The French Revolution is no longer possible. The surveillance state plus wealth mobility means the wealthy will be in New Zealand before anyone erects a guillotine, and the people that would foment a revolution are heavily surveilled and infiltrated.
Are you sure about that? Tech cuts both ways & asymmetric drone warfare has become cheaper than ever … how hard it is it to sink some yachts or down some jets?
I could only relate to this stuff in my 20s but now I just don't care. Maybe it's cause I went from < 200k net worth to over 1M in that time. I've seen the country I was born in collapse in my lifetime. I saw my grandparents give their entire life to that country only to be left destitute. I saw my parents come to America with literally $0 and after thirty years I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
> I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
If it was that easy, every office cleaner or bank clerk would be a millionaire.
> living in literally the best time ever to be a human being
Sure, but we're also watching the rise of a new oligarchy, and their latest innovation appears poised to put a lot of people out of work, making their lives materially worse.
It literally is. People just have no discipline or skills with money. Go on the fire subreddit. 25k saved per year is a million after twenty years with a modest very conservative amount. And if you can double that with a spouse you're looking at a million in only ten years. People who stretch that to 20-25 years end up with 3-5 million.
So you're still looking at 43% of every pay packet. And 50% of full-time workers will be paid less than that.
This is beyond discipline and much more than simply getting up and working hard, and more like living in self-imposed poverty, putting on hold anything resembling building a life, buying a house etc.
The fact is putting away $25k a year is the reserve of the privileged, not something achievable just by getting up and working hard for most people.
The average household income in the US is $83,730 and the median is $121,000.
It's also irrelevant. The average is weighed down by students and retirees. If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
But thank you for the comment. It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
And beyond that... yes? These figures are for all households, not necessarily households with people in full time work, which is a pre-requisite to looking at your claims properly. As such your household income figures don't give us a good picture to evaluate them.
The figures I quoted were for people in full time work, much more relevant to your statement, and no, they aren't weighed down by anything.
> If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
Why would I do that? Your claim was that people could become millionaires over the course of 20 years by saving $25k per annum. The median person in full time work would have a very hard time doing that as shown by the figures I gave you. And they are better off than fully half of other full time workers. Unless you have some compelling (sourced) figures about lifetime earnings that negate this, it doesn't really help us.
> It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
Wow, OK.
Well firstly I'm not American, I'm British, soon to be Australian and might eventually become Irish (by descent) as well. No US in the picture though. Never had a state handout in my life, and my net worth is already well over your target threshold.
What I have (that you seem to be missing) is empathy for people who don't have it so good and a basic understanding of figures.
Yea I had a feeling. I'd caution you not to buy into the Internet doom and gloom. Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine. Because the people that tend to live on less also live in the parts of the country where you can still buy a house for 100k.
- I introduced to the thread first
- You quoted incorrectly
- Doesn’t contradict the other sources given
- Doesn’t support your arguments
You think I’m ignoring that primary source? That would be quite a feat given I linked it first.
Please do explain further, preferably with reference to the comments above that show the figures you quoted aren’t a good match to illuminating the claims you made.
How does that source support the notion that median-and-lower earning people can realistically save $25k per annum, per person, or trivially become millionaires with a bit of discipline?
I dunno why people keep bringing this up as some sort of gotcha. You don't save for retirement based on your average. You do it during your peak earning years. Which are far above average. And most households have more than one earner. So even a 5% savings based on a median 84k household yields over 750k in 20 years.
The number I am finding for the median household expenses for America is $67,000 annually. That's just essentials, housing, food, transportation, insurance, healthcare
So if your median household makes 84k, and your median household spends 67k on necessities, where is the money coming from for saving 5%? The difference is only 17k
It doesn't take much to eat up 17k. A car repair, house repair, or hospital stay (in America at least) will easily reduce that to zero or negatives
So I dunno man. It doesn't seem that simple.
Edit: and keep in mind that median does mean that a pretty large proportion of people make less than that number too. Sometimes significantly less
Presumably the 67k spend contains the car repair, house repair, hospital stay part you mentioned. Everything you're saying is accounted for. Your argument is basically anti social security. I'm saying make your own social security fund and you keep going "and what about" as if that's an argument. These externalities are literally what the fund is for. And frankly you should have an HSA for medical expenses because it lets you spend pre-tax money on that stuff.
When you do non Roth it's pre-tax cash so it's much easier to run up your net worth because it's based on money that you haven't paid taxes on yet.
$5583 a month is essentials? This is more than what I spend on my mortgage..... and all my bills.... and all my food.... and I live in SoCal.
This conversation is dumb. Put money into an IRA. You lower your taxable income. It's not that hard. You grow your net worth on your untaxed monies and then later when shit hits the fan you can extract it at a lower tax bracket. And you get to gain market gains on cash that would otherwise be spent on taxes. It's how people who are good with money make an extra 10-15k per year while you're being all like "woe is me. i can't afford anything".
This is how you can cover that $10-15k you mention when it does happen. You're welcome.
I really don't know what gave you the impression I needed your financial advice in the first place
Do you think just because I'm concerned about people who are less well off that I must be one? Do you think the only reason I could or should care about poor people is if I were poor myself?
If so, then I truly hope you become a better person in the future
My financial situation is fine though, thanks for the concern. My financial advisor has me all taken care of
LOL, what are you going to do? Sit at the end of Northrop field and fly a swarm of drones into the engines of a G6 traveling down the runway at over 100MPH? No way a handful of drones are going to get sucked into a jet engine at that speed. Or do you mean engage a PJ in a dogfight at 40000 feet? I suspect if drones could down a jet, we would have heard about it coming out of Ukraine by now.
The reason we don't do these things is because the jets would come crashing down onto someone's home or place of work. That UPS jet that crashed last year when the engine detached on takeoff killed a dozen on the ground. Nobody is going to drone attack a private jet because the innocent would get killed by the dozen.
The original comment was made in relation to guillotines, popping unoccupied jets on the ground isn't what the commenter I was replying to was referring to. Taking down an occupied jet without using a sidewinder missile is a different capability.
PL> "I'm going to build a guillotine; be my lawyer and give me advice as if it's going to be built."
>>"... don't make it entirely functional."
PL> "It's going to be built functional."
>>"... hmm ... use a bicycle cable lock to add a safety to it – lock&key. But remember that my original advice was not to build it in the first place."
New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
> ... federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
> This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs.
To be fair though in the times of French Revolution the surveillance capability was really basic compared to today, the tech capability to organize protests was lower too. Which one prevails? We know that in PRC and maybe Russia it's surveillance, but what about US?
It's laundered through data brokers and 3rd parties, but with ICE subpoenaing reddit et Al for people that shit post about ICE online, do you really think we're that far off? Especially if the person shit posting is in the US on a visa?
I know what you mean, just saying relative to French revolution, they not only had no such surveillance tech but also no such tech for organizing protests and stuff. Which one tops which in US?
But it's a circular problem. The price wouldn't be exorbitant if these rural areas were left to their own devices. But their utility build outs must be done per rules passed at the behest of the richer urban areas.
We're dealing with this bullshit in my own city in another state. From the parks to the roads to the sidewalks to the library every goddamn thing we touch gets driven up to the point of "can't actually do what we wanted" in cost because some rich assholes 100mi away in the vicinity of the capitol have taken a "build it fancy and rich or don't build it at all" attitude and enshrined that in state law and rules.
Sometimes they'll be so kind as to eat part of the cost with state grants, as long as we sell our freedom away in other ways.
Rural power was always expensive, but now due to wildfire risk, it needs to be ruinously expensive. It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
But not ruinously so? What changed? The rules (both public and private).
> It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
Which is driven by laws and courts and precedents and best practices and recommendations and beurocratic rules that come from where?
Regardless this has nothing to do with city and everything to do with rich and out of touch.
I'm sure PG&E would be happy to build worse stuff if they weren't sticking their neck out by doing so.
Kind of like how my city would be happy to simply replace it's infrastructure but the state will take a bunch of money away elsewhere if we did that. Of course, if we weren't paying the state taxes we could afford it from scratch ourselves but I digress.
The complaint here isn't from SpaceX investors. It's from retail investors that are being forced to buy SpaceX stock on an accelerated timeline as part of the ETFs they likely purchased so that they would not be overly exposed to volatile single stock picks. The article isn't explicit on this point, instead vaguely gesturing to the series of mega IPOs coming and pointing out that retail clients need to plan for this.
There is a game being played here where the various indexes (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.) are trying to sweeten the deal to attract big entries like SpaceX (and later OpenAI, Anthropic). The sugar they are giving is an accelerated timeline and inflated spot in the index (3x float rule). That sugar is paid for by retail investors, who may get squeezed when their index funds pay a high price for a small float of public shares, all on predictable days.
Before you say that retail investors should simply buy SpaceX themselves prior to the 15-day index inclusion, realize that retail investors also don't have access to shares at the IPO offer price. That benefit is reserved for large investors, private equity, etc. While it is possible that some retail investors will take this gamble and win, many will be taking a large risk.
> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
I believe you can't put an outlet on the side of a kitchen island anymore because too many toddlers were able to grab an appliance by the cable and pull it down onto their heads. In the USA at least.
The conundrum of "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" hinges on that core question. It's weird, and possible contradictory, to see a policy claiming to attempt both.
Most would define a "fair" opportunity as everyone getting the same chances to succeed, but a "fair" outcome would segment on merit. If angling towards fair outcomes, there's usually less uproar over lifting the floor (e.g financial aid), versus lowering the ceiling (e.g. limitations on admissions based on ethnic or financial background).
Raising the floor is an equality of outcome. It is arguably equality of oppprtunity too, but only when ignoring intergenerational wealth as a factor. Your kids affordíng school is your outcome, their oppprtúnity.
Present LLMs are quite good at interpolating, in fact, too good.
That's the source of hallucinations. A path can be found between A and B, even if A is the 12th century Chinese royal court and B is the Easter bunny.
Interpolation and rote knowledge are still very useful. Most cognitive tasks are like this.
The thing that LLMs are not presently good at is extrapolation. You can train an LLM on pre-1904 literature, but you won't get special relativity from it, at least not without a human to prompt it in just the right way.
You can have an LLM provide a "novel math proof", but you are necessarily discarding 100 or 1,000 "novel math mistakes". The process is more like a guided walk (like the A* algorithm), with human supervision and intervention, not an autonomous math genius.
"They" are, of course, working on it. But the present implementation has some severe structural limitations (such as an inability for new or discovered information to affect model weights) that make LLMs as a human replacement incomplete.
> You can train an LLM on pre-1904 literature, but you won't get special relativity from it, at least not without a human to prompt it in just the right way.
At least 99.999% of humans aren't capable of producing special relativity either. If the bar for AGI is "must be at least as smart as Albert Einstein", one has to wonder why the deck is being stacked so unreasonably.
> LLMs as a human replacement
"Human replacement" and AGI don't seem like perfect synonyms to me.
It seems to me that "AGI" does a better job of revealing the biases of the people using the term than identifying a specific set of capabilities.
It's not just special relativity that's out of reach. It's generally difficult for an LLM to do anything novel, i.e. produce a new hypothesis from scientific data that fits no existing hypothesis, or create an algorithm with a new lower bound on runtime, or debug a proprietary system that makes unusual design assumptions.
AI for engineering productivity seems to be widely misunderstood to be a magic button that produces the same result, but faster and more cheaply. And based on that reasoning, you should want to force employees to tokenmax, because, why wouldn't you want to get more results but faster and cheaper?
A more nuanced view would be something like:
* AI lets you achieve your roadmap somewhat faster, but:
* You incur tech debt that's similar to if you hired a dev temporarily for the features. You don't necessarily have someone on the team that understands the new code.
* Similarly, you aren't upskilling your junior team members. So you aren't getting skill/wage arbitrage as much as before.
* You will complicate the product. P2 features are P2 for a reason, but AI can cause them to be included and complicate the product for lower marginal gain.
well, once they do, kohberger and who knows how many others will be let loose on the public. sets up a hell of a bargaining chip for the feds to prevent it going to the supreme court.
also makes you wonder if any of this would happen if the usage and post trial application of the death penalty were higher. less of a bargaining chip.
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