First, as far as I can tell you're equating likely foreign state propaganda with what appears to be a diffuse meme organization so they can't be assumed to be the same thing.
Secondly, for political messages it should be clear who the message is coming from! If this organization is coordinating messages that should be public (though from looking them up it sounds like they are already fairly public with it).
Open, fair, and honest elections are important. People always whine on about what the other side is doing but I want that fixed, too and I would gladly work with anyone that wants to fix both but sadly it's much more common to see continuous deflections to the other side (because they know their side is indefensible) rather than a desire for real change.
The population more than halving in the next century causes issues for normal people with expenses of supporting aging population and maintaining infrastructure with an ever dwindling percent of the population working age. There are some benefits to lower populations but also significant practical drawbacks to working class people.
Buying one million when only ~20 million are in circulation is shocking, to put it mildly. It would be 5% of global supply just owned by the US government. Assuming prices didn't go up much after they started buying it would be 100 billion dollars worth
> Buying one million when only ~20 million are in circulation is shocking, to put it mildly. It would be 5% of global supply just owned by the US government.
In a lot of states there was a more than 3x increase in price which I think is hard to justify as a difference in stock. Median square footage for homes now is only 1835 square feet (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDSQUFEEUS). There are also a lot of arguments like how quality has gone up but building technology has vastly improved. Either way that the price increase is mostly a function of housing quality doesn't seem convincing to me (I've seen really garbage houses go for crazy amounts recently).
One example is my grandparents' home was built in the 1930s. It's a small home but in a good location and they said when they were younger it was worth ~200,000$ (I don't know the exact decade they were talking about here but from context it was somewhere in the 50s to 70s). The literal exact same house is now worth around 3,000,000$. The house now needs a lot of work (it actually decreases the value of the land) but the price is still 15x higher.
> It's a small home but in a good location and they said when they were younger it was worth ~200,000$ (I don't know the exact decade they were talking about here but from context it was somewhere in the 50s to 70s). The literal exact same house is now worth around 3,000,000$. The house now needs a lot of work (it actually decreases the value of the land) but the price is still 15x higher.
If this is true, and using 1960 as our middle of the road, then this isn't exactly "egregious". 200k in 1960 is 2.1M today just accounting for inflation. If we use 1950 it's 2.6M and if we use 1970 it's 1.6M. Now sure the house needs work, but I also. bet the area even if it was "good" when they built it in the 1930's how many more people are living in the same location now all vying for the same plots of land? People often gawk at what their parents or their grand parents paid for their houses, but rarely consider what living there would have been like 30 or 60 years ago. I have some relatives that bought a house outside a developing area about 30 years ago that's probably seen an easy 3-4x increase in value (of which only 2x would be accounted for with inflation. But the difference between then and now is that when they bought that home, it was 1 of 6 on a street in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and undeveloped land. There was a single main road that ran through "town" about 5 minutes away that had 2 gas stations, and 3 fast food stores and a grocery store. For anything else you were driving 20-40 minutes into the nearest city (or around). They commuted every day 45 minutes into the city. Today that same area is bursting with new homes, there's now 2 exits / entrances onto the highway within 10 minutes of their house, the main street is jam packed with businesses and filled with strip malls and shopping centers with multiple grocery stores, and a good chunk of the main "national brands" you might expect (Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart, Gamestop etc). And just about anything they don't have along that main street and it's adjoining centers can be found 15 minutes away in the shopping centers and neighborhoods that sprung up between them and the city. In short, the house they live in today is in the sort of place some folks looking to move into a thriving and growing area would want to move into, and the house they bought 30 years ago was in the sort of backwoods sticks that such people would be avoiding as "too remote".
I never said that all or even most of the change in price is simply a function of changes in housing stock. I simply stated that changes in housing stock is something you must account for.
Also, your example of your grandparent's home is long tail. Some places have seen skyrocketing prices that have everything to do with the location (and zoning restrictions limiting stock of housing in area). Example would be Santa Monica. Lots of coastal towns in California. But median, not mean. Think about all the one-room shacks that used to exist. You don't see them anymore because ... why would someone keep them around now? The homes that survive are the ones that retained enough value to make it worthwhile to keep up/restore.
Here in southwest Virginia, an empty lot near town might be about $40k. A house built on that will have multiples of that value.
This has been one of the hard things to deal with working in tech. Tech has advanced so much but am I happier or more connected to people than my parents were at my age? Not really. I've had an existential crisis recently about what all this work I've been doing is for. Outside of work I've been using less and less tech and I think I've been happier (like today I have a physical cookbook and a couple handwritten recipes instead of using recipes on my phone).
It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management.
When I worked at Google everyone always said their favorite thing about work was their coworkers but when push came to shove they aren't willing to organize to help them. I get why many people don't want to organize but it made me happy to be gone, without cooperation they've just continued to be yanked around by management. I loved my coworkers, when management was shitty to them I wanted to fight!
> It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management.
Some employees are like the Boxer character from Animal Farm[1]. I vividly recall Amazon employees complaining about Amazon's new leadership principle "strive to be Earth's best employer", and once the job cuts started to hit home there were employees attacking fellow employees with jabs such as "being the Earth's best employer means those who do not like it should just leave", and "you're whining here but 10 would eagerly take your place".
One of the biggest scams is making you believe that your fellow employees are looking out for your best interests, as there were no backstabbers around.
When I worked at a big company I did a lot of mentoring and the dissonance between what people I mentored thought was the "right thing to do" and what it seemed like the organization wanted them to do (enforced via performance reviews or other mechanisms) was a huge hurdle for new engineers. Especially early in your career you're just one engineer in a huge org and most people eventually decide it's easier to go with the flow than fight against it (or they leave) but it was a struggle for people to get there.
This post seems the logical conclusion of that. Why spend your time and stress doing work that your boss doesn't appreciate? Just give them what they want, it's their job to align that with greater organizational goals.
All this being said I did not love working at a big company, partially for these exact reasons.
Not sure if / who am I quoting, but this thought isn't my for sure: the more layers of management the company has, the more times the incentives are inverted between the planning at the very top and the implementation at the very bottom.
It does often feel like Chinese whispers to the people at the very bottom: the orders make no sense whatsoever due to the distortion coming from the middle management. And, I totally agree with your assessment that OP sounds kind of sarcastic about the whole thing. Also the way they phrase it suggests it: it's not even what your boss wants, it's what's going to make your boss happy (if the boss is an idiot, they might want things that will end up making them feel sad, but that only makes your job harder as now you should also anticipate what would actually make them feel happy rather than dully following their advice.)
My parents were very supportive of me emotionally and I turned out a lot more resilient than many my peers, especially the ones told to "suck it up". The takeaway from the anecdote about children getting hurt on playgrounds isn't to just ignore them, you need to support them if they are actually hurt. My reading is that they aren't forcing kids to stay home and parents can choose to have kids stay home, I don't see an issue with letting parents decide.
It's hard to see where on the line this is between "supportive" and "coddling" without knowing the kids, for example one of my best friends is a woman married to a trans woman and is worried about needing to move states if a conservative wins. She absolutely has a good reason to be upset if conservatives win nationally and in our state as she's worried she won't be allowed to keep her marriage or her wife will have trouble accessing healthcare (it's already hard for her to find doctors who are accepting)
Edit: to be clear I dealt most things on my own growing up but reliable support helped me (and other people in general) learn healthy coping mechanisms and resilience. Who cares if the school lets parents decide for their own kids what they need, kids are different (and they are still kids)?
Secondly, for political messages it should be clear who the message is coming from! If this organization is coordinating messages that should be public (though from looking them up it sounds like they are already fairly public with it).
Open, fair, and honest elections are important. People always whine on about what the other side is doing but I want that fixed, too and I would gladly work with anyone that wants to fix both but sadly it's much more common to see continuous deflections to the other side (because they know their side is indefensible) rather than a desire for real change.
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