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Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:

Housing: Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.

Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.

Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.

Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?

> Private Equity buying up housing

I know there's a lot of media saying this headline but This is actually false. checkout Stephan graham, he's got a post on this on Youtube where he investigates it deeply and finds that an extremely tiny percentage of houses are being bought up by private equity.

it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.

Well, I started my career in the US durring the dot com bubble bust when absolutely no software engineer could get a job no matter what they did. this no doubt informed my views on the subject.

But, even now, I thought it would be harder to get a job as a junior role than senior. As a hiring lead, 5 years back, i remember, we could have our pick of just about any overqualified intern we wanted. we got one guy who already had 1 to 2 years of work experience, just so he could be hired as an intern and he was awesome.

As for being detailed. mentioning implemtations isn't just about padding out. It's about providing an accurate picture of what your experience is. It's not enough to simply say "i am intermediate JS experience". that doesn't tell the interviewer much. furthermore, most people aren't very accurate at rating themselves. overconfident people think they're experts and experts with no confidence under-rate themselves. by mentioning implementations and specific experiences, it allows the interviewer to more accurately guage your level of expertise.

1 year advice: It's very hard to get a software engineering job but stick with it, get work experience any way you can, even if you have to work pro bono. Get as much programming experience as you can. Don't over reach on your resume qualifications, but do go into great detail. Instead of saying: "Skills: Javascript". Go into details, for example: "Skills: Javascript, Front end dev experience: Tabs, pagination, leaderboards, infinite scrolling, post loading, pre-loading, page load optimization, etc" the more details you can give the better. this gives interviewers an idea of what experience you have.

10 Year: It's much easier to get a job, but it's also much harder to keep your job, especially if you just got hired by a new company. an engineer who spends 4 years at one company will be more qualified to work there than a brand new engineer at that company with 10 years of experience. So, at this level, when you join a new company, you'll have to work extremely hard.

If you want the very highest salaries, you'll need to jump ship. it's hard work but the more often you change jobs, the higher the salary.

personally, i think, once you get past the middle of the bell curve, any additional raises are of diminishing returns. you'll work harder and harder for less and less money.

don't let mean companies with bad cultures take advantage of you. there still exist companies with good work cultures where you don't have to be a full time slave.

Your job performance is determined by the following: 1/3 - your own hard work 1/3 - how well you do politically (play nicely with others) 1/3 - factors beyond your control (just one example: working in a rapidly expanding industry will be greatly in your favor)

not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.

i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.

The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.

There's been a pretty huge drop in living standards over the last 40 to 50 years. One interview with a person who lived through the 60s said, back then a painter could own a home, support a non working wife and six kids. These days, that same painter would have a hard time supporting himself, let alone a wife and six kids and house.

one of the biggest drivers of wealth reduction is all the regulation that prevents more housing from being built, and how it's built. this leads to higher land costs, higher costs of labor, higher regulatory costs. Not to mention, we've kept adding more and more people to this country but haven't added more land or more material inputs. so of course living standards have to come down as everything gets split up per capita. to be sure, there's a ton of empty land out there, but no one's allowed to use it. and companies have moved jobs to areas where people can't live. meanwhile gov regulates the s** out of the housing dev market and yet let's job creators go nuts in an area that can't grow due to local NIMBYism.

Gov spends 40% of all GDP. That should be plenty to take care of the elderly. Of the entire federal budget almost half goes to the elderly: medicaid/medicaid ~ 20%, social security almost 20%.

the question we should be asking is. Why doesn't all this money go farther than it does? I'd say, we may not be nearly as wealthy as GDP/capita says we are.

For the last 20 years: - case shiller shows housing has gone up 4% every year on average - Big mac index also 4% per year for the last 20 years - Gas (tax was not inflation adjusted, so gas prices appear to be only 2.5%) but the underlying cost is going up faster than that. - cars, one of the lowest inflation categories according to the CPI (real actual inflation is 2.7% for the last 20 years)-> pick your favorite car and see for yourself. those quality adjustments aren't worth nearly what the cpi boys say they are.

So, we've already got 3-4% inflation for the last 20 years. Now with the official CPI almost 2% higher than last year, it means real inflation is probably 2% higher as well. 3% + 2% = 5%

Treasuries are at about 1 - 2% and unless you hold the actual treasury, you're taking a pretty big risk if you're going into the TLT right now with very little upside gain.

European bonds are negative.

The highest yielding bonds, aka junk bonds are returning 3-5% but those will dip nearly as hard as stocks when things get ugly (look at the last two crashes 2020, 2018), so you might as well hold stocks.

Stocks are at record high valuations according to the warren buffet indicator.

if crypto is a ponzi scheme, then isn't cash also a ponzi scheme? cash can become just as worthless, when no one believes in it anymore, just ask zimbabwae.

personally, if i'm going to be in a ponzi scheme, at the very least I want something with a limited supply.

Also, what other option do we have for store of value? Equities are way overvalued beyond reason. Fixed income/cash are becoming worthless very quickly. real estate is hard, very hard (just ask anyone that's bought in the last year). What else is there? put everything in gold?(the supply there is manipulated).

yes, crypto has some environmental cost. but, there's huge need for store of value. if you've been working your entire life and have 200K stored up. Losing 10K per year to inflation, year after year is not acceptable.

I think we should make every sysadmin watch Mr.Robot, at the least the first season. That may drive home the point: secure backups are important. ;)

With re-zoning this won't be a problem. Just rezone it to residential. or residential/commercial.

it's merely a symptom of not having enough opportunities to invest in. Their workforce (and many large software companies) is already too large for the amount of opportunity available. Even, world famous software engineers like Stevie yeggie had to eventually quit due to lack of impactful things to work on.

In the absence of any opportunity, all you can do is share buybacks or dividends, or maybe give out even more employee compensation.