vostok

I used to think this, but then I visited China and the food isn't that different from Chinese food in the US if you are comparing food from the corresponding region of China.

Yes Kung Pao Chicken is very different from Cantonese dishes, but that's because Kung Pao Chicken is from a different part of China.

> mathematics is boring to everyone right up until the moment you need it. Then suddenly it becomes very interesting.

That might be true for higher level math, but anything at the graduate or undergraduate level has been already curated to be interesting.

The word "banker" is a homonym and you're using it in two different ways in your comment.

When people imagine bankers making a lot of money, they are talking about investment bankers. When people talk about bankers making $30k, they're talking about retail bankers.

These careers have nothing in common with each other. It's like comparing a McDonald's retail employee to a chemical engineer.

I'm actually ok with discrete pay.

I get that it's culturally difficult to lower salaries so companies don't feel comfortable paying very large salaries as they'll never be able to reduce them in lean years.

Bonuses/RSUs/etc seem like perfectly reasonable ways to pay people what they deserve without paying unsustainable high salaries that are very difficult to ever decrease if times get tough or if high performance is no longer achieved.

Absolutely. Extra zeroes matter a lot when you have only 6 to begin with.

Maybe I would feel differently if I was an investor / entrepreneur / thinker and not a simple, if well compensated, peasant.

Interestingly, banking and other professions associated with Jews, excluded Jews until relatively recently.

> The term originated in the Ivy League colleges and originally reflected a stereotype of old-line firms populated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). The term historically had antisemitic connotations, as many of the New York firms known as "white shoe" were considered off-limits to Jews until the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-shoe_firm

I recall some very decent by airport standards Japanese inspired food in Singapore's airport.

Fast food chains are normally the way to go for minimizing the downside risk though.

The military seems to pay pretty well considering the requirements.

It sounds about right to me if you don't like cooking. Note that the cost is for prepared food.

Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.

I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.

They mentioned they are of Ukrainian descent so perhaps they are of Ukrainian ethnicity, but they or their family came to Canada from Russia.

I find it hard to reconcile the common complaint that software developers are often unemployable past 35 with my personal observations.

This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed.

On the other hand, I know tons of former financial employees who became unemployable in the industry at 30 or even earlier.

I would love to hear how to find these places! I'm in the midwest, but I'm willing to travel for food.

Southwestern, tacos, Boreal, tagine, American, sandwiches, Polish, sushi, Tamil, no cuisine. It's all good to me.

Some farms and wineries have restaurants out here, but they don't have too many reviews so it's hard to tell if they're good or not.

How do you find these small town gems in the US?

I've lived in a very expensive city and a medium cost of living city in the US and the lower quality of restaurants is the biggest difference for me.

There are some very famous and very expensive restaurants, but even those places have been disappointing too frequently. It's often something really basic like the food being too salty.

This wasn't as much of a problem in the very expensive city. It's unlikely that my taste buds have gotten more sensitive because I lived in the more expensive city at a younger age and taste buds get less sensitive as you get older to my knowledge.

Almost every attempt at finding a small town gem has not really worked out for me in the US.

In countries like France, I know that I can find small town gems just by checking the Michelin guide. I can go to Vonnas (population 3000) and find a great restaurant just by checking the Michelin guide. I would love to do that in the US.

Wow that's amazing. You've inspired me to look into this for my area even though I've never considered it before.

If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.

What is the ratio of solar panel area to floor area for your home?

Most of these estimates exclude primary residence or the primary residence isn't a huge portion anyway.

I believe the threshold for the top 1% is around $10 million in net worth excluding primary residence.

Being able to buy whatever you want at the super market is probably a top 25% of the US perspective if not more.

If you look at education as a luxury good: I really liked learning economics from an economics Nobel prize winner, math from a Fields medalist, and I'm sure I'm forgetting other luminaries.

Do you have any links to examples of moderate views that will get one cancelled? I would be really interested in this topic.

I don't really see a problem here.

If you are in a low wage area and feel that your workers are as productive as workers in high wage areas then you can pay them a high enough wage that they get a visa.

If you don't feel that way then obviously the visa should go to a more productive worker and it doesn't matter that they happen to be in a high wage area.

I strongly dislike python, but I do have to use it because so many libraries are written for it.

It's the pragmatic choice.

> they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status

I think this is starting to change. I'm a Bloomberg user and I'm lower status than some of the non-Bloomberg users, such as high level software developers, at my firm.

The point of taxes is that they force people to pay for things whether they want to or not. This is nice because most people wouldn't want to voluntarily pay for negative externalities.

I know that there's no way I would want to pay for the ecological effects caused by my lifestyle choices for example. A tax doesn't give me the option to not pay.

I think a lot of smart or upper middle class people would still want to live near other smart or upper middle class people even if jobs were remote.

Humans are social animals and I think it's common for people in privileged positions to want to associate with others like themselves.

I would guess that more of this difference is explained by class/social factors than by the passage of time.

What does counter trading and running circles around clueless retail traders mean?

Is that another way of saying that retail traders buy on the offer and sell on the bid while HFTs buy on the bid and sell on the offer?

That's interesting. I actually feel quite differently about my own experience in finance.

HFT is a great example mentioned by a sibling comment. You kind of need some number of traders out there to make sure that market prices are honest and fair. HFT has done a great job of reducing (a) the number of people involved in trading per dollar traded and (b) the amount of money made by traders per dollar traded.

> What they did is somewhat complex and involved obtaining leverage as much as the tax savings but basically they turned short-term capital gains into long-term gains.

That sounds like misdirection. It's very common for hedge funds to use tons of leverage. It's not like getting this level of leverage is an unsolved problem.

On the other hand reducing your tax rate from 37% to 20% increases your returns by 27%. Even that would be valuable, but the real number is probably even more than 27%.

I think you'd want to adjust for age, source of wealth, and income level to have a reasonable definition.

Are they in their 30s with inherited wealth that allows them to spend like someone with a top 1% incone?