54 karma · joined February 8, 2024
I worked as the only developer at one company, one of 5 at another, and one of 50 at the last. The small team is ideal: division of labor, but everyone still kind of knows everything about the whole software package.
You’re missing the actual point of my original post
It’s bizarre.
SMUD time of day. Ran the AC super cold during the night (so it would run the entire off-peak period). Ran it somewhat cool during mid-peak. Didn’t use it at all during peak.
Other appliances I only ran at night.
Installed lots of insulation at move-in.
Like I said in OP, Sacramento. YMMV.
But in any case I’d argue $360 is still not expensive per se given the value you’re getting. How many square feet were you cooling? What else was operating?
It’s just about perspective. I was responding to the claim that electricity is expensive.
Might have been a bit over $100, but I’m just as flabbergasted at your $278.
Even during 115 degree heatwaves in a 70-year-old, 3-bedroom, single-family home. Most I paid was $100 in a month with 2 people with gaming computers working from home.
Not everyone has that kind of money, but my point is that most people have cell service and other services which add up to more than electricity costs.
That’s fine, I make no judgement of what people spend. I’m just setting a comparison. For how much value electricity provides us and how much we use it, I wouldn’t call it expensive, even in California.
YMMV by city, but it wasn’t an issue in Sacramento. The real monster is climate change, and so here we have a chicken-and-egg problem combined with wealth disparity.
I think we need comprehensive social program packages to address this.
If I’m being honest, all of these are true:
- I had life circumstances making me depressed and I get why I was included.
- Multiple projects I spent over a month on were just thrown away casually when management changed their mind. So I was being paid without creating value.
- I don’t think tech workers are overpaid per se, but most people are underpaid given the effort they put in or conditions they work in.
Even as I made great money as a tech worker, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t providing value to society. Or even arguably the company, even when I tried.
My favorite Orwellian phrase is “Human Resources”. In a publically traded company, headcount is another number to advertise in the game of stock evaluation. People themselves become speculative assets.
I still benefited from this system and most people in the US have it worse than I do. That said, I find the expansion-layoff cycle icky.
I live in Portland. I’ve been cornered for my opinion on urbanization, so I’ll give it.
But at least here, many people have black and white opinions. Either you don’t care about the environment or you don‘t care about displacement.
This is why we needed the Green New Deal or Build Back Better. Urbanize, but increase social safety nets, provide rent control…
I don’t claim to know which levers to pull, but we definitely need to pull more than one at once to meet the goals of increasing density without driving people out of their own neighborhoods.
But doesn’t it seem strange that increasing density would increase displacement?
The US has a lot of political barriers to things like the Green New Deal. So when areas are urbanized, those against urbanization can point to the flawed execution and they certainly have a point.
That said, I’d love to see the Green New Deal return.
I don’t know where you’re coming from as for safety. A single family home doesn’t imply safety and an apartment building can have both indoor and outdoor play areas.
Yeah, for sure I believe that cities, walls, friendships, food chains, economies, armies, language… this all rests on meeting the basic human needs of shelter (security from elements and hostile actors), food (security from starvation), community (security of a support network).
Would you care to present a your own views? Or to dispute the reasoning that follows from my stated values?
If not, then we aren’t going to agree. I’m very much in favor of streets not being designed like the video game Frogger. Listen, I like snowboarding; adrenaline is a blast. But I don’t know why getting groceries has to be an adrenaline rush.
I’m making a joke. I’m coming into this debate with established opinions. But even if you’re not going to win me over, the floor is yours to persuade future readers that speed and carrying capacity are more important than safety. Or to argue that I’m presenting a false dichotomy.
What I don’t find acceptable is accepting the status quo just because it’s the status quo.
But then that’s exactly why cars have stop signs. They trade high speed and carrying capacity against lethality.
Part of it is to slow cars down and take more cars off the road rather than changing who drives.
Invest in public transit, redesign problematic infrastructure, and create mixed use urban areas so people don’t feel the need to travel through a city.
A city should be a safe place. More deaths in a slower zone than on freeways is preposterous. I understand the reasons why this is true, but the deeper reasons for the reasons are that we gave up.
Fewer, less deadly automobiles is what the goal really should be.