Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.
And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.
Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
That's a really good point about the free stuff people with wealth get.
Free objects are an easy to understand example. If you're in an expensive neighborhood you can walk down the street and really good get free stuff because people are throwing it out - like the nice 42" Samsung screen I'm using right now. In a poorer neighborhood that just doesn't happen.
> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
Thanks for being skeptical, looked it up because of that. Looks like the primary study people cite is this one, which indicates around 65% of people filing for bankruptcy cite a medical contributor of their bankruptcy. That includes medical bills (highest contributor overall) and loss of income due to medical issues.
While we are not at the same state in history, there is a reason why Usury was illegal in many societies. Interest on loans can end up crushing one part of society while enriching another that any feel didn't deserve it. It can actively produce inequality.
> That line sticks out so much now, and I can't unsee it.
I thought maybe they did it on purpose at first, like a cheeky but too subtle joke about LLM usage, but when it happened twice near the end of the post I just acknowledged, yeah, they did the thing. At least it was at the end or I might have stopped reading way earlier.
> Also HN readers: upvote the most obvious chatgpt slop to the frontpage
Eh, this one was interesting as documentation of real work that people were doing over years. You don't get that many blog posts about this sort of effort without, usually, a bunch of self hype (because the company blogging also sells data analysis AI or whatever) that clouds any interesting part of the story. The slop in it is annoying but it's also noise thats relatively easy to filter out in this case
> I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics"
The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics.
Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual context of what you're responding to.
To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics".
That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.
I read it more as a claim that people who advocate against AI are picking arguments as a means to an end rather than because they actually believe or care about what they're saying.
> I don't block XSLT because I haven't come across malicious use of XSLT before (though to be fair, I haven't come across much use of XSLT at all)
Recent XSLT parser exploits were literally the reason this whole push to remove it was started, so this change will specifically be helping people in your shoes.
> It is a term almost exclusively used by the left
What a strange claim.
If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe recheck your priors.
> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's planned, merciless strategy. It costs nearly nothing to fire a ton of people, so why not hire a bunch with free money and dump them as soon as the free money disappears
Yeah pretty much. This is just late stage capitalism, and the working class seem to just be shrugging at it instead of what theyr forefathers did in reaction.
that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.