The Myth of the Second Chance
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There's still plenty to complain about regarding bureaucracy and red tape but don't let this alone deter you from running a business (especially not a software startup).
No. But it's complicated ... For example, income tax is charged on the employee, after the employer has been charged employer/social fees of 30-40%. And then, sale of most goods are charged ~20% VAT.
The total taxation pressure "per hour worked" is far above 40%.
But most people do not count employer contributions, because they are not part of the negotiated salary, and most people don't even know what they are. Yes, they of course affect how high salaries businesses will offer.
In terms of income tax and employee contributions, in the OECD scenarios Germany maxes out at 41.2% (the OECD average is 30%; the US is at 29.1%). As a comparison, Belgium is "always" worst in class on this in Europe, w/47.8%.
Overall Germany is still one of the highest tax countries in Europe, but it also has a higher difference than most countries the highest taxed (high income single earners) and families with children in total effective tax rate - for the later, Germany is much closer to the pack, to the point of being near or below the OECD average for a couple of categories.
VAT in most countries add very little, because most of your gross income does not go towards VAT rates products - for starters you're first paying tax, and then covering housing and most places exclude a number of others things from VAT as well. Depending on country and income level and spending patterns, it does add a few percentage points, but it's rarely significantly skewing the overall taxation level all that much (last time I did the numbers, at a far above average income, VAT increased my total taxation by about 4%)
So instead you ruin other people's lives?
Eg they also provide 'checking' accounts. There's no conceptual reason why that function needs to be bundled with the 'aggregating default risk' function; but it happens to be so in many countries.
To illustrate, on the one hand, think of an institution that takes deposits and lets you transfer money to pay your rent etc, but doesn't make any 'real' investments: all they do is park the deposits in government loans.
On the other hand, think of exchange traded funds that invest in a wide array of bonds (or even equities). They diversify defaulting risk across the economy, without taking deposits, like your typical bank does.
(And if banks could create loans from 'nothing', so could any other company that can issues bonds.)
There have been episodes in history with very lightly regulated banks, and they were very stable banking systems by and large. See the 'free banking episodes' in eg Canada, Scotland, Australia and China. There was no 'creating loans from nothing' that needed to be regulated away.
DR Loan, CR Deposit.
Job done.
No need to issue bonds or do anything. It's just splitting the zero in accounting.
Any operation can do that. Generally there is legislation that then brings these 'deposit holders' under specific requirements.
> Job done.
You can do that, sure. And if that was all there was to banking, it would be a fantastic business to be in.
Alas, the whole point of taking out a loan is to spend the money on something, eg to invest it.
And once the bank's customer withdraws the deposit half of that newly created pair of anti-particles, the situation isn't nearly as symmetrical and neat anymore: the bank better have some money in the vault to be able to satisfy that withdrawal request.
(Slightly less antiquated: the customer will likely spend their borrowed money electronically, but then just means that you need to have the funds available to settle with the bank who runs the account on the receiving end of that transaction.)
> Generally there is legislation that then brings these 'deposit holders' under specific requirements.
Even without legislation or specific requirements, you can't just keep creating these loan/deposit pairs out of thin air. At least not, if your customers are supposed to be able to spend their borrowed funds.
Withdrawing is always just transferring to another bank - even if that bank is the central bank.
Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank. That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Everything else is a collateral optimisation.
There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
No. You can withdraw cash. But you are right, that the common case is a transfer.
> Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank.
That's one way they can settle. But at the end of the day (or whatever the relevant period is), they send each other the net difference in the underlying base money. These days, that's deposits at the central bank.
> That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Correspondent banking being important is mostly an American thing (and perhaps a 18th and 19th century English, but not Scottish, thing, too.)
> There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
These days, the 'vault' is (mostly) an account at the central bank.
If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
> If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
Sorry, your analogy doesn't work out, because the roles are reversed.
Look at the situation where a company sells me a bond, to be paid back in ten years. But instead of me handing money over to them, I give them an IOU (or credit line) that they can draw down any time they wish to.
We can create this pair of bond and IOU out of nothing, just like the bank can create deposit-loan pairs out of nothing.
However, just like with the bank, people don't borrow money to let it just sit there. They want to invest.
So they spend their deposit, and draw down their IOU.
And once your customer does that, you better have some money in your 'safe' that you can hand to them.
In the classic case, that money comes from outside deposits.
> What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
How would they go insolvent in your model?
That somewhere is the bank’s depositors.
The only relationship with deposits (which are actually liabilities) and assets is that enforced by regulators.
This is how money creation works in the modern economy - so the money supply can grow as economic activity increases, all guided by central banks / governments with levers such as interest rates, open market activities (QE), and regulations.
Again - banks really do create money from nothing, all day, every day.
The only institution that can "create" money from thin air is the government. And even that is a polite fiction when you realize that "printing more money" also inherently devalues the money already in the system.
Whether that's currently legal or not is another matter that I cannot comment on.
At which point you will realise there can be no devaluation since money is destroyed as it moves around, and money in drawers may as well not be there.
I see money as units of resource allocation. There are only so many available resources at any given moment. More units of allocation means less resources allocated per unit.
I'm also not an economist. :)
There isn't and never has been a one-to-one relationship between money and stuff. At best it is inductive.
Just as with electrical engineering, the real world requires a reactive supply, which is what allows electrical innovation beyond direct resistive loads.
Electrical supply engineers hate reactive power, but without it we don't get iPhones.
The power triangle gives the best engineering analogy to the way the monetary system works.
But it is both novel and correct. As in it has both novel and correct parts.
If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.
Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.
If it is VC or SF Tech related, I usually learn something. Anything around Banking, Finance, Trading, Crypto etc... not so much.
You still need assets in fractional reserve banking. Those assets just don't need to be reserves.
Ie 90% of your assets could be diamonds in the vault, and 10% could be reserve cash in the vault. That would be fractional reserve banking, but you still have 100% assets. (In practice, you have more than 100% assets. The excess is your equity cushion.)
If your liabilities outstrip your assets, that's when you are bankrupt. Fractional reserve banking doesn't help you there.
I have two customers A & B. A has $1000 on deposit. B has $500 on deposit. I have $1500 in my safe. Assets = $1500, Liabilities = $1500.
B borrows $500, which for simplicity's sake he deposits in his account.
Now A has $1000 on deposit, B has $1000 on deposit. I have $1500 cash in my safe and a note from B for $500. Assets = $2000, Liabilities = $2000.
I just created $500. It's really that simple.
> B borrows $500, which for simplicity's sake he deposits in his account.
If you stop there, your analysis is indeed correct. However, people don't typically take out loans to stuff the borrowed money into their accounts until the loan comes due.
They go out and buy stuff with the proceeds. So B withdraws the money.
So now you have:
- Assets: 1000$ cash in your safe plus an IOU of 500$ from B = 1500$.
- Liabilities: 1000$ deposit from A + 500$ deposit from B = 1500$.
So far so good.
You can repeat that game two more times, and then you run out of cash to withdraw.
So if you repeated it a third time, you'd need to sell the loan from B to a third party for cash, so you can fulfill B's withdrawal request.
If B is credit worthy, you will generally be able to make that sale. (But it takes time and hassle to organise.) Ie you have short term liquidity trouble, but you ain't insolvent.
If B is a deadbeat, you won't be able to sell that loan for enough to cover the withdrawal request, and now you are insolvent, and go into bankruptcy.
That’s why central banks typically make the rules about reserves, etc.
Yes. But that means you got newly created base money from the central bank. Which sort of goes against the original claim.
However banks don't create money out of thin air. However they can create it out of assets.
As a silly thought experiment: if your bank has a vault full of valuable assets, like diamonds and deeds to houses in prime real estate, stocks etc, they can in principle create loan/deposit pairs (ie make loans and credit the borrowed funds to the borrower account).
When people make withdrawals, especially when they make more withdrawals than the bank has reserves, they just sell some of their assets to cover the difference. That's all pretty normal and boring.
Customers think of their deposits of 100% like money and economically behave as if that was true, but in practice they are backed by 10% money, ie reserves, and 90% other assets.
(The percentages are for illustration only.
Also we ignore minimum reserve requirements and other laws here. Many countries don't have minimum reserve requirements anyway.)
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Btw, you might want to study the section 'Managing the risks associated with making loans'.
The pdf is pretty vague about the limits of creating these loan/deposit pairs in general. But there's eg this:
> One way in which they do this is by making sure that they attract relatively stable deposits to match their new loans, that is, deposits that are unlikely or unable to be withdrawn in large amounts. This can act as an additional limit to how much banks can lend. For example, if all of the deposits that a bank held were in the form of instant access accounts, such as current accounts, then the bank might run the risk of lots of these deposits being withdrawn in a short period of time.
In general, the limit to loan/deposit pair creation is withdrawals and transfers of the new deposits.
---
Btw, I agree that fractional reserve banking can create money. (Just not base money, and not without limits.)
The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.
Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.
(And, for the record, this is also what I’ve been meaning by “currency”)
Incidentally, the only claim you as a lowly individual ever have on central bank money in most (all?) current currency areas is as physical currency, and even then for the most part you only ever get to exchange it for commercial bank money. For the purposes of this discussion, all digital money between most normal entities is commercial bank money. Commercial bank money _is_ money.
And I rarely exchange physical currency for digital money these days— Usually I’m exchanging it for food instead.
I just wave my phone at a terminal.
It's important that you _can_ get physical currency on demand. It's not nearly as important whether you personally actually make that demand.
It (probably) is, but if all of your bank's account holders asked for that at the same time it would be what's known as a "run on the bank" and you'd very quickly find out that they don't have anywhere near enough physical currency to cover even a fraction of their account holders.
This is true, and most of the rest of what you are saying is also true.
> The only entity that creates money is the central bank.
This is not true. Banks really can take arbitrary assets and turn them into money. Just not base money!
No. The other banks demand settlement in outside currency. In the olden days, they shipped gold around every so often. Nowadays, in the end you settle in central bank deposits.
Thankyou to hgomersail for providing the definitive answer, from the BoE no less!
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
You go to a bank with an asset. In this case the new house. The bank then creates a new financial asset called a 'mortgage' that goes on the asset side of their balance sheet. Against that they create a liability called an 'advance' that they give to you.
You then give the advance to the builder in return for the house, where it becomes a deposit of the builder than they can then transfer to anybody else in payment for goods and services.
If any of them happen to be at another bank then all that happens is the deposit is transferred to the bank and it becomes an 'inter bank loan'. The target bank then simply creates another deposit in its books to balance that loan and that is allocated to the customer being paid.
It's all just debits and credits. What limits bank money creation is the assets they are prepared to discount and the creditworthiness of the individuals they choose to advance to and whether the bank believes they can pay the current price of money.
Modulo some amount of transaction batching, when one bank’s customer initiates a payment to an account at another bank, reserves are actually transferred between the two banks (these days, in the form of central bank account transfers).
Each bank’s main concern is managing its daily cashflow— They need to have sufficient reserves each day to cover that day’s net outflow of payments. But holding reserves is expensive; they would much rather use that currency as an advance payment for a new loan if they can, so that somebody else is stuck with the currency.
And here’s where the inter-bank loans come into play: Because most of a bank’s outflows happen on an irregular schedule as directed by their depositors, and they have an incentive to hold as few reserves as possible, they may find themselves in a position where they would need to suspend payments. When this happens, they borrow reserves from another bank in order to continue operating. If the borrowing bank is considered trustworthy by the banking community, they generally have no trouble securing such a loan on standard terms.
Of course, if a bank systematically misjudges the default risk of their borrowers, they may have a bigger problem that their assets (future loan repayments) won’t cover their liabilities (future withdrawals by depositors). If that imbalance isn’t corrected quickly, they will eventually find themselves unable to secure future inter-bank loans because they will have become an unacceptable default risk to the other banks.
Not in the slightest.
If the bank doesn't take over the deposit in the source bank, then their customer doesn't get paid. At which point they will close their account and move to the source bank. That's a deposit outflow they won't want to have.
Both the source and the destination bank have an interest in ensuring the payment clear. Therefore it does.
Inter bank loan negotiation is about shuffling the risk around for a price afterwards.
"reserves are actually transferred between the two bank"
Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Correspondent banking is the base for payments, and is still used for most international currency payments - even with the advent of the CLS central clearing mechanism.
The destination bank can demand to withdraw that balance. And they typically do that with the net flows at the end of the settlement period.
(And they don't withdraw physical currency these days. The 'withdrawal' comes in the form of a transfer of electronic central bank reserves.)
> Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
No? This is easiest to see in a gold standard system: your physical gold are your reserves.
In typical modern fiat system, the reserves are account entries at the central bank (and vault cash, but that's a small-ish amount).
Private commercial banks can create 'money' via their normal commercial operations. But they can't create central bank reserves that way, nor are they allowed to print central bank notes.
> There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Citation needed. And also an explanation of exactly what you mean by reserves.
(Btw, talking about the 'UK banking system' over the last three hundred years already makes me very suspicious of your argument. During most of that time, Scottish banking differs remarkably from English banking. So there are not many blanket statement about the 'UK banking system' that are true.)
The very purpose of even smaller banks is to spread risk across multiple loans and investments in such a way that a client's bankruptcy doesn't ruin them at all. Given the interest rates they charge on certain financial services, they seem to have no problem not going under themselves in most cases.
Without consequence, of course not. But you should be able to 'separate' your professional and personal life, even as an entrepreneur.
I would NEVER found my own business if I knew that going bankrupt would take away my kid's house. This is why instruments such as limited responsibility companies have been invented.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I imagine if you have your own butcher in the first place, you are somewhat particular and specific about what you want (kind of similar to a lot of people clinging onto their usual hair stylist/barber for their dear life, once they find one that does things the way they like). And I would bet that the number of barber options around would be much larger than that for butchers.
Why? In case of success, you have the personal benefit from it. So why should other people and society take the bill in case of your fail? Or how exactly is this supposed tor work?
Maybe it's a bit of both
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where "wasting resources and harming society" by having a company with limited liability go bankrupt isn't fairly simple.
Germany, like some other companies in Europe has fairly "high" requirements of share capital, but it's still only 25k Euro.
In the UK it's £1. 25k Euros is ridiculously high!
In The European countries I have been living in, the concept of personal bankcrupty doesn't exist in the same way, at least. People who get too much loans kind of just hang with them, after 15-20 years they are forgiven AFAIK.
That's because once you do that, the supply of new student loans would most likely dry up. Thus shutting off the money fountain for the education industry.
We do this with drug reimbursement costs and construction already and I’m pretty sure those for-profit companies would also disagree on what the limit should be. I also don’t think it needs to be a one-size-fits all threshold; it could be adjusted to COL and/or job prospects that are tied to graduate statistics. IMO that goes a long way to aligning the incentives of the student and the institution.
I’m curious if you have an alternative solution
Personally I think limits (and significantly higher grants to make student loans unnecessary for a basic post-secondary education) are needed. But I think it's worth recognizing that limits will make what's already a very divisive issue, even more divisive...
I have seen other pilot programs. I think it was Purdue who was considering "buying stock" in students, where the student would pay a portion of their income for a certain number of years in exchange for a scholarship.
If people voluntarily want to pay high costs, and other people voluntarily want to make loans, who are we to judge?
We just need to get tax payer money out of the game. Afterwards, people can go nuts with their own money.
Yes, get the taxpayer out of the loan guarantee business. Sorry, I thought that was a given.
I actually want exactly the 'blowback': I want student loan creation to fall off a clip.
> Do you think there is an opportunity gap to be closed?
What is an opportunity gap?
> If so, how do you think that would work?
I'm guessing here what you mean by opportunity gap. I think the cheapest way is to open the US labour market to virtually anyone on the globe. That would be good for the US economy, wouldn't cost the tax payer anything (in fact you would save on border enforcement), and the people with the least opportunities globally would benefit enormously.
If you only care about Americans, I would suggest to give poor people money, and let them decide what to do with it.
Eg whatever the cost to subsidise education (including subsidised student loans) right now, just pay it out to poor people. Than they can buy education, or whatever else they deem more necessary.
It sounds like you may not understand how the system works. It doesn’t cost the government anything, with the exception of the loan repayment pause surrounding COVID.
I know the simple solutions like “Just give away money” can be seductive, but IMO they generally don’t work well in complex and nuanced problems. People aren’t rational actors by and large, and it’s a mistake to assume they can be modeled as such in many cases.
You'd still be on the hook explaining why you know what's better for people than they do.
> It sounds like you may not understand how the system works. It doesn’t cost the government anything, [...]
There are always opportunity costs. But what parts of the 'system' are you talking about?
There is much research, especially in behavioral economics, that shows that more objective decisions can be made by creating systems that facilitate more rational decisions. So my current position is that we should set up systems/institutions to foster those better decisions rather than push everything down to the individual, given the complexities of modern life. So to directly answer your question, there's decades of research that shows individuals aren't great at making rational decisions at the individual level. It's also interesting that you simultaneously seem to claim the "state" should make decisions, but also that institutions don't know what's better than individuals. It doesn't make for a very cohesive take.
The government guaranteeing arbitrary loans isn't free in economic terms. Just like eg increasing the length of patents from 20 years to 40 years ain't free, even though it won't show up as a cost on any government balance sheet.
At least with your patent example, we can measure it in economic terms, since patents are a commercial protection. Once we start getting into wishy-washy measures, people can make just about any arbitrary point to fit their narrative.
Unfortunately, the earning potential of a generic bachelor's degree seems to have mysteriously fallen at roughly the same time a flood of students were offered huge loans to achieve them. Maybe some day we'll be able to find the connection.
So the question still stands: if the government no longer guarantees the loans, what is the proposed solution to prevent banks from no longer lending to students?
Not claiming you are wrong, because I genuinely don’t know, but how does it gel with the fact that the federal student loans for undergrads cap out at the max of around $9.5-12k for independent students and $5.5-7.5k for dependent students per year[0]?
Given all the outrage I see online, where people claim paying upwards of $20-40k/yr for attendance, wouldn’t they need to supplement it with private loans?
I dont doubt that there are more federal loans out there than private ones (because it always makes sense to get the federal ones first, and only go for private ones later if needed, so pretty much everyone who has private loans also has federal ones). But what about in terms of the actual loan dollar amount?
0. https://financialaid.umbc.edu/types-of-aid/federal-loans/dir... (this is an UMBC page, but it breaks down the federal student aid limits that apply everywhere)
That 92% figure is in terms of debt amount, not number of loans.
The limits you mention are per student. Parent PLUS loans are limited only by the school’s official cost of attendance: https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/paren... (“The maximum PLUS loan amount you can borrow is the cost of attendance at the school your child will attend minus any other financial assistance your child receives. The cost of attendance is determined by the school.”). Schools are extremely aggressive about ensuring parents are on the hook for the loans so students can take out the maximum.
Small caveat (that ultimately doesn’t negate your point): PLUS loans have credit check requirements for determing eligibility[0] (with exceptions available in certain cases if you can satisfy additional requirements, like bringing an eligible cosigner who can pass the credit check).
0. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/paren...
The net benefits of education accrue to more than 100% to the customer. And, people from well-off backgrounds can and do take more advantage of education.
We should just give poor people money, and let them decide for themselves how they want to spend it. If they want to spend it on (unsubsidised) education, that would be fine choice for them to make.
That's where we disagree, I guess.
I don't mind education in the sense of people learning something. That's harmless enough (but doesn't need special subsidies. Just give money to the needy, and let them decide whether they want to invest it in a library membership.)
What I'm against specifically is education in the sense of getting a certificate at the end. A degree etc.
That sort of education has negative externalities and should be highly taxed, not subsidised. It leads to an arms race of credentialism, and is a big reason why eg a high school graduate can't get a decent job these days.
(There are plenty of jobs that used to be done by high school dropouts, that haven't changed all that much. But now require a degree, if you want to be considered for an interview.)
I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries). But I wouldn’t go so far to say credentialism as a whole is worthless. I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
What I do see on HN is that the crowd generally biases towards libertarian autodidacts and that colors much of their worldview.
The library was just an example. People can use their own money and time to pursue whatever route they wish. They can attend schools (and pay the fees), they can go to the library, they can read Wikipedia, they can do an apprenticeship, etc, whatever works for them.
> I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries).
Alas, no. Employers aren't stupid (and neither are workers). Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
For an individual worker and an individual company, the credential is a useful signal. Just like it's useful for an individual country to get some extra nukes.
But from an economy-wide perspective, it's just an arms race. (Similarly, there's no global benefit from every country getting some extra nukes each.)
> I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
I'm not an American, but I think the FDA is pretty much useless. (But that's mostly because it's a federal agency, and the relevant authorities should probably sit at the state level at the highest or even lower. With voluntary coordination between the different states. Very similar to how traffic signs and rules are regulated and coordinated.)
>Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
I personally think employers use credentials because they are incentivized to be risk adverse. It’s easier to defend a binary credential than to accurately gauge skillset and cultural fit through a behavioral interview. HR is concerned more with reducing false positives than letting a good candidate slip through the cracks.
I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden. I suspect that’s why you see a convergence on societies setting up a “council of elders” (ie govt) when they get to a certain size. Most of the people who lean into the unnuanced libertarian ideal tend to also lean towards certain troubles managing social dynamics.
I suggested that state level agencies can do that regulation. Why do you bring up the straw man of unregulated drugs?
Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs. In fact, many countries are even smaller than many US states. So it should be certainly possible for US states to regulate drugs. (Especially since they can cooperate, just like they do on traffic rules or the Uniform Commercial Code.)
I'm not sure why you want to paint my position here as some radical 'libertarian' fanatic? Even the Catholic Church likes subsidiarity, and it's (in theory) one of the guiding principles of the European Union. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
Aren't you the cynical one? I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots and know what they are doing. And you suggest 'hold one, they probably are idiots'.
> I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden.
Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way. We have examples from successful societies in other parts of the world and in other parts of history doing just fine with a lot less of that. So your argument from universal convergence doesn't fly, when there is no universal convergence in the first place.
Because it illustrates the problems of scale. Much of commerce is regulated at the federal level because crossing state lines makes the complexity of the problem much harder to manage. UCC is not a very good example; it has barely changed in half a century, in part because getting all states to update and agree becomes onerous. As an effect, the UCC largely boils down to a contract law policy of "shut up, pay me." That type of approach isn't great for handling nuanced problems.
>Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs.
You do understand much of this is predicated on the very institutions you are maligning. A vast and disproportionate amount of pharma R&D is done in, and regulated by, the U.S. Other countries generally use that information as a proxy for in-house regulation. Ever wonder how small countries manage to regulate their aircraft without much overhead? It's because they accept the US FAA certifications. They effectively outsource the oversight to the US.
>I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots
If you review my comments, I'm don't think you'll find me using the word "idiot." What you will find is that I claim individuals act irrationally and also struggle to manage information when the complexity of society gets high.
>Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way.
If you read carefully, I have not been an advocate for subsidizing education per se. What I am saying is we need to be careful of the blowback of simple solutions. If the intent is to increase education, subsizing it is one way, but it obviously has unintended consequences. Simply removing subsidies does not necessary fix the problem without creating second order problems of its own. I'm saying we need to be cognizant of that, and asked for solutions that effectively manage those consequences. Generally, those simple fixes like "remove subsidies" or "just give people money" belie a lack of nuanced understanding and risk creating more problems than they solve. Most of your perspective seems to be built on an overly simple model of human behavior that tends to break down on complex situations.
Also, instead of allowing a bankruptcy at any time, student loan down payment could be limited to max 25% of income after tax OR 10% of net worth, whichever is greater, with any balance after 30 years transferred to the college.
Objectives: 1) Reduce the incentive for colleges to offer education tracks that they KNOW (or should have known) will never lead to much beyond a minimum pay job. 2) Prevent unlucky or unsuccessful students to get stuck with an impossibly large loan that just keeps growing, absorbing all they earn or own. 3) Ensure that students still do feel some pain when this happens, but not so much that they lose all incentive to build themselves up. They still keep 75% of their income after tax AND they're guaranteed that the loan will end within 30 years. 4) Incentivize pricing of of the student loans in ways that reflect the risks involved. If students that study "lesbian dance theory" have to pay a 10% interest rate while Physics students pay only 5%, that's a pretty strong indication that the "credit score" for the former is pretty bad. 5) Also incentivize minimizing cost while maximize the useful learning for the college, to minimize the risk that they'll be stuck with too much of the debt.
If this leads to some (presumed worthy) students having fewer opportunities than they otherwise would have, it's still possible for the collages, government or others to provide stipends or other similar forms of support.
Step 1 is außergerichtliches Schuldenbereinigungsverfahren where the debtor attempts to reach an out-of-court settlement with creditors. This stage usually lasts up to 6 months.
Then there is Eröffnung des Insolvenzverfahrens where if the out-of-court settlement fails, the debtor files for insolvency with the local court. The court appoints a trustee to manage the debtor's assets and liaise with creditors. This stage typically takes 1-2 months.
Next there is either Regelinsolvenzverfahren or vereinfachtes Insolvenzverfahren. In the latter if the debtor's assets are insufficient to cover the costs of the proceedings, the court may initiate a simplified insolvency process. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan to the creditors, which includes a 6-year repayment period. If the plan is accepted, the court approves it, and the debtor begins making payments.
In the former, if the debtor's assets are sufficient to cover the costs, regular insolvency proceedings take place. The trustee liquidates the debtor's assets and distributes the proceeds among creditors. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan, which typically includes a 6-year repayment period.
After the insolvency plan is approved, the debtor enters a 6-year good conduct phase called Wohlverhaltensperiode. During this period, the debtor must adhere to the repayment plan, maintain gainful employment, and inform the trustee of any changes in their financial situation. The debtor is allowed to keep a portion of their income for living expenses.
If the debtor complies with the terms of the insolvency plan during the good conduct phase, the court grants a discharge of the remaining debts called Restschuldbefreiung. This typically occurs 6 years after the opening of insolvency proceedings.
This is really not that different from bankruptcies in America. I think Europeans are simply unaware of their options.
In the US Chapter 7 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 10 years, making it difficult to obtain credit, secure housing, or find employment. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a matter of public record, which can be accessed by anyone. The process is relatively quick, typically lasting 4-6 months. Most unsecured debts, such as credit card balances and medical bills, are discharged upon completion of the process.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 7 years, which is less than Chapter 7. Like Chapter 7, Chapter 13 bankruptcy is a matter of public record. The repayment plan typically lasts for 3-5 years, during which the individual must make regular payments to creditors. After completing the repayment plan, the remaining eligible debts are discharged.
Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren lasts longer (6 years) than both Chapter 7 (4-6 months) and Chapter 13 (3-5 years). Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 involve a repayment plan, while Chapter 7 does not. Chapter 7 has a longer-lasting impact on credit ratings (10 years) compared to Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 (6-7 years).
France has a procedure called "rétablissement personnel," which is similar to Chapter 7 in the US, allowing individuals to liquidate their assets and discharge their debts. In the UK, individuals can file for bankruptcy or enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), which is similar to Chapter 13 in the US.
Bankrupcy is no fun. All your assets are wiped out (house, cars, etc). Sometimes you are excluded from the banking system. So it's not "without consequence".
Lending money is a risky business. That is why you get interest. Getting people off the hook is not ideal, but neither is the inverse. From a societal point of view, this arrangement allows people to take risks that they may not have otherwise. And we're all better off because of it.
Often cited, but wrong. When you dig in, it turns out to be one of those "wet streets cause rain" causal mix-ups:
So are you saying that 2/3 of personal bankruptcy cause medical debt?
This study deliberately does not - just for example - count it as a "medical bankruptcy" if you weren't hospitalized. So magically every person who was bankrupted by the cost of their must-take prescription medicine, they don't count because they need to be admitted to hospital to count for this study.
As it is, the 2/3 statistic is mainly used to score political points and indeed one of the authors of the original study that came up with the 60% number is Elizabeth Warren. Now, you could say she participated in her capacity as an academic, but I personally have a hard time believing she would have put her name on the paper if it had found, say, 4% of bankruptcies came from medical debt.
If people are arguing about whether the Earth is flat or spherical, you cant use the fact that both are "wrong" (as the Earth is closer to an ellipsoid) to say that "flat" is as correct as "spherical".
That coupled with private equity's involvement in all late / end of life care ensures no one dies with a penny to their name to pass down.
It still paints a picture of an out of control, over-financialized system that only gets more expensive the more money is put into it.
> people who were admitted to the hospital
Ah yes, because there's no other way to get large medical debt. Not like an ambulance and ER stay alone will be high.
> in California
Obviously representative of a wider area: the most expensive state in the country and #5 highest median income.
> adults 25 to 64 years of age
Yes, let's exclude those who tend to have the highest medical bills and lowest incomes.
> were admitted to the hospital (for a non–pregnancy-related stay)
Yes, let's exclude pregnancies, which can be extremely expensive (thank god medicaid covered ours).
> for the first time in at least 3 years.
Yes, let's exclude people who have the highest medical debt by virtue of having had multiple hospitalizations.
Medical bankruptcy isn’t really the problem. Medical insolvency might be, but the two alternatives are not to receive treatment at all, or for the State to pay for it. The former is obviously worse, and the latter is arguably worse when looked at in toto.
Long story short, a judge plus two gorillas can and will confiscate every single thing you own and then put you in jail.
Bankruptcy is not a "haha, you'll never get me!" card like it's in the USA. It's actually diametrically the opposite.
Germany in particular takes a moralistic approach to finances that IMO harms the economy quite a bit and constrains entrepreneurship to the well connected and already established. You are only supposed to start businesses that succeed.
In reality money is not a real thing, money is numbers in a computer database that we collectively signal and coordinate the economic activity and utilization of the resources that hold the real value. As such a certain amount of default well above zero is optimal to maximize the amount of real world value being generated.
Someone who had worked in banking once told me they adjust lending standards to maximize profit. I was shocked that this meant about a 6-7 percent default rate on the mortgage loans. If you are too stringent you won't lend any money and if you let it flow freely you'll fail under all the defaults, so yes there is an optimal amount of failure even for the lender.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
It's more pragmatic, than moralistic. Germany aims for high quality in business and workers, the whole system is based around this. USA seems more aiming for quantity. Just throw money at it, and see what sticks. But the difference is, USA is very big and wealthy in resources and manpower, so it can afford this. Germany, like other European countries, is rather small and lives from connecting with others. So efficiency is very important.
Also, Germany has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so not as large as the US or China, but I wouldn't exactly call them "small" economically.
US GDP: $28.7T China GDP: $18.5T Germany: $4.5T
Also, Germany is relatively small when it comes to land area, has to import most of the raw materials, and heavily relies on subcontractors from China. They do not really play in the same league as US and China.
There's a dude on twitter who has been detailing his process of going through a bankruptcy over the last few months. I think he lost about $4M. He's discussed another business idea that he's had and his plans for implementing it. Now, a month after his bankruptcy has been final, it seems that that some investors are very interested in going forward with him on this new venture. It's likely that his openness about everything was what caught their attention.
This is how bankruptcy is supposed to work: fail at something and there's a path to recovery.
A new business generally requires a director's guarantee to get a loan, completely defeating the point of a limited company.
Between personally guaranteeing a loan and not having the funding available at all, I'd take the former.
Once the business has been trading for a while and shows it has a working model, it shouldn't have any problem financing without a personal guarantee.
Either way, limited liability remains crucial. You're still in control of how much personal risk you're accepting, putting a backstop on any loss.
In Silicon Valley for instance, many founders of successful businesses had multiple failures founding other startups first, it seemingly is part of the Silicon Valley ethos, almost looked at with a badge of honor.
Attitudes to risk taking are similar, e.g. your fear of high wire walking depends hugely on whether you have a safety line or not. Wealthy kids might pride them themselves on taking chances where the reality is that in their whole existence they have never been exposed to the possibility of paying the price for failure.
Generally a much better deal for first time founders.
This offloads some risk from the owners of the company to its business partners, it ended up enabling a real revolution in business formation and ownership. In a lot of ways it has had a democratising effect, as many more folks can afford to invest in a company than just those who are wealthy enough to bear the risk of unlimited liability.
> Nobody's going to loan money to an LLC with no assets without a personal surety.
I think that’s the system working. Customers, vendors and other business partners are also free to adjust their expectations accordingly.
I am unable to rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question.
Recovering from a 10k€ loss will take some time in a country with extremely high taxes.
It was mind-boggling..
As stated, we are talking about established, multi-generational businesses with high-end equipment already in use, that would more than cover the necessary collateral by orders of magnitude.
The finality of decisions is highly situational.
The article doesn’t hold true for me, I have used myriad chances to fail, and have so far lived 3 distinct epochs in my life, each one a life unto itself. I owe this to the simple decision of my father to buy 5 acres of raw land a couple of miles out of town and teach me to use tools.
On the basis of that I have never had to rent, I have had my own shelter (starting with a simple cabin and an outhouse) from the age of 16, and I have never been overly dependent on a job to where I wasn’t willing to walk away.
Having simple shelter made it so I could fuck around and find out until I found something that worked a little, then iterate.
I spent many years of my life intermittently in poverty, getting my food from food banks and buying expired surplus from food thrifts, gardening, etc and relying on social programs for medicine, but I was never at risk of being homeless. Always a place to fall back to.
I have parlayed that into a pretty good life, comfortable, productive, and a small economic engine that provides for several families in the community.
My advice for anyone having children: buy land if you can. Not structures, but land. A few miles out of town is fine, because vehicles and bicycles exist. Teach your kids basic carpentry, electrical, mechanical, and masonry skills. Those are the basis of civilisation.
Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed.
I have done this with my children and because of that, they enjoy the same benefits that I had, and are finding their way having known nothing but self determination as the fundamental principle of their lives.
Debt -Free Land you control without many restrictions, not “real estate” is what makes it possible to live better than most people do while technically being in “poverty” by income. That is what makes it possible to take risks. Risks are what makes it possible to find a working solution.
Of course, if you are born into financial privilege, that’s also a great start, but that wasn’t my case. I often struggled to even pay the (very low) property tax.
Without the freedom and willingness to take risks, and the resilience and willingness to endure hardships, you may have to endure being a servant to someone unless you are very lucky, and luck works better if you can make your own.
This might read like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps “ rant, but it is not. For most people, they are trapped in a situation designed to keep them in service of some goal not their own. It is very difficult to escape, and impossible without the proper training for self sufficient action and the complete lack of debt (or the willingness to lose anything you owe money on) You also might have to sacrifice your comfort, security, and literally risk your life or health to obtain the foothold from which you can launch a self determined life.
That is a position of extreme privilege, but it is one that can be obtained if you want it bad enough and are willing to roll the dice, and accept the finality of failure if you do not succeed (looping back to the article).
My point is that that kind of privilege is more within reach that most people understand. But you might’ve have to be willing to give up everything at first to use it. Most people are simply not prepared for the hardship and sacrifice that entails.
Land is still cheap all over the world. Unless you live on an island, You can probably get an acre of land for a months wages at a fast food place (in the USA) within a weeks bicycle ride of where you are. But that won’t do you any good unless you know how to turn that into a place to live and work from.
Sounds like typical American arrogance.
Everything you mentioned about building up a piece of land from zero, is predicated on a stable legal and economic framework, that protects and values private property. And every country that has that framework, tends to have high land prices already. Try this in some non-developed country, and you'll soon see why the world is considered unjust.
I am doing it right now in a developing nation.
I settled here on Hispaniola in 2007.
I am working and living right now in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We’re building up new infrastructure in agriculture, education, and startup incubation. We have already launched a couple of successful ventures.
Here are not the least stable places, but they’re hardly the most stable either. But the rewards are huge for those that can stomach the risks.
Anyone who wants to try this needs to watch and internalise the film “empire of dust” (2013). It’s A documentary about how to not succeed in a developing nation.
There’s basically zero competition at the early stages because, like you, no one thinks you can do anything.
My kids have established a beachhead in Mauritius and northern India, and we are looking at Madagascar and some demographically collapsing areas in the eastern United States as a possible next step.
Honestly, while you'd probably know better if you're on the ground there, Haiti does look like the least stable place right now.
Land, house, zero rent for a long ass time. Your ability to fail and come back is high due to that. And family support.
You don’t need a lot to have a huge advantage. Just a roof. And that can start with a couple thousand dollars for a chunk of land somewhere with some kind of dirt road to it that is passable at least most of the year. That opportunity still exists for many, many people.
Thats certainly how i feel as a white collar office professional in the US.
Your willingness to try great things is more predicted on What happens if you fail rather than what happens if you succeed.
If the worst that can happen to me is that I go back to my cozy but inconvenient cabin and do contracting until I can save up enough money to give it another go, that’s way different than the lose everything I own and live on the streets scenario.
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".
Is the typical attribution error.
[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
Isn't that an example of a 2nd chance? A person fails in his own country and gets another chance (2nd chance) in another country?
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— H. Simpson
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
I had a friend who was an engineer for a few years, decided to do something different, and now she's a physician.
> Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
Don't worry; many lawyers, at age 57, are saying the same thing!
(There are more lawyers of the Saul Goodman size of practice than the LA Law type of practice)
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.
Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.
But everything good in my life has come from this one path.
I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.
It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.
But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.
No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.
Too many people blame others for their current situation. Try taking a philosophy that we have more control and look back upon decisions we made and why we made them.
Not "I should have bought apple stock". but "why didn't I buy apple stock?"
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like: - Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered) - Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail - Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions - Avoid any drugs - Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.
- Allen Toussaint "Fortune Teller" :-)One thing wrong with it is that the myth leads us to blame ourselves for the failure to recover as well.
I had a colleague who was fanatically into soccer. I asked how does he feel when his team loses? It is devastating for many especially in big games. But he said he is willing to take the risk of rooting for a specific team and possibly losing because it gives him excitement. It's a bit like a drug really you get addicted to your team winning. It's a bit like any gambling addiction.
If you had no interest in the outcome of a soccer-match you wouldn't get very excited watching it.
In reality most people don't have a real interest in a soccer-game since they don't gamble money on it. Therefore it seems people pick a soccer-team to root for BECAUSE we want to get excited. We want that adrenaline. (or is it dopamine?) We want to believe that the arch of history tends towards our team winning.
False Belief 1: If my soccer-team wins I'll be much better off, much happier.
Consequent False Belief: Since my team did not win I must now be desolate. I must feel bad.
One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.
We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".
And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.
As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.
Pull yourself together!
Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.
The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
Inability for the human body to cope with something is not the result of evolution but the lack of evolution. Evolution is still going on.
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
Making a decision while angry? If one has not the capacity to see through anger when making a decision - a lack of mindfulness perhaps, then that decision even when made in anger is the best they could do at that point. If one practices mindfulness and can often deal with anger but fails this time, that is still the best that person could do given who they are when a decision is being made. There is nobody to blame.
Even perceived self-sabotage is still acting within some particular framing. If that person Knew something different about the nature of their being at a perspective and participatory level, they likely would have made different more constructive choices.
Everything emerges exactly as it should due to what is Known and is at any particular time. The nature of self being a lifelong quest to understand, the more we understand about it the better the decision we can make. Probably explains the importance of 'Know thyself' to Socrates. But there is never a wrong choice as you say, only non-optimal. Only that which was made due to you having not been some particular other potential version of you.
Learning makes change possible. Not all learning is good for you. You never know you're learning as you're doing it - for if you're self aware you aren't paying attention as so can't learn, but if you are paying attention you're not aware about "learning". Thus we should pay attention to what is good and trust that we are learning. And trust that we are also learning when we pay attention to what is bad for us.
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.
It often feels as if a second chance at a certain point in life requires more than a change in yourself; it requires an even bigger change than earlier, once over to make the real change, and twice over to convince others or overcome their biases. Either that or the luck of finding someone who understands second chances and is willing to give them.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
What nonsense. What makes it hard is everything around it. People can't choose to take a 50% pay cut to change careers. They can't let their families starve or lose their homes for it. They can't move move when they need to take care of a loved one.
This idea that changing your mind is the hard part is absolute bonkers unless you're so privileged that you don't care about the real externalities of those choices, or you don't have any.
Phrases like this one only worsen the situation, as for the majority of the world, that's simply not true. If, for you, all you have to do is change your mindset then good for you. You're very, very lucky. But please, don't assume everyone is as privileged.
The peer group, ever the reserve of the lazy journalist for "facts".
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.
That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.
> In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
I did not interpret GP post to mean "If you haven't settled down and started a family by 30, you may as well give up".
I interpreted it more as "If you haven't made a decent sized social network, or haven't figured out how to approach strangers, or haven't been in a committed/long-term/love/etc relationship, or didn't socialise enough to develop socialisation skills, etc... THEN you may as well give up!"
I think the GP's point is that those people who are settling down in their 30s and starting families, well, they didn't mess up, and figured things out before age 30.
Maybe he'll clarify, but I agree with my interpretation: if you haven't figured out romantic relationships by age 30, you may as well give up, because post-30 it's exceedingly difficult to find an environment with lots of socialising with peers.
Almost impossible, in fact, because, as you said, most people are already out of that scene anyway...
In reality this isn't black/white, but a spectrum. Some may have a harder time than others, but giving up is reductionary and depressing and leads nowhere.
Is it really necessary to both slip in an insult and try to shame opposing ideas into silence before stating your point?
Tell me you're a programmer without telling me you're a programmer :-)
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know. And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
The reality is that our expectations are much less realistic and bleaker. We love to talk about second chances and failing your way to success. On the other hand, 80% of us live in a very different world.
If you are on the following track which most of us are: high-school -> professional training -> early career -> senior career -> management -> senior management it's almost the opposite as described and downright bleak if you haven't always been a mega achiever.
Now I should possibly distinguish self-employed business people, entrepreneurs, and certain artists. Honestly even these exempt professions it can be like that, and there's exceptions to traditional professions.
Anyway, for most of us it's all about demonstrating perfect success every step of the way. You may be able to "get away" with certain things, but they can all still seriously hurt you. It doesn't take much before you can be perceived as valueless. Sometimes we talk about this, but we seem cautious about admitting it works this way.
So, contrary to the idea that being a failure is okay, most of the time the process looks more like detecting ANY failure in your past and not letting you in the door. After all there's 20 candidates that didn't get a D in 3rd grade biology.
If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."
As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.
Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)
But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.
Same with companies. The truth is that you kinda do know what you're getting more.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.
It seems like my only options are:
1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.
2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.
3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.
4) Start a business.
5) Just live with it.
Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.
I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.
My frustrations come from the fact that "Distributed Systems Engineer" seems to broadly translate to "we use Kafka to glue two services together" for most companies. While that can still require some level of clever engineering, it doesn't really require a ton of theory. At multiple companies, when I do on rare occasion come across a project that requires some more elaborate planning, I will try suggesting using TLA+ to test things out, and management will look at me like I suggested kicking a puppy or something. "Math" is sort of a dirty word in industry, at least in the places I've worked. Maybe I just don't do a great job selling it. In every single job I've ever had, I've always been "that weird math guy", despite the fact that I really don't think I suggest anything that arcane, at least shouldn't be to a software crowd.
Again, it's hardly something to complain about; "Woe is me, I'm making yuppie money but I don't feel fulfilled all the time". It's just something that annoys me.
But pitching this sort of thing to management is hard, where if they’ve heard of it at all then they associate it with big brain critical path shit at the highest levels of huge orgs like nasa or aws.
Can’t blame people for not seeing the value yet though.. we need to make things easier/cheaper. Plain old testing is often seen as a cost/effort sink that dev teams and management resent and so of course Model checking looks like a whole different layer of ambiguously-worthwhile effort.
Mere advocacy here won’t win people over, because they care more about costs than “correctness” as an abstract virtue. We probably need progress on things like generating code from models and models from code if we want to see more adoption
I've debated trying to write a PlusCal->Java transpiler [1], and I haven't really ruled that out yet; while I don't think it should be necessary to have that for PlusCal to be useful, I think it would potentially sweeten the sales pitch.
[1] I think PlusCal would translate better to a sequential Java style program than raw TLA+ would.
Unless your manager/colleagues are intimately familiar with such tools, I'd think that your touting their usage at work, is more like wishful thinking.
My long term plan on this is to submit a bunch of code that works correctly the first time, and eventually once I am established at this job as "clever" I'll reveal the PlusCal/TLA+ specs and hopefully have a decent sales pitch.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.
This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.
I mean this with all the respect in the world, but no shit. That's what I'm frustrated about. I feel like the entire thing I wrote was specifically because I am aware of these tradeoff. Just because the tradeoffs exist doesn't mean I have to like them.
I know that my dream job doesn't really exist, at least not in numbers large enough to even bother considering, and I'm not naive enough to really think that pivoting to another career will suddenly solve all my problems and frustrations.
I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.
My wife is wrapping up her school this year, so once she's working then I might be able to use her insurance and give this experiment a try.
I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
I'm in Australia so this isn't a thing for me.
It can depend somewhat on the job. When I was a part time adjunct last year teaching two classes (six credit hours) at a public university, I was given the option for health insurance. I don't remember what the premiums were but I remember they were lower than marketplace plans.
> I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
Since the Affordable Care Act, the prices are somewhat more regulated and they're not really allowed to "decline" you anymore, so the "bargaining power" thing isn't as bad as it used to be. Paying out of pocket for insurance is expensive but not insurmountable for basically anyone working in tech, and certainly you can factor into an hourly rate. In NYC there's the MetroPlus system, and the cheaper plan on that is around $1250/month for two people, which equates to roughly $15,000/year [1]. An employer plan in NYC will still typically have anywhere between ~$100-$600 monthly premium for a family plan, so anywhere between $1200-$7200 per year of just premiums (not counting what you pay before reaching your deductible), depending on the company and which plan you choose within the company. The US healthcare system is needlessly complicated.
Still, it would certainly be better to not pay $15,000/year if I can avoid it, so before I try doing half-time contracting I am going to wait for my wife to start working.
[1] https://metroplus.org/plans/individual-family/marketplace/br...
So I had to say no to it. This is life in the US.
It can be extremely variable between cities so I'm not saying that this applies to everyone, but when I checked against my NYC zip code, that's the number it gave me.
So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.
So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.
So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.
At a previous job, I would occasionally spend time on the weekend rewriting and simplifying code because there wasn't really a "maintenance" team and I knew the only way that it would ever get better was if I fixed myself on my own time. I've since drawn a line in the sand that I do not work for companies on weekends but I did sort of enjoy that process.
I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.
BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
I didn't word it terribly well, so apologies for that, but for "really need" I was talking about subsistence wages in this case. I make perfectly fine money, and I do save/invest as much as I can, and I do own my house in NYC, so I do alright. I do hope to retire somewhat early, at least by American standards, but it's not like I'm making "fuck you" money.
> BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
Outside of something I did with my dad a few months ago, not really. I have a decent job now that's not psychotic about non-competes, so I've been ramping up to build something.
Once my wife starts working, we figured that we'd put nearly 100% of her paycheck into some forms of savings to accelerate the process a bit further, since my salary has traditionally been enough to cover the bills. I'd like to have enough money to retire comfortably by my mid-to-late 40's. I think that's realistic.
2023 was one of the worst years of my life, maybe the worst. It was really horrible being laid off twice and having to spend so much time on LinkedIn and doing Zoom whiteboard interviews and waking up to dozens of rejections every morning, not to mention that being laid off twice in a year makes your resume look insanely bad (each stint being about 3 months). As a result, I think I've become more frustrated than I probably should, and grown a strong resentment towards companies, with a nearly-complete lack of optimism that they'll ever do anything even remotely actually-technical.
My current gig seems a lot better but I've learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. We'll see if it lasts more than three months.
Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.
I think Americans are kind of trained by the propaganda machine that you need to find fulfillment from your job, but fundamentally I think you're right and I need to take things into my own hands.
I have a few ideas that I think I might be able to turn into papers, and might even be able to get them published in a real journal. I doubt that my current gig will have too much of a problem with that (they're much more in the chemistry/healthcare space than pure CS), so I might be able to have some fun with that while giving myself an excuse to use pure math.
And you will find a very crowded place, populated with all the other guys who leant the job yesterday.
> I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software,
You are describing demand and offer: nothing more, nothing less.
> This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
> The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
> This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencem...
Optionality stuff like what you're describing is rationale and leads to by far the best expected returns on life satisfaction. Less stupid risk taking, more careful decision making would do a lot to make the world better.
What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.
Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.
A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.
Taoism with a dash of Existentialism?
Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.
I find in general, what works for me in pretty much everything gets to be so far out from textbook that I have to invent ways to even describe it.
Bottomline:
- These thoughts don't serve you
- You have more effective/productive years ahead of you then before
Figure out what you want, and grind at it. The rest is noise.
Speaking of which...
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
[1] https://safe.menlosecurity.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.
But yes, this notion that your life is a one-shot, and you may very well outlive the potential for your life to achieve what you wanted, or thought it might, is not common advice. At times mean-spirited people will say that so-and-so celebrity is "over the hill" or "past their prime", but of course this applies (in a good faith way) to us all at some point. When the barb is targeted at someone who's earned a lot and is no longer earning it is less painful and socially acceptable than when targeted at someone who never knew success at all.
Nature is interesting because She seems to play around with lifetime duration quite a lot. Most life is very short lived; they are one-shots. But it doesn't matter because there are so many. But the few, the long-lived, the lives with so many resources behind them, She plays with these too. And honestly it's not clear that they are so successful. They tend to exist at the top of a food chain and accumulate damage over time, requiring sophisticated repair mechanisms. Such creatures are also more sensitive to environmental issues, accumulating poisons much faster than those before them in the food chain. Humans exist in this sensitive, precarious place in the ecosystem and I think we often outlive our usefulness, as evidenced by pre-industrial poor-houses stocked mostly by the old and infirm.
Speaking of football, Messi is renowned for not running all the time. He strikes at crucial moments, accelerating out, one touch to move away, a dribble past the next, a fantastic shot. There are others who run more miles than him per game, even in his role.
An interesting parallel. I credit luck with my chances. My wife and I got close after I was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident. I found the job that made my career because a friend sent me the link the day I smashed my knee in a skateboarding accident and couldn't move. I moved to America because a friend was going and urged me to move with him. My wife and I have a genetic condition and embryo sequencing arrives just as we decide to have children. Many second chances after I'd first made another choice.
There's only the world and you. You can only constraint solve within the constraints and there's not much to be done about that. A one-legged man will not run the 100m at the Olympics.
Internet forums are littered with those who claim they are that man and the one who wins gold at 100m is just naturally gifted. But I know many strivers and while some would be considered failures, far fewer are than the ones who do not try at anything since they've got the one leg.
The other man always has an extra leg. The other man always has the sharper eye. The other man always has the more handsome face.
Perhaps this is natural. Cells know when they're failures. Perhaps people do too. Perhaps that is adaptive of species.
The reason why so many failures lead to success is that only those who strive fail. And you must strive to succeed. Those who do not try at all do not fail and do not succeed. That's okay. We form the infrastructure of the species.
That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).
Some decisions you make are permanent.
I suppose I could reject conventional morality and just bail lol. I'm not sure you really want to promote a society like such.
For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.
Circular logic, endless torments, eternal regrets.
Fixed points of the ethereal planes drawing souls like moths towards burning elevation.
Dear Author, you seem not to know the concept of trying (harder). As you stop trying at the first mistake, of course you didn't get a second chance.
If you don't have those two things, then it doesn't work.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
I remember another comment on HN where someone talked about their 50s and looking through the rear view mirror wistfully.
It's not like you can do nothing when you get older, it's more like you know you can't do everything.
It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...
Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".
Variation in overall size, branch angle/length/node distance influence the resulting number of possible steps, as well a the limited run time and state complexity does. This also lets "fail often, fail early" look like that simple approach for a massive wide step zig zag approach to life; only if assuming no life-relevant costs per step, that is.
Still, a state machine with loops allows for second chances in general, while the underlying environment also changes in parallel. So your outlook for the second try might as well be better.
To describe a backwards directed re-play, a decision tree might be a tempting structure. But just because the "truth" is too complex to describe and not visible to you in its entirety anyway.
Don't get discouraged by these kind of undercomplex views on life. There's still lot of environmental problems/limitations to be solved, to make everybody's run a bit smoother and less dependend on their environment, though, even though, or because, all the runs and the environment are basically the same thing.
In the other extreme, it makes me think of the generations that have grown up with respawn video games. When you die you just respawn. Those games are ONLY second chances. It's rare that anyone plays any game all the way through on the first life they're given. If you grow up immersed in worlds without consequences it can paralyze your decision making in real life. Not always, but I have seen some people retreat into these kinds of worlds and not want IRL decisions.
You need luck, or privilege, for your perseverance to bear fruit.
You need both! I'm stunned by how many people cannot grasp this simple concept. Typically, people who have luck tend not to notice it, and attribute everything to their merit. At the opposite, people who didn't get their fair share of luck, tend to ignore the effort part and paint all successful people as lucky slackers.
2 - Have you ever been an innocent victim in a serious car accident? Have you ever been diagnosed a debilitating illness independent of your habits? Have you ever lost all your material belongings in an earthquake? I suppose you didn't. Thus you are lucky.
And thank you for confirming what I had written: lucky people often don't even realise they're lucky - and I'll add: especially if they believe that idiocy called prosperity gospel!
The reality is that the difference between success and failure is in the majority of cases due to consistent small choices with compounding consequences. The decision to stay late at night and finish an assignment, the decision to not drink a lot at that party, to go to a summer school rather than a trip, to not cheat on a girlfriend, etc, etc. Later on in life, when the nerds get to get their "revenge", well, it was due to privilege all along ...
Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.
It’s the opposite of the Nobels in this regard.
Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.
I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D
(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)
It is also obvious that time flows in one direction, that you cannot recover time you have spent on one thing over another.
It is likewise obvious, though strangely difficult for people, especially the young, to grasp, that time spent waffling in FOMO-land is time totally wasted grasping in vain at everything, never attaining anything. "Decision" comes from the Latin "decidere", itself from "de" and "caedere", meaning to "cut off" [0]. Yes, to decide is to cut off, to give up options for the sake of the higher good, in order to proceed.
And lastly, it is equally obvious that obsessing over a past that we imagine that could have been is also a complete waste of time. The clock is ticking, time is running out, and instead of focusing on what can be done now, what can be done with the time left, how to make the best of where you are and what is possible and prudent, you blow away whatever time remains all the more.
Now, if one has indeed made mistakes, the last thing one should do is deny that one has. Denial is opposed to integrity and renders a person impotent, stagnant, and numb, with the worm of guilt gnawing at the soul. Admit it, and if necessary, make reparations, do your penance, obtain absolution. Then move on. Life does not stand still for anyone. Salvage from the wreckage what is good, and go foward. No one said you will be able to recover the life you lost, or thought you lost. Actions are not unitary operations. They have no inverse. Life is an append-only log, a directed acyclic graph. Persisting in attachments to what was ostensibly lost blinds you to what you should do next. Move on. Keep tilling the land for the harvest. Dismiss whatever draws you away and weakens your commitment to the objective good.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decision#etymonline_v_857
But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by the elite or those "who have made it".
[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
I don't know, I'm a bit tipsy. But this could be fun.
I've gone from being a capitalist libertarian to being some sort of a self-defined eco hippie because of this. I realized that the capital fueled "progress" changes things a lot and we can't guarantee that all those changes are good (even if we now think they are, we might later find out they weren't). On the other hand, when you change the ecosystem or the planet, it's changed for good and there's no going back. Therefore it's best not to meddle with shit we don't understand. Stop building new stuff, stop making new roads, stop destroying things to make them "better".
- Father was a lawyer
- Aged early 40s: is married, has kids, successful career as a lawyer
- Quits law to go to medical school
- Becomes successful pediatrician
- Loves it
I will always remember the quote from the son (who is telling the story):
"At age 12 I remember thinking: this is a little strange. Now that I'm in my late 30s with kids, I realize how absolutely wild my dad's decision was. Anyway, here is a picture with him and one of his pediatric patients" (cue picture of dad with a big smile on his face holding a baby).
I've got a friend a bit like that - husband kids successful law career but quit because she hates being a lawyer. It allowed her to go from poor to wealthy though so served its purpose.
Wife, kids, solid insurance career. But I quit to join a start up in cybersecurity because I was too curious not to give it a shot.
Unfortunately just recently laid off but I don’t look back and regret the decision. And now I can go back to insurance if I want to.
When Durian became available locally, I purchased the smallest fruit available. I used it as part of my smoothie. Yes, it was pungent while at the same time a very light and pleasing fragrant aroma.
I didn't purchase it again as I needed more understanding of flavor melding. However, I enjoyed the puff pastry filled with Durian a few years later while visiting China and only tasted the fragrant aroma.
At least compared to most "manual" labor such as electrician, you can be a lot more chill and only focus on what you have to learn and nothing more if you want.
You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."
Easily yes
In another sense, there are many paths which lead to similar things, and path dependency can be Markovian, wherein the whole path doesn't matter in the first place, just the last bit.
I don't think that's it. The misjudgment is invariably going to be just a sample in a pattern of similar such misjudgments.
What if we just stop telling stories, negative or positive?
Then perhaps less commenting on commenters commenting on authors writing stories?
Mistakes cost time and money, neither of which the majority of people have in abundance, and one mistake can set you on a path that is impossible to deviate from.
Choose the wrong career, chose the wrong spouse, have a couple of kids, and suddenly you find yourself stuck in a job, a relationship and a home you literally cannot afford to escape from. 50%+ OF ALL PEOPLE IN THE WESTERN WORLD are one paycheck away from financial insolvency and living on the streets. They literally cannot afford to quit their job to "Retrain" for a new career, as that training costs real money most folks don't have, and unless you're in a special / protected group no one is giving you a dime to pay for school let alone cover your food / housing / medical bills while you "Retrain" for a "Better future." It's a nice pipe dream / political talking-point to say truckers can all become coders, but when those truckers have mortgage payments, groceries, medical bills, kid's clothes / school fees, etc., to pay for, and when there's not even a dime of assistance money available to them, and they have nothing in the way of savings, how the hell are they supposed to be able to afford live for months or years at a time while they learn to code?
Folks can't even leave relationships these day, as moving also COSTS MONEY and the majority of people can't afford to pay for movers, put up first and last months rent, etc., making moving to a new home or a new city, too expensive a proposition to be realistic for the vast majority of low to mid income earners. The real kicker though is in basically any city in the US or Canada, if you're moving out of a rental home, the next place you live will be 50%-100% more expensive! Rents have gone up so fast in so many places that a great many people can literally never leave the place they are living as the market has gone up so fast around them they literally cannot afford to move.
It's all well and good to say people should just move for better opportunities, or just "Retrain" for a new career, but when the cost involved in either of those actions means unless they immediately pay off the person in question would find themselves destitute and homeless after bearing the involved expenses, it just goes to show how callous, self-serving and entitled our societies attitudes towards the poor and less fortunate have become.
I'm a little biased against the Dr Phil type of advice because, from what little I heard from him, it isn't really good advice.
But, I'm open to changing my mind based on a video from a trusted source, like a fellow HN reader :-)
'Mangling a life' is shooting way over the top.
Is having to deal with going down a school track that didn't turn out to be your bag what you can justify calling a mangled life? Isn't that just what we call life? The issue is that we'll almost always be able to find issues in our decisions in hindsight, if we really look for them. Even a ten million dollar exit can feel like a failure if you were shooting for a hundred.
If we forego using bombastic words for things that they shouldn't be applied to, the hollowness of the premise is revealed, and the illusion crumbles:
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can have a negative effect on your life.
By all accounts I had every reason to give up and lay down and die, and yet I didn’t. This sort of defeatist mindset is a poison. Will I ever fully recover and make it back to where I was? Maybe, maybe not, but the probability of success is zero if you don’t keep going.
If you want to be an extreme outlier, you likely will need some extreme outlier events to occur - depending on what your desire is. For many of us, we're not able to influence many aspects and outcomes in that extreme.
And so I like someone's quote: Life is what happens while you're planning other things.
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