circuitfarmer

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

$50 is decent. It's a living wage. It is not exorbitant and there's plenty of incentive for workers aiming higher.

One of my most hated "arguments" is the notion that "well, I'm an experienced worker and I've only made $15/hr forever. Therefore I will actively fight against raising wages because my wages were always low". What self-defeating bullshit. If the minimum wage had been indexed to anything having to do with cost of living for the last half century, $50 would be about right.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

That's exactly it. Cost of living has outpaced wages for 50+ years. $100k might sound like a "made-it" salary, but it's actually not that compared to buying power of previous generations.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

What am I missing?

Have you tried living off $9.24 an hour? That's about $370 a week before taxes.

Average rent in the US was $1372 a month 2023, which means just buying power isn't enough to figure this out. Many people who already own property miss the fact that it's largely impossible not to rent forever for anyone born after 1990, and extremely hard for anyone born after 1980 (on average -- it differs for cheaper areas, which won't be cheaper for much longer based on trends).

I'd argue we have multiple factors. Inflation is a huge one, but cost of living has in many ways outpaced inflation. Those two alone are additive, which is why even the current California minimum wage of $15.50 is not enough.

Let's leave it as an amorphous amount for now, and I'll ask a different question: what about a potential $50 minimum wage upsets you? What makes that a bad idea, in your view (and if you don't believe it is, apologies in advance!).

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

The whole damn system exists to place the burden of a living wage on the customer while the company paying peanuts can claim no wrongdoing. And the really sad part is: it has worked.

Edit: and there are many, many businesses that wouldn't be in business if they actually had to pay competitive wages on their own. The invisible hand can fix nothing if tipping culture says to throw more and more arbitrary amounts of money at people to subsidize their wages yourself. At some point (I'd argue we're past it already), the band-aid needs to get ripped off. Only then will we see self-correction. The almost immediate loss of many businesses will likely trigger other actions. It's already a no-win scenario.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

A recruiter reached out to me about two weeks ago. The role was interesting but said "hybrid to start, then on-site after 3 months" -- in spite of being listed as "Remote" in the title. I told the recruiter it was a hard pass. They proceeded to tell me that I really should be "more flexible" because they're seeing fewer and fewer remote roles.

I told them to simply remove me from any lists in the future and that I would not respond to any other recruitment requests from their company.

I have worked remotely since far before covid. It's been nearly 10 years. I am seeing some companies scramble for RTO, and in almost all cases, it's companies with demonstrable investment in real estate or contractual obligations to office space. Obviously it has also been used in some cases to force resignations so the company doesn't need as many lay-offs (specifically for those which overhired during covid). That's it. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no benefit to RTO in terms of worker performance, efficiency, or happiness.

Companies are very likely to lose top talent with RTO. They're also extremely unlikely to be able to attract that talent in the first place. It's effectively a brain drain. Remote-first companies stand to continue to gain, which isn't a bad thing at all.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

At a time when AAA often sucks so much, it sounds really out of touch to say your overpriced game is "quadruple-A".

Xfinity "10G" energy

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

On a scale of 1 to Surprised, this is a 0.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Because the US economy isn't doing well. The metrics that lead to that statement are wholly and completely disconnected from the American people who, except for a very, very select few, are not rich shareholders and really don't care how the S&P is doing if their pockets are constantly empty.

Rents are systematically high. Wages are systematically low. There is no end in sight. It's disconcerting that someone elected to represent me doesn't see that.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

I don't disagree that he's better than the alternative, but at a certain point, the government ceases to help anyone but its donors. We may be at that point.

"Wealthy career politician" is a group that does not really represent anyone, so ideally it shouldn't exist.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Yeah, that's the only option I think. Which is to say: we don't really have a democracy anymore.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Yeah, they're pricing themselves out of their own market. It's been happening for years but the recent economic shifts are making it more apparent.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but I'm a couch gamer, and text based games on the TV with a wireless keyboard work great. Relax on the couch and otherwise it's just like you're physically at the terminal.

I know few people have a PC on the living room TV, but there are ways to stream it over there -- e.g. with a Steam Link.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Jobs are starting to dry up in some industries because interest rates are so high that larger companies can no longer borrow cheaply to take a chance on side projects. The rates are high to combat this "inflation", and of course it won't work, because we aren't seeing real inflation. We're just seeing companies charging more because every industry is now an oligarchy. It's a bit of a death spiral.

circuitfarmer , 4 months ago

Super impressive since English is only 1,500 years old...

I'm guessing you mean "Old English" since it's sometimes said to be that old, but realistically that version of English has very little in common with English now (it was verb-second, for example, like German still is today). Even the post-Danelaw version of a couple hundred years later (with Norse borrowings like "husband" and even the pronouns "they/them") resembles modern English a lot more. Middle English was largely due to the influx of Norman French (both morphological and syntactic changes), and the whole thing isn't really recognizable as quasi Modern English until around 1500-1600.

Point is: language is a continuum, and a lot of these oldest this/oldest that claims in language just have to do with where someone is arbitrarily drawing a line.

Modern German for lox is "Lachs" (same pronunciation really, and spelling ultimately doesn't matter in linguistics). This makes sense, because the English of 1500 years ago would have been relatively close to German varieties of the period. But doesn't that mean "lox/Lachs/however you want to spell it" goes back further than that, perhaps to some earlier parent of both English and German? Yes, it likely does.

Edit: and yes, as others have said, that means lox is not a borrowing (vs. e.g. "husband"). Lox existed before anyone was calling English English. But that's also true of e.g. pronoun "he" and a lot of other stuff: by definition, any word that is reconstructed in Proto-Germanic and still exists in English today is "the oldest" (but there will be many of them and they're all roughly considered to be the same age, since proto-languages are ultimately abstractions with no exact dating).