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Also:

- Remote work being pulled by ancient management (average age of US F500 CEO is 58) even though quality of life bump is proven.

- If kids are desired, they cost $310k 0-18 (Brookings Institute 2023) each, not including daycare and college.

EDIT: - Climate change data and early impacts being realized.

> unfortunately, the older generation screwed up and failed the new one.

This is the crux. Great comment overall. Society grows great when trees are planted whose shade we won't sit in; instead, we clear cut the place. A whole cohort is trapped in a dysfunctional socioeconomic system they didn't build, but are forced to exist in. Would you be happy?

Related: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/world-happiness-america-low... ("Axios: U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report")

I noticed recently on HN lots of talking about cancelling remote working, introduced as a temporary measure to fight COVID. I am wondering, if working from home is here to stay, wouldn't companies start hiring talents from global market rather then paying extra for US employees if they still work remotely? Is it not "wiser" from the company point of view to hire talented people for instance from Eastern Europe which have more competitive salary expectations (due to lower cost of living) than American counterparts?

You see these attempts every few years, with the work coming back with nearshoring and re-onshoring. How confident are you in the hiring processes of most major corps that they can find diamonds in LCOL global geographies? I am not confident. They can't even figure out hiring locally. It's also a lot harder to seek legal recourse when the employee is out of your jurisdictional reach.

(20+ years in tech, ymmv, n=1, thoughts and opinions my own)

I am not sure about diamonds but I was involved recruiting software engineers in London City a few years ago using the best recruitment agencies they were back then on the market. Let me tell you, it was a disaster. I do not know whether this was specific to UK, industry or time period but it was a joke. I do not see a reason why broader pool of potential candidates is worse then geographically limited selection, if permanent working from home is on the table.

> it was a disaster

Was the testing just leetcode crap, or was it based on actually being able to get stuff done? ;)

That's the problem - it was just for senior developers, not rocket scientists. Most of candidates (curated by agencies) have poor coding skills, soft skills non-existent. So we didn't even dream of people who can get the job done and be independent.

Hmmm, bad salary range for the location maybe?

If it's something you can share, do you remember what the salary range was roughly?

Scandinavia would be a safer bet. Especially Finland has pretty low salaries in IT but more skilled people than USA.

But it's not that simple. Cultural differences, timezone differences, the inability to meet face to face all make the employment relationship less effective.

Have you tried running a team in Eastern Europe?

Actually, we do - in Poland, but most developers are from Ukraine. All other operations stays in UK. The salaries leveled up after a few years, but it is still slightly more cost effective comparing to UK. But the actual skill levels and work attitude is night and day. That's why I am perplexed that so many US software engineers want to stand their ground in terms of working from home policy, potentially exposing themselves to compete on a global market while big software houses like Microsoft or Google cutting jobs like there is no tomorrow.

Because no one wants to live like the lowest global common denominator.

You are exactly right! So why give up one of the biggest trump card - locality, and allow free access for other people from around the world to your job market because you want to work permanently from home.

How does requiring staff to come into an office stop a company from hiring remotely globally? The only solution is unionization and nation state regulation. If you don't have labor representation, there are no controls on corporate behavior besides shareholder interests.

You're spot on and I totally agree with you. But pushing hard for remote work might backfire for current IT folks. If bosses get comfy with everyone being remote, they'll wonder why stick to local talent when they can hire from anywhere in the world.

Sure, companies can and do hire globally, but at the same time managers still want most of the people to appear in the office from time to time (for whatever reason). But if IT guys demand working permanently from home, then it changes everything. Suddenly, being local doesn't cut it anymore, and the job could be done by someone halfway across the globe. Be careful what you wish for; demanding remote work is a double-edge sword which could make lots of positions way less secure.

The positions are already insecure, we have nowhere to go but up.

There is unrest in the forest.

> - Significant artificial inflation in consumer goods, no solution in sight.

I don't put a lot of stock in this. Inflation was double digits ~10% a few times in the 70s due to the oil shocks. And the FED interest rate was >10% as well. What we have now is nothing close to that.

Where inflation has been impactful is housing/healthcare/education. Consumer goods are quite cheap thought, all things considered.

> - A challenging dating scene, influenced by numerous factors.

Those factors are largely social media. Tinder is not a good way to find a stable relationship in my experience. But online dating is considered the default for many younger people. There's also unrealistic expectations created by watching a constant stream of Instagram influencers.

optional consumer goods may be cheaper.

Necessary consumer goods are not.

A cynic would say companies selling necessary goods have realized that they can price gouge because people don’t have a choice about paying, and then claim inflation is the reason despite that being demonstrably false.

Then you have continued conglomeration of intermediaries which has meant while the consumer price has been increasing the amount going to the producers has been reducing. Almost like the “efficiencies” used to justify mergers are built on monopoly exploitation.

> Consumer goods are quite cheap thought, all things considered.

New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley was famously heckled for this point.

> Dudley said said that while food prices may be rising, the cost of some other goods are going down, which evens out the overall inflation picture. The Fed's inflation estimates do not take into account volatile energy or food prices. The crowd was not impressed:

> "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said referring to Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) latest handheld tablet computer hitting stories on Friday.

> "You have to look at the prices of all things," he said.

> This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf."

> "I can't eat an iPad," another quipped.

https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-usa-fed-dudley...

https://news.yahoo.com/news/blogs/lookout/fed-official-heckl...

Referencing the advancement of technology is doubly tone deaf, as tech points out the fundamental problem with the artificial inflation aspect of their mandate. If you had $3000 in the 1990's, you could buy a 33MHz 486 with a 14" CRT. Or you could have buried the money as cash under a rock, dug it out in 2024, and bought a desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone that each dwarfed the capabilities of the 486. Yet you would have been utterly stupid do the latter, considering all you would have missed out on. Technology is the glaring example that shows today's consumption does not depend on the threat of prices being higher tomorrow.

But sure, if one still wants to toe the party line that artificial inflation is necessary, that still doesn't justify all of the resulting newly created money having been given to the financial sector as low interest loans just to bid up an asset bubble and create a bunch of make-work white collar jobs shuffling the paperwork. That money could have instead been spent for deliberate purposes, like infrastructure and mitigating the societal damage from offshoring (yet another thing that would have caused natural deflation had it been allowed). But all that wealth was basically looted under the auspices of "fiscal responsibility", leaving Wall Street incredibly rich (and bloated), while continually turning the financial screws on Main Street.

Can you explain what you mean by "artificial inflation"? For example, much of the 1970s inflation was caused by a spike in energy prices because of an oil embargo from OPEC countries. Is this artificial inflation (because it was precipitated by political decisions) or real inflation (because a necessary commodity got more expensive)?

I would call that real inflation, as it's the market responding to an external event, even though that event is human-made.

Artificial inflation is what we had for the past three decades where even though resources were plentiful and things were getting less expensive to produce (eg offshoring, technology), prices were still going up a few percent per year because the Fed's mandate is to artificially create even more new money to prevent the deflation bogeyman. In other words "moving production to Mexico/China may cost us some jobs but will be made up for by lower prices for everyone" was ultimately a lie due to Fed policy making lower prices impossible.

Most people use the term "artificial inflation" to reference the price of products going up for no real-world reason, or when the company lies about the reason. (As in, the price increase is explainable entirely -- or almost entirely, in higher margins for the company), but that the company blames on "inflation" anyway.

If "Company X" is publicly saying "our prices are higher because of inflation", but you can also clearly see that their costs are not meaningfully different and their margins are higher, simply because the market has no alternative but to eat them, that's "artificial inflation".

> "I can't eat an iPad," another quipped.

Imagine being able to do anything useful with an iPad except buy new ones. My 3rd gen has always been and is now marginally closer to a brick

Food inflation is also nowhere near what was seen in the 70s.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/its-been-30-years-sinc... | https://archive.today/65jOR ("It’s Been 30 Years Since Food Ate Up This Much of Your Income")

I don't get what this is meant to prove. The 1990s are often regarded as a golden era. So we're spending as much on food as we did in 1994 and that's supposed to make people unhappy?

I understand that housing/healthcare/education has gotten a lot more expensive since then, but saying that food prices are back to where they were in the 90s is not very persuasive for the idea that food inflation is making people unhappy.

I don't think you're making the connection between financial stress and unhappiness. Decades ago, price to wages were very favorable. Now, they are not, causing financial stress across cohorts without much earning or purchasing power, leading to unhappiness. Food costs are component, but not the entire picture.

Totally agree. I think there's a deep sense that "things are getting worse" across the board, and there doesn't seem to be much hope that the trends will reverse anytime soon.

In the 1960s, you could temp at a diner for a few weeks before snagging up a 2br/2ba on the GI bill, look to your partner who you met organically at a sock hop, and say to each other (in unison): "We can finally afford 2.1 children." And then you live happily ever after until today, when you die at around 80.

> die at around 80

Or, you blow past that and die at 88, 93, 99 like my family seems predisposed to do. Of course with a staunch reprehension for assisted living and no means to pay for it if you wanted to.