obstacle1

Millions of Americans were "able to" buy houses in the mid-2000s. The problem is they bought these houses entirely on credit, wholly without the means to eventually pay for them. Cars are also a type of purchase Americans typically take on debt for. It is slightly more difficult to obtain a loan you shouldn't qualify for these days, but there's plenty of opportunity in the US for those who want to get in over their head.

The problem with a story like the quoted is that it presents the superficial elements of someone's lifestyle without giving any actual insight into the fundamentals (i.e., budget) on which the lifestyle is based.

So, I guess stuff like this might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with US culture. But my point is it may only seem surprising if the assumption is the person actually paid for those things. It's highly unlikely that a house, car, and kids are in the clear on a part-time waitress salary, and more likely that the person is up to her eyeballs in debt and neglected to mention it.

>I absolutely don't believe that this problem mainly affects the US.

That's fine, as long as you understand that this is just a personal belief that you hold and not a fact about the world. Since it is just your unfounded belief, it doesn't detract from, devalue, or even argue mildly against the personal experiences outlined in the comments you are responding to.

Massive difference between sourcing candidates and interviewing/making hiring decisions. If a founder is doing the former it's probably that she's wasting a massive amount of time and there is a huge opportunity cost there. Recruiters have their place.

It's way more complex than you're making it out to be.

Whether or not one can find a job is hugely dependent on the individual's skillset, and very importantly, social abilities. The latter being a thing that laid-off IT people tend to completely discount, IME.

Think about what you are saying using your brain. It is equivalent to "please stop giving me your anecdotes, because they conflict with these other anecdotes that I like better".

If you're going to use personal experience as evidence for some phenomenon, you need to accept personal experience from every angle, not just the angle that agrees with your perception of the phenomenon.

It's really easy to plug your ears and scream that an opponent's argument is "ridiculous" (what you are doing). It's more difficult to actually make a counterargument yourself (what you are not doing). Try harder, maybe.

If it is really such a 'shitty problem' to someone, they can easily solve the problem by optimizing their job search for a high private:shared equipment ratio.

People share equipment in every office everywhere. Germaphobes will need to disinfect some stuff, they can't have private everything, and they can't demand that people stop sharing things. Oh well, them's the breaks!

>As a senior dev my workload is triple the juniors so it's not unusual for me to have to do 80-120 hours a week for 40 hours pay to not lose my gig.

Your workload is triple the juniors and it takes you triple the time as them to get your work done?

That's exactly equivalent to the productivity of the juniors. You just grind more hours. Maybe you need to look for a more junior role.

Carry Lysol wipes.

Or have the employee keep a container of them at each station (if they don't already, which IME many do).

The value of conferences isn't in sitting through talks. Depending on whether or not you need conferences depends on how much you value networking. If you want to network, then yes, conferences are hugely valuable.

A 30 year old male is a military-age male, PhD or not.

So, controlling for a bunch of stuff that doesn't predict value provided to a company by an individual or an individual's level of skill.

Why's that funny? Jobs programs and basic income are completely different animals.

I'm sure many people take issue with the various externalities associated with job programs, e.g. In this case making all of our lives more difficult and wasting our time while travelling. If we simply gave all TSA employees a basic income and told them to stay out of the way (i.e., fired them) the end goal of giving them money would be achieved but without the additional drain on everyone else's resources.

Delusion is asserting that you've found some objective measure of happiness that can be generalized to everyone.

Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist joke. Marxist doctrine wouldn't even recognize the legitimacy of ownership in the way you are describing, so the notion of striving for equal individual ownership of goods as a spark to action is nonsense.

Your link to The Gulag Archipelago as an expository on Marxist doctrine also reveals a complete ignorance of what Marxism even is, on a very basic level. The Gulag system was a pure product of Stalinism, which was an implementation of communism that directly rejected Marxist doctrine. Explicitly and directly. Communism is not stalinism is not bolshevisim is not marxism.

The turn to marxist criticism in humanities academia really has nothing to do with anyone wanting to lead a revolution or thinking they will overthrow capitalism or whatever. It is a reaction to lived experience that expresses itself in a particular mode of analysis.

"In the world around me, the economy is imploding and everyone is anxious and on edge and complaining about inequality. I think I'll interpret this novel through the lens of Marxist cultural criticism as a reflection of how I experience the world right now" is all that is going on.

1) What? Fact: the electorate chose Trump as the next US president. The fact that most of the country wants what you don't want doesn't make it a tyranny of the majority.

2) I don't care who is on what train, and I'm not shitting on anyone. Fact: OP's grandparents didn't fight for Trump to not be president. That what OP's grandparents or OP want is in contradiction with what the USA got isn't an indication of tyranny. What OP or OP's grandparents want doesn't generalize to what everyone else wants or should want, that's the point, and it's not an insult.

>My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.

Your countryfolk elected "this bullshit", so consider that what you and your grandparents want might not really be relevant.

A job title is not an accurate reflection of an individual employee's value to the company. It would be insane to require that a 10x developer gets paid the same as colleagues just because they shared a job title.

Or, it could actually be groupthink, and your bias is acting to prevent you from having to admit that a group you identify with expresses positions that are wrong.

There's actually no way to prove that either case is true. However, you expressed a position as a certainty -- "what you see as groupthink is really..." -- that is in reality just another opinion. Therefore, your comment is equally as ill informed and myopic as OP's.

It isn't a given that Trump is objectively hateful or that Trump's expressed words will personally affect any given American. Your point of view, while a wonderful work of emotionally-charged rhetoric, is not legitimate.

Your post was a general statement that working from home is usually light on working.

Stop and think about that for a second. Many of us here are 100% remote. How are we to interpret your general statement, except as insulting?

A little self-awareness would be far more helpful to you than lashing out in anger.

Maybe this is the case for the specific type of person who ends up working where you work. But it isn't universal. Many of us don't need "adult supervision" in order to be highly productive.

>if you can work remotely from home/desk, so can people who are willing to work for 10% of your salary

If you're so unskilled as to be that replaceable, there's no reason to feel comfortable in a non-remote job, either.

>Most youth have zero dreams related to property ownership

So what? If renting is a better financial decision than buying in a particular market, you rent. It's that simple, or else you're making an emotional decision based on value judgments rather than objective measures of benefit or cost.

>refer to it as a technical degree in software

So, you think they should just blatantly lie about what their program is?

It isn't a degree of any kind, or anything even approaching a degree.

It is a bootcamp, and people should take it exactly as seriously as the name implies.

Not dying is orders of magnitude more important than keeping eligible for student loans or government jobs you could theoretically someday get.

Also if an addict's perception of a life 'worth living' depends on external things, like yours does, the addict is highly likely to just go back to addiction anyway. Life is worth living without student loans or government jobs or travelling -- or similarly, drugs -- and much of overcoming addiction is learning to recognize that.

Could you point out where the author of this post even came close to suggesting that Rails is for great developers who don't need static typing?

Or did you accidentally post this unrelated opinion in the wrong thread?

>The affluent and the talented are flooding into superstar cities and tech hubs, creating a vicious competition for space that is pushing out the young

The above quote certainly is asserting a talented/young dichotomy, as well as an affluent/young dichotomy.

It's either deeply-engrained bias or sloppy writing. Pick one, depending on your level of cynicism.

Oh good, it's the language police. What would this forum be, after all, without folks like you telling us what to say and how to say it!

He was responding to someone who was offering a disagreeing POV, on a public web forum that anyone can read or participate in.

In that context, typing "we need better language" implies identification with the whole audience, i.e. all readers. 'We' does not mean 'my group of political activists' when used in that way.

Hence why the correction is important. Especially given that he was advocating for the redefinition of language in service of a political ideology. If you are going to suggest that 'we need' to clarify and standardize the words we use to refer to things, then you should probably be extremely precise with your own language, no? Otherwise you are just being a patronizing e-tyrant.