mancerayder

> Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.

Your entire message is extremely localized to your state. In New York State, the state marketplace a, are only HMOs with limited networks, b, are expensive with high deductibles, c) don't have all that much coverage. In California, by contrast, the plans are a lot more extensive.

In many states, no one pays 1200 a month for a family. My COBRA would be 1200 a month, and if I went with a marketplace plan probably closer to 800. Me. Alone.

And yes, paying for risks that don't apply to you is how insurance has to work, or the insurance companies go bankrupt.

The DSA has a narrow agenda: Israel is number one, second is immigration, racial and gender issues, maybe a distant other wish is actual socialist principles. In other words, it truly feels as though the left in the U.S., just as the right has done for years, narrowly focuses on culture and social issues... When economic issues should be the focus. "The rent is too high" stuff in NYC is just dressing - they only touched the rent stabilized units, which is half of the rental stock, and almost every mayor limits those increases. And it doesn't help anything.

What happened to "Medicare for All" being #1? How did we get here, that Israel and ICE are number 1? Did we not learn from the Right about 'Wedge Issues'?

Me, in my fantasies.

Sadly I'm tightly mortgaged and in a very high cost of living area in the US.

My plan is to move to Europe so I can cut my cost of living in half, not stress over health care, and eat real food instead of fake American chemicals. Need a few more years ..

You're repeating talking points that seem ideological in a response to a direct, falsifiable set of assertions. That's the most terrifying thing about ideologies, whether right or left - they just don't pay attention to debate or facts, but stamp repeated assertions religiously.

Did I misread? I hover over the Nuclear and it literally says 0% of electricity is nuclear" for Germany.

Your theory is just that - theory. Just talk to someone who owns property, or do the research. Insurance costs, Up, energy, Up, when something breaks, it costs more to fix it. It's basic input cost math.

I don't know what 'efficiency gains' means here. Maybe you're thinking of car production or software development. Insurance goes up due to climate change, due to insurance companies taking advantage of a poorly regulated environment, whatever other reasons. Energy goes up due to world events, due to more people, due to extreme weather. Labor costs go up due to inflation.

It feels as thought the 'rent is too damn high' crowd needs an enemy, and the enemy is landlord. And again, not a landlord, but I'm getting bitten by high costs of keeping property. I didn't even talk about the property taxes.

If I WERE a landlord, I'd either pass it along to the tenant as higher rent, or I'd sell the damn thing.

Well the Greens in Europe handed Russia leverage thanks to relying on natural gas instead of nuclear, which it opposed (thanks German Greens).

In France these ideologues oppose A/C becauase it's evil: it makes us comfortable when we should be uncomfortable - if we are comfortable in an era of climate change, we'll only make it worse. And it's all America's fault anyway because of their emissions.

When do we vote out ideologues and have logical people in power?

Underlying rent are other things going up - property taxes, input costs like labor and materials, and insurance.

While we must be mindful of greed and abuse, we need to include all underlying costs before just assuming people are cranking up rents. I'm not a landlord but I own property and the costs are gotten vicious lately. Labor is expensive, materials are insane, energy costs, and now insurance are suffocating. And in states with high property taxes, watch out.

If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each.

Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS

Software was leaner!

Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.

Too late! Win10 Pro absolutely demanded and harassed me til I upgraded to the dreaded 11. I put up with it for gaming and did registry hack workarounds to stop the stupid web connectivity and TV-like content it was pushing. It wasn't enough. The system was rebooting with updates all the time, messing with my settings I'd googled, and then someone on HN said:

'Linux on the desktop runs Steam games better than ever. Join us, brother.' I installed Fedora Workstation 43, played my games (albeit with a few quirks), but then as a side effect started all these little Linux and Claude projects after I got home from work, which I hadn't done since my 20s.

Thank you, brother!

It's extreme heat because there's a strong moral opposition and infrastructure immaturity when it comes to air conditioning. Look no further than France where there's even air conditioning in trains but they keep it borderline off, and where nursing homes and hospitals don't have A/C.

It's a mix of cheapness, climate change as things got hotter, and the unfortunate influence of Green types who believe in suffering.

So much capital has exited even the dominant coins. Is it another low to be inflated up again in a year or two? This has happened every single time The End was declared.

Won't that filter out actual sane people who would find Pascal knowledge requirements off-putting? It's like if you said, must have experience with OS/2 Warp to a DevOps guy. Or do you mention somehow that it's an AI canary signal?

I'm in agreement in general. I argue against people who think Manhattan should be more dense, or parklands should turn into apartment blocs.

The problem with a lot of the US is that the city designs are atrocious - if you can call them designed at all. Americans don't really understand how to create public transportation systems and to urbanize suburban areas. Instead of looking at Europe and copying, we bicker and argue and support this broken idea of local government. Btw, that's not a right or left thing - community groups are touted as a great thing to fight against gentrification, or over development in blue states, and defenders of freedom in red ones. The issue is the multi faceted bickering making it impossible to progress - why don't NJ and LA suburbs not have the best public transportation in the country or world? They easily could. It's just bad government and a lack of centralized planning at the federal level.

Here are two.

Suburbs, good ones with low crime, access to jobs and good schools are desirable. Desirability leads to prices going up. Prices going up leads to property tax revenue going up. That budget going up leads to a higher $/pupil for schools, better infra, etc... Increasing desirability.

So, not a supply problem.

Here's another. Jobs are in cities. People don't like commutes, and value not owning a car if possible. Young people like cities. People go there, causing demand to skyrocket, while companies hire there. Places like NYC and Paris and London are not Houston - unlimited development would ruin the cities. There's no amount of supply that would ever make these cities cheaper. Moreover the land itself is expensive, and the building costs (labor and other costs), so there's a floor to what things should cost.

In every one of these conversations on building, you get these Reddit-style upvoted comments akin to 'it's due to zoning and NIMBYism'.

Newsflash, the world isn't California. The problem of housing costs has a lot of dimensions.

I propose - abolish the property tax paying for schools like in most of the country, and distribute school funds equally at the state level. This would reduce wealth inequality.

Second - let's revisit this return to office idiocy. If I have a million dollar apartment in a city, it's because of my commute, not because I necessarily enjoy or want to be there. More than happy to sell it to someone else who'd enjoy it more (a young person - what cities are for).

Some companies don't know what they want and there's internal confusion. I've observed this first-hand. They'll release recs and shut them down a few weeks later, confusing HR (or HR confuses everyone), maybe re-open. It's annoying but more disorganized behavior than fake jobs.

How do you enforce that?

I don't even know what I applied to that's a ghost and what isn't. Maybe I'm completely clueless, but there's no difference: recruiters ghost, sometimes companies ghost and sometimes they reply, sometimes you get an F U letter, you're not good enough, sometimes not.

How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? I feel like the swindle must not be new.

Isn't that Scale AI investment in a company that does labeling? what are we missing? Are we all going to be labelers soon too?

I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).

All this is true, but the abortion restrictions are state-wide and a real issue while also remaining a symbolic turn-off for women from blue states. The bigger issue is the influence of Christianity on the legal system, which approaches third world levels for such a rich state.

What's your hosting stack? Do you stick to one type? How are things maintained long-term?

Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.

I think you're coming from a privileged position - finding a job is extremely hard*, and if someone stayed somewhere that paid well then it's a bit extreme to say they're "bankrupt" morally. Alternatives are finance, ad tech, big consulting, etc. Are YOU working for a non profit?

* For us, maybe not for you.

Not 30k a year, even in a LCOL area. Where's your health insurance? Do you even bother with it at that level?

He's saying there's no direct connection between effort and wealth. He works and made 140k, seeing his portfolio go up 140k a year by itself. So what's the point?

You and he are in different language games. His is an existential philosophical one, yours is the financial planning one.

Both make sense. I'm trying to transition to his, but I'm not ready yet.

What's the Point? is exactly the question we should be asking ourselves.

Gas is misleading - petrol / oil would be better. I don't know if natural gas is going up, but if we mean pump prices of the liquid that goes into cars: that's also used (although with some differences) to heat people's homes - oil heat is extremely common in rural areas. This winter it cost me about 600 dollars in one month to heat a home in the Northeast I kept at 60 degrees except weekends!

Electricity is even worse.

Petroleum also impacts industrial goods prices, flight costs, etc. It's more than just a talking point for drivers.

I fully agree. For some people, science is appealing to authority, though, that is the nuance here.

Are we doing studies ourselves? Of course not. Are we reviewing a multitude of papers ourselves? We generally don't have the time.

Science evolves and sometimes it's good to use your brain. You're probably too young to remember science pushing fat and cholesterol being bad, which not-so-helpfully contributed to a massive sugar push in the US in the 80s. And I'm sure you remember the push for mask usage and social distancing during COVID, while science told us that 'racism is a health emergency' to help justify street protests.

It's a good balance to care about science while still maintaining a human brain with independent thoughts.

Could it be urbanization? Young people are more food conscious with before (organic food popularity, vegetarianism, which is good for reducing red meat consumption risks , awareness around ultra processed foods, banned chemicals in the EU, podcasts with bro science, etc).

Urbanization means exposure to chemicals and pollution and stress, and even if there are higher life expectancy, it's probably correlated with wealth since cities are increasingly for affluent people.