swimorsinka

We've seen the same uptick in reckless driving in CO since Covid. Reddit Denver complains about it all the time. I think it's happening everywhere, and it's not clear why.

I'm seeing similar dynamics occurring with Denver/Boulder. These smaller tech cities have been hit hard by the tech recession.

It’s hard to know if this most recent move will be more permanent. The irony with Amsterdam was that they had a hell of a time hiring. They had to import 80-90% of their labor from Eastern Europe or elsewhere and everyone had visa issues and would take 2-4 months to start. I also think the company will get a rude awakening in a few years when they realize they can’t just fire everyone or do layoffs like they were in the US.

I can confirm this. Former Senior Manager from Big Tech Co here (I just resigned 2 weeks ago). When I left, we were in the middle of offshoring all of my groups to Amsterdam. No stock compensation in Europe = cheaper devs. There was no real talk of replacing anyone with AI. We all used copilot and the other LLMs as tools, but you still needed devs who understood the systems and how to debug the generated code.

+100 to this. There's no better successful enterprise than becoming a guru - assuming you have the personality to pull it off.

1978. In reality the worst months are $300+ and the others are less, so the average isn’t really $300 - probably more like $200 or $250.

But yes, this is another reason I want to move. I’ve done all the insulating I can easily do without tearing everything down and starting again.

70 kWh a day sounds about right. That’s what I calculated for a max load when I was sizing solar systems.

Xcel Energy. I'm usually at $300/month for electricity from November-March. A comparably sized house with an efficient furnace would be $100/month in this area (or so I've been told). My non-heat electric usage works out to something like $50-$75/ month. Our electric rates average 13-14 cents per KWH, but we just moved to timed metering, so that can vary a lot depending on peak hours.

I live in Colorado, so I'm in one of the colder climates with a decent amount of time spent below freezing each year.

I've had a Mitsubishi Hyper Heat mini-split system with 2 outdoor units and 3 indoor heads for ~7 years now. I'm trying to move houses to get away from it. It's crazy noisy during the winter, the temperature control is whacky, and it's 2-3X the price to run than a gas furnace with electric vs gas rates around here. Not only that, with new 95% or 96% efficient furnaces, I'm not sure heat pumps are any greener.

Don't get me started on the install costs and the fact that your average mini split unit is barely sized to heat a room, let alone a full house. For me, it was better than the electric baseboards I replaced, but I'd still prefer a standard furnace.

I think we need to be very careful forcing everyone to convert to these until the tech is more mature, especially in the Northern states and places like Colorado. I looked on forums recently to see if the tech has evolved in the last 10 years, but many of the recent buyers still had the exact complaints I listed here.

Both at the time. In retrospect, I was extremely naive, and I was building something I thought was "cool" instead of something that people would really want.

Yep. I did the exact same thing ~10ish years ago - leaving my job at Google to run my own startup for 2.5 years. I burned through most of my savings. In the meantime, I watched as my former colleagues got numerous promotions and made more and more money.

I wouldn't trade the perspective I got from the experience, but it was extremely emotionally painful.

I definitely fell into this category. None of my messages ever seemed to go through. I tried everything to fix it. The only thing that worked was getting a new phone, new number, and never connecting to my wifi. I have no idea what I did to get my account into that state but it really sucks. It damages your self esteem, but this is modern dating I guess. Talking to people in real life is quite a bit better.

Given that 2/3rds of the employees are now gone, doesn’t this mean that the business is still viable?

For me, it's been more useful to look at these relationships through the lens of reciprocity. Am I in a reciprocal relationship with this friend/coworker or not?

In my friendships, am I doing most of the work to text, call, or hangout or is it relatively equal? At work, if I do something that helps you, do you help me in return, or do you turn around and screw me over?

Getting away from the relationships which are non reciprocal has given me a lot of mental peace over the past few years. Most people are not like this, but something like 1/5 to 1/10 of people are.

Some of the people on my team had to switch back to Comcast after trying it for a few months. Video calls were laggy and would drop packets constantly. This was in Colorado fwiw.