You require the company to fund a pension held at a custodian. If the company goes bust, your pension benefits are not impacted. Importantly, the retirement contributions are on top of your wages, versus being expected to find the cash for retirement exposure out of your own wages such that a 401k requires.
The pension funds are protected, but that does not mean anything close to your promised benefit is available for you to receive. It also creates a recurring liability that the company is on the hook for. This has historically worked out to cases where employees must either get a partial payout from available funds and tank the loss, or have the company fold and everyone gets laid off.
Pensions are a better deal until they catastrophically fail.
Employers match employee contributions to a 401(k), so it's not purely out of one's own wages. In this case, Boeing is matching up to 12% of the employee's income, which is very high.
Based on a preponderance of the evidence, how successful has that token match been in achieving successful outcomes? It is a match, if you don't contribute, there is no match. That is not how pension contributions and benefits work.
I guess it depends on what you define as a successful outcome. Recent changes to the law mean that employees are automatically enrolled at the matching rate and then their contribution automatically escalates by 1 percentage point per year up to a max of 15%. I suspect that that's pretty effective at getting people to contribute and get the match.
I'm skeptical. A quick search suggests that 41% of eligible employees don't contribute anything to a 401-K.
The main argument for defined benefit pensions is that while they never covered most employees, they did represent money that people got in retirement without doing anything and which "society" would otherwise have been on the hook for to some degree.
A younger me was not so bright. At the time I needed the few extra bucks and retirement seemed a lifetime away; I had all the time in the world to make up for it.
Years later I got a mortgage and learned what compound interest is.
I'd been underfunding for most of my career. You overestimate collective intelligence.
Well if it is an equal amount of money contributes, yes a 401k match would be strictly better than a pension because it gives control over to the employee of the money.
> It is a match, if you don't contribute, there is no match.
That choice should be left to the employee.
Why are you upset with how the employee is choosing to do with their retirement?
This is no silver bullet. If the pension custodian assumed retirees would live to 75 on average and they start living until 90 then it's going to have a problem.
Superannuation is very very similar to the 401k honestly. I remember when Australia brought in superannuation system and the biggest pushback was that it was blatantly a move to the us system (we had government pensions in the 90s). The tax treatment isn’t that different since 401k contributions aren’t taxed like income either. I work for an employer that pays 15% 401k contributions on top of salary. The main difference is that employers aren’t required to pay 401k contributions and I think that would be the better point to make.
That's not unreasonable if you have good tests that hit the right elements. My experience about 10 years ago with the AP exams were very positive. The tests were good, and even though the classes were taught to the test, they were some of the best classes I ever took.
Education should be about more than just passing standardised tests.
I always remember my history teacher taking an entire term on the battles of the second world war. He brought in videos, old shell casings, all kinds of stuff. Everyone was into it, even kids who normally wouldn't pay attention.
At the end of term he apologised to us, since none of that would be in the test, and now we would have to work harder to get through the exam material. We didn't mind; he had hooked us on the subject.
But that is now rare. Increasingly teachers just teach to the test. And the number of tests the kids have to take keeps rising.
The best you can say about it is everyone gets the same tedious and stressful introduction to everything, which only proves their ability to remember lots of stuff under time pressure.
It's just an example of a teacher engaging their students in a subject by not only teaching to the test.
Here's another one. I had a maths teacher who engaged his students about probability theory through learning about games of chance. We spent some lessons figuring out what advantage we could get in various card games. He also spent some lessons on just "cool" ideas like infinity, zeno's paradoxes and other mind blowing concepts. None of which were on the exam syllabus.
As an aside, history is very much not about facts. It's more about interpretation of incomplete data from many different sources, not all of which are reliable. My Dad said it's more like being a detective (he was a professor of history).
the problem, at least in the US, is that the tests and standards have tightened up without necessarily giving the teachers better training or better productivity tools to teach them, and now their job evaluations also depend on it, so now everybody is optimizing for the test. Usually to the detriment of subjects not on standardized testing like the arts or physical education or anything resembling a break time.
Throw in the fact that in much of the country, teachers have to do things like pull second jobs to get by and beg parents for basic supplies like scissors and paper towels, and it's no wonder everything is falling apart.
Building a ship containing delicate sensors that needs to get into space, arrive at the target, and beam back measurements on the first try with a very low tolerance for error is hard.
A quick google suggests to me that smoking trends are still falling in the US and globally on average. imo smoking is considered lame to americans as a sign that someone doesn't have their shit together.
What exactly is it? I get the sense it's basically a knowledge graph and an inference engine. But what was it actually doing in terms of submitting queries and spitting out takeaways in human readable form?
I'm extremely skeptical about the anecdotes about the game as an indicator of this thing's competence. It sounds unlikely that this thing actually encoded any sort of game state or nuanced simulations and was really just spitballing on vague strategies that just happened to find some cheese (twice?). I'm guessing they had to play the strats until one of them proved valuable, and it's kind of weird and surprising that they thought this was a good use of their time and model.
> during pre-training, there is never an incentive for the model to say "I don't know" because it would be penalized. the model is incentivized to make an educated guess
The guess can be "I don't know". The base LLM would generally only say I don't know if it "knew" that it didn't know, which is not going to be very common. The tuned LLM would be the level responsible for trying to equate a lack of understanding to saying "I don't know"
I remember playing one of these a decade or so after it came out. Found out there were hookers and a prompt on whether or not to have safe sex. Despite my attempts, I was unable to receive any penalties for ignoring the prompt.
Employment is also a flywheel. Much has been written about the fact that recruiters and employers prefer candidates that are already employed and have been continuously employed for long durations without gaps. Make of it what you will but the reality is that taking two years off means that landing a job will be substantially harder than it would have been if you worked during that time. Attitudes towards this seem to be changing for the better but the last time I embarked on a job search I had several people misread my resume, ask me about an employment gap that wasn't there, then act relieved when I corrected them.
Question for international HNers: is this a US-centric phenomenon?
> the reality is that taking two years off means that landing a job will be substantially harder than it would have been if you worked during that time
When I got back from driving Alaska->Argentina I was out of money, so I went back to Software Engineering.
I put the trip on my Resume and put "Learned Spanish, learned to think on my feet, negotiation skills and quickly adapting to new information".
I applied for three positions and every one asked me in detail about the trip and how they would love to do something similar. I was offered all three positions.
But yes, also that it's developing for the better. I see sabbaticals from dedicated top-talent professionals more often now than before, it sets an example, and paves the way a bit for more mediocre people to do it without a huge corporate status impact. Some are even able to package it in a narrative that turns their year of a fun sabbatical into some self-development journey.
And I also find there's more opportunity to approximate the benefits of sabbaticals. Lots of employers are experimenting with remote work. And I see some friends who are able to play a smart game, e.g. during a 3 month period each year:
* taking a 40 hour workweek down to 32 hours
* having fridays off, having 3-day weekends and 4-day workweeks
* working remote for 3 months
* early shifts & lunch at their desks (e.g. 7am - 3pm shift)
* having the afternoon and evening off in remote ___location with lots to do and see
* take 1 week off every 6 weeks, or 2 every 12, to fully travel for a set of time without working.
* stay in 2-3 cities in one or two countries, and rent out their own home on Airbnb or sublet.
* avoid a bad weather season back home
* pick based on time zone differences to make early or late shifts easier
It's not quite a sabbatical, but it does allow you to detach from your routine life at hoe, travel and see a lot of the world, have adventures and meet new people without compromising your career (much).
Especially nice in junior roles to have this lifestyle remote if the alternative is to be a no-name number coming to the office every day for no reason in a big org. But if you can work under an inspiring technical talent / leader, I'd definitely recommend that instead.
I was able to gain about 300k in the span of about the last 5 years of working, saving, investing, and buying a home. I've also seen my income double or so.
I'm in my early 30s. That 300k doubles roughly every 10 years (7% annual ROI). And so those 5 years set me up for 600k, 1.2m and 2.4m respectively at 40, 50 and 60yo.
I've certainly had my fair share of fun, multiple significant relationships, travelled to each continent, great friendships, an active life with sports and cultural activities. But I never had the sabbatical lifestyle where I'd travel the world for half a year or more, 'fun' was always organized around studying and later work life, measured in hours, evenings, weekends or weeks of holidays.
I often doubt whether I made the right choice to spend these years working (sometimes more than) full time, I'll never know.
ROI amplifies money, making these conclusions even harder. A dollar today at 30 is 8 dollars at 60. But I also find the return of money measured in fun goes down as I age. At 16 traveling to Paris by train and staying in a cheap hostel sleeping in dorms and drinking 2 euro supermarket wines with strangers on the street on a summer night was amazing, now I can't get the same pleasure on that budget. Partly because I don't want to 'rough it' anymore, partly because I've already done it, and partly because it feels like I wouldn't belong with those kids in the hostel like I once did.
Anyway, fully agreed that the financial cost would've been way more than my expenses. With a 100k a year job the opportunity costs go up quite a bit, especially with ROI over time factored in. Earning 2 years of 100k at age 28 turns into close to a million at age 40, on average. That's a big opportunity cost...
I wonder how increased wages will change the way people work. Pretty much every household on my street is pulling in close to $500k / year. They’re all in their 40s and 50s. They seem to be putting excess wages into SPY. A handful of them have already retired. The rest are planning to in the next 5-10 years. I’m wondering how this will all play out.
> If you didn't work for two years, the cost was "less than a used tesla" and two years opportunity cost of missed wages
Absolutely, if having more money is the goal, then what I did (and continue to do) is stupid.
I decided a very long time ago that having more money is not the goal of my life. My goal is to have enough money to live the life I want to live that makes me and my family happy.
It turns out I don't actually have to work all that much to make that happen.
My point is not that you missed on some sweet cash. My point is that it's an example of extreme privilege and wealth opportunities that most people cannot afford. The post comes off as anti-materialism and worldly and not caring about the money. But it's really the opposite. Your particular circumstances around wealth are what enable you to do this.
I find it irritating. And phrases like this one:
> I looked around at the people that had been the 10 or 20 years and it scared the shit out of me.
> My point is that it's an example of extreme privilege and wealth opportunities that most people cannot afford
I understand what you are saying, but I don't agree.
At the time I was earning $48k CAD for a full time job. That is about $24 CAD/hr. or roughly $18 USD/hr.
I lived in a sharehouse with 4 other people. I walked to work, even in -35C winter. I had no phone, no tv. I didn't eat out, I cooked all my own meals. No alcohol. Enjoyment was a walk in the park (free).
I did all of that so I could scrimp and save for years and years until I finally had a meagre savings account, then I hit the road.
I lived full time in a ground tent for 2 years of my adult life. I ate plain oats cooked in a little camp stove for 2 years straight. I camped out in the middle of nowhere most nights which meant I didn't spend money on alcohol or partying.
I made a lot of sacrifices to make that happen, and I think basically anyone with a job could do the same, if they wanted.
