jmoak3

PE can be replaced with "Some guys".

PE bought your hospital? More like, "some guys" bought your hospital.

Ask why "some guys" bought it instead of using their money in the market, or why your hospital sold in the first place. As anyone who's company has been purchased by private equity knows, it's probably because your hospital wasn't doing so hot to begin with and "some guys" were willing to gamble that they could turn it around and make some money before it blew up. This will mean turning the screws on the customers and employees and creating a sucky environment. But this is just accelerating what was likely already an inevitable decline.

As with any risky investment, there's a solid chance the PE firm will lose money on the gamble.

See this recent hacker news submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36048464, 30% of rural hospitals are closing due to costs growing faster than revenues.

Hospitals, in many cases, are not good businesses. Especially in places where doctors, nurses, and other staff can demand a premium based on their local market's dearth of professionals. PE firms in my opinion are part of the slow death of these failing businesses - the last attempts of "some guys" desperate for returns trying to squeeze blood from a rock that everyone else was avoiding.

I totally agree, something has to budge. That's one of the reasons I bought a house in a cheaper area close to family and am trying to save money, but really what can one even do to prepare for this?

Mass monetary creation and a higher tax burden are guaranteed. Spend less and hold assets? Work in healthcare?

Also true. Most of our largest expenses - Medicare, Social Sec, Medicaid, Mil - are a mix of soft/hard pegging to inflation I believe.

Or we let inflation eat away the debt, turkey style.

But for real I agree in general - where is the money going to come from? The interest on the debt and the federal receipts don’t work! I see the ratio (linked below) hitting 0.5 this decade.

What’s crazier is that % of GDP taxed according to the FRED is at historically normal levels dating back to 1950 - we’re not even at a point of low taxation relative to output.

FRED data

-------------

Debt to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

% GDP Taxed by Federal Gov: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Interest Payments / Federal Receipts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=sOG

You're too right.

We need to move away from prompt-engineering - it's AI-Management. You pretend you're speaking to another (albeit confusing/confused) person when extracting work from a model. You're coaxing things out of it based on hearsay and mysticism that work most of the time. Sounds a lot like AGILE and free pizza to get a junior to stay late and deliver on time.

That's not engineering, that's management.

> freezing the pay sends the message of: "we don't really care about the workers and we will extract as much value as it's possible for the lowest possible fee".

It’s not a charity. Neither are we as engineers - the job hopping we’re famous for is evidence of that.

Don’t forget aging demographics increasing demand while reducing supply of able bodies, with the added bonus of driving unemployment down

It really is a Rorschach isn’t it? :)

That's so alien to me - when I read at a coffee shop or a bar I'm there to interact and have the book as something to do in the interim.

Reading and drinking at home is free, and quiet.

China is about as diabetic as the United States, with a 10.6% incidence rate vs 10.7% incidence rate. China’s scale however means that it has over 100 million diabetics compared to America’s 30 million or so.

Handy map:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/...

Statista:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281082/countries-with-hi...

World bank:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS?most_rec...

Interestingly enough, Pakistan is the most diabetic country by per capita by far.

I don’t think the flat’ers are happy about it all either, but what would you do if your future was either a hopeless grind or some degree of comfort? Booms are followed by busts, in the mightiest booms the future gets bought and sold as far as the eye can see and the stakeholders demand delivery at the expense of those who come along after. Sometimes you show up too late, reject the deal, and catch the bust as your peers join you - you just have to wait it out until your time is better spent.

I’m thankful that I’m from a place with plenty of responsibility and land up for grabs, and that I stumbled into this industry.

From what I can tell from reading casually, growing up today in many parts of the USA, China, or Seoul, or even Europe is a real struggle to claim reputation, responsibility, and assets for yourself.

I would sob if keep is gone. It’s my second brain.

>Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot.

I also moved out of the major metros - some things are worth the risk :)

To add to your comment - no man is an island and we live in a world of scarcity.

Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way?

What can you do for them? Who do you know?

If you're lucky you can provide agricultural products, but likely not at a competitive scale - so you'll hemorrhage money season after season. All of those people you see on instagram selling cabbages? They're not selling the cabbages, they're selling the instagram. Your network will be reduced to a bunch of other people in the same boat. Your life will likely enter a downward spiral into irrelevance.

You either bring all of the money you'll ever need, or find a way to decouple from society as much as possible because you'll likely have little to offer it. Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot.

Piling into cities (and suburbs) is just common sense. It's where the jobs are.

EDIT: some wording, two -> twenty (oops lol)

Yup! It’s not enough to do something that’s hard to obtain a good life - there needs to be more open roles than people able to fill them in your line of work.

"Operating within the tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party's basic credo, their so-called primal promise, was "a promise to keep none of our promises".[9] They then promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.[10]"

Thought this was entertaining

Sounds like if you’re in a boring nice place you need to keep those pesky artists away :P

>Turnitin advertises the feature as "98% accurate". That's a pretty terrible accuracy rate for potentially destroying someone's life.

Assuming the 98% applies to both false negatives and positives:

For a given 20k person school, assuming they each write only one paper a year that's run through this, an administrator gets to expel 400 students a year!

What fun!

I think you're close:

There are relatively fewer employers seeking hardware skillsets compared to employers seeking software skillsets. People may say, "there are way more software engineers though! hardware is SO hard!!" as a counter, but they don't realize there is a proportionally crazy amount of software employers out there trying to hire engineers.

Your pay is capped by what you make your employer (the ROI you mention), but actually determined by how hard it is to replace you. Hard being defined as the difference between "# of Positions" and "# of Employable People". You could make your employer 10 million a year but you won't see a dime of that if anyone on earth can replace you within 5 minutes.

The fact that rural areas pay less has more to do with lower bargaining power of the employees than it does the cost of living. If one quits, the literal million dollar question is where are they going to go work instead? Is there another major manufacturer out here in the middle of nowhere? "Shut up, take what you get." Many build out in these areas for precisely this reason.

If the rate hikes cause a mass startup extinction we'd see an equalization of pay.

The US is freakishly large. I've lived all over it and driven across it from west to east several times.

I grew up 2 hours outside of Appalachia, and couple that with the other places I've seen I feel safe in my belief that the US has large swaths of sparsely populated regions.

Here's some fun maps if you don't believe me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/l4zr10/red_areas_i...

If you don't like reddit, feel free to reference this night map:

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...

It's no surprise that these hospitals are at risk of closing. There are few people there and fewer new people coming in, causing the cost of labor to explode. For example, there's a shortage of new blood entering the workforce compared to retiring boomers:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

This leads to labor shortages especially in rural areas because the few young people are fleeing to urban environments to find work and a not-shrinking economy a la Japan & Tokyo. Here's a document referring specifically to some east coast regions, but there is likely one for your local region out there somewhere: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

Here's a document on Japan and Tokyo's situation:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/04/business/japan-pay-families-r....

It sucks that these hospitals are closing but this is what the decline of a region looks like. The labor costs are only going to get worse as time goes on because if you want nice things you have to convince people to hang out there and make it nice. The growing costs of labor will shut down hospitals and prevent the opening of new ones. It was easy to justify the construction of such things when the population of the USA almost doubled between 1970 and today. Now? Not so much:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTOTUSA647NWDB

Widespread immigration into these areas would help alleviate these issues, as would policy decisions that favor the industries that used to exist in them that drew people there in the first place.

Just plugged this comment in, also claims to have written your comment!

Imagine paying 60k a year (out of state) for this. Huge black mark on the reputation of Texas A&M.

This is true - even if we remove the cap on what people pay into it, it won’t resolve the fundamental issue. It’ll just keep the door open for the last of the currently retiring generation to enjoy it.

I have no expectation of receiving anything worth counting when I’m retired - I don’t think it’s ridiculous for the French to be rioting over the change in retirement age because they likely see that they’re paying into a system they will not enjoy.

The worse a company is doing the more they have to pay the CEO to stick around. It’s a little strange but that’s where we end up.

For the benefit of all companies, we need to find a way to produce more people qualified to lead large organizations so that they’re easier to swap.

I support policies that make it easier for people to make organizations and remove roadblocks to achieve this. This will make existing companies leaner and produce more stock of qualified leaders.

(American here) I knew a girl in college who was very sheltered: she was homeschooled in a rural setting by wealthy ultra-religious parents up until college. Her only outlet was british television. She's spoken with a badly formed british accent as long as I've known her.

I learned katakana as a middle schooler because I would wake up at 4am to watch anime on youtube on the family computer, so none of this surprises me.

Indoor kids can get weird :)

I didn't see any data in the article on this but I'm under the impression that we're making more indoor kids.

Correction:

>We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door.

This happened 2 months into COVID, and then I moved away soon after

30% of iOS users in the US also have an Apple Watch. This is a huge part of the deal, your phone syncs with your high quality watch, your high quality Mac, your high quality tv, etc. They cannot do much of anything with an android.

iPhones also last for several years making them ideal to pass down to teenagers and children, so it’s no surprise that 87% of teens in the US have an iPhone.

Apple has been playing the long game.

I lived in the Mission for 1.5 years and a random dude carrying some sort of radio antenna plucked all of the parts off of my roommate's street parked car that he could yank off. Another day a drug deal went wrong and two guys exchanged bullets for a few minutes in broad daylight right below our window a block from Dolores. We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door.

SoMa was definitely the epicenter of "woah" but the "woah" was by no means isolated to that area.

This was all pre-covid - I didn't stick around to see if it would get worse.

I've got hundreds more stories of people getting into fights on my morning train (the J), or just doing strange things to everyone around them while everybody keeps their heads down praying it will end soon so they can just get to work.

SF is undeniably fun and pretty, and honestly an amazing place - I even saw Tim Schafer on my morning train once but didn't want to bother him. However, between the intensity of daily life and the intensity of cost of living I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't a young millionaire, or literally 2 years from that outcome. My favorite parts were the west side like you recommend though.

Personal theory:

Many Americans are achieving a level of wealth and income relative to their demands that allows them to block out experiences and people they find fault with, or avoid some of the stress of interacting with others. This has short term benefits and long term pain.

I was reading about the decrease in the population of Ireland in the 19th century and there were some interesting similarities (disregarding the potato famine):

The Vanishing Irish: https://www.historyireland.com/the-vanishing-irish-irelands-...

A part that stuck out to me:

>Changes in the rural economy in the post-Famine decades made it easier for country people to run their farms and to provide for their comforts in old age without marrying or having their own children. People became not poorer, as the Malthusian view would suggest, or afraid of the opposite sex, as psychological theories imply, but simply less willing to accept the burdens of marriage and a family because it was less important to satisfying the economic goals marriage had once served.

Replace marriage with having to maintain a relationship with the grocery store worker, or the milkman, or even your workout instructor - all professions gig'd and virtualized into cough-syrup-sweet anonymity. When was the last time you were lost and had to ask for directions, or had to meet up with someone to catch up vs a phone call/text, or go to a cafe to get good coffee because you lacked the equipment at your house to make it yourself? How far do you live away from others now to protect your peace and quiet? In my opinion, these are the acts of a wealthy society sleepwalking into isolation.

Interacting with other people is varying levels of scary and stressful. With economic pushes towards forming relationships with others removed, it should be no surprise many are drifting away into their own worlds.

The supply of engineers has also massively increased compared to the supply of high paying tech jobs.

Your salary is capped by what you produce for your employer but your salary is determined by how hard it is to replace you. In the Bay with more companies than you could count, they had to fight tooth and nail for these incredibly productive workers, pushing wages higher and higher - capturing the value the workers create. Add in ZIRP and all the startups that creates and you’re looking at a cage fight between employers over workers.

With remote work and the end of ZIRP, suddenly the bay has less startups and the Googles of the world can more seamless employ workers in Cleveland or Bangalore. What does a Bay Area worker gain from this, access to tech jobs in Cleveland?

Found this to be an interesting case study of history with all of the discussion around lower birth rates. Not directly applicable, but interesting.

The part that piqued my interest:

>By 1911 there were in Ireland about half as many people as in 1841. Less than half of the total depopulation can be attributed to the Famine itself. The rest reflects low birth-rates and high emigration rates.