If you dropped your calories you wouldn’t expect to loose weight forever, you would expect to loose a bit of weight while your body adapted and then stay at that new weight if you stay at the new lower calories. CICO works well for the vast majority of people, it’s just very hard to know what the balance is and the averaging window is weeks not days.
So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?
Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.
Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.
Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.
The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
No, it’s a series of audio activities framed as a conversation between someone who knows the new language and someone learning. You pause the audio and play the part of the student when required and it focusses on the positive language transfer aspects between languages and how they can be used to build up sentences and phrases.
Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.
After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren’t taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as needed in the moment.
It's closer to courses like pimsleur or Paul noble where a teacher and student are speaking and there is pause before the student answers in which you are supposed to answer.
The thing I love about LanguageTransfer is how he explains _why_ something works a certain way. I find it easier to remember some grammar when I know the background evolution. He also makes an effort to map between languages which is the biggest contrast to things like pimsleur, which try to be more immersive.
I find LT great for "learning the language", but I find something like Spanish After Hours on Youtube to be far better for "learning to speak and understand the spoken language". I would recommend that everyone at least dips into something like LT every now and then, but I think something like SAH is better for daily exercises.
Do you just watch / listen to random videos or is it more structured?
I am planning a trip to Mexico soon, so I have been listening to how to Spanish, and mextalki podcasts. The latter is pretty difficult to follow, though I feel you need to listen to real native speakers speaking at a normal pace to have any chance of understanding locals.
SAH seems great because she does seem to speak normally and not too slowed down (or it just sounds quick to me :))
Yes! Language transfer is amazing imo. I found it here on hacker news and it's probably the most effective tool I have found for learning languages.
For Spanish, over the years, I have taken formal immersive classes, finished the Duolingo tree and the reverse tree, spent time in Spanish speaking countries etc. My level of Spanish was good but clunky and I made a lot of mistakes. After finishing about half of the course, I found I was making far fewer mistakes.
I love the etymology background he gives, I love linguistics so it keeps me interested, maybe not for everyone.
I completed the Paul noble learn Italian course, so that I could compare to language transfer. In my opinion language transfer was much better, I found Paul noble's a bit slow and less engaging, for me personally.
I used it for Spanish too, and it really gave me confidence. I went through the course once and was able to travel through rural Panama for two weeks. I plan to redo the entire course (total about 15 hours) soon, to freshen things up after five years.
I think it needs to be supported with other techniques (speaking to natives, watching Spanish TV or movies, etc.), but for taking in and understanding the language it can't be beat.
I learned French, German, Sesotho, Japanese, with a mixture of classroom teaching and full immersion. I decided to learn Spanish with Language Transfer. It is by far the best system I have ever used (short of immersion; the absolute best way to learn Japanese was to fall in love with a Japanese woman in Japan).
I have been supporting it with monthly donations for about 4 years now, because I believe it is such an important tool.
up vote here - Language Transfer has allowed me to be able to communicate in Spanish within just a few weeks - understanding is another challenge though. This app is absolutely genius. I wish there would have been more content though
My wife and I used it for Spanish as well and it’s a game changer for sure. I can now have a surpassingly decent (if simple) conversation with Spanish speakers based on this app and some supporting vocab learning
> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your
progress, and listen with your phone locked.
> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings
The app is really basic, in a good way. There are no ads or unnecessary permissions. It's just a basic media player that lets you download the audio files for offline playback and tracks whan you have already listened to.
I’ve always been a decent runner, won some school and county races, but I’ve never enjoyed it, it was something to get through.
I stopped running years ago when I took up weight training and I didn’t miss it at all.
Last year my wife wanted to do some Spartan races so started training, I joined her for a few training runs and due to the controlled, slower pace she was running at set by the training schedule/app I loved those runs.
Turns out I was running too fast and hating every minute. I now run once or twice a week at a slowish pace, it’s been great. Speaking to “proper runners” since starting back up this is apparently very common, most people who hate running are simply going faster than they should.
Anything that gets you outside, run/sit/ride/tennis club is a good thing so well done them for organising something.
Get a trainer. A good one will help you understand the progression and the different lifts and such. And will also keep you motivated when you are figuring it out. You don’t have to keep them forever but just to get started for a couple months can be great motivation in my experience.
In my experience, strength training is about gradually increasing the weight, start with something like 2.5 lbs, then move to 5 lbs as you go. But only add weight once you can do your sets and reps with proper form. Form really matters, bad form is how you get injured.
The other things that make a big difference: eating enough (you need more calories to lift more) and getting enough sleep as well as rest between workouts.
Like every other exercise, it's a question of building a habit.
Could well be, the other thing could be that weight training is quite a bit more boring than running - I rely on music to get me into a lifting zone.
Weights becomes fun when you see the progress in your physique and in the weight you can lift going up and feel in that things that were hard are now easier.
As someone else suggested, a trainer can really help as can doing a a simple compound lift based programme like Strong Lifts 5x5 as it’s simple and you make good gains pretty quickly.
It is comparable but not similar. Clinton had a private server for handling diplomatic emails. The vast majority of traffic was unclassified, the classified material was later deemed to be improperly marked (except three documents iirc).
This case is a single incident (that we are aware of) where a clearance holder manually bypassed security and tracking by transcribing attack plans to a commercial chat platform.
Hillary also had her phones destroyed (by hammer) so that those messages couldn't be saved for the record, much like Signal was set to destroy messages so they couldn't be saved.
The server had POP3 support and one of the email accounts being used had been set to delete messages after 60 days. In the investigation FBI director James Comey said there was "no doubt that the work-related emails were removed electronically from the email system". There were more than a dozen cell phones and several ipads that were used to check the email accounts but most of them couldn't be obtained to check for downloaded email or forensic evidence of classified email, because hammers were used to destroy the evidence.
Definitely seems like an electronic records issue if they weren't being archived. I'm wary of half-truths like "the email was destroyed" without mention of the other places the email might exist.
Didn't Comey say Clinton wasn't found to have obstructed justice?
That's true, they didn't have enough evidence to prove intent. Although having a low level staffer who had no business providing government IT services destroy the phones was unheard of, violated the law on how government records should have been handled, and highly suspicious there are also possible "valid" reasons for it, like protecting the information in those devices from being able to be recovered by anyone who dug the devices out of the trash, and the destruction of emails after 60 days could have just been to save space rather than specifically to hide evidence.
They also decided not to go after charges for the nobody staffer who did the deed, and controversially Hillary didn't face any consequences with the FBI saying: "To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."
You can get these in the UK as well based on the squeals of joy I heard from two lads racing up and down our road a few days back - looked like great fun!
Similar to me with CoPilot, I found it made it harder for me to spin up my brain to full power to tackle a genuinely tricky problem because I was letting it solve the simple ones for me. I stopped using it after about 3 months and had a total pause from CodeGen tools. Now I use Claude like a very documentation-knowledgeable junior developer who can write code very quickly. I guide it on the architecture and approach and sanity check what it does but let it save me a tonne of typing. I don’t use it for everything but as a CTO for an early stage startup that needs to turn somethings around quickly it’s incredibly useful.
I ran a small light plastic assembly factory years ago and within 20 minutes of a new person starting I could tell if they could, what I call, “think in 3D” if they couldn’t they would never meet the standard we needed and I’d sadly have to fail their trial at the end of the first day - about 30% of people fell in to this category.
Can you go into detail on this with an example or two? It sounds interesting.
A little bit of a ramble here:
Different mental models is kind of a fascinating thing for me. I don't always pick up on something as quickly as my peers when it comes to things like math and pattern recognition, but I've tended to make up for that with a hard work ethic and what I think of as rabid curiosity and a strong desire to constantly grow my work skill set and knowledge. I've grown a lot during my career as a result when colleagues who had much higher GPAs stagnated. It's interesting how wide and varied our brains are. Again, when doing any pattern recognition games (e.g. speed, set...etc) with my wife...I don't think I'm bad, but she is grasping things at a rate of 3-6x what I can and it was the same in any hard STEM classes that we took together. It's the opposite for things like history where she can't pick up as much of what is going on in a lecture or documentary or whatever. Physically speaking I'm not sure how the brain works differently between us, but I'm guessing the weights are just different if it's anything like the NN in computer science. We were playing dominoes the other day and I had to pause to check which had already been played and she got a little frustrated that I was taking too much time - like what do you mean you don't already know which ones have been played? So I guess it's a greater ability to recognize and retain patterns quickly.
In your case of the worker, I wonder if they were just dangerously clueless or just needed a little more time to build that mental model to grasp how the pieces all fit together. I also wonder how I would have faired.
Sure, difficult to really explain it as I don't think I have the correct physiological knowledge/vocabulary but I can try to paint a picture.
We assembled a plastic product with about 20 components of different shapes and sizes. There were slots to align and friction fit, there were things to click, wires to route, glue to dab etc.
The far extreme of "can think in 3D" were the people who could be shown the finished item, the kit of parts and pretty much just assemble it. They would miss some "trick" or "knack" we had developed and they might not quite get the alignment or placement of a part perfectly but the product would work.
The opposite end were the people who unless I was stood with them and helping to move the components in to alignment just simply couldn't "get" it. It was as if they didn't have a the ability to retain the finished view and movement through 3D space required to complete the movement. Could also have been a coordination, dexterity or proprioception issue.
Of course this was a spectrum and we had to make a judgement call (often in discussion with them) about how they would improve/get up to speed or if it was a lost cause. We built jigs and tools to help remove the finesse required in the assembly which helped a lot BUT, when you got someone who could just see it no amount of training or jigs could get everyone to that speed.
On quiet days we would have little competitions on certain stations to see if people could get a new record and it was those days when you could really see the people who just got it. The best example I can give was making the final cardboard packing boxes, this was an 8 movement process from flat box to assembled with lid open, the record was 2.7 sections, a sustainable pace (so the time that actually mattered) was around 7 seconds, people who just couldn't get it were over 30 seconds and usually with many quality issues as at those people were often fighting the box and material.
Thank you. That's helpful! I find this interesting as well. Some folks like to build with detailed instructions and others prefer to just get the gist and figure it out for themselves. :)
The best math professor I ever had was a fantastic instructor because he had in head a catalog of wrong mental models and could nearly immediately grasp where a student might have taken a wrong turn and try to get them on the right path.
(It was a graduate level real analysis course, and people who had been calculus whizzes were struggling with point set topology proofs.)
Wow that sounds like a real superpower in that setting. I have met many that have very strong visualization/conceptualization skills in things like 3d, mechanical, color/looks, code and electronics - but for other peoples mental models that one was new to me.
The closest I can remember would be some sales people I met who are also chess players, they could "play" in their heads a range of different scenarios of interactions in a sales conversation - many levels deep. And would do it, especially if/when stakes where high. In the blink of a second. It would take them muuuch longer to just answer me a few questions on why they thought "C" was the best way to open, and then make sure to get in point "E" (or "G") before proposing "K".
Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood but all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents (with one exception).
All either studied hard in school and went on to get a degree or left school at 18 and apprenticed in a trade or got specific qualifications.
I read so much about declining wealth and how each generation is worse off that I have to assume I’m in a lucky bubble because it’s not the case for me.
None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.
I feel like software has been an outlier here for a decade; the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply (semi-smart people can work hard, learn a technical skill, find a job in their field, pay off their loans, make more than their parents, afford a house, and have a comfortable personal life and relatively fulfilling work life)
Everything I've heard from the rest of the economy is that this model is dead
Fair question, it’s a mix: IT admin, manufacturing project manager, primary school teacher, tree surgeon, mortgage advisor, doctor, something in finance, secondary school teacher, plumber, software developer, power electronics engineer, charity sector project lead
Okay, so a lot of ~£40k a year salaries (outside of medicine and finance) to afford a £400k house when your parents might have had a £20k salary to afford an £80k house? There's a real disparity when you consider what they did too. If your parents are anything like mine, they were in the pub 4 days a week, drinking and eating with friends. I can managed that just a few times a month. Wealth compared to income from my experience is significantly lower by .lost metrics.
Maybe you have an exceptional friend group because .. outside of your anecdata .. the statistically average salaries for many of those professions over large sample sets is below the median in the us and they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly
>they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly
In the US? Real Disposable Personal Income has been growing very consistently over time [1]. The rate of growth did stagnate between 2000 and 2013 but the trend has been remarkably consistent.
it claims that the average person has 50k usd in disposable yearly income - there's no way that's after housing and other non optional expenses have been accounted for.
using this measurement, if wages go up 5% but rent goes up 50%, it would still look as if people have more money to spend than before.
Certain industries now are at a point where they are paid a ton. Jobs like the trades, piloting boats or planes, that sort of thing. Your schedule might look a bit irregular, but the path to say a quarter a million a year is far more realistic today for someone who is a pilot vs someone who takes a white collar job.
That phenomenon was not always apparent. Growing up, I was told specifically to avoid those sorts of jobs and go for white collar, informed by a generation where those sorts of jobs were a lot more dangerous and less compensated. In some companies over the last century we went from say building floors of modestly paid draftsmen and a few highly paid white collar classes managing them to floors of modestly paid white collar people fiddling with excel and a few highly paid certified engineers doing the actual technical work. The dynamic has changed.
It also depends on who your parents are. My parents at my age were poor working class. We had a much smaller house (800 sq ft), used cheap cars, cheaper clothing, etc... My dad spent a lot of time fixing our cars (I don't even try), fixing plumbing issues, and we rarely ate out (and never DoorDash'ed!). I was lucky to get some quarters to go to the local arcade to play Pac Man.
My point -- even being slightly lower middle class now would feel like a good jump over my parents. That's just pointing out that comparisons to parental income is very relative.
"the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply"
Which economy? In the US, healthcare, public schools in some states, and B2B sales come to mind as decent jobs. But I agree with the general sentiment - there do not seem to be great choices that support a nice life. Quite a few of my friend have to work multiple jobs or double shifts to make it work.
Most healthcare jobs don’t pay particularly well. The inefficiency is going to pay the salaries of medical transcriptionists, people handling billing inside insurance and in healthcare facilities etc. Things that aren’t improving outcomes are ultimately why healthcare is expensive in the US.
Just for comparison the minimum wage nationwide in Feb 1, 1968 was 1.60$/hour that’s ~14.61$/hour when adjusted for inflation. Median household income in 1968 was 8,600$ or ~$78,504.90 inflation adjusted and that was mostly single income.
That’s the higher end of medicine, orderlies are making 16$/h. People on ambulances are often making 17$/h. Some nurses make ok money, but starting salary for a school nurse is 20$/h and median school nurse is making 30$/h...
Granted I understand what you mean, but it’s kind of like saying managers make good money while ignoring all the shift managers at fast food joints.
Can we summarize it that 'easy' or 'low skilled' jobs aren't payed better today comparing with the past? Not surprising taking into account demand and population. More worrying is that high-skilled jobs aren't rewording. As for equality.. welcome to USSR, you see how it ended. Now only a few Arabs states have greater inequality.
I wouldn’t call working an ambulance as easy by any metric.
As to inequality, we’ve made this much worse intentionally via things like a tax code that massively favors high income earners. It’s not even that this tradeoff has increased GDP growth or anything the country was growing faster with higher tax rates on corporations and dividends.
Even just theoretically it’s suboptimal because jobs catering to or trying to extract money from high income people don’t lend themselves to automation. Long term everyone rich or poor has been worse off.
> You have no clue about the collapse of the USSR.
I lived through it. We can talk a lot about, but the fact is equality doesn't work. Maximum it gets to is everyone equally poor. And as a result of it there are no startups. You need middle class for this and motivation. Government controlled and own monopolies is also the result of equality. Nobody else has the resources. So commies had to create the economy, few bigger things are easier to manage. Managers aren't interested in risk taking, it's not worth it. Finally everything stalled and fell far behind the rest of the world. There were bright spots, but that's it. Like North Korea today can build missiles and not much else.
Just look around. Probably only Cuba and North Korea are still in true socialism. In both there is a small super-rich class and the rest is, yes, equally poor. Super-rich are pretending to be poor too and invent theories to keep the rest under control. BTW, I'm not sure Cuba still has strong ideology today.
Just as a factual matter I think everyone can agree with these three statements:
The USSR didn’t actually have economic equality.
The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
Finally, arguing for equal taxation isn’t arguing for equal pay.
As to my actual argument, I’m saying economic growth is slowed through the economic inefficiency resulting from unequal taxation. The point of economics is to make goods and services people want and capitalism achieves this through investments and exchanges of money. But distorting that feedback loop through taxes unequal taxes on individuals or companies is a distortion. Invest in the wrong things and economic growth stalls.
> The USSR didn’t actually have economic equality.
More or less it had. Except for privileged commie bosses everyone poor. "Rich" had cars (!) Having noticeable business was prohibited. Selling own potatoes on flea market, or growing chicken and pigs was fine.
> The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
In Mass. it's 10% to begin with.
> I’m saying economic growth is slowed through the economic inefficiency resulting from unequal taxation.
Not sure about this. Do you have examples when equal taxation helps?
> Except for privileged commie bosses everyone poor.
By modern standards dirt poor, but by historic standards it becomes more nuanced economically if not socially. Most of the world was just shockingly poor until very recently.
As to equality the economy isn’t just the legal economy. A cop accepts a bribe is making more than a clean cop and greasing the wheels of bureaucracy was really common as was a rather extensive black market fed by production being diverted etc. It’s quite consistent how effectively people learn to leverage what they have to get what they want.
> Do you have examples where equal taxation helps.
You can look at tax rates vs long term GDP growth and see trends but economic growth isn’t clear cut. The best example is cases where tax breaks for the wealthy has been harmful is the UK which is still doing alright but had massive advantages from it’s early industrialization and colonies that it quite effectively squandered.
Why wouldn't the required skill level increase though? I think it's expected that as a society specializes it becomes more and more difficult to get ahead if you're producing goods or services at the lowest level of specialization. With education getting better and technology improving, it's impossible to make rote jobs be economically feasible for anything other than robots.
Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here.
Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds.
But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet.
Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either.
As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level.
To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside.
I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.
> it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world
It's about margins. Software has the 2nd highest margins of any sector (highest is High Finance), so it's easy to pay competitively in software compared to other fields.
Right. There’s obviously a totally valid market-based reason for it, and I am absolutely not implying that developers should receive less of that than they do. However, its an external factor which gives many developers a very skewed understanding of how much work most people expend for the amount of money they receive and agency they get at work, and how much they’re worth as workers outside of the software world with roughly the same amount of ambition and effort. Compared to most industries, software companies coddled developers and really tried to trump up the mystique of the great hacker genius. While particularly apparent in the restaurant industry, developers thinking they’ve ‘solved’ an unrelated business they’ve got no experience in using their genius software brain or assume they can simply transfer their existing skills to a new field is pretty common. I encountered one developer who thought they’d simply pivot to crime to keep their family comfortable, which is hilarious. The beginning of a career in crime is long and full of petty bullshit crimes that pay very little because you don’t have the wisdom to not get caught doing more serious crimes, and you don’t have the network to support you doing things like getting unregistered guns, fencing, etc. What I wouldn’t pay to see that guy walk into a bar in a rough part of town, order a craft beer, and try to debate the sketchiest people he saw about why he’d make a trustworthy partner in crime.
I'm just saying the only reason SWEs (and IBs) get paid the big bucks is primarily because of market economics, even if plenty of other high stress roles (eg. Nursing, EMT, Teaching) get paid a relative pittance.
I think a lot of us members of the tech industry need to cut down on our hubris and respect other industries and jobs, and understand that we are cogs inasmuch as anyone else.
Much more recently to be honest. The bottom only fell in MechE fields (Automotive, Aerospace, Defense) in the 1990s, but if global tensions continue, it might be a good time to be a MechE.
That’s right. Things are changing and it’s going to be a really tough pill to swallow for a lot of people that only think they understand what work looks like for nearly everyone else in the world.
Ask the nurses how much they got for severance when steward health closed. Or what my severance was when I got laid off in 2009 working as a fine dining line cook as a culinary school graduate. Or the career concept artists replaced by AI. Add all three up, throw in 4 bucks, and you can buy yourself a coffee at Starbucks. And all of their salaries were a hell of a lot lower, even in the exact same housing markets. Hell you might be able to add all three up and still be in the neighborhood of junior developer.
The dev world’s baseline for what constitutes good treatment, bad treatment, and fairness from employers, an acceptable amount of disposable income, acceptable housing expenses, etc. is completely detached from the rest of the working world. Now that the demand is dramatically changing, that will probably also dramatically change, and that’s going to be rough. If it does, maybe it will recover. It has before, but this seems like a much more significant change.
I'm a little surprised by this. While I'm better off than my parents I went into a much more highly paying field (software engineer vs teacher/social worker.) If I did a similar job to them I would have no hope of ever affording a similar house to them.
They were part of a generation that benefited from enormous house price appreciation due to a combination of falling interest rates went from almost 15% down to under 5% (this is about 3x on its own) and the fall in house building which drove up prices and rents generally.
This effect is somewhat less pronounced outside of southern England.
You make a good point about higher paying fields in the younger generations. While there is a spread of occupations that I replied to another commenter with you may have hit on something. Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations.
Thinking of one (not me) it’s delivery driver -> enlisted service -> mid level finance (not London)
> Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations.
That is unarguably true of our parents' and grandparents' generations, but I don't think it is as true of people of my age or younger (born in early 1980s.)
There was a huge expansion of higher skilled jobs after the war with large numbers of people moving into the middle classes. For me and everyone I know our mothers (born 1950s) worked. We all grew up in dual income families.
My great-grandfather was a miner. His son, my grandfather enlisted in the forces during the war, seems to have been recognised as being technically apt and worked with radar, became an officer and in the early 1960s left to be a manager at an engineering company.
His daughter, my mum, became a teacher (first in family to go to college) and his son did not go to college but became an IT manager (married a teacher). All of us grandchildren went to university but basically have similar jobs to our parents' generation.
Several of my siblings and cousins own houses but they got help from parents or partners' parents and mostly bought outside the south east. Renting a flat in London as a fairly highly paid IT contractor I had to pay six months up front because my parents didn't earn enough to be guarantors.
Boomers benefited from a ton. Significantly cheaper housing, education, healthcare, childcare, groceries, cars, gas. Even when adjusted for inflation. Employment was significantly easier to get, especially without degrees, and those easier to get jobs paid relatively much more in terms of the ratio of income to cost of living.
I have a very different experience. I did all the right things, more or less, got into a good field with a secure job in the broader tech industry, and indeed I make very good money.
Despite this, I can not afford to buy the house I grew up in; a 3 bedroom SFH with a decent sized yard and a pool, around 1400 square feet, 45 minutes away from downtown without traffic in a hot real estate market. My father was able to purchase this home as a tradesman with 4 kids, being the only parent who worked outside the home.
Same. Though my dad was also a software engineer, but he was just never good at negotiating raises. My wife and I both work and we could maybe swing the price of the house I grew up in, but the mortgage would be roughly the same as our rent now currently.
Similar case for my wife. Her parents bought in 2000 with a combined household salary of less than mine alone. The mortgage would be twice our monthly rent. Fortunately we stand to inherit that house, which sort of proves the article's point.
> None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.
I have a similar sample, all middle class in their 30's. The only ones who have bought houses have been given significant assistance from their parents, now none of them are poor by any stretch, but few have any significant assets.
Well things worked out for you and they have worked out for me as well. For a long time I have this arrogance expressed privately usually to myself or very close people that it is all due to hard work, diligence, thrift that I reached where I am today.
But lately after reading and observing around quite a bit I come to realize due to being ended up in a fast growing sector at least a minimum level of success was guaranteed. I see same thing at my company where a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me and growth was much faster than compare to when I joined in mid 2000s.
They can talk down to me just like I can talk down to more juniors about value of hard work, drive and so on. However, joining a growing sector early was best thing career wise. No amount of hard work will help if one is starting at a middling IT job in middling company in 2025 like I did in 2005.
> a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me
Not refuting your point but there is a selection bias here. You are in contact with people who did in fact achieve VP or higher levels. Lots more also joined the industry 10 or 20 years before you and burned out, failed, hated it, got fired, whatever. The people who succeeded may not be particularly exceptional in terms of talent, brainpower, innovative thinking, etc, (lots was luck, or being in the right place at the right time, surely) but it's also not true that everyone they worked with back then became a big success.
Well, and even the company matters. I was in IT since post-grad school (with a bit of engineering earlier). But with dot-bomb, a company that struggled through and then 2008, I was only in an "OK" position. It was really the period post 2010 that set things up a lot better.
Indeed. For me 2010-11 was when I got a full-time job as compared to contracting (small time) which was big jump for me in terms of job quality and money. Interesting enough I met many people who joined Amazon in same time frame and earning about 50% more than me in straight first job that I earned after with 8-10 years of experience. So yeah company part is important.
I wouldn't even say it was work quality; the job I had for a good period really set me up for my ultimate full-time job and I mostly liked it. But that ultimate job was a public company and even if not FAANG level comp, set me up pretty well and provided the leverage to make investments that were pretty solid during that very good period.
You're not an outlier. If you look at US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, it's higher than ever. If you then look at the median personal income, also adjusted for inflation (i.e. the middle class), you see the same trend.
There's a lot of doom and gloom but it doesn't seem consistent with the data.
There's a weird tendency to zoom in on particular data points that paint a particularly negative story and leave out the rest. For example, we look at housing and will say that its prices outpaced inflation. And that's true, sort of. But it's also completely untrue. For example, if I look at my own situation compared to my parents: I have a 1.5% interest rate on my mortgage, my parents paid 15%. Homes are now about 50-75% bigger than my parents' generation, on average. And the average home is shared by 33% fewer people than my parents' generation. So the cost to rent the money to buy a certain area of home for 1 person, i.e. housing costs, has actually gone down, despite the average price of a house having gone up.
In all fairness I wouldn't want to trade with the average person in past generations.
Romanticizing the past while at the same time having an apocalyptic view of the future, while I don't know if it is a human thing to do, it is certainly a western thing to do.
I think about how much is it worth for me to work remote vs working at the same factory for 40 years like my father. Some people pretend like this is just a given in the modern world and basically worthless. In reality, it is hard to put a price tag on because the difference is so valuable to me. I actually could have been the 4th generation working at a flour mill if I had wanted. Even if the flour mill paid double what it does, my life is so much more grand than what that would have been, it isn't even close.
So you're saying that on average if you can afford to buy a house, it's bigger and better than it used to be, but also that the fraction of people who can afford to do that is stagnating or declining.
My dad migrated to London in the 70s and bought his first property in London around age 26. He didn't have a degree but did get a professional qualification.
I ended up getting a good degree at a top uni and started my career at Amazon but definitely couldn't have amassed the necessary amount for a down payment for a place in London by the time I was 26.
By the time my dad was 35 he had two kids and my mum was a full time mum.
This doesn't sound remotely close to the reality of my numerous banking, lawyer, accountant, engineering and doctor friends.
The only people I know who are remotely close to being able to own a property in London and have only one breadwinner work in hedge funds.
You can't compare London from back then to London today though. In terms of its place among cities around the world, it's a different place now.
There certainly would have been locations where your dad would not have been able to afford property, and conversely there certainly are places where you can afford property.
Point being, things change, but this anecdote doesn't illustrate that you're worse off than a previous generation.
Of my friends only one set lives in London and I have no idea how they afford it, one or both of them must be on silly money and it’s pretty clear most of the money must go into the mortgage. I started my career is a very cheap part of the UK so I sort of have to carve London out of any generalisations I make.
Sure maybe there was some inertia from the benevolent bettering institutions of the New Deal that have given a chance to Americans.
I just think you'd have to be so willfully in denial as to miss the darkness we are descending into. To miss how bitterly the GOP and the wealthy are building empires of lies and bespoke manufactured realities to make up down and left right, to cover for horrible treacherous actions against the possibility of the individual, stacking the deck for empire and inherited wealth. (And Dems are frequently unwilling to bite the donor class that makes winning elections possible, after the courts have obstructed democratic funding reforms.) Are actively opposing the possibility of people doing good for themselves & the world.
I strongly recommend folks go read one of the darkest periods of America, before enough was enough
Adam Hochschild's American Midnight (2022) tells an amazing story of a circa-WW1 state that had radicalized against people, that had been totally overrun by well monied powers. Of Hoover using the full power of the police state to surveil as Ralph Van Demand had done during the Philippines civil war, of of the postal service run by someone using it for information control, of American Defense vigilanism.
Its not a tale of what happened next, how that broke, just a long amazing story of how dark America got, how badly the state was an extension of capital and power, and how deeply it subverted the individual, the union, any attempt for everyday humans to make any claim to life liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
We face today not quite such amassed power, but a completely warped infosphere where these bespoke realities create lifestyle beliefs where people are on board with incredible trains of lies crafting false enemies, supporting the opposite of the signalling they claim. Its different than dark; the world today is overloaded by hell's din, by monsters of abuse, doing their worst to harm us for greed and for the possibility of undoing the good of the world.
In the US, my anecdotes seem to show that things have stayed neutral or declined slightly. It seems harder to get a decent job than our parents. It seems that fewer of us have bought homes, or delayed buying due to financial reasons. Seems like more of us are working multiple jobs too. I think the aggregate measures showed real income only trending up slightly over the past couple generations.
I'm in the same position as you, but I see myself as rather lucky. I worked very hard but I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. And I happened to be interested in a lucrative career path.
> I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship.
That's a typical confirmation bias: you worked hard and got successful, so you're tempted to think that it's because you worked hard. Some don't work hard and get successful, many work hard and don't get successful.
The one thing that you clearly can't rule out is luck. Tell people in Gaza that if they work hard they will end up in a situation similar as yours...
It's related because you said "you can't rule out luck" which is basically casting doubt on the whole idea of hard work having an impact on success. Well, no reasonable person would say hard work guarantees success, or that all success is luck. The truth is luck and serendipity affect all outcomes, but to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes is an insidiously disempowering perspective.
Sorry, to me it looks like a lot of words that say nothing.
Obviously, if you don't do, you don't do.
> to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes
I'm not doing that at all. I am not saying that the effort put into achieving something is worth nothing. What I am saying is that whenever someone is successful, it means that they have been incredibly lucky (and on top of that they worked a lot, maybe). Whenever they compare themselves to someone else who also worked hard but was not successful, the first conclusion to make is that this someone else was not as lucky.
But the first thing that happens when someone gets successful is that they forget how lucky they are, and just start talking about merit. My point is just that whenever you talk about merit, just remember that you were not born in a poor family in a war zone, and that does not make you more deserving.
How can you compare these experiences to a greater upward mobility which does not exist? You don’t have a baseline for comparison. What if you had 2x more leisure time with the same fiscal wealth? What if you had easier access to healthcare?
The argument in your case is you should actually be _much_ better off than you are without this massive wealth transfer.
That’s part of the challenge in the populous understanding this issue. Many people are better off than their parents, but for being the richest country in the world most people should be far better off.
Very anecdotal. You can't just look at yourself and your circle (which is similar to yourself) and extrapolate to the general population. Also most people in HN are in Tech which did well in the last 15-20 years comparing to other fields.
Some of it might be declining costs of everything apart form limited resources (like housing).
Perhaps you generation is better off than their parents were in terms of everything except real estate. But their parents are also better off now than they used to be when they were their age, because everything (except housing) is much cheaper (relatively) than it used to be thanks to optimizations in production and economies of scale of last 5 decades.
> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood
> all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents
These are conflicting statements. Your group are all beneficiaries of generational wealth by this description. Maybe it isn’t as overt as a trust fund, but you definitely inherited wealth and opportunity from your parents.
It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.
OP described a group of families that accrued wealth over 3 generations "without inheriting any wealth". Assuming they weren't orphaned at birth, each generation definitely benefited from the fruits of the previous generation. Even without an overt handout like a trust fund, we still inherit wealth from our ancestors (eg: housing, health care, education, credit, social networks, etc). In this case, the "handout" would have been their upbringing. They feel "the system is working" because of this, but not everyone in the system has an ancestry like this.
So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?
Ah, I was wondering too but my reply button was gone, yes I would say we’ll be net > 0 around the same time as you age wise. If we hadn’t had to renovate a 60s property we’d possibly be there already but UK housing stock needs work sadly.
Same here, but we are in a very similar boat in our voyage through socioeconomic statuses (though I'm in Ohio River Valley US). I may be fooled by the discourse that [Xennials/Oregon Trail gen/Gen Y/Elder Millennials], but we supposedly saved more, delayed gratification, planned more, and worked more than even Gen Z (who, don't get me wrong, have it worse because of undercompensation vs purchasing power and sheer hopelessness).
In which case you were able to save a deposit within 6 years of graduating? When i was at that stage my outgoings (rent, food, council tax, car, insurance) were probably 90% of my salary.
Yep. A good friend of mine grew up to a very poor immigrant family, both him and his sister got full rides to good schools because of grades, and at age 30 bought a house in NJ with a very good school with 4 kids after saving non stop and living with his parents and taking care of them.
The system works fine if you don't need nonstop luxuries
It’s really incredible how much people feel entitled to in the us. And by entitled, I mean they spend money on these things because it’s beneath them to think they shouldn’t have said experience or thing.
Josh’s first course, CSS for JS Devs was how I finally “learned” CSS after 15 years of working with it.
It’s not just for JS devs of course, I started with C and PHP nearly 20 years ago now, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to understand things like “why isn’t the z-index doing anything?!?!” and the like.
Yeah, +1. I started as a backend dev and for a long time, I knew just enough CSS to be dangerous. After taking that course, I feel pretty confident. Josh is quite good at balancing aesthetics, standards, and pragmatism. He explains the mechanics of CSS in a way that facilitates developing understanding and intuition, giving you an ability to reason about solving design challenges instead of just trying things and crossing your fingers.
I used to run a small factory (two assembly lines 10 people) and something like this would have been useful, not to force people to work harder but to optimise movements and points of friction. I would actively encourage and reward people for making suggestions and we had a process in place to test if changes made things better (and not just faster - we included easier, simpler, more enjoyable etc in the test)
Sadly it’s not about the tool in this case, it’s how it’s being promoted and positioned. The line “know who’s working and who’s not” on their website says it all sadly.
Exactly my thoughts, if this was a European demonstration they would be talking about providing training to the worker on the line to improve the efficiency.
I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better.
In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors.
The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.
I'm not convinced it's really that useful. If you have rows of people sewing the same piece of clothing or similar, then it's not exactly hard to track output without digital surveillance. If you have assembly lines where people perform different parts of a larger project digital surveillance is useless next to things like lean, and again, bottlenecks will show themselves extremely fast if a single station is slower than usual.
I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.
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