Go ask people installing solar panels and heat pumps if the idea of working a "cognitively taxing" job where they could make more money, work from anywhere and not be dead physically tired at the end of the day sounds appealing... I don't think you'll hear them all say "screw that, I love installing solar panels". The grass is always greener for sure, but none-the-less software engineering and tech offers a very high quality of life with significant earning potential and a ton of flexibility.
IMO a gas tax rate that is on par with the rest of the developed world would be the most sane way to combat this. Gas taxes in the US and Canada are dismal compared to many other countries (https://afdc.energy.gov/data/widgets/10327).
And of course more investment in pedestrian/biking infrastructure and more walkable city planning.
Car registration cost is proportional to (internal combustion) horsepower in Switzerland, which is helpful in punishing buyers if heavy vehicles.
Electric cars in Canton Vaud can be registered for a flat rate of $25, whereas cars are $700 a year and bigger vehicles (SUV, 7 place minivan) are $1200.
Eventually the transition to electric will require that we apply proportionality to electric too.
Problem is they are convienient in cities. Make your cities unusable for the size and it's problem solved. Just make your streets more narrow. Removing parking is a dick move. Taxing is pointless.
For people with special needs - subsidise specialised Uber. For the very few tradies who actually need to lug cargo narrower street is minor inconvenience.
I'm all for putting an excise tax on new on gasoline cars. Make the owner of a new gasoline powered car pay their carbon tax up front. In this case you don't care about the money you want people to stop buying gasoline power cars. You can then that money to buy back older cars and take them off the road.
The issue I perceive with this is that all of these wages seem to be extremely inflated compared to the job market for similar roles. Are private hospitals in SF paying RNs almost 300k a year? Are the FB shuttle shuttle drivers or delivery drivers in industry making 108k a year? I doubt it.
It's a common problem actually. Private shuttle companies complain they are unable to compete with all the benefits etc. Government monopolies are the absolute worst for this reason.
That's all good and fine until you want this model you built with tooling you barely understand to be deployed. Then your gross data scientist spaghetti code gets handed off to some one who actually has the skills to turn it into a robust deployable code base.
I love that Python has brought a lot of people into programming and that it makes it relatively easy for domain experts to do advanced analytics. However, another side of me wishes that there were a less user friendly language being used for data analysis so that it would force all of these people to actually learn to code half-way decently.
Concerto Health AI is building a team of healthcare and AI experts to break down data silos and make the world’s cancer data actionable. We have a multi-disciplinary group of people from top healthcare and data companies working together to build value for the cancer ecosystem.
----
stack: python, making heavy use of numpy/pandas/scipy - SQL - AWS
PHAI is building a team of healthcare and AI experts to break down data silos and make the world’s cancer data actionable. We have a multi-disciplinary group of people from top healthcare and data companies working together to build value for the cancer ecosystem.
----
stack: Javascript/React front end - pure python backend making heavy use of numpy/pandas/scipy
I'd agree young Americans are less interested in owning their media and there does seem to be a general trend away from materialism and towards spending any extra income on experiences over objects. However, I reject the notion that the younger generations are less interested in owning property. Young people do want to have a stake in the system, but most places young people are living (especially where they're moving to) it's nearly impossible for most of them to get into the property/housing ownership game to begin with due to housing price inflation and stagnant wages.
If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s/80s) had I think this would be a very different story.
Yeah, this is a "blame the millenials" article in disguise. The problem is that we're pretty broke compared to our parents, because the big purchases (housing, education, cars) cost way more relative to our incomes. The elder dev sitting across from me bought his house for 10k around 1989. Now every house in that neighborhood costs ~350-400k (and it's one of the bigger and better ones).
The average price of a house sold in the US in 1989 was around $145,000.
The average price of a house sold in the US in 2018 is around $375,000.
If we adjust the 1989 dollars for inflation, that $145,000 becomes about $295,000.
That means, in 2018 dollars, the average house price has gone up around $80,000 or 27% over the past 29 years.
That's a significant increase and we should be concerned about whether or not Americans can afford to purchase houses, but framing the problem as "houses are now 35-40 times as expensive as they were in the late 80's" is terribly inaccurate as a general metric.
One shift in owning vs streaming media is that so much is accessible now.
In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.
I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).
The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.
"A stake in the system" comes with restrictions. It's hard to move around when you own a house. And there's various forms of "stake", too. I'd much rather own stocks & bonds and other instruments that I can look at in an app versus a complex bureaucratic like a house. The transaction and maintenance costs are unbelievable.
