I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.
Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.
Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard.
How sorry can life be?
I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.
For what it's worth, I don't mind a bit of higher dimensional data reduction when processing raw multi channel data, or geophysical world modelling (magnetic fields, gravity, radiometrics, etc).
I'm pro "everyone cleans their own shit" but the meaning of a garbage truck driver could immense compared to a honest hedge fund manager or a VC Patagonia vest.
Cleaning time of our own shit hopefully won't be a full time job. We'll just figure out the ones creating too much shit and educate them as a society :D
I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that the same number of people would be interested in wiping butts and fixing mains lines in snow storms if they weren't paid for it. To me this seems unbelievable and naive on its face, but I'm willing to keep an open mind if you have some evidence.
I generally think people who believe these jobs would be done without some kind of incentive have never worked them before. They suck. Sometimes jobs really do suck, but they still need doing.
Apologies for a fb reel, but its the easiest way to share.
>> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?
However if it happens so fast, and so many of us are impacted, I have to believe that will impact how we vote.
How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?
It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
This sounds a lot like you've been conditioned to think there can't be an alternative to the current system. Even if I don't know what a better system would be, I can absolutely imagine that there are better options than what we've got. We should all want that and push for that and ask ourselves what it might be until we find it.
I can tell you this much about what I think would be part of that better system: we wouldn't leave people to sleep on the streets and we wouldn't have for-profit healthcare.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Perhaps it is your own point of view of seeing everything as an ownership problem that has you looking out from inside a too-small box.
I think you'd do well to learn more about how slaves were treated before making these comparisons. Have you been whipped until your flesh opened and had salt, lime juice, and peppers rubbed in the wounds because you messed up at work, where you are also forced to lived?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Thistlewood#Treatment_o...
Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?
If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?
So it is going to be a feeling. Is their smaller income going much farther now in how it benefits them, if so they feel better-off
Sentiment is an important barometer in this case.
I'd like to do something like this but everything that has to do with kids is both too expensive and too unpredictable for lean living to be an achievable goal.
I guess it must be nice not living in high col areas.
- how old are they? If the poster is ~60, likely has savings and may even have Social Security income. If they worked as (say) a police officer for 20 years, they may have pension income. A 47-year-old former military officer could reasonably have kids at home and also pension income from the military.
- Many people inherit houses (most houses are eventually inherited). Most sell them, but it can be a viable choice to just move into an inherited house to zero out housing expense. OR one could inherit a house that is >> valuable than one's own, such that selling the inherited house allows one to pay off one's own house.
- Location. The Discourse typically divides between HCOL and LCOL, but ignores that in both there are also people who spend much less than the average. In NYC the average home price is ~$850k, but there are today listings for 3BR homes in the low $200s (<$1,500/mo).
And of course these are stackable. One could have a military pension and buy a cheaper place and have a buffer from an inheritance. (None of this is uncommon.)
Not to mention that the professional prestige itself in an academic profession gives your family a lot of status that other people usually try to attain by buying expensive stuff.
Even in the fanciest neighborhoods, nobody cares if a Princeton Professor drives a 20 years old Volvo.
Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
1. Longer hours at work
2. Same hours working but adding time learning
3. Ruthless optimization of time at work.
4. Working smarter (which probably means learning new skills).
5. Doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable. E.g. honest feedback, applying 2 levels above current, hand up to lead messy project etc.
You could argue that the value is in the entertaining filming/acting/story telling etc, but if the videos are about digging holes then I think it's valid to say someone is paying you to dig holes.
The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.
The truth of the matter is that employers pay a humongous share of the health insurance bill, and if you shop directly, you will pay that 100% on your own.
You do have to put in a little more effort, but as an employer you can build a hybrid plan and contract with certain networks, and lower your bill tremendously.
How does ICHRA fix that? What's this "contracting with certain networks" you're referring to?
No. Individual states can refuse Medicaid expansion, but that does not have any bearing on the health insurance marketplace / premium tax credit ("subsidies"), which states cannot opt out of.
I assure you, I have never in my life worked 20 times harder than someone making minimum wage.
There is no such thing as knowledge work that takes that much out of you. Sure, thinking hard and making choices all day will exhaust you, but you won't stop moving at age 55 because your body was literally used up for pennies to make someone else wealthy.
If you fly business class, you are the elite making your wealth by skimming from people doing the real Labor. Your wealth is enabled by a paper and some writing. You contribute nothing.
Any other system of incentives would be insane.
Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.
Maybe this doesn't apply to your case, but how would you measure outputs of say product development, or any data related project. Lot's of things don't have a good measure of output before the thing is done. Maybe your product / analysis improves profitability by 10x or maybe it was a flop and lost money.
Tangential, but I'm also seeing the quality of measures going down, with AI it seems that the number of [emails|code|analysis] produced is again a good measure.
Measuring outputs or inputs (hard work) is always hard. Did someone get the thing that was asked done both quickly and correctly? Do they do this consistently?
I also find inputs harder to measure because someone could be in the office 12 hours/day, but on Facebook the whole time. They could also just spin their wheels doing 'fake' work.
Pick two.
Some things just aren't very hard to make.
It's crazy how many times I have to explain this to people, and it's usually when they ask me for a raise.
If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.
Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.
Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
If some of your projects are monetizable, couldn't you move forward without VC help?
Perhaps related, why do you need to be worth billions of dollars? I feel your visions for what you want your future self to be are highly unrealistic and you're probably setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness.
Sorry for the bluntness, but I think one could be happy on a lot less.
I don’t think anything I have right now is very monetizable; most of the fun stuff I work on now ends up being formal methods stuff, which is cool but hard to make any money with.
I guess what I was saying is that I think I am ultimately think I am too cowardly to just go for it and make my own company. I don’t think I am capable of purposely avoiding income for N months for a project to pick up.
I can't tell if you're wildly underestimating how many circumstances are outside of your control or just have an extremely high opinion of how much of an outlier you are (or maybe this isn't meant seriously and just went over my head), but I think that there are vanishingly few people (if any) in the world whose only impediments to a high likelihood of becoming a billionaire are self-imposed. I don't think that even extremely smart and charismatic people are particularly likely to do that. For every one that reaches that level of wealth, there are far more who try and fail, and it's not always because they weren't willing to work on shady things or weren't smart enough; some factors are just beyond the ability of an individual human to overcome, and you might just be lucky or unlucky.
I was just saying that I am too much of a coward to actually even attempt to make my own business.
No worries, I'm pretty bad at being able to recognize humor over text even when it's done well, so I legitimately can't tell the difference between whether it's on my end or yours! And if it is on your end, it's certainly still a more palatable character trait than the amount of ego needed to say it seriously.
There probably is some truth to that, and it can understandably come off as me not listening or being mindful to things people say to me because they think I'm blowing it off, even when it's more of just how I deal with things. My wife, being pretty awesome in many ways, realized this pretty early on and thus more or less always understood that when I make a smartass comment even for serious topics, I'm not really trying to make light of it as much as its just how I cope with things.
Anyway, yeah, I'm sarcastic a lot of the time and I realize that that doesn't always come through with text.
It's more obvious in verbal communication because of course it would be easy to tell by the tone of my voice that I'm being sarcastic.
Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder.
I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.
Most countries used to be hereditary dictatorships ("kingdoms") just a few hundred years ago, then people picked up rifles (and guillotines) and changed that. Now, since we already have some semblance of democracy at the top layer of power, maybe we could revolutionize the lower layers without the risks inherent to picking up rifles.
I don't see why we should be controlled by sociopaths[0] 8 hours a day, quite often against our interests.
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The other part of the solution is automatically and continuously redistributing ownership of the company according to hours worked and skill level. This of course has to be required by law, otherwise those sociopaths at the top have so much leverage that if you ask for anything other than money during negotiation, you'll get laughed out of the room.
[0]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...