I work in fintech; we use a mix of Scala and Node. Scala for heavy data processing pipelines, Node for our client API, due to Node’s very fast cold start times in lambda.
Yep, I agree. I just mean to say that the simple peaceful life that some are able to attain nowadays is possible due to the way our society is currently setup. Banding together in larger and larger tribes has been required because other people were doing the same and other people put their tribe's well being ahead of others. Whether they like it or not, those living the simple peaceful life are a part of our tribe and they benefit from the protection that our tribe provides.
That’s why I don’t trust any of these new trendy banking apps; better to stick with established institutions IMO. Not that they’re great either but at least you won’t be in a situation like this, or at the very least they’ll have better customer support.
It's why I switched everything to a combination of [boring established brokerage] and a credit union that's been around for almost 100 years. Their apps are mediocre and some of the more complicated account changes require a mix of faxed forms and phone support that's only available during normal business hours. But they're unlikely to mess things up very much and they're hopefully less likely to sell or leak all of my financial and personal information. And if something goes wrong my brokerage has in-person customer support branches around the country.
I'm in the same boat, with half my checking in the brokerage and half in the credit union. Some recent changes to the credit union(merging/renaming/ui changes) have been frustrating me and I've thought about rolling everything to the brokerage's offering, but the redundancy is nice for a situation like described here. Knock on wood though since it hasn't happened yet.
credit unions are great. Typically very customer friendly (i.e. no stupid monthly fees), many have been around a long time, and have rolled-out decent online banking options and mobile apps.
One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people.
To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand.
Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars.
You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it.
Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go.
PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”
I don't see how you can look at the many coups against democratically elected foreign leaders who sought to nationalize their countries' natural resources being anything other than protecting the interests of American/British companies who wanted those resources for themselves.
I can see you have a very broad definition of "democratically elected foreign leaders". Yes, the people who got backing from the CIA weren't white knights in armors. Nor were their enemies. Rarely a black-and-white issue. For example neither the CIA-supported Taliban nor the Russian invaders of Afghanistan were democratically elected by either Russians or Afghans.
Picking the "business interests" as the only motive for these action is an extremely narrow and simplistic explanation at best. And in my opinion also wrong, given historical facts. You could even argue the US went to war against Nazi Germany because Hitler would have seized all their foreign investments in Europe... Which is true but hardly the complete picture.
You said a lot of words and strawman arguments without actually addressing any of the events in the article.
Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, several leaders of Laos, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic, Joao Goulart of Brazil, and Juan Torres of Bolivia were all democratically elected leaders who got overthrown by CIA-backed coups. And that's not even the complete list.
EDIT: and several of those coups happened immediately after the victim countries attempted to nationalize their natural resources, such as oil and minerals, such that US and British companies could not extract them anymore. After the coups, the right-wing dictators which were installed often allowed those companies back in to continue their extraction. These are just historic facts, and the US government has declassified and acknowledged much of it.
Read OP's article. It's well-cited. I shouldn't have to summarize it for you in the comments.
I am not disputing the CIA did ethically wrong operations. I dispute the motivations were entirely "business interests". I also allege the OP is extremely one sided and has an agenda to smear the whole American nation, including its people, and including its current government. And muddying the distinctions towards much more authoritarian governments.
I also gave the example of the Taliban. Cuba is another good example of a situation entirely without legitimate governments to overthrow.
Juan Bosch was not overthrown by the CIA, btw, whereas the murder of Trujillo, an actual dictator of the Dominican Dictator, probably had been done with CIA help.
I also don't see "nationalization" as such an ethically blameless thing. It's essentially stealing, from some point of view. To not see it that way - without sounding like a marxist idiot - requires careful analysis how the property situation came to be and how it is to be changed. Just taking back the oil rigs you sold a few years ago to an US company can't really be the answer.
> an agenda to smear the whole American nation, including its people, and including its current government
I think this speaks to a sensitivity on your part, to which you're overreacting. OP never alleged anything of the sort. You inferred that yourself.
The fact that I'm arguing is that the CIA committed coups against democratically elected leaders in many countries, which was ethically wrong, and you seem to agree with that. Great. Afghanistan and Cuba can be their own different examples for the sake of argument. I'm talking about the countries I listed above.
Moving on from that, I would argue that a nation-state has the ultimate authority to decide what is done with the natural resources it controls. If people fairly elect a government which decides to stop selling its resources to foreign companies and keep the resources for its own people, that trumps previous business agreements made by a different regime. Full stop.
But, for the sake of argument, let's say the above scenario is immoral. Is it so immoral that it deserves a coup and installation of a CIA-friendly dictator? I don't think anyone would argue that. The worst it merits is financial compensation to the affected company which can't extract resources anymore.
Finally, I'll elaborate and say that I don't believe any of those coups were entirely for resources - it was for resource access as well as the broader American geopolitical strategy at the time of toppling any regimes deemed too leftist in favor of right-wing dictators. Similar to the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union; it was about installing puppet states who are loyal to you so that you can extend your sphere of influence as an empire. Neocolonialism at its finest. But the resources were always part of the picture too.
Just look at smaller players: Iran, Turkey, etc. Look at China's activities in SE Asia via a vis their neighbors. Look at their activities in international waters. They all project at least regional power.
You're saying given a larger playing field, they would forgo it. Let someone else project?
Not sure Iran is the best example - it is effectively surrounded by nations who want nothing more than to topple its leadership in favor of another West-friendly regime. Look at all the confirmed CIA activities listed in OP's article that have gone on in Iran. I chalk anything they do up to existential self-defense at this point.
Turkey isn't a great example either due to its NATO membership; their geopolitical motivations aren't that easy to pin down.
And yes, China acts very territorial towards Taiwan and the regional oceans. Taiwan and the surrounding ocean is the one exception to my statement; given the opportunity they'd take it without hesitation.
But for all those countries you listed, I really believe they would remain strong regional powers and not try to dominate the world the way the US does. Shocking as it may be to some of us in the British/American sphere of influence, most countries do not have imperial ambitions, and our opinions of places like China are heavily influenced by the military-industrial-media complex seeking to gin up resentment against foreign powers who don't bow to Western economic influence. (Much criticism of China is valid; that's beside this discussion specifically about imperialism).
I think you kind of missed what I said upthread. Specifically if they had our resources (size, location, resources).
So, if they had the resources the US has, I very strongly suspect they would be more muscularly assertive than we are when it comes to world affairs --as I pointed, out, even at their reduced size and power, they desire quite a bit.
Also, correction, China is not only rattling sabers with Taiwan, but Philippines, Vietnam, Japan too.
I suppose what I'm saying is that in order for a country to have the resources the US has and the political motivation to pursue empire, they'd have to have been on the path to empire for the last 200 years and come from the same sociopolitical history that has fueled the United States. So it's pretty steep conjecture.
In other words, yes, if China had the resources of the US it would be a global empire... because in order to have the resources the US has, you need to be a global empire.
This is just a pet theory at this point, I'm not an actual historian.
Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
> Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
This is all great if you have an aptitude for participation in the knowledge economy. That's not everyone. There used to be much more high-wage blue-collar work available to those who didn't fit that mold, but that has been ebbing away over time as America's manufacturing economy has been hollowed out.
Stronger unions and collective bargaining in the dwindling blue collar work that still exists is my only idea for how to improve things, but I'm not an expert.
> Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
Then you have to fight against this by organizing better and more widespread. Sometimes I do worry that all this information on Fox News and others about bogeymen distractions us from trying to better the things we actually can.
It may be that we are too easily distracted / disorganized / disheartened to better our position. And then we will not better our position.
But if you believe you can not change your fate, then you definitely can not. So I do suggest being like Obama and starting with community organizing and solidifying ones position locally and taking that larger. There are effective strategies to engage in. But they are not watching TikTok or YouTube all day.
I can't help but read this as a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. Sure, some cars have electric starters now... how does that matter? Plenty of poor, working class people do not own cars. They're getting priced out of the cities they've lived in their whole lives. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades. Healthcare and education costs have risen much faster than inflation. A huge percentage of Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.
But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.
Look at the kinds of projects apartments and leaky rural shacks the poor of the 50s-70s lived in. You might have to combine five to get what we today consider one working set of appliances and utilities.
Section 8 apartments and double wides are such a massive step up from that. There will always be a bottom of the economic latter. But that bottom has moved up a lot over the past couple generations.
Mobility is a somewhat separate topic from what standard of living constitutes the bottom.
I'm not denying that. Of course average standards are better now than they were in the 1950's. But that argument is frequently used as a distraction to avoid talking about very achievable ways that we in America could improve living standards even further, or about very real ways in which lower class people are still suffering even though they might have an Xbox at home. All of the problems I mentioned in my above comment are still valid even though a section 8 apartment is better than a tin shed, yet you didn't address any of them. "There will always be a bottom of the economic ladder" is not an excuse for the wealthiest nation on earth to still allow people to be financially ruined for visiting the ER, for example.
Also, the myth of mobility is not an entirely separate topic, in that it's another distraction frequently employed to place problems on the individual and avoid talking about systemic changes that could take place to benefit people on a broader scale.
And yet, if they or a family member have to visit the emergency room, they will likely be financially ruined.
I recently visited the ER for some chest pain which amounted to nothing and was charged $4,000 for it. Imagine what that would do to the 60% (!!) of Americans who can't come up with $500 for an emergency (see my top comment about stagnant wages, rising rent, and astronomical health care costs).
Comments like yours are easily and frequently used to distract from very real systemic problems that working class people still face. Access to cheaper smartphones doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but food and housing security and the ability to get medical treatment without fear of going bankrupt sure do.
I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.
> certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive
This is what classist "but they have refrigerators" arguments love to obfuscate. Yes, a poorer person might still have a roof over their head and a smartphone. But they're spending a huge chunk of their income on rent. They want to move somewhere cheaper, but there are fewer opportunities, or their pay would go down too. They avoid seeking medical care because of how astronomically expensive it is, which makes future negative outcomes more likely (and more expensive). And seeking higher education amounts to taking on tens of thousands in debt from predatory lenders, with only a few college majors actually amounting to a good ROI.
It's not that poor people now have it worse than poor people in the 50's, it's that we shouldn't set the bar that fucking low in the richest country on earth. Our society could do so much more. That's what all these commenters are missing, willfully or otherwise.
Adam Smith observed many years ago that if you give people more money they tend to spend it on better dwelling places.
Medical care has always been expensive. We have made a lot of progress: 200 years ago those ER bills would be zero: because everyone just died from what we consider solvable today.
1. Have you observed that almost every other developed, first-world nation on earth has some kind of nationalized health care service for its citizens, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves?
2. Have you considered that Adam Smith's anecdata from 200 years ago may not be accurate anymore?
Having made progress since 200 years ago is no excuse for piss-poor progress compared to where we could be.
I've seen lots of people follow what I think are stupid things. You think national healthcare is a good idea, I don't. (I think we went wrong by making health insurance come from your job, and all the things you hate about our system are a result ofthe current system being good for the employers)
You don't need to get insurance through your employer anymore. That's what the ACA did. You can buy it on a marketplace and choose from dozens of plans, employed or not. It costs hundreds a month for an individual - thousands for families - for barebones insurance that covers almost nothing.
I'll restate my earlier point. The vast majority of Americans would suffer huge financial setbacks (to put it lightly) from one visit to the emergency room. Health insurance historically being tied to your employer isn't the problem, health insurance itself is the problem. It's a predatory industry which has successfully lobbied to make healthcare immensely lucrative for themselves and financially ruinous for average people.
It's interesting to me that you still think nationalized healthcare is "stupid" even though dozens of countries [1] have successfully implemented it. And yet you can look at the system we have here in the US, and say "oh it's just that it's tied to your employer. Otherwise it'd be fine." Healthcare isn't a commodity and shouldn't be marketed as such. The evidence that nationalized health systems can work well is everywhere. I also refused to see it for a while because of internalized fear of the "socialism" boogeyman, but turns out you can just do it and still have a capitalist market for other things. Go figure.
>Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years
What people say is often very different from the truth. It is hard to measure make an objective measure of quality of life, but that doesn't mean the subjective measure is actually correct.
> valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?
Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.
Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.
I watched a video of Geoffrey Canada[1] explaining that when parents would ask them what they could do for themselves he would respond with something like "Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to change your situation. Which is why it's so important to place a high priority on your kids." I'm paraphrasing and don't remember the exact words but that really had an impact on me. The platitudes that Americans grow up - "Be who you want to be" and "You can do anything you want" - really start to fall away once you're older and have responsibilities and don't have the time anymore to take risks.
Unfortunately public schools in poor neighborhoods are getting shittier and parents need to pay for private tutors and summer school. Guess who can afford that?
Yes, money makes stuff easier. I don't think anybody is disputing that.
But you can be in a great school district with parents who think education is pointless, and in a shit school district with parents who think (know) it's one of the only ways out, and the former will underperform the latter all things being equal.
And this isn't as simple as "dump more money on shitty schools and they'll become great." There are plenty of examples of poor areas with higher per-capita student spending than more well-off areas, and the schools burning giant piles are money are still worse.
If parents value education they don't need to pay for tutors or summer school. I grew up in district with shitty schools, but I saw some kids succeed only because they learned stuff on their own.
Those schools aren't necessarily shittier...they are filled with kids that don't want to learn (and their parents increasingly blame the teachers for their failure).
So, it's just a statistical reality that kids in poor areas don't want to learn, and that's why the results show poorer people doing worse in education that rich people?
Any teacher in a school considered "inner city" (i.e., poor, relatively high crime) will tell you that there is often an anti-achievement culture present (and it's not correlated with race or ethnic background). My wife teaches in such a school. Many kids consciously try to avoid appearing smart or like they don't hold school in contempt because if they don't, their peers or their parents will shame them or abuse them. It's considered a very serious problem in the field of education.
At the same school, several of her students have received large scholarships, including full four year rides to university. This is rare, of course, but does correlate very clearly with parents being involved in their children's education, encouraging them, and not having an anti-achievement peer group.
It's a statistical reality that if your parents don't value education, and don't impress upon their children its importance, that those children are incredibly unlikely to decide completely on their own that education is the way out of their impoverished lives.
But that's a little too nuanced for your straw man.
Yes it is. Kids in poor areas don't see education as they way out of being poor...how could they. They see drugs and gangs as a way to do that though. I went to a shitty school and did well and went to college (thanks to my parents pushing me to do so)...so many people couldn't fathom why I was doing that and why I wasn't going to just go get a job right away. Many of those people are still living in that same area and are just as poor as their parents were.
You don't need to "feel" something towards poor people to advocate in favour of them. It is practically impossible to really feel anything for people who are not in your very inner personal circle. But trying to help society progress and reduce inequalities is a net benefit for everyone.
I don't care about poor people either. All I care about is a system that sets everyone up for success. I know it's possible and I know it would help poor people, but we aren't there yet.
Middle class kids (and above) get good education handed to them on a silver platter while poor kids will have to fight tooth and nail to scrape their own education together.
It's not impossible but if you were that determined you could learn even better in a good school so the relative downside for poverty still persists. What you are setting yourself up for is not becoming poor. That's good but it is clearly not fair.
A lot of parents of modest means, immigrant parents in particular, will move out to suburbs expressly because of the school quality relative to what's available in many city-centers. They're also willing to make much higher sacrifices for their kids' educations and enroll them in parochial or even private schools in spite of the cost. Sometimes, a good charter school or a magnet school is possible too.
It's not necessarily that the educators aren't high quality, but that the majority of students are there as a babysitting service and take up more time being disciplined than actually getting taught. We always say inner city schools have worse education...but I suspect it's more that the kids that attend those schools are disruptors and the system won't allow them to be disciplined in the way they should be (not that expelling them is the right thing either).
Lots, actually, but it's very resource constrained, so once again, the relationship between money-poor schools and bad students plays out.
There are a variety of diversion programs that have been tried and shown great success with problem kids, but that requires staffing so that disruptors get more teacher attention than they otherwise would in a class of 35. Having competent, active counselling services in schools does a lot, too.
With that said, it's not my wife's experience (as an inner city high school teacher) that disruptors are the problem. They're a problem, but there are lots of ways to handle them, individually or in groups.
The way kids get shafted in poor schools is high teacher:student ratios that reduce or eliminate any individual attention a kid might receive, coupled with poor facilities and supplies. You rightly identify parental involvement as a key factor in school success, but the flip side is that kids lacking parental involvement are denied any individual attention in schools that are simply overcrowded and understaffed. And the kind of attention I'm talking about isn't substitute parenting, it's just following up with kids on assignments and attendance.
Sure, a class size of 35 is a problem. So are a lot of factors that can lead to kids not learning. However the city I currently live in has a 20:1 ratio...and there are plenty of kids not succeeding (better than average though). Another local school in Portland has a ratio of 19:1...and they are 22% proficient in math. Thornwood HS in Chicago...13:1 ratio, but 8% proficient in math. It's not always about staffing...
To what end though...I'm sure 1:1 ratio would be a huge improvement, but at what cost. You always get diminishing returns in these cases which seems heartless...but like with anything there is only so many resources to go around.
99.9% minority students, 94% economically disadvantaged. Testing scores are horrible...across the board. 2.8% percentile for their SAT scores...26% of the students took an AP exam and 3% those that took them scored acceptable (3). This brings up a lot of questions...like why is a school that can barely graduate kids (54%) focused on having 1 out of every 4 seniors take an AP exam?
In my city it's hard to separate the multitude of interrelated issues to say it's any one thing, but something I didn't realize until I moved here is that magnet schools pull out virtually all the competent and interested kids by the time they reach highschool.
Given that, it's less surprising to me that the bottom tier public schools in these areas wind up so much shittier than the average public school.
Can you really blame them? Why wouldn't you want to pull the good kids out so they can succeed? Seems like having tryouts for basketball...you take the best of the best to make the team strong.
What's the underlying factor that makes it possible to only poach the good students?
I'm thinking either it is externally visible or the factor is "solvable" for every student, meaning a school with bad students will receive more policies/measures to boost their performance as everyone is suffering from the same underlying problems. Of course this assumes that poorly performing schools get support at all.
On the surface it might look like it's just about "discipline" but in the kinds of school districts you're talking about the problems are very deep-rooted and multi-faceted. Discipline alone is not nearly enough to address what's going on.
Agreed...but at the school level what can they do? If the parents aren't engaged in their kids getting an education and behaving (for whatever reason)...it's not really the school's job to fill that gap.
Some school districts are now having a measure of success with having ONE school but tracking the kids into "accelerated" or "regular" programs and elevating the resources for both.
This happened as a result of a large-enough number of well-to-do parents no longer being able to get their kids into very desirable and academically rigorous city-wide schools, so they effectively "took over" a neighborhood public/charter school by participating VERY HEAVILY in the PTA, the school's funding, and getting deeply involved with the ALL the kids, teachers and administration.
From what I can tell, it required a very uncomfortable and ongoing dialog about race and class. Not every school in every big city can do this, IMHO, but AFAICT it lead to better outcomes for all the students, including the at-risk students.
The quality of education is dictated innate ability, parents, and school system. I like to think of as a three leg stool. If one leg is missing, it's possible to balance. If two are missing, no amount of money will solve the problem.
The stool has a fourth leg: other students. It's tough to get a good education if many of the other students are violent or disruptive. Public schools can't easily expel problem students.
I think there's also other cases where kids grew up without education (like myself) - but could have, but if i were to have kids now i'd value education immensely. Ie i'm not an immigrant, my lack of early education is a result of my family being poor and making poor decisions.
However now my values have shifted drastically. Ironically i would consider myself very lucky. Not wealthy by any means, but far better off than the average American household. Which then perhaps would put my children (which i'm not having, lol) in the position of being "children of well-off families".. maybe.
I dunno.. these are loose definitions but i make enough that i'm confident i can pay off my mortgage, make meaningful contributions to my retirement and not be afraid of money (outside of job loss, at least). I also significantly budget for things like home repairs, car repairs, medical expenses, etc. I could lose my job tomorrow and be safe for 6 months, 12 if i needed to. I have no financial concerns outside of job loss right now.
My view however is that this isn't wealthy. Instead this is where the middleclass should be. I don't make enough to retire early (though i could probably extreme FIRE, but that doesn't sound enjoyable to me). I'm not by my definition wealthy, just safe, satisfied, happy. No fancy cars or homes, just a stable honest and predictable living. These are traits that, in my mind, America should strive to bring to all people.
Unfortunately i've not seen this spread. I've only seen it decrease. People far more and more on the edge of collapse, with no safety net in their bank, no budget for emergency expenses, no possibility of retirement.
Relative to the current state of America i am wealthy. To me that is very, very sad.
That's exactly how I would describe my own situation. From the outside looking in, people with less economic means think that my situation is "perfect", and that it equates to no worries(it does not).
Job loss is the only big worry, and even in that situation it wouldn't be difficult to find a similar job with similar pay. I know that is a comfort that not everyone(or most people) has. Knowing that this seems to be "as good as it gets" when compared to the majority of Americans is what makes me very, very sad.
My dad has a friend who owns a bus-sized camper/RV in addition to multiple cars and a beachfront home, but doesn't consider himself rich because he can't afford a large boat.
Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!
I replied https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27516973 - curious what your thoughts are on it. But no, i have literally zero fancy expenses. My car is 10 years old, my mortgage is not paid off, i don't have retirement, but all of those things are being worked on, and i am quite financially stable.
When I was a kid... I wanted a cabin in the mountains. I would imagine living there (forever), and being more or less away from society.
Fast forward... I own a house in a rural area and have a family. I'll likely never have that cabin in the mountains, and I'll never be free of having to support my family. That's my fault though..I took the path of least resistance and ended up where I'm at - I didn't take the path towards what I dreamed about having as a kid.
Well that's unfortunate. In this cabin dream, do you have a family or was your intention to live in a cabin in the mountains in isolation?
Regardless, perhaps make it a goal to do this when you retire. It will give you something to work toward and possibly quell some of your regret.
If it's on your mind this much, and I'm no expert here, you might want to talk about it with a professional. You can't let this stuff bottle up and eat away at you from the inside.
