That study you linked was done in animals, and I have a feeling it was dug up to support the notion that keto is in any way shape or form, good for you.
Based on advice from certain experts like Rhonda Patrick and various anecdotes from others I think the combination of sugar and fat in particular exacerbates the damaging effects of both.
This study seems to focus on one variable, but there may be all sorts of bias in that those who consume a lot of saturated fat also have poor nutrition otherwise and lead unhealthier lives overall.
I'm Over 40 and my body is showing it. I've done quite a lot of health research over the past few years. My personal metric at the moment is to lower my cholesterol and have been moderately successful without medication, so I think I'm doing something at least partially right.
I think the beneficial geeky rules of thumbs for healthy living that are simple rather than perfect, are:
1. One needs in ones diet
1.1 Protein
1.2 Fiber
1.3 Carbohydrates
1.4 Fats
1.5 Vitamins
3. Generally avoid food with:
3.1 Fast sugars
3.2 High inflammatory index
3.3 High saturated fat content
4. Don't eat more than you consume.
5. For exercise, as the bare minimum, try to walk at least 8000 steps per day or equivalent. This will statistically reduce mortality considerably.
6. Sleep enough
7. Don't stress about the above rules! Pay attention, but don't judge - yourself or others.
8. Look into other stuff that's probably good for you like stretches, breathing exercises and strength exercises.
These are not hard and fast rules. But things that one can pay attention to, and through self observation perhaps make slow adjustments.
So don't stop eating burgers, but pay attention to the number of calories you eat, and of what the calories are composed of. Eat what you like, but don't delude yourself.
For geeks metrological devices may offer motivation. I have a bracelet that measures my steps and my sleep, and I feel it as a successful facilitation tool. But don't treat the device as a life coach, or the numbers as something that you should strive to optimize.
4. will (literally) kill you because your metabolism slows down as you age and you have to choose between obesity and eating much, much less. Exercise helps but will only get you so far.
In my 20s I would eat ~1000 calorie meals with an entire pizza, salad, rich dressing, and a big slab of chocolate fudge cake. I was never slim, but I wasn't obese either.
If I tried that today I'd be breaking the scales in a few months.
Having to cut down on food a lot has been one of the hardest adjustments to make. Quite a few of my friends have never managed it and they're now dangerously beyond a reasonable weight.
As someone who's over 35 and has dropped from obese to normal BMI, I can say it's absolutely possible to keep the metabolism running fast. However, at least for me, it's quite difficult and always has been.
Very quickly I'll go from eating a huge number of calories in a bulk phase, start cutting, and watch as over ~10-12 weeks as I need fewer calories each week to achieve a steady fat loss. After about 12 weeks of cutting fat I've gone from needing X calories to lose a pound a week, down to needing only 0.5X. At this point, I'm eating very few total calories. So I stop, and spend another 10-12 weeks slowly adding calories back in along with vigorous exercise until I'm gaining a steady half pound a week (maybe 50/50 fat/muscle). I'll rise up in weight about half of what was lost in the cutting phase, but ideally only about 1/4 of the fat lost. Once my total calories is back to a very high starting point, I'll start the cut again. This is the "secret weapon". I've lost a huge amount of body fat since starting this program, and my shoulders and legs are starting to stretch seams.
I came to this program after ~10 years of trial and error, but it works wonders.
If you need a starting point, Renaissance Periodization has some very expensive templates that can help a person get started with this. Or, just buy a scale, measure and weigh everything, and start cycling cut and bulk cycles every 10 weeks or so. Always aim for a pound lost a week, continuously dropping calories to maintain that rate, then bulk for 10 weeks, aiming to gain 0.5 pound a week along with strength training, adding calories each week to achieve that goal. Also, when cutting, long slow calorie burning like rucking, hiking, cycling, or swimming is perfect to help keep the daily calorie levels high. If not for those, I'd find my total daily intake to be unpleasantly low.
I think most people would disagree with your definition of "quite simple".
Going from three meals a day to a 16:8 eating pattern (16 hrs fasting, 8 hrs eating window) isn't too bad. It's basically skipping breakfast. Shortening the eating window until you're eating one meal a day is tougher. Then extending the fasting period > 24 hrs is tougher still. You can't just jump into this stuff while you're carb-addicted and your body is screaming for glucose. Getting used to a keto-style diet, even if your carb intake is just low but not keto-low, helps a lot.
If you're a somewhat lazy young person like I was, falling into a one-meal daily routine could just happen due to a busy daily schedule. Unfortunately I also managed to put on weight during that time, so my meals of choice were probably non-optimal and probably too large.
I stand by that most people should be able to do it, as long as they can get over the hangry phase.
There are hundreds of links on HN about fasting. You cannot lose fat without first depleting glycogen stores. You can exercise these stores away and then in the absence of further caloric input your body turns to fat stores. Or if you fast, the absence of caloric input means your body will naturally burn its glycogen stores (takes longer if you aren’t exercising, for obvious reasons).
Nope. Your metabolism is related to your current weight, unless you have some specific diseases.
You probably don’t remember your actual activity level from the past.
That might just be that together they are particularly palatable. You would have a hard job eating a bowl of sugar or a bowl of cream but mix them together and it's much easier.
Great, now let’s stop pretending that meat dairy and eggs are health foods and that low carb high fat diets are ideal for you, particularly here on the usually-scientific HN. We’ve known of a direct causal link between high saturated fat intake and heart disease for years but this study (published in 2016 by the way) should be the nail in the coffin on the idea that high saturated animal fat is healthy.
In HNs defense, dietary science is a minefield of special interest groups, small sample sizes, animal models and poor controls. Not to mention the editorializing of every p < 0.05 by the media and bloggers, along with all of the n=1 anecdotes. Its so much harder to find valid reliable sources than to find sombody with a book to sell.
The other problem is that people want a silver bullet. Being told to eat a varied diet with enough macro and micro nutrients is less satisfying than being told that "the thing you want to eat is good and you should cut back on the things you enjoy less".
What's this supposed direct causal link? Total cholesterol, like we believed before? Or LDL cholesterol, like we believe now?
Or none of the above, like the the failed drugs (other than statins) that reduce LDL and improve the ratio between LDL and HDL, but have 0 effect on heart disease outcomes[0]?
Too much saturated fat is a statistical killer in some populations, sure.
Please investigate the ratio of saturated fats in the food produce you highlighted before making quite coarse statements.
The saturated fat content typically in egg (3% saturated fats) and for example, ground beef with 30% fat content (10% saturated fats) is quite different.
Fat content of industrially produced dairy products can vary quite a lot as well.
So it's quite different thing to eat all of calories for example from butter (50% saturated fat of total weight) or lean ground beef.
Do not forget that many (most?) people here are quite young; in your 20s you can basically eat whatever and not notice it. Let's check people who kept it up for 30+ years. If they exist as I don't think many do anything with diet beyond the fad unless they have something like Crohn's.
What we need is to stop consuming animals and animal products, or we’ll keep having economy destroying pandemics. Not to mention the obvious problem that farming is horrendous for the animals. Animals aren’t some inanimate object.
We need to be realistic. Reeducating several billion people from something very addictive, culturally engrained and with no direct negative effects for consumers is almost impossible.
I think the parent's point is well proven your exact example. There is a significant portion of the globe who think the pandemic isn't real or was caused by humans.
Remember when segregation was normal? Remember when slavery was normal? Remember when women had no rights? A growing and large amount of people believe abuse against animals and the environment follows on perfectly. You can be part of the change or blindly ignore it because it doesn't suit how you were brought up.
The more these discussions progress, the more I wonder if there is really only one solution. We need less people. Trying to convince 8 billion people to do something like never eat meat or fish seems like an impossible goal. We need to raise the standard of living in countries that reproduction rates > 2. We could also remove tax breaks for kids after the second in developed countries to mitigate the incentives for extra children. Maybe if we only had 4 billion people, we might be able to have everything be sustainable. Such a hard problem to solve.
Overpopulation is a racist myth. Developed countries use far more resources and waste significantly more food than developing nations and wealthy people have a larger footprint than their working class counterparts.
I'm not sure why you are claiming racism. I'm suggesting we raise the standard of living in poorer countries. That we empower women in these countries. Honestly, how is that racist?
Also, yes, wealthy countries over consume. Collectively we just don't care. We can't even get people to wear a mask. I don't think there is a pragmatic way to convince the west to consume less.
The thing is, fertility rates are going down across the world.
What are you going to do with the current people? They will all want a decent quality of life. Will you sacrifice your life and quality of life to achieve this greater goal you mention? Or do you just want "others" to sacrifice themselves for it?
Salmon is general is a bad fish to farm because it consumes more protein than it produces. There are better fish (in terms of sustainability) that can be famred, and proper regulations (which the US has, compared to other countries) exist to help. In general, I don't believe the US is the problem with overfishing or polution problems caused by fish farming, compared to other countries who don't have or want the ability to keep things in check.
Dunno. Maybe less efficient use of the same feedstock?
Further, now they're putting oil in Salmon feedstock so they have imaginary dietary advantages i.e. Omega-3 fatty acid, which farm-raised salmon don't have much of normally.
It might make sense, especially for where salmon farms are usually placed, or it might be overly destructive in terms of resources and environment. The analysis needs to be done before we can make a conclusion about it, but I'm sure other parties have already come to the conclusion they want.
Ya. I’m not sure why you are being downvoted but with animals you always get out less than you put in. Plants are the same way, but can grab other inputs (solar, minerals from the ground).
Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
> Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
Ideally, yes. In practice, we feed animals mostly things that we ourselves could eat ourselves - like corn, soy, and grains. Sure, you can find cute examples of cattle eating grass on rocky soil... but around 99% of animals are not grown that way... they are grown in factory farms where they're fed soy, corn, and grains.
Soy isn't very appetizing to humans in large quantities, so if it wasn't for animal feed, we wouldn't' grow nearly as much as it. Likewise for corn, which is a not so great staple for humans, and often just used as a sugar substitute. Yes, we can live on animal feed, but we can't really thrive on it, and a lot of land is only suited to such.
Meat is still a useful medium for converting what humans can't consume very well to something they can. Especially pigs, which in much of the world are used as recyclers (not in the west anymore, due to safety issues, and probably not for long in the undeveloped world, but they have bigger problems to worry about).
I'm thinking fish farming in urban centers, maybe tied to hyrdoponic greenhouses.
I can picture more urban parks, with many fish ponds. The fish pond water used to grow labour intensive cash crops like raspberries (that are hard to pick).
It's a uniquely western thing to pontificate about how enlightened we are about animal welfare while simultaneously funding the majority of the global meat industry - maybe.
While it's true some Asian countries eat animals "taboo" to eat in "the west", large parts of these industries comes from countries pulled out of the brink of famines just a few generations ago and many young people/adults in the developed parts of those countries have already moved away from consumption them or cruelty certain animals viewed as "companions".
Spare the preaching about us caring about other animals though. I don't see why eating, say, a horse is any more ghoulish than eating a pig.
A lot of those animals that became taboo to eat in the West was due to industrialization making pork, beef, and poultry cheaper than other meats and driving them out of the market, and cultural attitudes following afterwards to make them taboo. The "west" ate plenty of strange meats at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Hot dogs sausages often had dog meat in them while they were native to Germany, and you could still find horse and dog meat sold in the early 1900s.
Ah yes. The birthplace of several religions that that introduced the moral worthiness of animals centuries (if not longer) before the West and the origin of all mock meats up until a few decades ago has no interest in animal well-being. Absolutely.
Do any of the Woke/critical theory people know if it's acceptable to say something like this ^ if you explicitly tie it to culture? Is it OK to say some regional cultures place more emphasis on animal cruelty than others?
The thing is, most people saying this only pretend to give a damn because it reinforces the belief they already want to have that Asians are barbaric or undeveloped. It's just back-propogation of conclusions. So people are going to be raising eyebrows understandably if you bring this up randomly without knowing your facts.
You can talk about how and historically why some animals were or are eaten in some places in some countries - sure. But that kind of nuanced and historic analysis isn't usually why they're talking about this in the first place.
And we're not some magical creature free from biological needs.
Eating other animals is what got us here. Until we can print actual, chemically identical meat on a conveyor belt, our reliance on animals will continue.
> And we're not some magical creature free from biological needs.
Am I? I became 100% vegetarian a year ago. No one around me was vegetarian. I saved money. I never ate so well and I'm in my best physical form ever. What is magical?
You need supplements to grow healthily as a vegetarian. For example, it's difficult to get Omega 3, 6 and 9 from plants. You need supplements for that.
Also you've only been vegetarian a year. Being a vegetarian from birth to death without supplements would be much more difficult to do without major deficiencies.
Also vegetarians today have the option of buying food from all over the world, but that wasn't the case for the vast majority of human history.
You only need to look at cultures like in India, Taiwan and elsewhere that have large vegetarian population to see that your statement doesn’t hold water.
It's possible to have a large population with deficiencies, which may be the case in India for example [1].
Another factor is, the number of insects that accidentally get into the food supply provide some protein. I remember reading about how a more primitive lifestyle leads to more insects being in the food supply, which provides some of the necessary protein for humans to thrive. But I can't find the link at the moment.
Practical experience of trying to go vegetarian/vegan. I gave up after a while. I just felt constantly hungry. Maybe because I started working out and going vegan at the same time.
fwiw - "vegetarian" doesn't count for animal well-being. Egg laying chickens and milk cows are treated really badly and their agony is rather prolonged for the duration of their "productive life".
Everyone needs Omega 3/6/9. You can get it from nuts and algae. IF you want to be inefficient and introduce a middleman, you can get it from fish.
B12 is needed by everyone. The meat you eat has it supplemented. Again, you can cut out the middleman and get it directly as a supplement rather than having a cow killed.
India is incredibly agriculturally productive, with amounts of arable land other countries can only dream of. Try doing the same diet just a few paces up in more arid and mountainous Central Asia and it would be famine.
Great, meat SHOULD cost a fortune. The actual cost of meat is not what you pay for it, the only reason it’s even affordable is because the taxpayer shoulders the burden of the farm subsidies. Cut those out and a $5 Big Mac would cost almost $15.
Add to that the environmental impact, insane water usage, and the fact that meat production will continue to destroy economies through pandemics, and it should cost 10-15x more than it does now.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but this doesn't seem like it could be true. My Dad always raised cattle as a pastime, just a handful, one for meat and sold the rest. Never subsidized, and he usually broke just about even. A big mac has a fifth pound of beef. $75 a pound for ground beef? He'd buy hundreds. So would I, and everyone else. Why bother cutting out steaks, just grind the whole thing down.
Agricultural subsidies that affect beef, either directly or indirectly, have been in place in the US for almost a century. So either your father is quite old, did not live in the US, or that meat was subsidized.
OK, but I'm asking for -how-, truly. My father is getting up there, but still raises cattle to this day. He buys them as calves, and sells them the next year. They mainly eat grass and hay, but admittedly there is -some- corn feed in the winter, which I understand as one source of subsidy, but I can't see it amounting to much in the grand scheme just based on the amount. When selling them, after accounting for initial cost, medicine, and extras, he breaks even. And that's at today's 'cheap' beef prices.
Industrial Carrie farming has additional costs. Like wise they need to be transported, butchered, packaged, etc. This adds cost.... Your dad's break even is still losing money for anyone doing this as a business.
You don’t need taxes to offset subsidies, of course. You just need to end the subsidies. But yeah, there are likely major environmental externalities that could be eliminated by taxation.
People could afford to eat beef (albeit less of it) at 1800s levels of wealth per capita.
Currently high quality beef imitations like B-On are not quite cost competitive with real ground beef. Basically it's taken us an additional ~100yr of supply chain growth to get to a technological point where plant beef is priced like beef was 100yr ago.
I feel very comfortable saying that any change that hits the low level commodities that underpin these things, fuel, grain, etc. would just exacerbate that difference and set plant based "transition foods" back.
Most people in society like meat so it makes sense we subsidize it. This is progressive. Otherwise only the wealthy could eat meat. The wealthy actually pay more to eat meat as they pay the majority of the taxes that go into these subsidies so nearly everyone can afford meat in the market. Once again, this is progressive.
Just like roads. Most people in society want to be able to freely travel where they want and when they want to. So we subsidize roads as a society where the wealthy pay more in terms of taxes but everyone gets to use the roads.
It's a representative democracy. People vote for representatives that then propose bills and spending policy and vote on them. Elect officials or run for office yourself if you think your ideas are better and more attractive.
Who should be the authority for what society finds value in, which policies are invoked, how taxes are distributed and spent if not the representatives of the people? Clerics? Doctors? Lawyers? Scientists? Sociologists? Bartenders?
If true then hopefully people agree to mandate that we value these negative externalities more than subsidized farming. Anything is possible if people can persuade others it's worth doing and that the trade offs are worthwhile.
Clever move to make the slide transition timeout juuust a tad too fast to read, further driving home the point that carousels are a shit way to present information.
But yeah, carousels moving too fast is almost always an issue when I actually want to read the contents. It's one of those design patterns that just makes me want to close the website.
I felt that detracted from the argument since it was really just demonstrating that a badly implemented carousel is bad - which isn't a strong argument against a well designed carousel.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as a well-implemented carousel. Maybe in theory you could have one, if browsers could do eye-tracking, such that you could stop the carousel’s rotation as soon as the user looks at it.
But without that, users are always going to land their eyes on the carousel and start reading an item in it some random interval after the carousel’s rotation timer last fired. (As, remember, users like to look away from the browser while pages load, and it takes them a random amount of time to look back.) Then, with this random "misalignment" of engagement times, the carousel content will inevitably transition out from under them.
IMHO, this is exactly why users choose to not engage with content in carousels (according to the studies the author cited.) They know they’re going to not get to fully read whatever it is the carousel currently says; and they don’t know for sure how to stop the carousel from progressing; so they don’t bother with it.
Its easiest to point out an issue by first pushing it to the extreme, and then re-evaluating whether the middle-ground does not exhibit the flaw (in lighter fashion)
I mostly agree with this. I've seen one valid and helpful usage of timers though: in Waze. Some things start automatically after some time, like navigation after selecting and address, or dismissing a notification. The time remaining is indicated on the corresponding button itself in a progress bar fashion.
It's surely better than Google's Maps approach. They make Maps crash while you're driving on the freeway, so you say "Okay Google, start directions home" and it says "Would you like me to start directions home? We know you're driving at bone crushing speeds on a road you've never been on in a country you're not entirely familiar with. Just look at your phone screen and find the button and crash into the side of the freeway and don't get home. It's not like you need to keep your attention on the road while driving; we are quite happy if you crash and die. But timers and explicit audio instructions are just such poor usability."
If you tell it to _navigate_ home it will actually pull up the directions and the go button will have a autostart timer so you don't touch anything. Ask for directions and you will have to start touching the screen.
I'm not sure if that was a design decision or just a natural artifact of using a carousel. They have a natural uncanny ability to rotate precisely when you don't want them to.
I find it weirdly infuriating. It feels like the whatever I just tried to focus on is being pulled away by someone being annoying.
That, in combination with the inevitable gimme-your-email and some other gate between me and whatever I tried to view is usually enough to make me leave the site and wish I could tag sites in my browser as "do not activate links to".
Too slow is also a thing. They always seem to scroll the second you try to click on them. There's a neuroscience phenomenon whereby the mind fills in for the motion of the eyes, I forget what it's called but it was on HN a little while ago about how crazy the human brain really is.
I’ve been using this for quite a while, and recently I’ve run into the trouble that the fire base account was overcapacity. Not sure if it’s been fixed since then, but I’ve had to use the QR code instead of the automatic detection. Still, really nice tool.
> FIREBASE WARNING: The Firebase database 'sharedrop' has reached its peak connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider upgrading. (https://sharedrop.firebaseio.com)
I am big into video games, and a couple of years ago I found a blog that really resonated with me. Same type of games that I want to play, and they were all fairly old. A couple of years ago I stopped playing modern video games and just kind of stuck in the past, and didn’t have anyone to talk about them with, so I’d comment on this blog I used to read about older games and made some good friends that way.
Eventually I want to talk about my own gaming experiences, but mostly I wanted a place to log my thoughts about games I was playing, games that were coming out, and basically have a place that I could go to to trigger my own happy nostalgic thoughts experiences, but mostly I wanted a place to log my thoughts about games I was playing, games that were coming out, and basically have a place that I could go to to trigger my own happy nostalgic thoughts.
I’ll be honest, I really wish I had chosen a different name, but I bought the WordPress plan already so I settled on https://www.nostalgiatrigger.com. It doesn’t roll off the tongue nor would it be the average person’s cup of tea, but for the 5-6 people who comment and leave feedback, it’s a cool little community.
Anyway, this is just my experience and it doesn’t really answer the OPs original questions. If I go back and read my old material, it really comes off as pretentious and just overall atrocious, so to probably echo what everybody else is saying here, the trick is to just write as much as possible and don’t try to focus on things like length or flow on the first time through. In fact don’t even worry about editing anything, the editor will highlight any misspellings or grammatical errors, so let your mind go into stream of consciousness mode, just to get ideas down on paper.
Oh! And a recent tip for something that I’ve started doing a few months ago (typically while writing down initial thoughts while I’m playing a game for the first time), I leave Notes open on my phone so I can easily tap the microphone and speak sentences straight into a first draft. I realized that I spent the most time trying to figure out how to phrase certain things on the first draft, so by getting out actual well formed sentences as they came to me while I was playing a game, I was essentially removing the hardest part of writing from the equation.
I’ve been running this blog for about five or six years now, and also did some longform game review writing I’ve been running this blog for about five or six years now, and also did some longform game review writing on https://www.thewellredmage.com a few years back, and getting started on a blank canvas is always the hardest part. So whatever works for you, try taking YOUR “hardest part” out of the equation.
Sounds like process needs to be changed on a higher level, not that an ever-growing population needs a slavish devotion to sitting in ever-growing levels of traffic.
I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/year difference in just the mortgage. In other words, what I pay just in property taxes annually here, is how much a house costs annually that's double the size, there.
Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.
This could be dangerous, restarting your life somewhere sight unseen just because it looks great on paper. You sell and move to that house in location x for cost alone, always pining for that life you had in location y with all the intangibles you never realized you were reliant on, and never will make enough to reverse the play and relocate back to y which has experienced ever higher property values since you've been gone.
A better move would be to move laterally, to a place with the same benefits that the one you are in gives you, be it leisure activities or a network for your field. That might limit you to metros, and particular metros that are most favorable to your activities (skiers might like CO, sailors might like FL). Suddenly your options become limited, and you find among these limited choices the same housing issues that have plagued states like CA as demand ramps up, because everyone had the same idea as you. No city in the U.S. actually builds sufficient supply for their influx in labor; even the ones that we applaud are doing quite poorly in terms of how much housing should be built and where. The ones that don't seem to have a housing crisis are experiencing a contracting local economy, and that doesn't bode well with your networking prospects and career options.
There's a concept known as operating leverage which applies here: fixed costs, even if high, mean that increases in revenue multiply net income.
And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc.
Absolutely true. Once you move out of the center of a high-density, major metropolitan area, you literally cannot find and use private schools, airports, hospitals, and theme parks.
And your IQ drops by 50 points. Instantly. It's weird.
That's not what I said, so your sarcasm is misplaced and makes you seem unnecessarily irritated. Maybe you are misunderstanding the meaning of "greater metro area" which means "a metro area and surrounding, connected developments" and not "better than rural metro area."
I live in northeast Alabama currently, in a rural area, well outside any metropolitan area. Now, I can't speak to private schools; I don't have kids.
As far as airports go, there are two connector airports about an hour away, to the northeast and west, and a major hub two hours east. (As it turns out, even when I've lived in major metropolitan areas, I've never been closer than an hour to an airport.)
There are two regional hospitals relatively close (plus trauma helicopters if you need that sort of thing). Then there are major hospitals an hour west, plus Birmingham and Nashville---both of which I've known people to go to for specialized care.
I honestly don't know what you mean by "high infrastructure recreation"; if it's outdoor sporting and recreation, it's as good here as anywhere (and fishing is better than most).
There is a dearth of bars and live-music venues, but then I didn't partake of those even when I had easy access.
So, when you write "And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc." you seem to have a very wrong idea of life outside a "greater metro area", one that is either extremely naive or deliberately insulting.
No, I have the right idea just as you corroborated. There are amenities of legitimate value in a metro area. You do not care for them, so it doesn’t make sense for you to pay for easy access to them. However, saving money by reducing consumption is a lifestyle choice. Many people would rather choose to consume. That’s all I was trying to point out.
There are network effects as well. I live 15 minutes from an airport with daily direct flights to the my parent’s home country. There are only a few such airports in the USA. Places with that kind of infrastructure also tend to have other valuable infrastructure. So even though I don’t benefit from the live music venue 2 blocks from my home, it’s part of the deal of being able to return home on short notice in emergency.
> Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.
Keep in mind: that asset your company is paying for can be sold and the difference will be kept by the employee, which will let them set themselves up for a much better retirement in a lower cost of living area.
It reminds me a bit of the SF Giants. They couldn't pay high salaries because they had to pay for their ballpark. But the value of that ballpark is part of the value of the club, which would be realized if the owner ever sold it. So it still was a lot like the owners pocketing the money. But not exactly.
> It's literally just the lowest they can get away with paying you.
Um, yes? That's exactly how this works. Google doesn't pay software engineers what they do out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because that's how much it costs for a highly skilled engineer to come live in the Bay Area and work there.
Humans aren't necessarily commodities, but labor is ABSOLUTELY a commodity. We have to start decoupling the value of a human from the value of their labor, because there's no use pretending that all labor is worth the same — while you and I might both agree that all humans are inherently equal. It's like any other good/service, labor costs as much as the buyer is willing to pay.
Please stop posting flamewar comments in the first place. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys the curious conversation that it is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> And employees don't work for Google out of the goodness of their hearts, what's your point?
My point is that the current value of a Google employee in Mountain View is the result of the negotiated value between the buyer and the seller. A Google employee in Mountain View earns more than a Google employee in Atlanta even if they are engaging in the same labor for the same number of hours.
> How exactly would you go about doing this? How is it possible to say that you don't deserve to live in a nice house, or have a nice car, or send your children to college based on the job you have and how much Google decides to pay you -- all while they capture the value you're generating so their execs and VCs can live in a nice house, have a nice car, and send their children to college?
Are you really making the argument that software engineers outside the Bay Area do not live in nice houses, or drive nice cars, or send their children to college? In fact, even with the currently lower salaries of software engineers outside the Bay Area, it is easier to buy a house, buy a nicer car, etc. This can be calculated by computing the ratio between the median house price in a locale and the median salary in that same locale[1]. In San Francisco, one must earn $183k to afford the median home. In Chicago, one must earn $63k to afford the median home.
> The system we live in is disgusting.
The system we live in is one in which we try and minimize the cost of goods and services to consumers. The role of markets is to minimize the amount of input necessary to produce goods/services, while maximizing the output of those goods/services. In practice, this means driving down the price of goods/services to the minimum possible price, while making them as abundant as possible, and as high quality as possible. This is good for consumers, because they can purchase those goods/services cheaply. This is why bread, milk, eggs, washing machines, clothes, TVs etc have gotten cheaper over time, relative to inflation.
Another good/service that consumers purchase is labor, mostly indirectly. The market is also very good at driving down the price of labor, and this is why wages don't outpace inflation, in the same way that the price of bread doesn't outpace inflation. Again, this is excellent for consumers, because the labor is an input in the production of goods/services, and the former’s cost is a part of the latter cost that consumers ultimately pay.
For software engineers, this is largely fine, because there is virtually no market in which software engineers are not in the top quintile of wage earners — or at the very least, in the top 2 quintiles. High skill workers will always find higher leverage work to do, and it's easiest for them to adapt to a changing market. Low skill workers, on the other hand, struggle to do this, and we must help them out through welfare and safety nets.
I finally finished a little convenience tool I made for fetching lyrics for your currently playing Spotify song, called Spotify Karaoke.
Currently I'm working on an Electron app for automatically importing/managing screenshots and recordings from your Nintendo Switch, off the SD card. It matches the file name IDs (Nintendo uses these seemingly random IDs for each game) with the actual game name, moves it into a custom folder structure, etc.
Loooooove the Spotify karaoke tool. I have to know the words to songs I listen to so I started a local Electron tool (https://github.com/bradydowling/spotifylyrics) like this some time ago but then abandoned it.
It's great that this is web based and can be used on a device that you're not listening on.
Thanks for building this! It infuriates me that they have a widget that does display the lyrics but keeps switching to random trivia every 5s. There's an open bug on spotify to have it always show lyrics but doesn't seem to receive any love.
I think Spotify joined forces with Genius. And that trivia is from Genius. Sometimes the trivia is good, but I would have loved a simple lyrics widget.
