year in a few days and it went right back up. We are in a fantasy world where numbers don't mean anything anymore.
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