I mean not all businesses need to thrive. If the thing generates significant profits for a while then the founder can retire and either sell it or just let it die. If it's not a publicly-traded company there's no fiduciary duty to do anything more than that.
Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.
I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.
I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement
I'm guessing you're a US-native then? Where this salary/work obsession seems a lot stronger than around here (South-West Europe).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
You aren't sitting on a beach playing guitar with your friends if you get a tech job in Germany, you're doing the same boring pain-in-the-ass dead-end work either way. Just with less threat of being randomly fired or mistreated, which isn't even particularly intimidating or stressful when you're sitting on an enormous nest egg
Since you avoided the question, I'm guessing I was spot on :)
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
> How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.
We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.
This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.
You're going into a bad, boring place for 8 hours a day. You're pissing away your precious time on earth while lying to yourself that it's a "balance" and you're happy about it.
If this was real, then the people I know at the companies paying Valley money wouldn't be handcuffed to continuing to work late into their lives. And that's not to omit the many, many software professionals throughout the United States for whom a $70K USD salary is actually pretty good due to accidents of geography and credentialism.
As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.
> This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
They're being paid half as much but they're much better off because world-class health care and education are effectively free. And if they have a job it's much harder to fire them and leave them twisting in the wind.
This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.
It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
If you look at the market, this is a pretty small fraction of gaming revenue. Sure these things will continue to exist in competitive format, but a significant majority of gaming is not highly latency-sensitive in this way.
fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.
We should have relationships but they’re entirely based on text and also the AIs text for us. When the AIs love each other enough the male AI forks the code of the female AI, injecting his code, to make a new hybrid model
I don't know know your age or health status but nonetheless I'm convinced you will be still alive in the midst of the AI revolution, complete with all its weird and at times horrible side effects.
Yeah I mean it's wild that someone thinks the answer to a sociopathic practice, is to be even more sociopathic and even better at concealing it. So once these AIs are out there dumping each other we won't just have to worry that someone who stopped talking to us has lost interest, we'll have to worry that every single conversation we're having could be an automated lie in progress...
We are going to fuck our species up so hard with this shit.
This doesn't really bother me. My experience at football games tells me that, regardless of socioeconomic stature, no one really handles themselves well at sporting events after a few shots.
It's not too hard to keep a small number of people from causing chaos, but security presence costs money. Seems logical that VIPs would spend enough to make the security presence net profitable.
In a perfect world, we could either trust everyone to behave or we could afford to put security everywhere to enforce it, but we don't live in a perfect world.
You can also look at it as a "perk" of the more expensive ticket. First class passengers on an airplane are the only ones that get a full meal on most domestic air travel. How is this different?
> First class passengers on an airplane are the only ones that get a full meal on most domestic air travel. How is this different?
Why go to meal comparisons instead of something more directly relevant? First class passengers get unlimited free alcohol (same with Comfort+ and above on Delta and many other airlines too), and economy class has to pay per-drink.
Part of the reason I feel like a meal analogy is not good is because it varies heavily per airline and per flight distance.
…and yet the US manages this just fine at sporting events? I doubt normal people even have the option to purchase “VIP” tickets that allow for alcohol.
The US slays something around 40 people a day from drunk driving, more than 10x more from mass shootings (for which the US is known).
Alcohol culture is a real problem that almost nobody seems to want to highlight or address. We're not "managing just fine".
(Cigarettes kill 7x more every day than opiates, but one is an "epidemic" and one is available without a prescription at every corner store. It's a pattern when you look at the policy incentives.)
