Are there even rich people in Europe? It seems like Europeans are mostly poor with a small super wealthy elite.
Unlike the US where most people are middle class, a sizable number are rich (millionaire plus), and most of the wealthy come from either already well off families or self made.
Everyone craps on US (I mean we are the best at everything lol good and bad) but that’s what happens when you’re the best and at the top of the hierarchy. People say shit about you. It’s not like I care much about that because my life as an immigrant to the USA is phenomenal to say the least.
But I always wonder why Europeans just seem so… stagnant? Like they’ve basically plateaued. Idk.
I’m from a former “colony” so it’s not any concern to me. But I always see these kinds of posts and wonder.
Western Europe's economic, tax, regulatory, and social welfare systems are a positive and negative, depending on who you ask.
Compared to the US, only a small segment of the population is either very poor or very rich. Everyone is basically lower- to upper-middle class.
But there's a price to that large safety net. The above policies create a disincentive to innovate and build wealth - the reason behind the stagnant you mentioned.
America: the sky is the limit.
Western Europe: lower-middle class is the ground floor.
In the US and Asia, people seem to be trying to claw their way to the top. Not everyone succeeds obviously, but some do, and I'd say many others at the very least improve their lot in life.
In Europe, it feels like most people are just content and satisfied with their current lot in life, and even those that are not, aren't really motivated to significantly change their position in society.
Can't speak to Asia, but the big difference between US and EU is that US has a lot more variance in quality of life. Its quite a bit easier to monetize skills, but its also quite a bit easier to become poor because of lack of social safety nets.
In EU there is very little variance, so most people don't see the value in extra effort that they have to put in to get ahead. Middle class is undoubtably much better off in EU - you have a lot more social safety nets and assistance, and furthermore, because most of the people around you are generally in the same boat financially, the lack of materialism is actually quite good for peoples mental health and finances.
The only caveat is, EU can have this sort of setup in large part due to economic influence of US. A lot of wealth from US is exported to EU, which goes on to fund the social safety nets. You wouldn't think that 2007 housing crisis in US would go on to affect job markets in EU, but it very much did. Also, US pretty much subsidizes military capability development costs for all of EU.
I wonder if it’s a chicken or egg thing too. The same amount of effort it would take to substantially improve your financial situation in the US…does not feel like it would have the same impact in EU. If that’s the case, then I can see people just going “what’s the point?”
There are around 23 million US millionaires. I’m not even sure that single million is “rich” any more, particularly if that includes the value of all retirement accounts.
(Post the pension era, $1M safely provides only about $40K/yr in retirement income for a 30 year retirement.)
I would not buy a Tesla today. I used to dream about the Roadster 2.0, but I don't like the direction they've gone in design of the car. I'm hoping the Corvette EV impresses, because that's likely going to be my next car.
There are plenty of people who work until they’re able to take a risk without destroying their family’s well being.
We don’t hear about the failures because it’s a tragedy. But I’ve worked with a lot of failed entrepreneurs in their 40s. It’s clear they aren’t happy in their jobs but also have no choice now.
Might be due to some of us growing up really poor. I’m from a third world and I remember lack of water and electricity, five plus people crammed into a home the size of my current apartments living room. We used to use kerosene lamps and heat water and I grew up in the 90s. Even today my parents don’t own a home yet and they have rented their whole lives. They still work. It’s really up to me to resolve all our issues. And that’s my duty as their child, everyone has their circumstances.
My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.
Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do. They have well off parents who own at least one home. Somehow these people send their kids to private school or can afford to buy homes in great public school districts.
I’ve noticed the people in my situation more often than not are from a similar background. We grew up poor and we are trying to build our wealth. I work in tech so I can’t speak for people from other socioeconomic backgrounds. But this is what I experience.
Most of my friends are other Asians. I don’t know it seems like Americans are mostly well off.
I promise circumstances are not going to get better. Many individuals who eventually become parents wouldn't have taken the leap if they had waited indefinitely for what they deemed as "perfect circumstances." It's perfectly acceptable if you choose not to have children; after all, it's your decision. However, and Frankly speaking, it becomes tiresome to hear the implication that parents who took that leap have a more privileged situation than the tech community on platforms like Hacker News.
fwiw every 40yo I know who had kids at that age wish they did it earlier when they had more energy. Wealth building is easier in your 40s however for most
Hold a 10lbs weight on your arm for three hours (simulates an infant trying to fall asleep in your arms). Do this for six months, three times a day.
Lift a 20lbs bag of rice off the floor to your hips once every 20 seconds for two hours (simulates a toddling-walking child wanting up). Do this for a three years, six times a day.
Get up off the floor in a hurry once every five minutes for two hours (simulates the toddler-child doing something they shouldn't). Do this, I dunno, forever.
Lift a 40lbs bag of dog food over your head every five minutes for 4 hours (simulates an older child wanting to play). Do this for 10 years, five times a day.
There is a lot of other 'cardio' like things mixed in too. But the above should give a sample of the physicality of child rearing. It's a lot of low weight, very high rep, long workout, long interval, isostatic exercise. You're mostly holding things near your center of mass for very long times, adjusting between arms. And you have to get up off the floor a lot in a big hurry.
For those who want kiddos sometime in the future, maybe about 2 years from now - this won't change, 2 years from now you'll still think 2 years from then is going to be the time. Just stop and have one. It'll turn out ok, probably - and the sooner you get one, the easier you'll handle the toil, 1% of which is described by the parent post ;)
> Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do.
Same here, but looking back to my hometown and how it is now, it wasn't this way even just 20 years ago. Now even well-to-do doesn't guarantee kids, and lower and middle class folks have simply stopped.
Which bothers me a lot. I think many people are catastrophizing themselves into thinking they can't afford it, and in a few decades we'll all be worse off. I'm especially tired of couples making more than $200k/year talking about how it's effectively child abuse to send their kids to public school, or if they can't somehow guarantee an Ivy League golden path then it just isn't worth it.
The truth is we've been so 'scared straight' about the difficulty of parenthood that many of us want nothing to do with it. Life is easier without them.. not as fulfilling sure, yadda yadda
But saying we can't afford it sounds a lot better. In most places in the world, and through time, less money corresponds to more kids. So it's easy to see though this excuse.
> My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.
There's a chance you won't make it, though. And at some point, it does become too late.
I’ve used launch darkly and I think it works fine. Pretty good for larger companies imo.
For my smaller projects I’ve used simple kv stores and user id lookups to handle it. Works fine.
Depends how advanced you want to go honestly. If you want to go bonkers use LD. If you want something simple like literally serve X user Y content you could set something up yourself in 30 minutes.
I think it’s fine as long as an email is always collected.
This way if the phone is compromised your email is still there.
As far as convenience goes it is convenient in actual practice as an end user. I’m sure even if 1% have this issue that’s billions who are not. It’s cheap and it’s convenient. Your phone gets the message and autofills.
You don’t need to switch apps to check email or something. And your account will always be recoverable as long as your email isn’t compromised. If you lose your email I mean that sucks. But that happens anyway and it’s why people should rotate passwords and set up MFA.
Security can never be 100%. That’s just a fools errand. It should be convenient enough and secure enough that it works for as many people as possible.
Literally everyone else outside of HN doesn’t even care or understand. They don’t need to. Just use the apps to do your thing and move on.
The universe is infinite. FTL just makes it slightly less infinite.
FTL means we actually get to see the grandeur of the universe instead of hypothesizing mathematical models of it. Without FTL, we'll never leave this star system. The grandeur of the universe will be nothing but our imagination, instead of a real thing you can see with your own eyes.
I was explaining to my kids yesterday that it took 33 years for Voyager to leave the solar system, the next closes star is 2,000x further than it’s already travelled. That would require infrastructure to support 100 generations of humans, 99 of which would be indentured by their ancestors to a life stuck inside a space-ark. And it would only require one of those generations to fail for the whole endeavor to fail. And there’s nothing there, it would take another 50 generations to get to what is hypothesized to be a habitable planet.
Human existence doesn’t scale to inter-star system travel.
That's why I choose to believe that FTL will be possible at some point. Otherwise we may as well be the only life in the universe, the rest is dead and pointless. If we can't leave our solar system, our entire universe may as well just be our local system and everything else is just neat wallpaper.
My money is on a quantum theory of gravity unlocking the ability to cheaply warp space.
The Voyager is nowhere near max speed, nor is current biological age the final limit on human life span. If you survive another 500 million years or so, you might meet some aliens then. https://grabbyaliens.com/
If FTL were possible, causality breaks too. Plus if there's other life out there who have discovered FTL, we shouldn't even be here. Don't get your hopes up for more than a tiny portion of the universe ever being explorable.
How big of a lunatic would our great-great-great grandparents have considered us for telling them that soon the several-month trip across the USA will pretty soon take an afternoon, and going to the moon will take 3 days?
Sure, traveling at Voyager’s (impressive, but essentially wagon) speed won’t get it done. But betting against technological advancement has made fools of a vast many.
Generally it's taken for granted that the technological problems with generation ships can be solved with sufficient time and resources. We can probably build a metal box that lasts for a thousand years. We can probably design a sustainable closed ecosystem. We could probably build fusion reactors that run on interstellar hydrogen collected with ramscoops.
But the real problem with generation ships is not technological. Technology can't solve the fundamental social and psychological problems of locking some humans in a box for a hundred generations. That's the most important problem, and the one that's usually waved away with "oh you just can't imagine future technology"
You'd probably need to create a religion for them about some gods/ancients that they are serving in their mission. That seems to be how humans stay focused on long-term social organization across generations.
Mormonism seems well-suited for the religion role you mention since they have the concept of a particular planet being close to the residence of their god: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob
On the contrary, nothing would make me excited about existence more than knowing our limits have vastly expanded. Less of unknown, sure. But unimaginably more of grand human civilization, knowledge, diversity...
Our ants may have many questions too but we don't seem to understand whether they even have questions and we may not even know how to start engaging with them to answer them. Surely they don't seem to respond to our level of intelligence, so we should adapt to their level in order to tell them something they can understand. But if we achieve that, will the ants really perceive us as a higher level of intelligence? We would clearly stumble our way to approximate a communication channel the best possible way with them and use the feedback to learn how to get better at communicating, but that may take a lot of effort on our side because we may always assume we "bottomed out" their intelligence level and that's pointless to continue probing.
I now ask you to imagine an analogy with a species that is as smarter, bigger, more powerful and radically different from us as we are to ants.
Be careful what you hope for. For all we know, the answer might be, "Sorry, human, I'd love to chat, but I need to get your dish cleaned and racked up to dry before they close the lab for the eon. Now, how do you get the childproof cap off this bottle of antineutronium..."
Unlike the US where most people are middle class, a sizable number are rich (millionaire plus), and most of the wealthy come from either already well off families or self made.
Everyone craps on US (I mean we are the best at everything lol good and bad) but that’s what happens when you’re the best and at the top of the hierarchy. People say shit about you. It’s not like I care much about that because my life as an immigrant to the USA is phenomenal to say the least.
But I always wonder why Europeans just seem so… stagnant? Like they’ve basically plateaued. Idk.
I’m from a former “colony” so it’s not any concern to me. But I always see these kinds of posts and wonder.