I am curious what the UK was like 20 years ago, can't say I was very aware around that time. Would love to hear your thoughts on how and why its gotten worse.
I think its easy to shit on the UK at the moment because we're in this period of relative decline. The point I was trying to make was that in absolute terms, it's still a great place with a lot of upsides, it just takes more work to realise it and even more work to be grateful despite of it all.
Going from 5 to 4 hurts, going from 3 to 4 feels good. Either way, you're still at 4. It's on the people of Britain to recognise that 4 is still OK, better than the 2 that many countries experience, and better than the 1 of fighting lions and being murdered by your fellow tribesman because he's bigger than you.
10 years ago the entry level SWE salary for FANG was about 160k USD.
Today, about 100K GBP or EUR are still "senior" SWE salaries at a lot of non-FANG tech companies around UK and Europe.
In that time, the currencies have also cratered against the USD.
The question is, which is it? Do engineers generate so much value that they should earn hundreds of thousands or are US engineers overpaid.
Given that most the FANGs generate over 1.5M per employee I'm inclined towards the former. Europe/UK is just poor. Our markets are smaller, our dreams are smaller and we settle for lower salaries while around us everything else gets more expensive, land healthcare education and energy.
Companies here might not be making fang money but they are underpaying. You have to push harder and people here tend not to do that here. Most I know value their free time above everything and so they want easy ok paying work, not millions while working their asses off. If they don’t appear in the office or take an ad hoc vacation they don’t want to be yelled at. Personally I have almost always made fang+ money as developer (since the early 90s) in Europe. I am good at what I do but I also have a big mouth and I mesh well with c levels; we become friends usually. Unfair for my colleagues but it’s not like don’t tell them to speak up and bluff; they don’t want to mostly because they think it encroaches on their freedom (not sure if it does; in my company it doesn’t; just less shares).
Modern PHP is a pretty good language. Not my favorite, but it's not antiquated. And there's tons of websites built with it (granted Wordpress and Drupal are the majority of them).
I got shutdown on twitter on this subject once - but I maintain can crime stats go down while crime goes up? As crime rates go up (and police get flooded) do people stop reporting all but the most serious of crimes?
I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized.
Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?
off topic, but if I view using incognito then just click YES or REJECT ALL->confirm is that a way to escape this madness? Or should I just nope out of pages like this, seems like the content was pointless anyway
I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother.
She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God.
So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions.
Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again.
Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap...
Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community.
Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...
Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...
Even in light of what the Christian Nationalist movement is striving towards in the US, and in light of the ugly persistence of fundamentalism in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan?
I wonder if it's like any technology and trade offs between helping/hurting people. If religions help 95% of people be more loving and 5% be more hateful, would it be a net benefit? Does it depend what those 5% do with the hate or the 95% with the love? What if the percentages were different?
Obviously an overly simplistic thought experiment, yet I wonder if we have any way, that isn't arbitrary, to say if a tool is net beneficial.
Side note...I've often played with the idea in the past of what I called the case for moral superposition: nothing is good or bad, everything is good AND bad, but thinking makes it good OR bad.
It's more like 50/50, though. So in practice it mostly just amplifies authoritarians telling us to either submit or go to hell. The other (loving) half gets so non confrontational we never hear of them again.
I think the "loving" half is often not fully loving but other-loving and self-hating.
"I feel annoyed that this person is doing this thing. But if I say something, they may feel angry, so I won't say something... And then will fight against myself instead."
I really appreciate you answering in such detail and feel grateful that your mother has found such an anchor to keep her faith in humanity, herself, and beyond. What a blessing for her, for you, and for all of those her life touches. Thank you.
Twitter. Look for people that aren't trying to bamboozle you with wishywashy arguments or anyone who tries to make things sound too simple or are sales-y.
Best is to follow people who are speaking in precise technical details where you're not the audience. A bit like software engineers talking to each other: speaking in precise technical terms, assuming a reasonable amount of background knowledge. AKA professionals
Then do your own work to clue yourself up on the nomenclature and basics
>Just the usual reminder that people should not be taking financial advice from random people on the internet.
There are lots of people on the internet putting out super valuable insight and/or trying to educate the unsophisticated masses. Putting out a blanket statement perpetuates this myth that finance is only for professionals, just like coding.
The culture of open source has led to high-trust collaboration in the software community. While anything involving money attracts grifters and scammers, that doesn't mean that there aren't honest and open people out there giving away gifts.
Much like you shouldn't just blindly execute random code on your machine from an untrusted individual on your computer, you shouldn't just blindly open a position on something without thinking hard about the decision for yourself.
Please define functioning police force? The fact the police had to remember that turning up to burglaries is a good thing suggests otherwise
Please define takes care of sick people? The fact that ambulance response times were so slow they couldn't save cardiac arrests suggests otherwise
No offence but all those assertions sound like the UK 20+ years ago, not the one of today...