they're pointing out that the US is insanely stupid when it comes to healthcare and retirement. the stuff we do in this country is so much extra work/effort/cost and all of it comes at the worker's cost.
My reading was that nothing of that applies in Europe. No earning 6 figures, no way to invest pre-tax or in any other tax advantaged way, no way to optimize healthcare costs, early retirement unlikely.
Retirement accounts are a thing in Europe though. In Poland for example there's IKE and IKZE. IKE is a bit simpler of the two. If you hold your money on IKE until you're 60 you're not paying taxes on that. Can invest in stocks or bonds.
UK has the state pension which comes from NI (National Insurance) contributions which in a way acts like a Defined Benefit pension in that you work for X number of years and get state pension of Y in return(currently adjusted for inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% annually, called the 'triple lock'). Not based on income so you don't get a massive state pension by earning 6+ figures.
Then more recently (as in, as of around 2012 and up to 2018) we got auto-enrollment into private pensions, which are more like Defined Contribution (DC). Employer has to pay a percentage into the pot and so do you. Usually 5% employee and 3% employer by default but many will offer better (or contribution matching) as a perk. I think this is probably the same or similar to the 401k in US terms. The employer chooses the pension provider but you need to proactively switch to a high risk scheme to see any growth from it.
At a certain point the tax rebate from the government doesn't cover your whole income so you have to file a tax return to get the rest of the rebate. You can instead choose to 'salary sacrifice' which means you are lowering your income on paper but the sacrifice is put directly into pension (or otherwise can be used to get a car on lease or a bicycle via another scheme). Salary sacrifice is used by a lot of higher earners to bring their gross income down in order to avoid being cut off on certain benefits like child-care.
After all that you have SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension) which gives you more control over what you can invest it. Not just stocks, ETFs, and all that, but can also be commercial property (so the pension itself owns that asset). This gets the same tax treatment for pensions.
Finally there is the ISA and LISA. The first is a savings account where any interest or capital gain is free of tax, the second gets a 25% boost by the government to help buy a house or flat, but you can only use that money for a mortgage deposit.
Most people won't see all that much from their auto-enrollment given they could just opt-out to get the extra cash in their paycheque (especially when a low earner), or might not know to switch to the high risk fund, so the state pension and other benefits for OAPs will be there still. Those with more disposable income or a long term view (e.g. doing FIRE) are likely to max out the various vehicles available to them but at that point you're gonna be earning too much to care.
No need to optimise healthcare costs or any of that unless you want to go private.
There are options to save extra for retirement, if you take a private pension or a bank account that you can't withdraw from until retirement for example; in that case, you don't pay wealth tax and only pay taxes when it starts paying out. Sometimes the money you put into it is tax deductible, too. But, that's in NL, I don't know anywhere else. Source: https://www.nibud.nl/onderwerpen/pensioen/pensioen-opbouwen/
6 figures is possible, there are/were some software companies (VC backed, US based, US startup style, FAANG) that pay that much, otherwise there's highly paid jobs like management, doctors/dentists, landlord, public motivational speaker, drug dealer, etc that can earn you that much. But it's not handed to you like it feels like it is in the US / SF, but I realize that's very much a unique bubble.
So yeah, basically none of your comment is true, it's just not talked about as much because our basic systems are alright for most people and few have the extra income to think about doing more with it.
The investment taxation was already discussed in a sibling comment. As always in Europe, it depends on a country. Good for you if that's possible in Netherlands.
Of course some roles can earn six figures or more, hopefully everyone knows there isn't a hard cap on earnings. Should've been obvious that wasn't my claim.
I am not sure which profession they are in (software development?), but no. Not everybody is guessing. If they were you would have half of the buildings and bridges collapsing and the other half on fire by bad electrical wiring.
You can legitly learn how to do things properly and people who learnt to do that do the polar opposite of guessing. It is just that the world of software development has yet to be made liable for their results in the same way as civil or electrical engineers. So in software development many are just guessing because guessing wrong won't ruin their life.
Software "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.
Yet when we talk about controlling trains, airplanes, freight ships, medical devices, nuclear power plants and space stuff we suddenly know how to do it?
There is software engineering and it is known how to do things that absolutely must not fail. It is just thst these standard are not commonly deployed if nobody forces you to deploy them. And why would you? Costs money and a software error is widely treated like divine intervention.
There is a big difference between knowing something must not fail, and how to make it so it will not fail. The latter is where opinions and approaches often differ, in ways that more formal engineering does not.
I'm very wary of anyone in tech/software eng that says "this is the only right way to do this." I'm aware those attitudes exist everywhere.
I once found a very interesting definition of engineering. It is about making something that just barely does the job. Doing it better costs more usually and doing it worse costs lives.
Not much different in software. There is always many ways of solving problems and that is typical of any engineering. Contrary to sciences.
They are guessing much more than computer scientists would think, typically . A structural engineer does not know: the peak wind force, what the ground under the bridge is really made of, what the actual tensile strength at the weakest piece of material is, what the exact force on the screws were at time of fastening (and after), etc... Heck, they don't even know if euler bernoulli beam theory is actually right about the existence of a neutral axis..They just take their best guesses, add generous safety factors and have the bridge inspected regularly ..
You have abstractions and models for those things. I was formally trained as an EE, so I'm just guessing at how structural engineers do it.
I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree.
I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.
american fast food learned that if they try to hit the business market they can sell higher mark up items. it's why mcdonalds for a long time went to premium chicken and premium burgers that were more expensive. they changed strats, but for a while in the US that's what a lot of fast food was doing. they were chasing whales.
I had to get out of tech for that reason: i need a physical good I can create and hold. Using my engineer skills to build physical things satiates my brain so much more. I don't think I can ever go back to coding as a job. I just don't care about other people's garbage code, lol.
i got out of tech/coding so i could apply my skills to more real world stuff. it's been so much better. i don't make as much but i end each day with a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. i wouldn't trade it away. my social life has gotten so much better, as well, because i'm happier in general and i talk to so many more people as a result. i smile more, i think is the main thing.
Surely step one is psychological. I feel like being able to accept a lower paycheck is critical to leaving tech if you’re at the over specialized part of your career
Callous, but that’s your fault for building a life that requires tech money to maintain. I don’t get the point of comments like yours, just to make one feel bad for escaping the golden handcuffs.
There are plenty of people that have children and live decent lives earning less than $200k/year + benefits.
My partner is a therapist and so I wind up in a lot of therapist groups and support groups for therapists. Many of them are youth therapists. I also coach kids and help coordinate youth athletics. My best friend is also a middle school teacher, along with his partner. So I think I have a decent grasp on where kids are at nowadays. At least in my area.
Most people I know who work with kids agree that the majority of children nowadays lack basic skills that will really handicap them in life. From a lack of basic reading/writing/typing/math skills to an ability to handle any kind of confrontation. The anti-social stuff is really, really bad and it compounds as life goes on, where kids never learn skills as they need to. Avoidance is really prevalent in people nowadays and this leads to never learning or atrophying basic skill sets. Then it also leads to not learning how to learn, or asking for help, etc.
Kids also lack the basic ability to put a series of tasks together to accomplish a larger goal. Critical thinking is severely lacking. Kids have grown up being able to ask a search engine a question or have an AI do tasks for them. The ability to understand how things work, then manipulate those things to meet a goal is just not there for a large amount of kids. I think we really need to bring back things like shop class, home ec, etc to get kids using their hands more. Kids need to be able to have an idea and then implement it in the real world. This is a skill I rarely see in kids nowadays. Way too often kids are told to avoid making mistakes and to get someone/something else to do things for them. The agency is just not there.
I really feel terrible for a lot of kids nowadays. Luckily, since I work with athletics and STEM kids, most of my tribe are eager to learn and move about. This is definitely not the norm nowadays though. My teacher friends are really struggling to feel like they're making a difference or benefitting these kids. It's sad because the problems are mostly related to their parents, not really the school system.
It kind of sound to me like you're surrounded by a lot of people who will tell you stories about kids, but only the ones who are having problems. Either because there's a selection that happened before they even encountered the kids (being a therapist), or because there's just no reason to talk about the ones that are doing fine (teacher)
Western society is made of the weaklings (I think the term nowadays is snowflakes) who will do anything to avoid fight/conflict, I realized it when I returned back after few years in China and saw everywhere these weak people. In China you have to be rude/fast to survive, ignoring other people's interests.
Same experience when I was kid before serving in military vs after serving in military, you really grow up fast over there from teenager.
They should be teaching assertiveness in the schools, western people will nowadays just complain on internet (internet heroes) or find excuse "oh it's just a dollar" to avoid conflict instead of complaining directly where it's suitable.
Interesting (I read this all) and wonder if it is a local issue vs a larger issue? Meaning are you seeing the influence of your local social economy class and how they parent?
I'm guessing this is a urban city area of upper middle class? I could be completely off.
a few years ago I stopped using social media to interact with fans. One thing I realized is that no matter how i use my blog to present a story, 90% of users simply dont interact with content in a meaningful way.
The reason I mention social media is all the apps operate the same way: the user swipes up or down, left or right, double taps and moves on. A website or blog or interactive content requires interaction, it requires thinking, it requires the possibility of a mistake. Those things make most users never click more than once on a website. Once a website goes beyond the first page most users leave.
It's really weird how folks are conditioned to do the least amount of effort in everything and then we complain when things are confusing. Convenience is a disease.
the internet really needs to stfu about tesla and get over that oatmeal comic that spawned a billion internet myths. dude was a decent inventor but suffered from chronic mental health issues and, in his lifetime, wasted so much time/energy/money and burned so many bridges with his horrible attitude. there's a reason most people didnt like him in his day, he was a depressed asshole who alienated everyone around him, and yes I know he was likely gay in a time when that wasn't cool. the fact still remains; his inventions are massively overblown by internet nerds.
the podcaster Sebastian Major from "Our Fake History" did a looonnngg patreon episode on tesla and debunked most of the weird myths around tesla. Sebastian doesn't have a vendetta or anything, it's just amazing how much of the Tesla stuff is just nonsense or is viewed through a very weird bias nowadays. Major also briefly touches on the weird Edison stuff and how the internet has twisted Edison into a villain.
Software engineers idolize Tesla because they see themselves as the Tesla (a selfless devotee of the abstract idea of technology) against evil Edisons (businessmen who only care about money and steal other people's ideas). They've basically projected the Jobs/Woz divide back onto two historical figures who, in reality, barely interacted.
The funniest part is that The Oatmeal comic didn't invent this concept, but drew on pre-Internet narratives put forward by The Tesla Society, who were mailing busts of Tesla to universities around the country since the 70s at least. And that organization is explicitly nationalistic and religious, tied to other Serbian-American heritage organizations, and doing events with the Orthodox church.
> And that organization is explicitly nationalistic and religious
So are many Serbs (more so if emigrants from atheist-socialist Yugoslavia, or descendants of folks who moved before WW2) as well as many other nations and organizations (America itself lol). So are many Something-Or-Other-American individuals and communities.
I presume that the organization(s) sending Tesla busts, being American-rooted, have had no illusions about which matters will forever remain impossible to communicate to Americans. (Such as anything not reducible to paperclip optimization.)
Instead, I consider it more likely that the point of promoting Tesla was not to impress anyone in America, but to uplift Serbia and generally the South Slavs of the Balkans who'd only gained national sovereignty in Tesla's day: "look, our heritage has already produced an honest-to-god American inventor half a jebani vek ago, so you guys have zero excuse to act as if you're stuck in the middle ages - do join the cargo cult of mordorn civilization instead, will ya - we got value to extract from ya!"
>They've basically projected the Jobs/Woz divide back onto two historical figures who, in reality, barely interacted.
I'd rather say this has been projected for them, but by whom is anyone's guess; not like there's a shadowy cabal operating. Besides said Serbian-American heritage promoters and whatever their game is, I guess - but here we're not talking mid-XX century Serbian diaspora any more, but a "culturally nonspecific" audience.
Much safer to call it "a hivemind situation" when nobody knows where some idea comes from, and nobody is accountable for rebroadcasting it either, since it comes pre-tagged as Good and True and Useful and it is wrongthink to doubt those. Especially when the idea is so obviously Useful for excusing nonaction. ("I can't be bothered to learn the first thing about electricity, even the history of why I have access to it in the first place - but now that Tesla guy I've vaguely heard of, he was the great genius of the people! What better reason to Experience a Positive Emotion!")
People need heroes. It's like the Keanu Reeves or Musk era, all the ""badass"" stories about this or that soldier / local hero / w/e that are very often overblown and get further and further away from the initial facts every time they resurface.
No hate here, just noticing there is a weird visceral need to distill stories to their most essential, good vs evil, and the Tesla v Edison thing embodies this perfectly I think.
Keanu Reeves and Nikola Tesla to a degree as well, are decent figures.
Aside from all the cult classics Keanu is part of like john wick and the matrix, even discounting that, he is a good person in it of itself who is genuinely humble and might be one of the best persons within hollywood.
What I feel pissed about is that people like Andrew Tate and others like them took the concept of Matrix and the contributions Keanu did within that movie and tried to capitalize on that cult classic decades after in the most toxic form that might be the issue if we are talking about an era
To be honest, Nikola tesla is also a great person within the context of his time. GGP's comment is still true but Tesla's contributions can hardly be reinstated and I'd much rather people believe these to be the heros (Keanu/Tesla) rather than Tate/Musk etc.
If I take anything from Keanu, I would like to take his humility/humbleness.
Whilst I agree that Keanu is a most excellent human, he was hardly responsible for the concept of the Matrix. In my opinion, Philip K Dick was a major influence (I'm a fan and consider him the prophet of the modern age), though Gibson's Neuromancer was likely a big influence too. (Also, there's the old Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" which features the Matrix).
It always seems to me that the far right are bereft of original ideas and always co-opt other pre-existing concepts. There's exceptions, but I always find that right wing works are always lacking humour or irony (c.f. Ayn Rand's works).
I mean yeah, but it's not like the guy's 'horrible attitude' came from nowhere. He naiively romanticised migrating to the US thinking the game was about scientific progress rather than capital, and so he got repeatedly screwed over by almost everyone around him for decades.
If I was in his position I'm not sure I'd have taken it as well as he did.
There’s no way he suddenly developed autism or whatever mental illness plagued him upon arrival to American. Like most absolute geniuses he struggled in other areas. He said he had visions as a child.
Tesla was an outstanding technologist, but a poor businessman. He had a "vision" (actually more than one) about how his ideas could transform the world. Some of his ideas were amazing, but he was swindled out of his patents because the investors knew he had a passion and wanted to see them in use. The polyphase AC motor or fluorescent light bulb could have made him millions.
IMHO, the vision he had about universal free electricity (transmitted wirelessly) was the dumbest. It was a novel idea, and he invested a lot (his time and other people's money) in it. The problem with his idea is that there was no way to monetize it (and profit from it). (There were also the technical issues of the power loss over distance (1/R^2), the harm to the environment, and the interference with radio communications.)
Edison was quite a villain. He stole many of his "inventions", and orchestrated a PR campaign against Tesla touting the "evils" of AC power. AFAIK, the electric chair was either invented or inspired by him.
I know these things because I've read many books on various topics related to Tesla, and all of this knowledge predates the Internet.
Essentially none of this is true. The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse, not Tesla. Tesla's downfall was that he turned into a crackpot who rejected modern science, such as Maxwell's equations, and started defrauding investors. Edison was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, and the electric chair used AC simply because it is much more deadly.
Westinghouse was using Tesla's patents. Get your facts right.
Every so often, I see or hear a new narrative of history that does not align with reality. I used to wonder how this could happen, but one of my sons explained to me that in his college history courses (in multiple accredited universities), the professors would teach their version of history, using their notes as the course material. They circularly cite other like-minded revisionist material, and most of their students just accept what the professor says as fact. He has seen this again and again in both lower and upper division courses.
This is a disturbing trend, and aside from "woke culture" indoctrination, I don't know what's behind it, or why these professors are not held to basic academic standards.
> The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse [...]
Thank you for quashing the gross misinformation. I was going to post this, but searched and found your comment. `\m/`
(I learned of the "Current War" in the 70's, since the Edison Museum was in my "backyard" -- and was a common destination of local school field trips.)
Edison did not invent the electric chair. When the inventors were trying to choose between using AC or DC he helped them decide on AC as part of his PR campaign.
I have a "frequent post" section of my blog and a "deeper" section. Unless you're interested in the frequent posts they aren't in your face on my blog. It's kind of a best of both worlds type thing.
The frequent posts also let me quickly try out new methods of telling stories or presenting information or new techniques. I think this tends to speed up how often I post larger effort things cuz I can practice skills with frequent posts.
A good comparison would be a youtuber with a patreon. The youtube gets the produced media, whereas the patreon gets "cell phone in the moment" updates.
but i totally agree that when folks are finding things to post about that can be problematic and annoying.
It's up to the individual to choose how much knowledge they want to trade away for convenience. All the containers are just forms of that trade.
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