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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Considering only 30% of the people in this survey from ages 18-34 are working full time, i’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t an accurate representation of independent young adults.

    26% are in school and 16% are unemployed for a total of 42% not really making money / are using loans for housing or are living at home.

    28% are working part time and are unlikely to be living on their own - it’s rare to find a part time gig that can afford housing.

    So 22% think housing is the highest cost issue… and only 30% are employed full time… sounds about right to me! I’m guessing it’s not 30% because those 8% got mortgages during the 4% or lower interest rate era.


  • Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers

    I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They’re not going to be using cloud services, they’re going to privately host because it’s way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.

    Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn’t alter the bottom line.






  • Same deal almost everywhere… but firsthand experience is that a significant portion of all drivers have their phone out.

    Would love to see some proportional crash rates of autopilot use vs not autopilot use too. People focus on things like crash totals or death totals. 17 deaths is a tragedy to be sure.

    That being said when the US has over 40,000 auto deaths per year… and this article is telling me only 17 deaths are in any way involved with Autopilot since 2019… I really wonder why this is somehow more outrageous than the ~240,913 other vehicle deaths in the US since 2019. Given that Tesla is about 5% of all autos in the US, I would expect tesla deaths to be about 12,000 deaths in that period, or 5%.

    Are so few people using autopilot? Shouldn’t the autopilot death toll be something closer to the 2000 deaths per year one would expect statistically from Tesla Drivers?

    Is autopilot much safer than human drivers? Is it more dangerous?

    Is Autopilot + Attentive safer than just attentive?

    Is the 40k deaths per year not something that should be considered simply because people stop thinking of so many deaths as a tragedy and just think of it as a statistic?

    Is the outrage and focus on car self driving just an extension of human phobia of technology and articles allow for people to have anecdotal confirmation bias?







  • Yes, but usually they do something that provides value. A mechanic charges you more than their costs, but they are also charging for their expertise and skill.

    Not all jobs are that clear cut though. Most white collar jobs are bullshit (sauce: been working in corporate environments for close to 15 years.)

    Car Salesmen are useless for me. They’re still legally required. They get paid WAY too much to swindle grandparents out of a few thousand dollars per car.

    Real Estate Agents generally do not produce any real value but are again required. 4-5% commissions for selling a home which today in the boston area is a median of over 700k. Don’t try and tell me that $35k of effort goes into creating a listing and doing a showing, and helping someone throw in a bid. It should be a couple thousand at most. Sales here are almost always a weekend of two open houses then offers due on tuesday… and then a P&S is signed on Friday.

    If car salesmen and real estate agents are so valuable, then i’m sure a middleman finding furniture and reposting it on other sites that are more visited than craigslist free section and taking a commission is hardly any more dubious. After all the agents and salesmen in these cases do not create any value - they didn’t build the car or ship it over or really do anything except maybe detail it before delivery, even the paperwork is done by others! Same deal with the agents… they arent the lawyer, mortgage broker, house inspector etc which you still pay yourself out of pocket as closing costs as a buyer.

    Anyway, yeah I totally agree about people needing handouts to get on their feet. I’m very much for housing the homeless and giving basic necessities to all (basic shelter, food, water, basic clothes, internet, electricity, smart phone.) We just aren’t that kind of nation though. We’d rather prop up insurance companies and pharma profits than lift a finger for the homeless. “IGMFY” is the way the US works, mostly.


  • PPP falls apart when you consider the price of consumer electronics, electricity, gasoline, airfare…

    In the Dominican Republic you can’t get completely stable electricity. It just doesn’t happen without generators/batteries. Generators aren’t suddenly cheaper in DR. It’s 20DOP for 1kwh of electricity in DR, or $0.34 USD/kwh. I pay less in the greater Boston area. Wages there are way, WAY below 30k/year. The thought of having air conditioning at home is practically impossible for almost all who live there.

    I love how you nitpicked the chile reference (with no counterpoint whatsoever) but it’s true across Latin America. Imported goods to poorer nations generally cost way above and beyond what the US pays…unless it’s prescription drugs because almost all other nations negotiate those prices to be much, much less than what the US pays (and only just started negotiating… for JUST Medicare.) I’m sure there are other examples as well. The PPP is so far apart on imports it’s insane. Often times things are sold in the US even if they are made locally because the price in the US is way above and beyond what the locals can afford.



  • The real rich

    What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.

    In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.

    If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.

    When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.

    There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.