A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.
This is a good argument. In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life and financially never recover if it fails once.
It's a little different with tech, as you usually don't have as high costs early on, but still. There is an extremely high risk involved that most people simply can't afford.
What's the alternative tho? If you take a loan, in most countries you're expected to pay it back, no? Do you think people should be able to default without consequence?
In many countries there is the idea of bankrupcy. You make the debtor suffer for a couple of years (to ensure incentive against it) and then wipe the slate.
Bankrupcy is no fun. All your assets are wiped out (house, cars, etc). Sometimes you are excluded from the banking system. So it's not "without consequence".
Lending money is a risky business. That is why you get interest. Getting people off the hook is not ideal, but neither is the inverse. From a societal point of view, this arrangement allows people to take risks that they may not have otherwise. And we're all better off because of it.
Most of Europe does not have bankruptcy laws comparable to the US. Technically they do exist but the differences in the details are so large they may as well be called two different things.
Also, the reason people go bankrupt in the US are very different than the reasons people go bankrupt in Europe. 2/3 of personal bankruptcy in the US is linked to medical debt somehow. That is not the case in Europe.
Why would they exclude elderly from their study? It seems odd to exclude a population with higher rates of health problems. Is there assumption that bankruptcy only matters to those who would otherwise be working?
Ah, there's the old "everyone who disagrees with me is arguing in bad faith" argument the internet loves to make. Wondered how far down I'd have to scroll.
Technically true. It's paying the bills on top of the second mortgage after helping your 30 year old grandkids afford college, weddings, and starter homes that leads to bankruptcy. A surprise one-time medical cost is only a minimal contributing factor in the arc of recurring mandatory prescription, insurance, and care costs, at that point. My inner Humean rejoices.
That coupled with private equity's involvement in all late / end of life care ensures no one dies with a penny to their name to pass down.
It still paints a picture of an out of control, over-financialized system that only gets more expensive the more money is put into it.
While this article points out some potential problems in the methods used to derive that headline political figure, its own methodology seems to have pretty serious flaws. The most I'd take from this is "This is such a bad problem that even when you try pretty hard to look in the wrong place you find it anyway".
This study deliberately does not - just for example - count it as a "medical bankruptcy" if you weren't hospitalized. So magically every person who was bankrupted by the cost of their must-take prescription medicine, they don't count because they need to be admitted to hospital to count for this study.
The thing to take from it is not that the figure the linked study arrives at is "right", but that the cited 2/3 figure is seriously flawed to the point that it shouldn't be cited.
As it is, the 2/3 statistic is mainly used to score political points and indeed one of the authors of the original study that came up with the 60% number is Elizabeth Warren. Now, you could say she participated in her capacity as an academic, but I personally have a hard time believing she would have put her name on the paper if it had found, say, 4% of bankruptcies came from medical debt.
Yeah I mean you can certainly have the opinion that any amount of medical bankruptcies greater than 0 is unacceptable, but that has nothing to do with my original point that the 2/3 number should not be cited in discussions about bankruptcy.
It's still pretty clearly far less wrong than stating 2/3 of bankruptcies are caused by medical costs.
If people are arguing about whether the Earth is flat or spherical, you cant use the fact that both are "wrong" (as the Earth is closer to an ellipsoid) to say that "flat" is as correct as "spherical".
If a study concludes that x/y bankruptcies are caused by z but makes no assertion of the total number of bankruptcies, I would be very suspicious that the author was forwarding his agenda via a weird counting methodology.
More that bodies respond to stress of all forms and people who have a failing business might push themselves beyond reasonable healthy limits to avoid that outcome, leaving them in a situation where their finances are wrecked just in time for all the chickens they stored up not getting enough sleep, pulling a double shift, working through the pain, etc. to come home to roost.
And even were it true, would it necessarily be a bad thing? Personal bankruptcy is an orderly process in which an individual gets to legally terminate all his debts. If a person with medical debt declares bankruptcy, his creditors lose out but he still has all the medical treatment he went into debt for. He still has all the non-bankruptcy-liable assets (e.g. certain pension and retirement benefits, and in many states his home and vehicle) he started out with.
Medical bankruptcy isn’t really the problem. Medical insolvency might be, but the two alternatives are not to receive treatment at all, or for the State to pay for it. The former is obviously worse, and the latter is arguably worse when looked at in toto.
Haven't checked in a long time but I remember you can easily have 2-3 years with only 6 months in actual jail. But it leaves a lasting stain on you, after that nobody will want to give you money for a while. At least 5 years I think.
Without consequence, of course not. But you should be able to 'separate' your professional and personal life, even as an entrepreneur.
I would NEVER found my own business if I knew that going bankrupt would take away my kid's house. This is why instruments such as limited responsibility companies have been invented.
Knew a guy who tried to outsmart tax rules and founded the company as his wife's. Also had a big mortgage on their house. She fell in love with the local butcher (no joke) and one afternoon they emptied the bank account and flew to Goa. That guy lost his wife, his company and his house in one afternoon and went straight to ER with a heart attack.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I imagine if you have your own butcher in the first place, you are somewhat particular and specific about what you want (kind of similar to a lot of people clinging onto their usual hair stylist/barber for their dear life, once they find one that does things the way they like). And I would bet that the number of barber options around would be much larger than that for butchers.
> But you should be able to 'separate' your professional and personal life, even as an entrepreneur.
Why? In case of success, you have the personal benefit from it. So why should other people and society take the bill in case of your fail? Or how exactly is this supposed tor work?
This is pretty much exactly the point of limited companies: You can tell that you're dealing with a limited company because of the name suffix, and you know (or should know) that if that company fails, you risk losing anything they owe you and there's very low chance of going after the proprietors.
If I go to open a restaurant and I can convince a bank to lend me capital to start the business, and then it fails, I can see an argument for why they shouldnt lend me money to open a second restaurant, at least not right away. But why should I be penalized in personal life for a business failing. Should the bank get to take my house if my restaurant fails? Should I be prevented from getting a credit card?
Where is the money coming from? And who should pay the bill you have left, when you fail? It will not disappear, and for the health of the system it can't disappear, so where is it going?
The party lending the money is knowingly taking the risk, and they get compensated for that risk by charging an interest rate that both sides agree to. There is nothing inherently nefarious about business loans. Some loans work out, others don't, and a competent lender will usually come out ahead in the long run.
well, thats the risk the bank takes when they lend my business the money, that I might not be able to pay it all back. they eat the loss, minus whatever they can recover from assets left over. and I get a mark that says you should think twice before lending me money for a restaurant again. but my life isnt ruined. i get to keep my house, i can still participate in financial society. the alternative is, as someone else pointed out, only those with lots of resources can afford to try to create new businesses. the US policy is that its worth it to have a more lenient bankruptcy process, with more bankruptcies that are less ruinous, since it leads to more risk taking (ie new business formation).
In Germany, your life is not ruined if you go bankrupt and have to pay for the fail you created. Society still gives you shelter, food, healthcare, even if you have lost your luxury. So there is no reason to make wasting resources and harming society simple.
Germany has limited companies - it's what GmbH's and AG's are for.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where "wasting resources and harming society" by having a company with limited liability go bankrupt isn't fairly simple.
Germany, like some other companies in Europe has fairly "high" requirements of share capital, but it's still only 25k Euro.
well, its not harming society, its harming the lender. we obviously want to have protections against people taking advantage, but ultimately its up to the lender to make sure that the borrower has a realistic plan to pay back the loan, at least within whatever risk parameters they are willing to accept. In the end, its a tradeoff, the US has higher new business formation, especially from less well-off members of society, but more of those businesses fail.
I could not possibly disagree. But in a world with fewer lenders who have more rigorous qualification practices, are we paying lower rates? Kinda seems like no but we are now in the land of fourth order effects so who is to say.
Liability limitation exists in order for people to take risks without losing everything. A person or persons can form a company (such as a corporation or limited liability company), invest assets in it and so long as they conduct business properly their personal assets are safe from business creditors. Part of conducting business properly is typically that counterparties know that they are dealing with a limited-liability structure (e.g. by ‘inc.’ or ‘limited’ in the name); another part is complying with the law (e.g. typically failure to pay employees can lead to claims on personal assets).
This offloads some risk from the owners of the company to its business partners, it ended up enabling a real revolution in business formation and ownership. In a lot of ways it has had a democratising effect, as many more folks can afford to invest in a company than just those who are wealthy enough to bear the risk of unlimited liability.
You generally have to either have a ton of capital or a great idea to get started without any personal liability though. Nobody's going to loan money to an LLC with no assets without a personal surety.
If a large corporation takes out a loan, even a substantial one, and fails, the corporation can just go bust and the people behind it have no responsibility.
A new business generally requires a director's guarantee to get a loan, completely defeating the point of a limited company.
But that's the norm almost everywhere. Try going into a regular US bank and ask for a loan for an LLC. Almost everywhere will expect collateral and/or a business plan and/or personal guarantees if the business is new. Some countries have more risk-averse banks than others, but it's a matter of degree not a fundamental difference, and generally reflected in interest. And it then just changes the calculus of when you look for investors rather than lenders.
Il am not sure I think that, but as a matter of fact successful people tend to be bankrolled by either friends, family, or some kind of extended network that allows them to fail several times. I think it is unfair, and I find it really obnoxious when they lecture us about grit and bootstraps instead of being grateful for their network or luck, but it is what it is.
Yes, exactly this. A second chance is a safety net, available mostly to those with the circumstances or resources to deploy it. One helpful circumstance being youth (plenty of time), while an obvious resource is personal or, more likely for the younger, parental wealth.
Attitudes to risk taking are similar, e.g. your fear of high wire walking depends hugely on whether you have a safety line or not. Wealthy kids might pride them themselves on taking chances where the reality is that in their whole existence they have never been exposed to the possibility of paying the price for failure.
Ah that's why they're complaining about the student loans.
In The European countries I have been living in, the concept of personal bankcrupty doesn't exist in the same way, at least. People who get too much loans kind of just hang with them, after 15-20 years they are forgiven AFAIK.
Btw, my suggestion for the US would be to remove that special bankruptcy exception for new student loans.
That's because once you do that, the supply of new student loans would most likely dry up. Thus shutting off the money fountain for the education industry.
Your suggestion wouldn’t work because nearly all student loans (over 90%) are issued by the federal government, which does not (and for political reasons, never will) evaluate credit risk.
> nearly all student loans (over 90%) are issued by the federal government
Not claiming you are wrong, because I genuinely don’t know, but how does it gel with the fact that the federal student loans for undergrads cap out at the max of around $9.5-12k for independent students and $5.5-7.5k for dependent students per year[0]?
Given all the outrage I see online, where people claim paying upwards of $20-40k/yr for attendance, wouldn’t they need to supplement it with private loans?
I dont doubt that there are more federal loans out there than private ones (because it always makes sense to get the federal ones first, and only go for private ones later if needed, so pretty much everyone who has private loans also has federal ones). But what about in terms of the actual loan dollar amount?
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera... (“As of the first quarter of 2023, student loan debt in the U.S. stands at a total of over $1.77 trillion. More than 92% of this is federal student loan debt while the remaining amount is owed on private student loans, according to Federal Student Aid (an office of the Department of Education).”).
That 92% figure is in terms of debt amount, not number of loans.
The limits you mention are per student. Parent PLUS loans are limited only by the school’s official cost of attendance: https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/paren... (“The maximum PLUS loan amount you can borrow is the cost of attendance at the school your child will attend minus any other financial assistance your child receives. The cost of attendance is determined by the school.”). Schools are extremely aggressive about ensuring parents are on the hook for the loans so students can take out the maximum.
That’s a good point, thanks for bringing it up. It pretty much resolves the conundrum I was having in my original comment.
Small caveat (that ultimately doesn’t negate your point): PLUS loans have credit check requirements for determing eligibility[0] (with exceptions available in certain cases if you can satisfy additional requirements, like bringing an eligible cosigner who can pass the credit check).
An alternative is to tie the federal student loan program to a regulation in school cost. If the school exceeds some threshold, their students are no longer qualify for federally-backed loans. Granted, it creates administrative burden but it’s the only proposal I’ve heard that seems to address the root problem of tuition costs and almost unfettered access to collateral-free loans.
That's unlikely to be accepted for other reasons. Putting a limit means most will approach that limit, and those that exceed the limit will be even more unaffordable. Plus no one will agree on what the limit should be. Which makes them extremely unpopular (except for benefits to individuals which of course should have the lowest limit possible nationwide)
>Plus no one will agree on what the limit should be.
We do this with drug reimbursement costs and construction already and I’m pretty sure those for-profit companies would also disagree on what the limit should be. I also don’t think it needs to be a one-size-fits all threshold; it could be adjusted to COL and/or job prospects that are tied to graduate statistics. IMO that goes a long way to aligning the incentives of the student and the institution.
Yeah, I intentionally didn't say it wouldn't happen, just unlikely :)
Personally I think limits (and significantly higher grants to make student loans unnecessary for a basic post-secondary education) are needed. But I think it's worth recognizing that limits will make what's already a very divisive issue, even more divisive...
I think more thoughtful limits would be a good idea. I also think the reduction of aid money has been part of the problem. I just don't know where the money comes from to shore up that problem.
I have seen other pilot programs. I think it was Purdue who was considering "buying stock" in students, where the student would pay a portion of their income for a certain number of years in exchange for a scholarship.
We are to judge because we are the taxpayers who guarantee the vast majority of those loans. That’s the mail reason I said “collateral-free.” Most of those loans would not happen in a private market because teenagers, in general, do not have collateral to secure the loan, meaning they have little to lose by defaulting.
Their degree and future earning potential is supposed to be the collateral.
Unfortunately, the earning potential of a generic bachelor's degree seems to have mysteriously fallen at roughly the same time a flood of students were offered huge loans to achieve them. Maybe some day we'll be able to find the connection.
I don’t think that’s correct. You can’t put up “future earning potential” as collateral while simultaneously allowing for discharge of debt in bankruptcy. That results in an incentive to incur as much debt as possible and then declare bankruptcy shortly after graduation when the impact is negligible. That’s the whole reason why student loans aren’t generally dischargable in bankruptcy.
I agree that's the theory, I disagree that it actually is what would happen in practice. E.g., if the government stops guaranteeing the loans I seriously doubt banks will accept "future earning potential" as collateral. So I disagree that it's actually collateral (your initial claim). The real collateral is the govt promise to back up the loan.
So the question still stands: if the government no longer guarantees the loans, what is the proposed solution to prevent banks from no longer lending to students?
I’m not against that, but I do think just getting rid of federally backed loans previously causes more problems. (Ie it’s one of those simple cures that may ignore blowback) Do you think there is an opportunity gap to be closed? If so, how do you think that would work?
> (Ie it’s one of those simple cures that may ignore blowback)
I actually want exactly the 'blowback': I want student loan creation to fall off a clip.
> Do you think there is an opportunity gap to be closed?
What is an opportunity gap?
> If so, how do you think that would work?
I'm guessing here what you mean by opportunity gap. I think the cheapest way is to open the US labour market to virtually anyone on the globe. That would be good for the US economy, wouldn't cost the tax payer anything (in fact you would save on border enforcement), and the people with the least opportunities globally would benefit enormously.
If you only care about Americans, I would suggest to give poor people money, and let them decide what to do with it.
Eg whatever the cost to subsidise education (including subsidised student loans) right now, just pay it out to poor people. Than they can buy education, or whatever else they deem more necessary.
>whatever the cost to subsidise education (including subsidised student loans) right now
It sounds like you may not understand how the system works. It doesn’t cost the government anything, with the exception of the loan repayment pause surrounding COVID.
I know the simple solutions like “Just give away money” can be seductive, but IMO they generally don’t work well in complex and nuanced problems. People aren’t rational actors by and large, and it’s a mistake to assume they can be modeled as such in many cases.
I'm talking about real costs. The government doesn't lose money by guaranteeing loans (in fact they make money, which is a totally different — but reasonable —argument against the current setup). I assume you mean opportunity costs as in "what else could the govt fund" with that money; if that's your claim, it again belies a misunderstanding of what's going on. You seem to have created this false narrative in your head that doesn't reflect reality.
There is much research, especially in behavioral economics, that shows that more objective decisions can be made by creating systems that facilitate more rational decisions. So my current position is that we should set up systems/institutions to foster those better decisions rather than push everything down to the individual, given the complexities of modern life. So to directly answer your question, there's decades of research that shows individuals aren't great at making rational decisions at the individual level. It's also interesting that you simultaneously seem to claim the "state" should make decisions, but also that institutions don't know what's better than individuals. It doesn't make for a very cohesive take.
> I'm talking about real costs. The government doesn't lose money by guaranteeing loans (in fact they make money, which is a totally different — but reasonable —argument against the current setup).
The government guaranteeing arbitrary loans isn't free in economic terms. Just like eg increasing the length of patents from 20 years to 40 years ain't free, even though it won't show up as a cost on any government balance sheet.
So what do you think the non-monetary realized cost is? And that cost compare to the benefit of a more educated populace?
At least with your patent example, we can measure it in economic terms, since patents are a commercial protection. Once we start getting into wishy-washy measures, people can make just about any arbitrary point to fit their narrative.
I think that's a potential part, but to play devil's advocate: don't you think this may exacerbate the opportunity gap? I.e., those who are the best bets (in terms of not defaulting) are also those who come from well-off backgrounds?
Unless someone else (like parents) stand as guarantors, I think the greatest predictor for a default will be how competent the candidate is after finishing the education.
Also, instead of allowing a bankruptcy at any time, student loan down payment could be limited to max 25% of income after tax OR 10% of net worth, whichever is greater, with any balance after 30 years transferred to the college.
Objectives:
1) Reduce the incentive for colleges to offer education tracks that they KNOW (or should have known) will never lead to much beyond a minimum pay job.
2) Prevent unlucky or unsuccessful students to get stuck with an impossibly large loan that just keeps growing, absorbing all they earn or own.
3) Ensure that students still do feel some pain when this happens, but not so much that they lose all incentive to build themselves up. They still keep 75% of their income after tax AND they're guaranteed that the loan will end within 30 years.
4) Incentivize pricing of of the student loans in ways that reflect the risks involved. If students that study "lesbian dance theory" have to pay a 10% interest rate while Physics students pay only 5%, that's a pretty strong indication that the "credit score" for the former is pretty bad.
5) Also incentivize minimizing cost while maximize the useful learning for the college, to minimize the risk that they'll be stuck with too much of the debt.
If this leads to some (presumed worthy) students having fewer opportunities than they otherwise would have, it's still possible for the collages, government or others to provide stipends or other similar forms of support.
That's why we shouldn't subsidise education in the first place.
The net benefits of education accrue to more than 100% to the customer. And, people from well-off backgrounds can and do take more advantage of education.
We should just give poor people money, and let them decide for themselves how they want to spend it. If they want to spend it on (unsubsidised) education, that would be fine choice for them to make.
I do agree that when you subsidize something you get more of it. So there’s a case that in some instances like education, it’s a good thing. Most people probably agree that a more educated society is better than a less educated one (although I agree there’s still room for debate on what that education should entail). The issue with an open-ended handout is that you don’t know what you’ll be getting more of.
> So there’s a case that in some instances like education, it’s a good thing.
That's where we disagree, I guess.
I don't mind education in the sense of people learning something. That's harmless enough (but doesn't need special subsidies. Just give money to the needy, and let them decide whether they want to invest it in a library membership.)
What I'm against specifically is education in the sense of getting a certificate at the end. A degree etc.
That sort of education has negative externalities and should be highly taxed, not subsidised. It leads to an arms race of credentialism, and is a big reason why eg a high school graduate can't get a decent job these days.
(There are plenty of jobs that used to be done by high school dropouts, that haven't changed all that much. But now require a degree, if you want to be considered for an interview.)
I think we actually agree largely on the education piece, that’s why I gave the parenthetical. I don't get the impression you really think a more educated populace is worse, but we may disagree on how one gets educated. There are many routes to education, and I think it’s wrong to think all people need the same route. But I think you’re committing the same error by assuming the library route works for everybody.
I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries). But I wouldn’t go so far to say credentialism as a whole is worthless. I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
What I do see on HN is that the crowd generally biases towards libertarian autodidacts and that colors much of their worldview.
> I think we actually agree largely on the education piece, that’s why I gave the parenthetical. I don't get the impression you really think a more educated populace is worse, but we may disagree on how one gets educated. There are many routes to education, and I think it’s wrong to think all people need the same route. But I think you’re committing the same error by assuming the library route works for everybody.
The library was just an example. People can use their own money and time to pursue whatever route they wish. They can attend schools (and pay the fees), they can go to the library, they can read Wikipedia, they can do an apprenticeship, etc, whatever works for them.
> I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries).
Alas, no. Employers aren't stupid (and neither are workers). Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
For an individual worker and an individual company, the credential is a useful signal. Just like it's useful for an individual country to get some extra nukes.
But from an economy-wide perspective, it's just an arms race. (Similarly, there's no global benefit from every country getting some extra nukes each.)
> I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
I'm not an American, but I think the FDA is pretty much useless. (But that's mostly because it's a federal agency, and the relevant authorities should probably sit at the state level at the highest or even lower. With voluntary coordination between the different states. Very similar to how traffic signs and rules are regulated and coordinated.)
I think your response is overly cynical. As the Oscar Wilde quote goes, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The FDA is far from perfect, but I have much more confidence buying a drug regulated by then than some pills sold at the convenient store.
>Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
I personally think employers use credentials because they are incentivized to be risk adverse. It’s easier to defend a binary credential than to accurately gauge skillset and cultural fit through a behavioral interview. HR is concerned more with reducing false positives than letting a good candidate slip through the cracks.
I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden. I suspect that’s why you see a convergence on societies setting up a “council of elders” (ie govt) when they get to a certain size. Most of the people who lean into the unnuanced libertarian ideal tend to also lean towards certain troubles managing social dynamics.
> I think your response is overly cynical. As the Oscar Wilde quote goes, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The FDA is far from perfect, but I have much more confidence buying a drug regulated by then than some pills sold at the convenient store.
I suggested that state level agencies can do that regulation. Why do you bring up the straw man of unregulated drugs?
Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs. In fact, many countries are even smaller than many US states. So it should be certainly possible for US states to regulate drugs. (Especially since they can cooperate, just like they do on traffic rules or the Uniform Commercial Code.)
I'm not sure why you want to paint my position here as some radical 'libertarian' fanatic? Even the Catholic Church likes subsidiarity, and it's (in theory) one of the guiding principles of the European Union. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
Aren't you the cynical one? I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots and know what they are doing. And you suggest 'hold one, they probably are idiots'.
> I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden.
Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way. We have examples from successful societies in other parts of the world and in other parts of history doing just fine with a lot less of that. So your argument from universal convergence doesn't fly, when there is no universal convergence in the first place.
Because it illustrates the problems of scale. Much of commerce is regulated at the federal level because crossing state lines makes the complexity of the problem much harder to manage. UCC is not a very good example; it has barely changed in half a century, in part because getting all states to update and agree becomes onerous. As an effect, the UCC largely boils down to a contract law policy of "shut up, pay me." That type of approach isn't great for handling nuanced problems.
>Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs.
You do understand much of this is predicated on the very institutions you are maligning. A vast and disproportionate amount of pharma R&D is done in, and regulated by, the U.S. Other countries generally use that information as a proxy for in-house regulation. Ever wonder how small countries manage to regulate their aircraft without much overhead? It's because they accept the US FAA certifications. They effectively outsource the oversight to the US.
>I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots
If you review my comments, I'm don't think you'll find me using the word "idiot." What you will find is that I claim individuals act irrationally and also struggle to manage information when the complexity of society gets high.
>Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way.
If you read carefully, I have not been an advocate for subsidizing education per se. What I am saying is we need to be careful of the blowback of simple solutions. If the intent is to increase education, subsizing it is one way, but it obviously has unintended consequences. Simply removing subsidies does not necessary fix the problem without creating second order problems of its own. I'm saying we need to be cognizant of that, and asked for solutions that effectively manage those consequences. Generally, those simple fixes like "remove subsidies" or "just give people money" belie a lack of nuanced understanding and risk creating more problems than they solve. Most of your perspective seems to be built on an overly simple model of human behavior that tends to break down on complex situations.
Germany has Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren. The individual's credit rating will be negatively affected for several years after the completion of the procedure. The insolvency proceedings are recorded in a public register, which can be accessed by anyone. The process typically lasts for six years, during which the individual must adhere to a strict budget and make payments to creditors. After completing the six-year period, the remaining debts are discharged, provided the individual has adhered to the terms of the insolvency plan.
Step 1 is außergerichtliches Schuldenbereinigungsverfahren where the debtor attempts to reach an out-of-court settlement with creditors. This stage usually lasts up to 6 months.
Then there is Eröffnung des Insolvenzverfahrens where if the out-of-court settlement fails, the debtor files for insolvency with the local court. The court appoints a trustee to manage the debtor's assets and liaise with creditors. This stage typically takes 1-2 months.
Next there is either Regelinsolvenzverfahren or vereinfachtes Insolvenzverfahren. In the latter if the debtor's assets are insufficient to cover the costs of the proceedings, the court may initiate a simplified insolvency process. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan to the creditors, which includes a 6-year repayment period. If the plan is accepted, the court approves it, and the debtor begins making payments.
In the former, if the debtor's assets are sufficient to cover the costs, regular insolvency proceedings take place. The trustee liquidates the debtor's assets and distributes the proceeds among creditors. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan, which typically includes a 6-year repayment period.
After the insolvency plan is approved, the debtor enters a 6-year good conduct phase called Wohlverhaltensperiode. During this period, the debtor must adhere to the repayment plan, maintain gainful employment, and inform the trustee of any changes in their financial situation. The debtor is allowed to keep a portion of their income for living expenses.
If the debtor complies with the terms of the insolvency plan during the good conduct phase, the court grants a discharge of the remaining debts called Restschuldbefreiung. This typically occurs 6 years after the opening of insolvency proceedings.
This is really not that different from bankruptcies in America. I think Europeans are simply unaware of their options.
In the US Chapter 7 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 10 years, making it difficult to obtain credit, secure housing, or find employment. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a matter of public record, which can be accessed by anyone. The process is relatively quick, typically lasting 4-6 months. Most unsecured debts, such as credit card balances and medical bills, are discharged upon completion of the process.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 7 years, which is less than Chapter 7. Like Chapter 7, Chapter 13 bankruptcy is a matter of public record. The repayment plan typically lasts for 3-5 years, during which the individual must make regular payments to creditors. After completing the repayment plan, the remaining eligible debts are discharged.
Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren lasts longer (6 years) than both Chapter 7 (4-6 months) and Chapter 13 (3-5 years). Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 involve a repayment plan, while Chapter 7 does not. Chapter 7 has a longer-lasting impact on credit ratings (10 years) compared to Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 (6-7 years).
France has a procedure called "rétablissement personnel," which is similar to Chapter 7 in the US, allowing individuals to liquidate their assets and discharge their debts. In the UK, individuals can file for bankruptcy or enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), which is similar to Chapter 13 in the US.
You declare bankruptcy and walk away, more or less without serious consequences so long as you were not deliberately fraudulent. You may have trouble getting another loan or conversely you may find it easier now that you have relatively more experience than before.
Germany in particular takes a moralistic approach to finances that IMO harms the economy quite a bit and constrains entrepreneurship to the well connected and already established. You are only supposed to start businesses that succeed.
In reality money is not a real thing, money is numbers in a computer database that we collectively signal and coordinate the economic activity and utilization of the resources that hold the real value. As such a certain amount of default well above zero is optimal to maximize the amount of real world value being generated.
>> As such a certain amount of default well above zero is optimal to maximize the amount of real world value being generated.
Someone who had worked in banking once told me they adjust lending standards to maximize profit. I was shocked that this meant about a 6-7 percent default rate on the mortgage loans. If you are too stringent you won't lend any money and if you let it flow freely you'll fail under all the defaults, so yes there is an optimal amount of failure even for the lender.
> you may find it easier now that you have relatively more experience than before
There's a dude on twitter who has been detailing his process of going through a bankruptcy over the last few months. I think he lost about $4M. He's discussed another business idea that he's had and his plans for implementing it. Now, a month after his bankruptcy has been final, it seems that that some investors are very interested in going forward with him on this new venture. It's likely that his openness about everything was what caught their attention.
This is how bankruptcy is supposed to work: fail at something and there's a path to recovery.
> Germany in particular takes a moralistic approach to finances that IMO harms the economy quite a bit and constrains entrepreneurship to the well connected and already established. You are only supposed to start businesses that succeed.
It's more pragmatic, than moralistic. Germany aims for high quality in business and workers, the whole system is based around this. USA seems more aiming for quantity. Just throw money at it, and see what sticks. But the difference is, USA is very big and wealthy in resources and manpower, so it can afford this. Germany, like other European countries, is rather small and lives from connecting with others. So efficiency is very important.
My experience is incomplete I will admit and possibly outdated besides, however I speak German, regularly consume a fair about of German news, and I spent a few months living in Munich. The attitude I've observed, especially among older Germans, is that buying with credit is a moral shortcoming while paying with cash is virtuous. High interest rates are considered good because they reward savers, conversely people complain about low interest rates as an injustice.
Also, Germany has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so not as large as the US or China, but I wouldn't exactly call them "small" economically.
> Also, Germany has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so not as large as the US or China, but I wouldn't exactly call them "small" economically.
US GDP: $28.7T
China GDP: $18.5T
Germany: $4.5T
Also, Germany is relatively small when it comes to land area, has to import most of the raw materials, and heavily relies on subcontractors from China. They do not really play in the same league as US and China.
Bankruptcy in the US for example, is way more straightforward for businesses compared to individuals. Its not nearly as frowned upon for businesses. Take for instance:
In Silicon Valley for instance, many founders of successful businesses had multiple failures founding other startups first, it seemingly is part of the Silicon Valley ethos, almost looked at with a badge of honor.
I've also heard first hand of banks requiring from business owners to be personally liable for the loans even for well-established, successful businesses. And when you are trying to extend your facilities, the loans are not in the 10k range..
If the banks gave cheap credit to businesses without any collateral or any real liability, they would quickly go out of business because of people taking advantage of them. Credit without collateral is available (e.g. credit cards), but it’s not cheap, and it’s limited in size.
We are not talking about consumer loans for financially illiterate pigeons ready to be plucked.
As stated, we are talking about established, multi-generational businesses with high-end equipment already in use, that would more than cover the necessary collateral by orders of magnitude.
From what I could find it bankruptcy in Germany takes 3 years after a change in 2020, which I find is pretty reasonable and is the same length as in the US...
Well it's high in Europe in general. And seems quite similar like in the US. That is you can use a rough estimate of 40%, meaning half the time you're working for the state. So the problem is not taxation as much as low wages. Germany has lower wages than US, Romania has lower wages than Germany. State skims half what you make anywhere. It's the absolute amount you are left with that makes the difference and that's why Americans have more money to spend on businesses than Europe and Europe has more than Asia and Asia more than Africa.
I agree, it's difficult in most countries. Germany has tons of additional laws regarding taxation too. I for myself wouldn't even want to try opening up a business solely due to the taxation expertise I'd have to look up into. Don't get me started on international business too... It's just too much. Kudos to whoever manages to get through all that as a one man business owner.
As someone running a business in Germany I think you're overestimating it. I have a steuerberater (accountant/tax-advisor) who is also doing my bookkeeping and he takes care of all that. When my UG was young paying him was a few €100s per year overhead. Today (when my company is turning over several €100Ks per year) it's a couple €1000s per year (so relatively negligible expense for my business).
There's still plenty to complain about regarding bureaucracy and red tape but don't let this alone deter you from running a business (especially not a software startup).
I'm pretty sure it's pretty much like that in most other countries (at least most other European countries). I believe its the US/UK that are unusually easy to open a company in.
No. But it's complicated ... For example, income tax is charged on the employee, after the employer has been charged employer/social fees of 30-40%. And then, sale of most goods are charged ~20% VAT.
The total taxation pressure "per hour worked" is far above 40%.
Total tax wedge (including employer/social fees) for a single person with no children earning 167% of the average worker in Germany was 49.2% in 2023 according to OECD Taxing Wages. Most of the other categories they measure (a matrix of single vs married, no vs 2 children, and 67%, 100% and 167% of average wage for one of the partners w/ the other person at 100%) end up closer to the 40% mark (as low as 28.4%)...
But most people do not count employer contributions, because they are not part of the negotiated salary, and most people don't even know what they are. Yes, they of course affect how high salaries businesses will offer.
In terms of income tax and employee contributions, in the OECD scenarios Germany maxes out at 41.2% (the OECD average is 30%; the US is at 29.1%). As a comparison, Belgium is "always" worst in class on this in Europe, w/47.8%.
Overall Germany is still one of the highest tax countries in Europe, but it also has a higher difference than most countries the highest taxed (high income single earners) and families with children in total effective tax rate - for the later, Germany is much closer to the pack, to the point of being near or below the OECD average for a couple of categories.
VAT in most countries add very little, because most of your gross income does not go towards VAT rates products - for starters you're first paying tax, and then covering housing and most places exclude a number of others things from VAT as well. Depending on country and income level and spending patterns, it does add a few percentage points, but it's rarely significantly skewing the overall taxation level all that much (last time I did the numbers, at a far above average income, VAT increased my total taxation by about 4%)
The US tax levels are lower than Europe, but it mostly events out when you account for health insurance with exception of a few of the highest tax European countries (Belgium always being the extreme outlier, and Germany is usually second, at least of the OECD countries, depending on your specific circumstances)
I'm sure the executives at Chase or JP Morgan struggle to wipe the tears of loss from their eyes with 100 dollar bills once you default on a loan their underlings made to you.
The very purpose of even smaller banks is to spread risk across multiple loans and investments in such a way that a client's bankruptcy doesn't ruin them at all. Given the interest rates they charge on certain financial services, they seem to have no problem not going under themselves in most cases.
Yes, exactly. It's amazing how people don't see that the _whole_ point of banks is to aggregate defaulting risks across a very large number of loans to power the economy.
Eg they also provide 'checking' accounts. There's no conceptual reason why that function needs to be bundled with the 'aggregating default risk' function; but it happens to be so in many countries.
To illustrate, on the one hand, think of an institution that takes deposits and lets you transfer money to pay your rent etc, but doesn't make any 'real' investments: all they do is park the deposits in government loans.
On the other hand, think of exchange traded funds that invest in a wide array of bonds (or even equities). They diversify defaulting risk across the economy, without taking deposits, like your typical bank does.
The ability to provide loans from nothing is the special feature of a bank, which is why they are so heavily regulated. The deposits are just the opposite half of the loan creation. No bank invest deposits - they're a liability to the bank.
(And if banks could create loans from 'nothing', so could any other company that can issues bonds.)
There have been episodes in history with very lightly regulated banks, and they were very stable banking systems by and large. See the 'free banking episodes' in eg Canada, Scotland, Australia and China. There was no 'creating loans from nothing' that needed to be regulated away.
If a company issues a bond and I buy it then I have to give my own existing money in exchange.
If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
> If a company issues a bond and I buy it then I have to give my own existing money in exchange.
> If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
Sorry, your analogy doesn't work out, because the roles are reversed.
Look at the situation where a company sells me a bond, to be paid back in ten years. But instead of me handing money over to them, I give them an IOU (or credit line) that they can draw down any time they wish to.
We can create this pair of bond and IOU out of nothing, just like the bank can create deposit-loan pairs out of nothing.
However, just like with the bank, people don't borrow money to let it just sit there. They want to invest.
So they spend their deposit, and draw down their IOU.
And once your customer does that, you better have some money in your 'safe' that you can hand to them.
In the classic case, that money comes from outside deposits.
> What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
You can do that, sure. And if that was all there was to banking, it would be a fantastic business to be in.
Alas, the whole point of taking out a loan is to spend the money on something, eg to invest it.
And once the bank's customer withdraws the deposit half of that newly created pair of anti-particles, the situation isn't nearly as symmetrical and neat anymore: the bank better have some money in the vault to be able to satisfy that withdrawal request.
(Slightly less antiquated: the customer will likely spend their borrowed money electronically, but then just means that you need to have the funds available to settle with the bank who runs the account on the receiving end of that transaction.)
> Generally there is legislation that then brings these 'deposit holders' under specific requirements.
Even without legislation or specific requirements, you can't just keep creating these loan/deposit pairs out of thin air. At least not, if your customers are supposed to be able to spend their borrowed funds.
"And once the bank's customer withdraws the deposit"
Withdrawing is always just transferring to another bank - even if that bank is the central bank.
Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank. That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Everything else is a collateral optimisation.
There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
> Withdrawing is always just transferring to another bank - even if that bank is the central bank.
No. You can withdraw cash. But you are right, that the common case is a transfer.
> Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank.
That's one way they can settle. But at the end of the day (or whatever the relevant period is), they send each other the net difference in the underlying base money. These days, that's deposits at the central bank.
> That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Correspondent banking being important is mostly an American thing (and perhaps a 18th and 19th century English, but not Scottish, thing, too.)
> There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
These days, the 'vault' is (mostly) an account at the central bank.
A bank can just magic up an account with $1M in your name, sure, but when you show up to withdraw the money they have to source that currency from somewhere— Their loans won’t be held in very high regard if you can’t then use the loaned money to, for example, pay for all of the various labor and materials you need to build your new house.
Except that they don't have to source that currency from somewhere - it really is literally magicked up out of thin air! When you come to spend it, that amount is transferred to another bank, that they can then offset against their own magic money.
The only relationship with deposits (which are actually liabilities) and assets is that enforced by regulators.
This is how money creation works in the modern economy - so the money supply can grow as economic activity increases, all guided by central banks / governments with levers such as interest rates, open market activities (QE), and regulations.
Again - banks really do create money from nothing, all day, every day.
No they don't, banks have accounts with the central bank. They also have their assets and liabilities. They have to manage the system so that they can manage external withdrawals. When assets outweigh liabilities it's a bankruptcy. When current demand for withdrawals exceeds short term liquid reserves it's a liquidity issue. At no point do banks create base money. A balance in a bank is just an iou for base (central bank's) money.
The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.
Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.
So if someone pays you using a credit card, or using money they derived from a bank loan, presumably you don't accept that money because it's not a loan from the central bank - it's not "base money"?
Incidentally, the only claim you as a lowly individual ever have on central bank money in most (all?) current currency areas is as physical currency, and even then for the most part you only ever get to exchange it for commercial bank money. For the purposes of this discussion, all digital money between most normal entities is commercial bank money. Commercial bank money _is_ money.
I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance, so I’m happy to accept any form of payment that results in an appropriate increase in that number— Just because I draw a distinction between currency and commercial money doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that the latter is money.
And I rarely exchange physical currency for digital money these days— Usually I’m exchanging it for food instead.
> I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance
It (probably) is, but if all of your bank's account holders asked for that at the same time it would be what's known as a "run on the bank" and you'd very quickly find out that they don't have anywhere near enough physical currency to cover even a fraction of their account holders.
Citation needed. I do not believe this for even a single moment.
The only institution that can "create" money from thin air is the government. And even that is a polite fiction when you realize that "printing more money" also inherently devalues the money already in the system.
I only skimmed this briefly (no time), but things operating as suggested (eg the banks loaning money they do not have) would fall into the category of fraud IMO.
Whether that's currently legal or not is another matter that I cannot comment on.
What he wrote is a popular myth that originated in a misunderstanding how fractional reserve works, it just means they have long term assets to cover short term liabilities. There's a lot of this stuff on youtube.
If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.
Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.
You can only really hold the "printing more money" analogy in your head, if you are prepared to balance your thinking and accept that taxation and loan repayment "shred money" and that financial savings is "putting money in a drawer".
At which point you will realise there can be no devaluation since money is destroyed as it moves around, and money in drawers may as well not be there.
I see money as units of resource allocation. There are only so many available resources at any given moment. More units of allocation means less resources allocated per unit.
There isn't and never has been a one-to-one relationship between money and stuff. At best it is inductive.
Just as with electrical engineering, the real world requires a reactive supply, which is what allows electrical innovation beyond direct resistive loads.
Electrical supply engineers hate reactive power, but without it we don't get iPhones.
The power triangle gives the best engineering analogy to the way the monetary system works.
Clearly that's not true as the bank note analogy shows. If you print trillions of £50 pound notes and stuff them into an empty coal mine guarded by many competent people with guns, that's not going to have any impact on prices whatsoever.
While I disagree with somewhereoutth and mostly agree with you, it is true that banks can create money.
However banks don't create money out of thin air. However they can create it out of assets.
As a silly thought experiment: if your bank has a vault full of valuable assets, like diamonds and deeds to houses in prime real estate, stocks etc, they can in principle create loan/deposit pairs (ie make loans and credit the borrowed funds to the borrower account).
When people make withdrawals, especially when they make more withdrawals than the bank has reserves, they just sell some of their assets to cover the difference. That's all pretty normal and boring.
Customers think of their deposits of 100% like money and economically behave as if that was true, but in practice they are backed by 10% money, ie reserves, and 90% other assets.
(The percentages are for illustration only.
Also we ignore minimum reserve requirements and other laws here. Many countries don't have minimum reserve requirements anyway.)
That's a long PDF. What do you want to refer to in particular?
Btw, you might want to study the section 'Managing the risks associated with making loans'.
The pdf is pretty vague about the limits of creating these loan/deposit pairs in general. But there's eg this:
> One way in which they do this is by making sure
that they attract relatively stable deposits to match their new loans, that is, deposits that are unlikely or unable to be withdrawn in large amounts. This can act as an additional
limit to how much banks can lend. For example, if all of the
deposits that a bank held were in the form of instant access
accounts, such as current accounts, then the bank might run
the risk of lots of these deposits being withdrawn in a short period of time.
In general, the limit to loan/deposit pair creation is withdrawals and transfers of the new deposits.
---
Btw, I agree that fractional reserve banking can create money. (Just not base money, and not without limits.)
Fractional reserve banking does not work like this.
You still need assets in fractional reserve banking. Those assets just don't need to be reserves.
Ie 90% of your assets could be diamonds in the vault, and 10% could be reserve cash in the vault. That would be fractional reserve banking, but you still have 100% assets. (In practice, you have more than 100% assets. The excess is your equity cushion.)
If your liabilities outstrip your assets, that's when you are bankrupt. Fractional reserve banking doesn't help you there.
Yes, IOUs of credit worthy people can be part of your assets. But so can be diamonds or stocks.
> B borrows $500, which for simplicity's sake he deposits in his account.
If you stop there, your analysis is indeed correct. However, people don't typically take out loans to stuff the borrowed money into their accounts until the loan comes due.
They go out and buy stuff with the proceeds. So B withdraws the money.
So now you have:
- Assets: 1000$ cash in your safe plus an IOU of 500$ from B = 1500$.
- Liabilities: 1000$ deposit from A + 500$ deposit from B = 1500$.
So far so good.
You can repeat that game two more times, and then you run out of cash to withdraw.
So if you repeated it a third time, you'd need to sell the loan from B to a third party for cash, so you can fulfill B's withdrawal request.
If B is credit worthy, you will generally be able to make that sale. (But it takes time and hassle to organise.) Ie you have short term liquidity trouble, but you ain't insolvent.
If B is a deadbeat, you won't be able to sell that loan for enough to cover the withdrawal request, and now you are insolvent, and go into bankruptcy.
B is creditworthy. That’s why I leant it to him. If I have an issue with liquidity I go to the discount window of my central bank and they will lend me the money.
That’s why central banks typically make the rules about reserves, etc.
> B is creditworthy. That’s why I leant it to him. If I have an issue with liquidity I go to the discount window of my central bank and they will lend me the money.
Yes. But that means you got newly created base money from the central bank. Which sort of goes against the original claim.
> When you come to spend it, that amount is transferred to another bank, that they can then offset against their own magic money.
No. The other banks demand settlement in outside currency. In the olden days, they shipped gold around every so often. Nowadays, in the end you settle in central bank deposits.
You go to a bank with an asset. In this case the new house. The bank then creates a new financial asset called a 'mortgage' that goes on the asset side of their balance sheet. Against that they create a liability called an 'advance' that they give to you.
You then give the advance to the builder in return for the house, where it becomes a deposit of the builder than they can then transfer to anybody else in payment for goods and services.
If any of them happen to be at another bank then all that happens is the deposit is transferred to the bank and it becomes an 'inter bank loan'. The target bank then simply creates another deposit in its books to balance that loan and that is allocated to the customer being paid.
It's all just debits and credits. What limits bank money creation is the assets they are prepared to discount and the creditworthiness of the individuals they choose to advance to and whether the bank believes they can pay the current price of money.
I think you’re glossing over some important details regarding the inter-bank loans. As far as I understand, they are not automatic and must be negotiated in the same way as any other bank loan.
Modulo some amount of transaction batching, when one bank’s customer initiates a payment to an account at another bank, reserves are actually transferred between the two banks (these days, in the form of central bank account transfers).
Each bank’s main concern is managing its daily cashflow— They need to have sufficient reserves each day to cover that day’s net outflow of payments. But holding reserves is expensive; they would much rather use that currency as an advance payment for a new loan if they can, so that somebody else is stuck with the currency.
And here’s where the inter-bank loans come into play: Because most of a bank’s outflows happen on an irregular schedule as directed by their depositors, and they have an incentive to hold as few reserves as possible, they may find themselves in a position where they would need to suspend payments. When this happens, they borrow reserves from another bank in order to continue operating. If the borrowing bank is considered trustworthy by the banking community, they generally have no trouble securing such a loan on standard terms.
Of course, if a bank systematically misjudges the default risk of their borrowers, they may have a bigger problem that their assets (future loan repayments) won’t cover their liabilities (future withdrawals by depositors). If that imbalance isn’t corrected quickly, they will eventually find themselves unable to secure future inter-bank loans because they will have become an unacceptable default risk to the other banks.
"As far as I understand, they are not automatic and must be negotiated in the same way as any other bank loan."
Not in the slightest.
If the bank doesn't take over the deposit in the source bank, then their customer doesn't get paid. At which point they will close their account and move to the source bank. That's a deposit outflow they won't want to have.
Both the source and the destination bank have an interest in ensuring the payment clear. Therefore it does.
Inter bank loan negotiation is about shuffling the risk around for a price afterwards.
"reserves are actually transferred between the two bank"
Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Correspondent banking is the base for payments, and is still used for most international currency payments - even with the advent of the CLS central clearing mechanism.
> If the bank doesn't take over the deposit in the source bank, then their customer doesn't get paid. At which point they will close their account and move to the source bank. That's a deposit outflow they won't want to have.
The destination bank can demand to withdraw that balance. And they typically do that with the net flows at the end of the settlement period.
(And they don't withdraw physical currency these days. The 'withdrawal' comes in the form of a transfer of electronic central bank reserves.)
> Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
No? This is easiest to see in a gold standard system: your physical gold are your reserves.
In typical modern fiat system, the reserves are account entries at the central bank (and vault cash, but that's a small-ish amount).
Private commercial banks can create 'money' via their normal commercial operations. But they can't create central bank reserves that way, nor are they allowed to print central bank notes.
> There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Citation needed. And also an explanation of exactly what you mean by reserves.
(Btw, talking about the 'UK banking system' over the last three hundred years already makes me very suspicious of your argument. During most of that time, Scottish banking differs remarkably from English banking. So there are not many blanket statement about the 'UK banking system' that are true.)
This is critical and often overlooked when it comes to fully appreciating socio-economic factors that influence a person's capacity to "succeed". People with the resources are simply allowed to fail and recover more times than those without.
The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt and be resilient is hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants chasing the American dream.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
The article doesn’t hold true for me, I have used myriad chances to fail, and have so far lived 3 distinct epochs in my life, each one a life unto itself. I owe this to the simple decision of my father to buy 5 acres of raw land a couple of miles out of town and teach me to use tools.
On the basis of that I have never had to rent, I have had my own shelter (starting with a simple cabin and an outhouse) from the age of 16, and I have never been overly dependent on a job to where I wasn’t willing to walk away.
Having simple shelter made it so I could fuck around and find out until I found something that worked a little, then iterate.
I spent many years of my life intermittently in poverty, getting my food from food banks and buying expired surplus from food thrifts, gardening, etc and relying on social programs for medicine, but I was never at risk of being homeless. Always a place to fall back to.
I have parlayed that into a pretty good life, comfortable, productive, and a small economic engine that provides for several families in the community.
My advice for anyone having children: buy land if you can. Not structures, but land. A few miles out of town is fine, because vehicles and bicycles exist. Teach your kids basic carpentry, electrical, mechanical, and masonry skills. Those are the basis of civilisation.
Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed.
I have done this with my children and because of that, they enjoy the same benefits that I had, and are finding their way having known nothing but self determination as the fundamental principle of their lives.
Debt -Free Land you control without many restrictions, not “real estate” is what makes it possible to live better than most people do while technically being in “poverty” by income. That is what makes it possible to take risks. Risks are what makes it possible to find a working solution.
Of course, if you are born into financial privilege, that’s also a great start, but that wasn’t my case. I often struggled to even pay the (very low) property tax.
Without the freedom and willingness to take risks, and the resilience and willingness to endure hardships, you may have to endure being a servant to someone unless you are very lucky, and luck works better if you can make your own.
This might read like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps “ rant, but it is not. For most people, they are trapped in a situation designed to keep them in service of some goal not their own. It is very difficult to escape, and impossible without the proper training for self sufficient action and the complete lack of debt (or the willingness to lose anything you owe money on) You also might have to sacrifice your comfort, security, and literally risk your life or health to obtain the foothold from which you can launch a self determined life.
That is a position of extreme privilege, but it is one that can be obtained if you want it bad enough and are willing to roll the dice, and accept the finality of failure if you do not succeed (looping back to the article).
My point is that that kind of privilege is more within reach that most people understand. But you might’ve have to be willing to give up everything at first to use it. Most people are simply not prepared for the hardship and sacrifice that entails.
Land is still cheap all over the world. Unless you live on an island, You can probably get an acre of land for a months wages at a fast food place (in the USA) within a weeks bicycle ride of where you are. But that won’t do you any good unless you know how to turn that into a place to live and work from.
"Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed."
Sounds like typical American arrogance.
Everything you mentioned about building up a piece of land from zero, is predicated on a stable legal and economic framework, that protects and values private property. And every country that has that framework, tends to have high land prices already. Try this in some non-developed country, and you'll soon see why the world is considered unjust.
The issue is that folks who "try that in a non developed country" often know what they need to do to protect their own private property, which is to hire thugs who will shoot at folks who try to squat.
It’s really not that bad. Instead of paying property taxes like you would in a developed nation, you just make small contributions to political campaigns and help to build a new cuartel for the police in your local town. It’s way less expensive than property taxes and you get very personalised services when your name is engraved on the local police station.
lol. Sounds like typical developing nation defeatism .
I am doing it right now in a developing nation.
I settled here on Hispaniola in 2007.
I am working and living right now in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We’re building up new infrastructure in agriculture, education, and startup incubation. We have already launched a couple of successful ventures.
Here are not the least stable places, but they’re hardly the most stable either. But the rewards are huge for those that can stomach the risks.
Anyone who wants to try this needs to watch and internalise the film “empire of dust” (2013). It’s
A documentary about how to not succeed in a developing nation.
There’s basically zero competition at the early stages because, like you, no one thinks you can do anything.
My kids have established a beachhead in Mauritius and northern India, and we are looking at Madagascar and some demographically collapsing areas in the eastern United States as a possible next step.
Yeah that’s what I said, basically. I had land. I built a cabin and an outhouse from salvaged lumber. Hauled water in 5 gallon jugs. Built up from there.
You don’t need a lot to have a huge advantage. Just a roof. And that can start with a couple thousand dollars for a chunk of land somewhere with some kind of dirt road to it that is passable at least most of the year. That opportunity still exists for many, many people.
i think the reality is that people want the luxury of modern society even if it means they are chained to it. Its either that, or people are born in the chains and dont even realize they can break them.
Thats certainly how i feel as a white collar office professional in the US.
Yeah, it’s not a glamorous trade-off. But it’s a >0 starting point that makes it so you can risk losing your comforts.
Your willingness to try great things is more predicted on What happens if you fail rather than what happens if you succeed.
If the worst that can happen to me is that I go back to my cozy but inconvenient cabin and do contracting until I can save up enough money to give it another go, that’s way different than the lose everything I own and live on the streets scenario.
It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
That's a great approach to this issue. I believe this is exactly what happened to me, and to most people who are not "lucky" in having all the necessary conditions for their original "dream" to be realized. Anyway, the older I get, the more I believe there's no way a person can just have "one" dream the want to pursue their whole life, what you really want keeps changing every decade or less. I still remember what my dream was when I was 12 years old or 20, and I can tell you with confidence I am happy I ended up in a different place 30 years later.
Apart from that intial quote which to me sounds like road to absolute passiveness, thats my life so far.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
I feel similarly. Pick the most interesting opportunity you’re aware of, seasoned with some realism. Excel to the best of your ability. Continuously increase your abilities. Leave everything better than you found it; but don’t exhaust yourself needlessly. Leverage the advantages you have and don’t mourn the ones you don’t.
To be fair, “anime protagonists” are not the same category as “arbitrary human” so in this context saying “she” actually does come off more like virtue signaling given the statistical prevalence of male anime protagonists
Statistical prevalence is irrelevant when talking about a specific person's experiences watching anime. They may predominantly watch shows with female protagonists, or they may have had just a few particular female-protagonist shows in mind when they wrote the comment.
Personally speaking (as someone who watches very little anime and has mostly only seen the famous ones, like Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service), I think only ~10-20% of the animes I have watched have had male protagonists. It is surprising to me to hear that protagonists in that genre are mostly male, given my own overwhelming experience, and I'm not totally sure I believe it.
If you watch very little anime.. why would you presume to weigh in on this topic? Shōnen is the most popular category of manga / anime and it’s targeted at adolescent males with mostly male protagonists.
Because we aren't talking about anime in general. We are talking about one specific person's personal experiences with the subset of anime they watch.
If I say "she" when talking about generic protagonists in some Miyazaki films I've seen, are you going to say I'm wrong and should say "he" instead because some genre of anime I've never heard of is popular with some demographic I'm not a part of?
If that's really how you think, then do you also opine that we should say "she" rather than "he" when talking about generic human beings, seeing as women outnumber men? Somehow I suspect not.
Is there much Shonen that you'd describe as "heartwarming", though? I like stories about personal emotional growth, and magic. Wasn't using "she" for virtue signalling, just as what seemed to me to be a statistical fact. There's one I can think of with a male protagonist, and his great aspiration in life is to be murderer, and he targets his classmate, who is a tall and slightly dim-witted model ... and ends up filled with protective feelings toward her, which begin when he impulsively lends her his intended murder weapon (a boxcutter) to cut some card for a school project ... and by the end of the series they're going round a mall together at Christmas, holding hands. That was a pretty good one. Recommendations for ones with male protags are welcome, if they're not full of tanks and battles and so on.
I don't know how you figure that affordable place means you can't be a developer, when software engineering is probably one of the little professions where this doesn't apply.
Also doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while. What I earned in a 3 month internship was enough to pay my remaining studies and anything I wanted to buy for a long time. Don't take for granted what you get.
The dev jobs obviously still exist but they aren’t financially viable anymore and I would need to change careers to fit the local market.
> doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while
yes and at the end of my big travels I’ll come back to a 1k/month rent increase for an even lower quality of life. This is not a viable long term plan. I already need to spend an extra 800 to rent the same unit I’m in if I was on the market today
> "I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is"
That's an astonishing level of confidence / hubris. Also, many people choose to enjoy extended travel -- having saved $ in advance, and typically finding ways to live with much less luxury than your FAANG lifestyle takes for granted, and/or doing odd jobs or remote work/gigs, or teaching....
I would recommend that you find a way to broaden your horizons, either literally w/ travel or by way of books and ideally interactions with people outside the very narrow band of your current environs and perspective.
I live in a tiny old 1 bedroom apartment with no car and spend less than $100 on entertainment most months. You Americans are extremely spoiled. I’ve been doing this for 3 years already and I still can’t even afford a 2 bedroom condo. I need to save and live like this for 3 more years before I’ll have enough
What country are you from? Obviously this is all context dependent.
I do agree that thinking you’ve always made the best decision is a contradiction at the very least. You never know it’s the right decision until after the fact but also it’s impossible to guess how other outcomes would play out.
I’m Canadian. The only thing I could have done better is move to the states. I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice in the long term despite the low pay but it’s a huge mistake. My life is a dead end right now and I need to get out. Until then I just sit here and cope and seethe
The mistake is Canada, not FAANG. Essentially no career choice pays enough to afford RE in Canada without supplementation. I recommend moving because things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Saying "FAANG" without clarifying "in Canada" was completely misleading. Since the only reason you brought it up was to signal high income, it must have been deliberate.
Also, you went straight from "I've always known what the best choice is" to "I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice... but it's a huge mistake."
You're spouting nonsense and contradicting yourself.
Everyone else, sorry for having accidentally fed a troll.
Are you illiterate? I said in my original post that my compensation is adjusted for my own country.
> I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is and the “path” is which trade offs I choose. There are no good options
Why do you act like I chose to work here on purpose? I wasn’t smart enough for the jobs i wanted so I picked the best option that was available to me. I was wrong. I know that an American FAANG job is better
Well, yes. This is the aim of a civilisation, isn’t it? To render banal what was previously trying, and raise to daily concern what was previously trivial.
Not to belittle your situation, which I know nothing about, but there’s nothing unusual about living very modestly the first few years of one’s career.
A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
I believe in the Myth of Second Chance and Third and so on. It is what we tell ourselves to keep going. Nothing wrong with that.
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
Hindsight living, is like hindsight investing (I should have bought Apple stock in 1999) useless.
With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.
Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.
But everything good in my life has come from this one path.
I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.
It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.
But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.
No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.
I can relate 100% to that with my own experience coming from a poor economic background and coming to a more affluent background right now where any misstep can make me goes back 10+ years of economic development.
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like:
- Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered)
- Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail
- Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions
- Avoid any drugs
- Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.
100% correct but I think what more people should do is post-mortems on import decisions.
Too many people blame others for their current situation. Try taking a philosophy that we have more control and look back upon decisions we made and why we made them.
Not "I should have bought apple stock". but "why didn't I buy apple stock?"
Yes. False beliefs breed more false beliefs, and at some point they catch up with us.
I had a colleague who was fanatically into soccer. I asked how does he feel when his team loses? It is devastating for many especially in big games. But he said he is willing to take the risk of rooting for a specific team and possibly losing because it gives him excitement. It's a bit like a drug really you get addicted to your team winning. It's a bit like any gambling addiction.
If you had no interest in the outcome of a soccer-match you wouldn't get very excited watching it.
In reality most people don't have a real interest in a soccer-game since they don't gamble money on it. Therefore it seems people pick a soccer-team to root for BECAUSE we want to get excited. We want that adrenaline. (or is it dopamine?) We want to believe that the arch of history tends towards our team winning.
False Belief 1: If my soccer-team wins I'll be much better off, much happier.
Consequent False Belief: Since my team did not win I must now be desolate. I must feel bad.
Yes precisely. If I had a pound for each time a dev told me they wish they were a doctor, and another pound for each time a doctor told me they wish they were something else!
I've many regrets similar in vein to that of your friend. Over time I've decided that it's rather reductionist to think that things connect together so simplistically. The "how my life could have been better if X, ceteris paribus" can be a really painful analysis, but -- in this case favourably -- there is no "ceteris paribus" in real lives.
There's a collection of techniques in the mental health field called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is about helping people identify and replace these negative stories. If folks are having a hard time applying these ideas themselves alone, look into this therapy as it can be good to have a therapist help you through using the technique.
I think the idea that our lives are a set of branching paths, where once you go down one path you can't go down others, is partly a consequence of how the academic path of many careers is designed to "weed out" promising students from others. This "branching tree of time" illusion is created by the elitist, rejecting attitude of the gatekeepers of our society... and by our sensitivity to taking rejection personally in our young and formative years.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".
And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.
As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.
Pull yourself together!
Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"
This simply cannot be overstated: to be paralyzed into inaction is nonetheless yet another action. The curse of choice is common to us all. To quote my mentor (and the actual fatherly mentor of Tony Robbins) Jim Rohn: "To wish it away is to wish your life away."
There is a retrospective and a prospective reading of this advice. I agree with your take when this advice is applied retrospectively, but I find it downright sobering when thinking about my future. I am in the process of making some big decisions, and perhaps I have been a bit to casual about them.
Perhaps, or perhaps you merely let the entirety of your brain make the decision, and more optimally so for your circumstances, instead of the limited executive function. Maybe. Or maybe that was just the lizard brain. Really hard for the executive brain to discern between the "all of my brain / know it in the gut / good instincts" and the "lizard brain want"
The myth is that that there is one optimal path through life that will make you happy and that any deviation from it will cause you to lose that happiness. While mistakes might take you down a path that you didn't anticipate and you might regret it for some time; they might also have opened up doors that would never have presented themselves.
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.
That's exactly my thought reading the piece: it talks about "errors", "mistakes", "irrecoverable damage" where everything could be viewed as "non-optimal choices." And they are judged with the benefit of hindsight, because they could have been the most logical choices with the information available at the time.
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
I look at it as the impossibility of having regret once you understand that every decision you made in the past was the best decision you could have made. Which is to say you were some specific person, with a particular ego and relation to self and to world. Any decision made was being made withing some particular frame of mind - mood, energy, memories, as well as their relevance and salience mappings.
Making a decision while angry? If one has not the capacity to see through anger when making a decision - a lack of mindfulness perhaps, then that decision even when made in anger is the best they could do at that point. If one practices mindfulness and can often deal with anger but fails this time, that is still the best that person could do given who they are when a decision is being made. There is nobody to blame.
Even perceived self-sabotage is still acting within some particular framing. If that person Knew something different about the nature of their being at a perspective and participatory level, they likely would have made different more constructive choices.
Everything emerges exactly as it should due to what is Known and is at any particular time. The nature of self being a lifelong quest to understand, the more we understand about it the better the decision we can make. Probably explains the importance of 'Know thyself' to Socrates. But there is never a wrong choice as you say, only non-optimal. Only that which was made due to you having not been some particular other potential version of you.
Learning makes change possible. Not all learning is good for you. You never know you're learning as you're doing it - for if you're self aware you aren't paying attention as so can't learn, but if you are paying attention you're not aware about "learning". Thus we should pay attention to what is good and trust that we are learning. And trust that we are also learning when we pay attention to what is bad for us.
Right, rumination is bad serves no useful purpose. It is good to analyze our previous mistakes but we should not lament our previous behavior because we cannot change it anyhow. We can only try to be better next time.
The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
I really can’t conceive of a way in which depression helps humanity survive. Just because we have a trait doesn’t mean it’s adaptive. More likely, it is a dysfunction of a related emotional state with actual utility (pessimism, paranoia, etc), but it is incorrect to say it helps us survive. It’s just not so maladaptive that it outweighs the benefit of the well functioning adaptation, on a population level.
Very untrue. Evolution didnt evolve depression, just as evolution didnt evolve every other disease or defect. These are byproducts of convulated systems.
Great point. Some things evolved (by evolution). Then some complications arose because of the different things evolving to their local maximal fitness.
Inability for the human body to cope with something is not the result of evolution but the lack of evolution. Evolution is still going on.
Yeah, I'm wondering what is the actual point of the article, and you're touching on where I'm coming from. It's very retrospective, and gives very little time to forethought. Yet the author establishes that they see peers step into life decisions with relatable distress, or indoctrinated softness, people facing the future, but doesn't explore much beyond that. See, to me, this is grasping for an answer, where next step is "and how many of those people who took the step casually or overtly seriously had that have an equivalent impact on their life?"
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities? Like really that’s an example? Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined. This article is just too pessimistic for me.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities?
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
A part of their success has to be dependent on millions of people not trying to do the exact same thing, no? What a disaster it would truly be if everyone had the same realizations
I'm not sure. Since I've never seen a situation where millions of people earnestly try for something they want, I would only be theorizing on the outcome. I think certainly there'd end up with more than 2 or 3 success stories, which is mainly my point though
Because the struggle is with yourself. The parent post is correct when they say:
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.
I don't know. My experience is that as you get older, you're constantly evaluated against what could have been, and experiences that in youth would have been seen positively become discounted or, strangely, even held against you.
It often feels as if a second chance at a certain point in life requires more than a change in yourself; it requires an even bigger change than earlier, once over to make the real change, and twice over to convince others or overcome their biases. Either that or the luck of finding someone who understands second chances and is willing to give them.
As you get older, probably you are the one doing the evaluating and realizing you won't be a heart surgeon or discover a major math theorem (that was two from my own teenagerhood). Mostly people not you don't give it two thoughts. But whatever. Learn from your life and don't judge it. I mean sure being old is held against a lot of people but that's just some political social change you can work for a little. Other people's opinions aren't the truth and it seems hard to get a few decades in and not realize this. You can make your own chances each morning, especially to be free and to be helpful to others.
The narratives change when we’re older; but I think there are still “sorting my life out”, or “taking on a new adventure”, narratives that work. And that’s all this side of things is - a story to tell yourself and others while the real work of changing habits and working consistently toward a goal occurs.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
When looking for guidance for life, a good example might be Jesus. Did he make the best decisions in his life? He didn't really care about his life, he gave it away. He only cared about the well-being of others.
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What nonsense. What makes it hard is everything around it. People can't choose to take a 50% pay cut to change careers. They can't let their families starve or lose their homes for it. They can't move move when they need to take care of a loved one.
This idea that changing your mind is the hard part is absolute bonkers unless you're so privileged that you don't care about the real externalities of those choices, or you don't have any.
Phrases like this one only worsen the situation, as for the majority of the world, that's simply not true. If, for you, all you have to do is change your mindset then good for you. You're very, very lucky. But please, don't assume everyone is as privileged.
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
When he won in 2016 i remember thinking. The campaign was so long and so intense and for all of it it seemed clear that he would lose. I remember thinking, this guy in every other respect is a despicable person, but I can't help but be impressed that he just kept going.
Anything can be relatively easy if you've either already succeeded the first time based on sheer determination and/or you've successfully done other harder things that were at least as abstract as having a successful career. This article is not about the moment you make a decision, because that's as easy as it's set up to be based on all of the previous dice rolls of your life, but about the likelihood that you'll be able to bounce back from rolling snake eyes on what seemed like a sure thing at a time when time itself was cheap.
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
I think this is quite terrible advice because our (Western) culture is already way too biased towards quarter and mid-life crises, ageism and fatalism when there is objectively little reason to panic.
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
There's Orwell's essay Such, Such Were the Joys, where a horrible ordeal of preparation, in a preparatory school, for a scholarship and a successful future in Edwardian society, is completely nullified by coinciding with the First World War and the nature of society changing.
The problem is people want to enjoy their lives and starting over means forfeiting many years of that life, as well as potentially closing doors they wanted to leverage. People often put their lives on complete hold for a phd. Discovering that was a waste is awful.
From my experience, the number of chances you have is not the limiting factor in life. I see people making the same kind of mistakes over and over again. The problem is often the pattern of reaction to externalities. The pattern is then the problem, and it is very hard to break habits.
Yes! Many bad decisions—choosing the wrong partner, making bad health choices, or even getting the wrong degree, can be changed in 6-36 months, if the mistake is realized.
But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.
That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.
In my case it took a few decades to plumb utterly the idea that perfecting myself, or trying extremely hard to do so, would not make a bad relationship good. It was a hard lesson for me but I learned it in every cell of my system. Not that I am against being flexible, but some people need life to really beat that lesson into them.
At least in relationships that's not the case. Unless you are naturally extroverted or charismatic, if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s then you may as well give up. American society just isn't built for finding love outside of school/college.
I had a dreadful marriage that ended in my forties and am now ten years into a relationship where I am so persistently happy I had to rescale my idea of happiness. Maybe by a factor of 1024 or more. I have step kids and my kids have a step mom but they all have been exposed to more happiness than before. And I finally got able to be myself and found a spouse who can talk math with me and gets me in a way I was too blind to conceptualize as a young adult.
This is one of those areas where money can solve your problem. It's a lot harder to rebuild if you're not making good money. Especially for those who are on the hook for alimony & child support.
That's a pretty strong claim to make completely unsupported by evidence. In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
>> if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s
> In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
I did not interpret GP post to mean "If you haven't settled down and started a family by 30, you may as well give up".
I interpreted it more as "If you haven't made a decent sized social network, or haven't figured out how to approach strangers, or haven't been in a committed/long-term/love/etc relationship, or didn't socialise enough to develop socialisation skills, etc... THEN you may as well give up!"
I think the GP's point is that those people who are settling down in their 30s and starting families, well, they didn't mess up, and figured things out before age 30.
Maybe he'll clarify, but I agree with my interpretation: if you haven't figured out romantic relationships by age 30, you may as well give up, because post-30 it's exceedingly difficult to find an environment with lots of socialising with peers.
Almost impossible, in fact, because, as you said, most people are already out of that scene anyway...
I also disagree strongly with that. I live in Seattle (a city well known for being not social and welcoming - aka the seattle freeze), and didn't recover from being a shy introvert until around 30. The skills and mindset for human connection was hard for sure, but I found many pockets of really welcoming social environments around shared interests. My personal interests run to the outdoors, so for me it was hiking/biking/mountaineering/run clubs. However, groups and clubs around shared activities exist for almost any interest, and the whole point of them is to socialize and meet people! It DOES take some effort and discomfort, but it's not even close to "almost impossible".
Obviously it is in the West in tech circles where everyone is introverted and they work 14 hour days. The protestant work ethic has decimated society and all that matters.
In reality this isn't black/white, but a spectrum. Some may have a harder time than others, but giving up is reductionary and depressing and leads nowhere.
Easier to identify and work around your characteristic errors. Go slow into romance, or make sure to lint and test the code, or be wary of saying yes to things you don't really care about, maybe offload some judgment calls to a trusted delegate. Whatever it is, we all have weaknesses and we can learn to work with them better. And realize when they crop up it isn't uniquely shameful to have broken bits.
A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know.
And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
The point is more about reflecting on things that are false, but we tell ourselves to feel better. We don't like to think of a 17 year old as a finished person, however in other ways we try to make them that way.
The reality is that our expectations are much less realistic and bleaker. We love to talk about second chances and failing your way to success. On the other hand, 80% of us live in a very different world.
If you are on the following track which most of us are: high-school -> professional training -> early career -> senior career -> management -> senior management it's almost the opposite as described and downright bleak if you haven't always been a mega achiever.
Now I should possibly distinguish self-employed business people, entrepreneurs, and certain artists. Honestly even these exempt professions it can be like that, and there's exceptions to traditional professions.
Anyway, for most of us it's all about demonstrating perfect success every step of the way. You may be able to "get away" with certain things, but they can all still seriously hurt you. It doesn't take much before you can be perceived as valueless. Sometimes we talk about this, but we seem cautious about admitting it works this way.
So, contrary to the idea that being a failure is okay, most of the time the process looks more like detecting ANY failure in your past and not letting you in the door. After all there's 20 candidates that didn't get a D in 3rd grade biology.
I've met some people who have that outlook, and almost all of them have come from competitive high schools on the coasts, with successful parents who put a lot of expectations on them to achieve from a young age.
If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."
As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.
Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)
But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.
It's worth hearing all opinions, but I don't agree with this sentiment. This applies to many people in a variety of fields. Contrary to our values about achievement we line up for people that purchased their way to credibility.
Same with companies. The truth is that you kinda do know what you're getting more.
Robert Frost's, often misinterpreted [0], “The Road Not Taken” also comes to mind here.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
For almost all of us, the truth is that life could have been better -- there are mistakes that can not be wholly erased or undone -- but life could also be much worse. And you'll be a lot happier if you don't hyper focus on regretting your mistakes.
Life probably could have been much better for all of us, but also the life we’re imaging that might be much better benefits greatly from being untarnished by reality.
If you count the mistakes as educational then how can you regret them. They were your mistakes going from where you were to where you are, this one unique and fascinating life.
On the job side, this is a scary consequence of specialization. If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is. If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
> If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.
It seems like my only options are:
1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.
2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.
3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.
4) Start a business.
5) Just live with it.
Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.
I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.
If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.
BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
> If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I didn't word it terribly well, so apologies for that, but for "really need" I was talking about subsistence wages in this case. I make perfectly fine money, and I do save/invest as much as I can, and I do own my house in NYC, so I do alright. I do hope to retire somewhat early, at least by American standards, but it's not like I'm making "fuck you" money.
> BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
Outside of something I did with my dad a few months ago, not really. I have a decent job now that's not psychotic about non-competes, so I've been ramping up to build something.
Well, I think the suggestion remains: live on subsistence income whilst working for as long as it takes to be able to live on subsistence income whilst not working. (All the while you can be attempting to effect changes that allow you to earn more than subsistence income at something you enjoy going.)
Yeah, I don't really disagree; I'm still trying to get out of debt from the six months I was unemployed last year (which also ate a bit into my savings, but I live kind of boring so it wasn't super bad). Hopefully that should be coming to a close pretty soon (even sooner if Gemini actually reimburses the money that they ponzi'd out of me like they claim they will). I've been trying to invest in a combo of relatively-low-risk ETFs (VOO and VTI primarily) and US Treasury Bills, to give myself a combo of potentially-higher-than-inflation-reward but also zero-risk-and-still-higher-than-bank-interest money.
Once my wife starts working, we figured that we'd put nearly 100% of her paycheck into some forms of savings to accelerate the process a bit further, since my salary has traditionally been enough to cover the bills. I'd like to have enough money to retire comfortably by my mid-to-late 40's. I think that's realistic.
2023 was one of the worst years of my life, maybe the worst. It was really horrible being laid off twice and having to spend so much time on LinkedIn and doing Zoom whiteboard interviews and waking up to dozens of rejections every morning, not to mention that being laid off twice in a year makes your resume look insanely bad (each stint being about 3 months). As a result, I think I've become more frustrated than I probably should, and grown a strong resentment towards companies, with a nearly-complete lack of optimism that they'll ever do anything even remotely actually-technical.
My current gig seems a lot better but I've learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. We'll see if it lasts more than three months.
The statement "my options on who will hire me are kind of limited" is a bit misleading. Limited compared to whom? Your options are abundant compared to most people.
It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.
This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.
> It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
I mean this with all the respect in the world, but no shit. That's what I'm frustrated about. I feel like the entire thing I wrote was specifically because I am aware of these tradeoff. Just because the tradeoffs exist doesn't mean I have to like them.
I know that my dream job doesn't really exist, at least not in numbers large enough to even bother considering, and I'm not naive enough to really think that pivoting to another career will suddenly solve all my problems and frustrations.
> I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.
So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.
So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.
I've debated doing that exact move as well, simply because I do enjoy making "incorrectly" designed code "correct", by either moving to a simpler model or utilizing a more tried-and-true way of doing things, and since no one wants to be in "maintenance" it might afford me some more freedom.
At a previous job, I would occasionally spend time on the weekend rewriting and simplifying code because there wasn't really a "maintenance" team and I knew the only way that it would ever get better was if I fixed myself on my own time. I've since drawn a line in the sand that I do not work for companies on weekends but I did sort of enjoy that process.
I guess you’re in USA. Luckily I am in poor Germany with way lower salaries. Which opens me another option
6) go into trades. Becoming certified electrician takes a lot of time or money or both. My university degree with an expensive course was enough. Salary stays the same as long as I am self employed.
Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.
This is your chance to decide what your values in life are. Money or fulfillment. Maybe you can alter the software job somehow to make it more fulfilling to you. An organization with a purpose or mission that you believe in. A role with different type of expectations or work. Maybe writing on the side or starting a family.
I think Americans are kind of trained by the propaganda machine that you need to find fulfillment from your job, but fundamentally I think you're right and I need to take things into my own hands.
I have a few ideas that I think I might be able to turn into papers, and might even be able to get them published in a real journal. I doubt that my current gig will have too much of a problem with that (they're much more in the chemistry/healthcare space than pure CS), so I might be able to have some fun with that while giving myself an excuse to use pure math.
Possible other option: I hope to soon go part-time.
IE keep my current job with the pay rate, but change the balance of hours worked.
And if it doesn't work how I like, go back to full time.
I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.
Yeah, I've debated doing that; just doing contracting work half-time and spend the other half of my time focusing on the stuff I actually enjoy. The thing that stops me is health insurance.
My wife is wrapping up her school this year, so once she's working then I might be able to use her insurance and give this experiment a try.
> Insurance is a fair point I hadn't thought of. I guess there is some link between "full time" vs "part time" and insurance in that sense.
It can depend somewhat on the job. When I was a part time adjunct last year teaching two classes (six credit hours) at a public university, I was given the option for health insurance. I don't remember what the premiums were but I remember they were lower than marketplace plans.
> I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
Since the Affordable Care Act, the prices are somewhat more regulated and they're not really allowed to "decline" you anymore, so the "bargaining power" thing isn't as bad as it used to be. Paying out of pocket for insurance is expensive but not insurmountable for basically anyone working in tech, and certainly you can factor into an hourly rate. In NYC there's the MetroPlus system, and the cheaper plan on that is around $1250/month for two people, which equates to roughly $15,000/year [1]. An employer plan in NYC will still typically have anywhere between ~$100-$600 monthly premium for a family plan, so anywhere between $1200-$7200 per year of just premiums (not counting what you pay before reaching your deductible), depending on the company and which plan you choose within the company. The US healthcare system is needlessly complicated.
Still, it would certainly be better to not pay $15,000/year if I can avoid it, so before I try doing half-time contracting I am going to wait for my wife to start working.
I'm in the US. I just had to turn down my dream job because it doesn't have health insurance benefits. The cost of insurance on your own is so ridiculous that we were around 35k apart in salary just to make up the insurance difference.
Obviously don't dox yourself, but roughly where do you live? I just looked up insurance premiums for Oscar Health and it was $2,000/month for one of the budget plans, so about $24,000/year?
It can be extremely variable between cities so I'm not saying that this applies to everyone, but when I checked against my NYC zip code, that's the number it gave me.
There's no requirement to put qualifications or experience on the CV that aren't necessary for the role. Hiring managers make a lot of assumptions, and if specialisation is going to limit opportunity then leave it out.
There are jobs (e.g. database engine development) where knowledge of distributed systems algorithms comes in handy. Most likely not nearly at the level of your theoretical PhD, but also much more stimulating that adding fields to JSON.
I've never worked on database engine stuff, so I cannot speak to it, but I've worked a million jobs, many of which have titles like "Distributed Systems Engineer".
My frustrations come from the fact that "Distributed Systems Engineer" seems to broadly translate to "we use Kafka to glue two services together" for most companies. While that can still require some level of clever engineering, it doesn't really require a ton of theory. At multiple companies, when I do on rare occasion come across a project that requires some more elaborate planning, I will try suggesting using TLA+ to test things out, and management will look at me like I suggested kicking a puppy or something. "Math" is sort of a dirty word in industry, at least in the places I've worked. Maybe I just don't do a great job selling it. In every single job I've ever had, I've always been "that weird math guy", despite the fact that I really don't think I suggest anything that arcane, at least shouldn't be to a software crowd.
Again, it's hardly something to complain about; "Woe is me, I'm making yuppie money but I don't feel fulfilled all the time". It's just something that annoys me.
Lots of us are increasingly interested in formal methods coming out of the labs and ivory tower and seeing more casual usage in industry.
But pitching this sort of thing to management is hard, where if they’ve heard of it at all then they associate it with big brain critical path shit at the highest levels of huge orgs like nasa or aws.
Can’t blame people for not seeing the value yet though.. we need to make things easier/cheaper. Plain old testing is often seen as a cost/effort sink that dev teams and management resent and so of course Model checking looks like a whole different layer of ambiguously-worthwhile effort.
Mere advocacy here won’t win people over, because they care more about costs than “correctness” as an abstract virtue. We probably need progress on things like generating code from models and models from code if we want to see more adoption
I agree, and part of the issue is that if the formal methods work as intended, then by design nothing interesting happens, making their success less visible to managers that aren't paying close attention. Ideally something like TLA+ would catch a bug that you wouldn't notice for multiple years (e.g. infinite money glitches), but that means that value becomes less obvious because it can take multiple years to manifest, and that means you're waiting multiple years for TLA+ to show its value, which would be "nothing happened", which can be harder to measure.
I've debated trying to write a PlusCal->Java transpiler [1], and I haven't really ruled that out yet; while I don't think it should be necessary to have that for PlusCal to be useful, I think it would potentially sweeten the sales pitch.
[1] I think PlusCal would translate better to a sequential Java style program than raw TLA+ would.
Why don't you try using PlusCal/TLA+ on some portion of the code at work (if you still care to stay there) to prove its effectiveness? Whittle down the code to something basic to show how it'd work so your manager/co-workers can see for themselves on code that they're reasonably familiar with.
Unless your manager/colleagues are intimately familiar with such tools, I'd think that your touting their usage at work, is more like wishful thinking.
Just do the math and don't worry about management. If you are generally productive you can take a quarter here and there to focus on a thing only you know the value of.
Yeah, I've taken to occasionally testing some of the simpler stuff I write in PlusCal without telling managers. If they think I'm dicking around with "theoretical" math stuff they might get annoyed but if I submit code that works correctly within a deadline I suspect they'll be alright.
My long term plan on this is to submit a bunch of code that works correctly the first time, and eventually once I am established at this job as "clever" I'll reveal the PlusCal/TLA+ specs and hopefully have a decent sales pitch.
What you’re describing are just run of the mill backend jobs. They aren’t very sophisticated in terms of algorithms or theory. What I had in mind is working on say Cassandra or ElasticSearch, or internally within FAANG on one of their database engines. If you’re high enough there (which, granted, may take multiple years) to decide on the future direction of the engine, you get to ponder a lot of theoretical or at least very complex stuff.
I did try applying to MongoDB a few times, even made it relatively far in the interview process both times but eventually get the "We regret to inform you..." emails for it. I also failed a phone-screen for CockroachDB though I'm actually not 100% sure why. ElasticSearch never got back to me. I certainly applied for these kinds of jobs (and many, many more), but there's not much more I can do than wait for the companies to recognize my brilliance.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
What I'm describing is friction. In a market where demand changes over time, supply friction affects efficiency. The time scale over which the market reaches equilibrium and that time scale's affect on the people providing supply is what I'm talking about.
As a counterpoint, see The Trouble With Optionality [1] as a critique of keeping your options open to forestall a single "decisive mistake":
> This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
> The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
> This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.
Oh no, someone who might have become megarich settles for... upper class and we treat this like it's something worth critiquing?
Optionality stuff like what you're describing is rationale and leads to by far the best expected returns on life satisfaction. Less stupid risk taking, more careful decision making would do a lot to make the world better.
This viewpoint seems a bit fear based or conservative to me. I wouldn't be shocked if the author wants a high degree of wealth as well. I guess that is a defensible approach but there is another approach of trusting the process, learn from your experience (and the experience of others if you can) and bring a perspective that most experiences have a positive aspect that you can focus on. Why be afraid, you die either way. Life isn't a zero sum game where if you get divorced or don't become a famous person or a really rich person it has no interest. Everyone has interesting experiences and the chance to learn and form connections and help out and find meaning strewn all over. And even the wrong career will give you skills and perspectives that you find yourself drawing on when you get the perfect career. Even if only to deeply appreciate the perfection, that is worth a lot of lifetime savings.
The trouble with this viewpoint lies in the "all hope of the life you wanted" part. To enter into this game is the start of the losing outcome. As the saying goes, the only way not to lose the game, is not to play it at all. If you don't want to lose at football, then don't play football. It's a stupid sport.
What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.
Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.
A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.
Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.
I have no idea. I guess it's tailored to me, but maybe someone else finds it useful. And this IS the way I solve pains. But I don't have physical pain or PTSD.
I find in general, what works for me in pretty much everything gets to be so far out from textbook that I have to invent ways to even describe it.
Well, it depends on what is meant, by "second chance."
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
There is a novel in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Life's Lottery, by Kim Newman [1]. It follows a character from birth to adulthood, with the reader constantly making decisions which will shape his life. Things can go well, or (very) badly. I'm not sure if the chapters form a tree or a more general DAG, but i do know that the book splits into two completely separate sets of outcomes according to your very first choice, which is, at age, six whether your favourite character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin.
> But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.
“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.
Most who write articles like this don't even know the life they want much less a feasible way to get there. All they really know is the life they have is the life they don't want. When you think like that then every decision you ever made is viewed as a mistake because they all led you to where you are.
Came here to say the same thing. Everyone says "don't compare yourself to others", but comparing your life to an imaginary one you dreamed up in your head generates pointless misery too
One of the problems of this article is that although many of these things are true, a lot of times you must play the cards you're dealt, cause not playing will be even worse.
Its like in poker where you are playing one on one against a player with a substantially bigger stack and the blinds are just eating you up. In such situations, waiting for a better hand is a bad decision in many cases. Then when you lose because you bluffed and lost, you will blame yourself for this mistake, but actually it could just be the best chance you had. 6 more blinds would have destroyed you anyway. You thought you had a good enough hand and played it. You lost, but you still made the best decision.
Life is like that.
Another example: you are a 37 year oldwoman and you feel your fertility slip away. You take a man and make some children. The man turns out to be an idiot... Your lifes dreams destroyed by an asshole man and your childrens needs.
But maybe this was the best you could do... Maybe not taking that choice at that moment would have left you childless and maybe you would have been very sad about that. Regretting not taking the chances. I know quite a few people that waited for the best partner to have children, but never had them. Now old, they feel it is their greatest regret.
There are some in the "advice-instrustial complex" that give such advice. The Stoics have a technique where you imagine losing all you have, and this creates a feeling of gratitude for what you do have, and prepares you for losing it (as we all must do, in time). The Buddhists say that "Life is suffering".
But yes, this notion that your life is a one-shot, and you may very well outlive the potential for your life to achieve what you wanted, or thought it might, is not common advice. At times mean-spirited people will say that so-and-so celebrity is "over the hill" or "past their prime", but of course this applies (in a good faith way) to us all at some point. When the barb is targeted at someone who's earned a lot and is no longer earning it is less painful and socially acceptable than when targeted at someone who never knew success at all.
Nature is interesting because She seems to play around with lifetime duration quite a lot. Most life is very short lived; they are one-shots. But it doesn't matter because there are so many. But the few, the long-lived, the lives with so many resources behind them, She plays with these too. And honestly it's not clear that they are so successful. They tend to exist at the top of a food chain and accumulate damage over time, requiring sophisticated repair mechanisms. Such creatures are also more sensitive to environmental issues, accumulating poisons much faster than those before them in the food chain. Humans exist in this sensitive, precarious place in the ecosystem and I think we often outlive our usefulness, as evidenced by pre-industrial poor-houses stocked mostly by the old and infirm.
That seems true. You can't repair everything. Perhaps recognizing when you're at an inflection point in the curve is a skill. Some of us just happen upon these. Others recognize them.
Speaking of football, Messi is renowned for not running all the time. He strikes at crucial moments, accelerating out, one touch to move away, a dribble past the next, a fantastic shot. There are others who run more miles than him per game, even in his role.
An interesting parallel. I credit luck with my chances. My wife and I got close after I was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident. I found the job that made my career because a friend sent me the link the day I smashed my knee in a skateboarding accident and couldn't move. I moved to America because a friend was going and urged me to move with him. My wife and I have a genetic condition and embryo sequencing arrives just as we decide to have children. Many second chances after I'd first made another choice.
There's only the world and you. You can only constraint solve within the constraints and there's not much to be done about that. A one-legged man will not run the 100m at the Olympics.
Internet forums are littered with those who claim they are that man and the one who wins gold at 100m is just naturally gifted. But I know many strivers and while some would be considered failures, far fewer are than the ones who do not try at anything since they've got the one leg.
The other man always has an extra leg. The other man always has the sharper eye. The other man always has the more handsome face.
Perhaps this is natural. Cells know when they're failures. Perhaps people do too. Perhaps that is adaptive of species.
The reason why so many failures lead to success is that only those who strive fail. And you must strive to succeed. Those who do not try at all do not fail and do not succeed. That's okay. We form the infrastructure of the species.
> A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own ( Atonement).
That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).
This sounds so true yet false. For absolutely every successful life there is a trail of failed lives left behind and restarted. And I dont mean like movie star or Nobel prize success; just plain vanilla happy and almost boring life. It is a real cliche, but it is true; never ever give up easily. That means that you may need to admit and give up things that never would have worked out, but hold on to things that may; and to know the difference is impossible; you have to trust in your principles; the right principles may extract a terrible initial cost but lead to great happiness in the end. Amen (And you can get Principles here - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34536488-principles )
There's merit to this but it's not the advice that most people need. Most of us already worry too much about making mistakes and need to know that course correction, at least to some degree, is almost always possible.
For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.
Life is hell. There are no second chances, because there weren't even a first chance to begin with. There is no escape because this is hell and there are no escape from hell. Live through it.
Honestly I don’t get the appeal. It reads like something one would write in the middle of puberty and then throw away when you’re a few years older and embarrassed.
You reach an age when life becomes a (text) adventure game: you wake up in a field next to a mailbox with a letter in it, and on the ground is a bag with items some of which are useful now, some that may be useful later, and others that are not useful at all.
It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...
Well, in the "advice-industrial complex" as the OP correctly identifies it, the OP being in the advice business (sort of) himself, has two choices: join the inflationary 'self-help, you can do it' camp and have a hard time getting himself remarked from the crowd, or join the tried and true 'contrarian' camp, yielding much better results for a minority who wants to hear and feel 'different'.
Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".
I genuinely think it's neat how all of our impulses have been commoditized. People want to feel "different"? Great, there's ways to make money from that. Money is such a spur for creativity.
There are beliefs that are true, and there are beliefs that are beneficial. Sometimes they are the same. But in this case, knowing that you cannot turn back and fix things mostly just leads to depression, whereas faith that you can turn around can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other case, knowing as a youngster that wrong choices can screw up your whole life doesn't bring anything new — it's not like people want to make bad choices to begin with!
There is just too much randomness in life and control is an illusion. Of course, it is true that some life choices will close or open doors, but, again, life is messy for everyone.
By the way, when did mindfulness fall out of favor with tech people? I have the feeling there is a whole new generation that again has to learn the benefits of contemplative practices from scratch. Anyone here read Search inside yourself etc. ten years ago?
Variation in overall size, branch angle/length/node distance influence the resulting number of possible steps, as well a the limited run time and state complexity does. This also lets "fail often, fail early" look like that simple approach for a massive wide step zig zag approach to life; only if assuming no life-relevant costs per step, that is.
Still, a state machine with loops allows for second chances in general, while the underlying environment also changes in parallel. So your outlook for the second try might as well be better.
To describe a backwards directed re-play, a decision tree might be a tempting structure. But just because the "truth" is too complex to describe and not visible to you in its entirety anyway.
Don't get discouraged by these kind of undercomplex views on life. There's still lot of environmental problems/limitations to be solved, to make everybody's run a bit smoother and less dependend on their environment, though, even though, or because, all the runs and the environment are basically the same thing.
This kind of pessimism seems to come when people want to justify surrender. Why bother trying another path if there are no second chances, right? Now in middle age, I have found the 100s of small choices we make to be just as important as any of the big ones. Sometimes these are more important. I have seen it in my peers as well. People who choice the same path had different outcomes from all the small choices they made along the way. It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.
In the other extreme, it makes me think of the generations that have grown up with respawn video games. When you die you just respawn. Those games are ONLY second chances. It's rare that anyone plays any game all the way through on the first life they're given. If you grow up immersed in worlds without consequences it can paralyze your decision making in real life. Not always, but I have seen some people retreat into these kinds of worlds and not want IRL decisions.
> It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.
You need luck, or privilege, for your perseverance to bear fruit.
You need both! I'm stunned by how many people cannot grasp this simple concept. Typically, people who have luck tend not to notice it, and attribute everything to their merit. At the opposite, people who didn't get their fair share of luck, tend to ignore the effort part and paint all successful people as lucky slackers.
I disagree with that completely. You are arguing for a surrender of personal power and self-determination. It's a short journey between 'luck' as a concept and fate, magic, religion, or just random occurrence. If that's really your belief, then why try anything? I don't live like that. I have been able to succeed on merit or work and despite negative environments. Many, many others have as well, throughout human history.
1 - I said very clearly that you need both of them.
2 - Have you ever been an innocent victim in a serious car accident? Have you ever been diagnosed a debilitating illness independent of your habits? Have you ever lost all your material belongings in an earthquake? I suppose you didn't. Thus you are lucky.
And thank you for confirming what I had written: lucky people often don't even realise they're lucky - and I'll add: especially if they believe that idiocy called prosperity gospel!
This argument is so dear to so many people: that guy is not successful because he works hard, it's because he's privileged and can afford to fail, so he can take chances, and second chances and third chances. I'm not privileged, so I'm not successful.
The reality is that the difference between success and failure is in the majority of cases due to consistent small choices with compounding consequences. The decision to stay late at night and finish an assignment, the decision to not drink a lot at that party, to go to a summer school rather than a trip, to not cheat on a girlfriend, etc, etc. Later on in life, when the nerds get to get their "revenge", well, it was due to privilege all along ...
While I think it is true that mistakes cannot be undone, it's also the case that most mistakes (even fairly bad ones) are not a sentence of doom. There are still choices to be made in the future (if you think there are choices) and you can always take the stoic route which is imo quite useful regardless of the question of free will.
> In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. ... This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist.
Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.
I mean if you're 30 and (taking from the article) married badly, chose sciences instead of humanities or did a misjudgement, you absolutely definitely can fix it up. Even at 40, it just gets harder and people don't always find the supposed effort worth it but you totally can.
I am in my fifties and taking a masters degree mostly for fun while keeping my software engineering job. I am working a lot harder than I have in a long time, specifically in an intense super hard homework due in 8 hours crank it out way. I do learn a lot of complicated stuff at work, but mostly can optimize for well rested and ready to learn and don't use it till I am confident kind of mode. Kids and work was hard but for different reasons. But when I forget my age and just dig in, I do feel younger. But also I am way more mature and able to talk to professors with less fear and like send that email asking stupid question or let people know ahead if I will have logistic problems etc. Best of both worlds except so much hard work.
Well done! I've studied with people in their 60s who decided they wanted to expand their knowledge or change domain, very inspiring.
Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.
I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D
(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)
It is also obvious that time flows in one direction, that you cannot recover time you have spent on one thing over another.
It is likewise obvious, though strangely difficult for people, especially the young, to grasp, that time spent waffling in FOMO-land is time totally wasted grasping in vain at everything, never attaining anything. "Decision" comes from the Latin "decidere", itself from "de" and "caedere", meaning to "cut off" [0]. Yes, to decide is to cut off, to give up options for the sake of the higher good, in order to proceed.
And lastly, it is equally obvious that obsessing over a past that we imagine that could have been is also a complete waste of time. The clock is ticking, time is running out, and instead of focusing on what can be done now, what can be done with the time left, how to make the best of where you are and what is possible and prudent, you blow away whatever time remains all the more.
Now, if one has indeed made mistakes, the last thing one should do is deny that one has. Denial is opposed to integrity and renders a person impotent, stagnant, and numb, with the worm of guilt gnawing at the soul. Admit it, and if necessary, make reparations, do your penance, obtain absolution. Then move on. Life does not stand still for anyone. Salvage from the wreckage what is good, and go foward. No one said you will be able to recover the life you lost, or thought you lost. Actions are not unitary operations. They have no inverse. Life is an append-only log, a directed acyclic graph. Persisting in attachments to what was ostensibly lost blinds you to what you should do next. Move on. Keep tilling the land for the harvest. Dismiss whatever draws you away and weakens your commitment to the objective good.
If I'm still breathing, I can still have another go. At least at things I'm not legally or culturally barred from due to age or diagnoses, e.g., no flying planes for me because ADHD.
But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.
The myth is not in second chances or our ability to adapt, this is sometimes extremely hard but doable
- ex: 1st time immigrants.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by the elite or those "who have made it".
After reading many comments in this thread:
I wonder if we could emulate this problem digitally. To have a digital recording of the decision we'd made and can change the pivotal moments and have the program follow through with decisions we could be making...etc.
I don't know, I'm a bit tipsy. But this could be fun.
This article is essentially a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy camouflaging as analysis. The world is full of turnarounds, and stories where "mistakes" turn out to be happy accidents: "maybe so, maybe not."
This, I think is why all (most) old people are conservative while young people tend to be more liberal (both in politics and in personal life). If you know that a single mistake can ruin everything, you focus on not doing that mistake over anything else. And the only way to do that with limited information of the world is to just keep everything running the same way it's always been running.
I've gone from being a capitalist libertarian to being some sort of a self-defined eco hippie because of this. I realized that the capital fueled "progress" changes things a lot and we can't guarantee that all those changes are good (even if we now think they are, we might later find out they weren't). On the other hand, when you change the ecosystem or the planet, it's changed for good and there's no going back. Therefore it's best not to meddle with shit we don't understand. Stop building new stuff, stop making new roads, stop destroying things to make them "better".
I can't find the original of this story but it goes something like this:
- Father was a lawyer
- Aged early 40s: is married, has kids, successful career as a lawyer
- Quits law to go to medical school
- Becomes successful pediatrician
- Loves it
I will always remember the quote from the son (who is telling the story):
"At age 12 I remember thinking: this is a little strange. Now that I'm in my late 30s with kids, I realize how absolutely wild my dad's decision was. Anyway, here is a picture with him and one of his pediatric patients" (cue picture of dad with a big smile on his face holding a baby).
I guess once you've sorted the wife, kids and career then trying something else is relatively low risk. He could always have gone back to lawyering if it didn't work out.
I've got a friend a bit like that - husband kids successful law career but quit because she hates being a lawyer. It allowed her to go from poor to wealthy though so served its purpose.
Some times the second chance succeeds because you rely on the expertise of someone else rather than your own.
When Durian became available locally, I purchased the smallest fruit available. I used it as part of my smoothie. Yes, it was pungent while at the same time a very light and pleasing fragrant aroma.
I didn't purchase it again as I needed more understanding of flavor melding. However, I enjoyed the puff pastry filled with Durian a few years later while visiting China and only tasted the fragrant aroma.
No. I disagree with the sentiment strongly. I've seen so many of my friends alone turn their life around from bad choices. Truth is, this article is most likely just attribution bias. Life is rich enough to allow for manueverability. And for the record i hate everything that makes life seems a more hostile place. I take it my personal responsibility to have the opposite effect to people.
I would imagine it comes from the programmer culture, in that you have to take everything as if life depends on it.
At least compared to most "manual" labor such as electrician, you can be a lot more chill and only focus on what you have to learn and nothing more if you want.
"Many people are miserable and accepting of it" does not disprove that you can, in fact, make career moves after 30, or study the humanities you ignored in undergrad at a later point. Many people are fragile; does that mean that you shouldn't try to be resilient?
You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."
> You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
In some sense life is obviously path dependent, since everything you've done is at least dependent on what didn't happen to you.
In another sense, there are many paths which lead to similar things, and path dependency can be Markovian, wherein the whole path doesn't matter in the first place, just the last bit.
Life is path-dependent, but it is more about the awareness and acknowledgment of your choices in the forks. Unaware, the path becomes constrained and thus dependent on your previous choices. Once aware, your choices opens up.
Second chances are yet another of the many, many privileges afforded exclusively to the rich in our society. For the rest of us, one mistake can literally be terminal.
Mistakes cost time and money, neither of which the majority of people have in abundance, and one mistake can set you on a path that is impossible to deviate from.
Choose the wrong career, chose the wrong spouse, have a couple of kids, and suddenly you find yourself stuck in a job, a relationship and a home you literally cannot afford to escape from. 50%+ OF ALL PEOPLE IN THE WESTERN WORLD are one paycheck away from financial insolvency and living on the streets. They literally cannot afford to quit their job to "Retrain" for a new career, as that training costs real money most folks don't have, and unless you're in a special / protected group no one is giving you a dime to pay for school let alone cover your food / housing / medical bills while you "Retrain" for a "Better future." It's a nice pipe dream / political talking-point to say truckers can all become coders, but when those truckers have mortgage payments, groceries, medical bills, kid's clothes / school fees, etc., to pay for, and when there's not even a dime of assistance money available to them, and they have nothing in the way of savings, how the hell are they supposed to be able to afford live for months or years at a time while they learn to code?
Folks can't even leave relationships these day, as moving also COSTS MONEY and the majority of people can't afford to pay for movers, put up first and last months rent, etc., making moving to a new home or a new city, too expensive a proposition to be realistic for the vast majority of low to mid income earners. The real kicker though is in basically any city in the US or Canada, if you're moving out of a rental home, the next place you live will be 50%-100% more expensive! Rents have gone up so fast in so many places that a great many people can literally never leave the place they are living as the market has gone up so fast around them they literally cannot afford to move.
It's all well and good to say people should just move for better opportunities, or just "Retrain" for a new career, but when the cost involved in either of those actions means unless they immediately pay off the person in question would find themselves destitute and homeless after bearing the involved expenses, it just goes to show how callous, self-serving and entitled our societies attitudes towards the poor and less fortunate have become.
I think lots of times this is the essence of agism: that old dogs can't learn new tricks etc. I'm not sure path dependence needs to be as strong as it is, but it often is because society disallows it.
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life.
'Mangling a life' is shooting way over the top.
Is having to deal with going down a school track that didn't turn out to be your bag what you can justify calling a mangled life? Isn't that just what we call life? The issue is that we'll almost always be able to find issues in our decisions in hindsight, if we really look for them. Even a ten million dollar exit can feel like a failure if you were shooting for a hundred.
If we forego using bombastic words for things that they shouldn't be applied to, the hollowness of the premise is revealed, and the illusion crumbles:
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can have a negative effect on your life.
Yawn. This sort of thing is baseless whining. I’m reinventing myself and graduate with a Masters in a STEM field I enjoy this weekend after losing my extremely lucrative career to illness.
By all accounts I had every reason to give up and lay down and die, and yet I didn’t. This sort of defeatist mindset is a poison. Will I ever fully recover and make it back to where I was? Maybe, maybe not, but the probability of success is zero if you don’t keep going.
Meh. Like many things in life it isn't one or the other.
If you want to be an extreme outlier, you likely will need some extreme outlier events to occur - depending on what your desire is. For many of us, we're not able to influence many aspects and outcomes in that extreme.
And so I like someone's quote: Life is what happens while you're planning other things.
>…the vast international appeal of football. “It’s the only sport which is usually decided by one goal,” he theorised, “so the pressure on the moment is more intense in football than any other sport.”
A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.
This is a good argument. In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life and financially never recover if it fails once. It's a little different with tech, as you usually don't have as high costs early on, but still. There is an extremely high risk involved that most people simply can't afford.
What's the alternative tho? If you take a loan, in most countries you're expected to pay it back, no? Do you think people should be able to default without consequence?
In many countries there is the idea of bankrupcy. You make the debtor suffer for a couple of years (to ensure incentive against it) and then wipe the slate.
Bankrupcy is no fun. All your assets are wiped out (house, cars, etc). Sometimes you are excluded from the banking system. So it's not "without consequence".
Lending money is a risky business. That is why you get interest. Getting people off the hook is not ideal, but neither is the inverse. From a societal point of view, this arrangement allows people to take risks that they may not have otherwise. And we're all better off because of it.
Do some countries not have a concept of bankruptcy?
Most of Europe does not have bankruptcy laws comparable to the US. Technically they do exist but the differences in the details are so large they may as well be called two different things.
Also, the reason people go bankrupt in the US are very different than the reasons people go bankrupt in Europe. 2/3 of personal bankruptcy in the US is linked to medical debt somehow. That is not the case in Europe.
> 2/3 of personal bankruptcy in the US is linked to medical debt somehow
Often cited, but wrong. When you dig in, it turns out to be one of those "wet streets cause rain" causal mix-ups:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642/
Why would they exclude elderly from their study? It seems odd to exclude a population with higher rates of health problems. Is there assumption that bankruptcy only matters to those who would otherwise be working?
Because the goal is to discredit the 2/3 number by any means necessary.
Ah, there's the old "everyone who disagrees with me is arguing in bad faith" argument the internet loves to make. Wondered how far down I'd have to scroll.
Your meta-commentary is just as vapid as mine.
Tbf, the authors cite (their own) previous work indicating hospitalizations do not cause bankruptcy in the elderly
Technically true. It's paying the bills on top of the second mortgage after helping your 30 year old grandkids afford college, weddings, and starter homes that leads to bankruptcy. A surprise one-time medical cost is only a minimal contributing factor in the arc of recurring mandatory prescription, insurance, and care costs, at that point. My inner Humean rejoices.
That coupled with private equity's involvement in all late / end of life care ensures no one dies with a penny to their name to pass down.
It still paints a picture of an out of control, over-financialized system that only gets more expensive the more money is put into it.
While this article points out some potential problems in the methods used to derive that headline political figure, its own methodology seems to have pretty serious flaws. The most I'd take from this is "This is such a bad problem that even when you try pretty hard to look in the wrong place you find it anyway".
This study deliberately does not - just for example - count it as a "medical bankruptcy" if you weren't hospitalized. So magically every person who was bankrupted by the cost of their must-take prescription medicine, they don't count because they need to be admitted to hospital to count for this study.
The thing to take from it is not that the figure the linked study arrives at is "right", but that the cited 2/3 figure is seriously flawed to the point that it shouldn't be cited.
As it is, the 2/3 statistic is mainly used to score political points and indeed one of the authors of the original study that came up with the 60% number is Elizabeth Warren. Now, you could say she participated in her capacity as an academic, but I personally have a hard time believing she would have put her name on the paper if it had found, say, 4% of bankruptcies came from medical debt.
Why not? 4% is also awful. As a politician you'd probably say "One in every 25" rather than 4% if you wanted to emphasise that it's unacceptable.
Yeah I mean you can certainly have the opinion that any amount of medical bankruptcies greater than 0 is unacceptable, but that has nothing to do with my original point that the 2/3 number should not be cited in discussions about bankruptcy.
It's still pretty clearly far less wrong than stating 2/3 of bankruptcies are caused by medical costs.
If people are arguing about whether the Earth is flat or spherical, you cant use the fact that both are "wrong" (as the Earth is closer to an ellipsoid) to say that "flat" is as correct as "spherical".
If a study concludes that x/y bankruptcies are caused by z but makes no assertion of the total number of bankruptcies, I would be very suspicious that the author was forwarding his agenda via a weird counting methodology.
Ignoring any other issues here let's look at the article:
> people who were admitted to the hospital
Ah yes, because there's no other way to get large medical debt. Not like an ambulance and ER stay alone will be high.
> in California
Obviously representative of a wider area: the most expensive state in the country and #5 highest median income.
> adults 25 to 64 years of age
Yes, let's exclude those who tend to have the highest medical bills and lowest incomes.
> were admitted to the hospital (for a non–pregnancy-related stay)
Yes, let's exclude pregnancies, which can be extremely expensive (thank god medicaid covered ours).
> for the first time in at least 3 years.
Yes, let's exclude people who have the highest medical debt by virtue of having had multiple hospitalizations.
>> "wet streets cause rain"
So are you saying that 2/3 of personal bankruptcy cause medical debt?
No I'm saying that the conditions that lead to one declaring bankruptcy can also cause one to rack up medical debt.
Having medical issues and no way to pay for them?
More that bodies respond to stress of all forms and people who have a failing business might push themselves beyond reasonable healthy limits to avoid that outcome, leaving them in a situation where their finances are wrecked just in time for all the chickens they stored up not getting enough sleep, pulling a double shift, working through the pain, etc. to come home to roost.
And even were it true, would it necessarily be a bad thing? Personal bankruptcy is an orderly process in which an individual gets to legally terminate all his debts. If a person with medical debt declares bankruptcy, his creditors lose out but he still has all the medical treatment he went into debt for. He still has all the non-bankruptcy-liable assets (e.g. certain pension and retirement benefits, and in many states his home and vehicle) he started out with.
Medical bankruptcy isn’t really the problem. Medical insolvency might be, but the two alternatives are not to receive treatment at all, or for the State to pay for it. The former is obviously worse, and the latter is arguably worse when looked at in toto.
I would say, most of countries in Europe do not have bankruptcy laws that are lenient like in the US.
Here in Bulgaria we only technically have bankruptcy but it's extremely different from the USA.
Long story short, a judge plus two gorillas can and will confiscate every single thing you own and then put you in jail.
Bankruptcy is not a "haha, you'll never get me!" card like it's in the USA. It's actually diametrically the opposite.
How long do you stay in jail?
Haven't checked in a long time but I remember you can easily have 2-3 years with only 6 months in actual jail. But it leaves a lasting stain on you, after that nobody will want to give you money for a while. At least 5 years I think.
Short answer: yes, but.
Without consequence, of course not. But you should be able to 'separate' your professional and personal life, even as an entrepreneur.
I would NEVER found my own business if I knew that going bankrupt would take away my kid's house. This is why instruments such as limited responsibility companies have been invented.
Knew a guy who tried to outsmart tax rules and founded the company as his wife's. Also had a big mortgage on their house. She fell in love with the local butcher (no joke) and one afternoon they emptied the bank account and flew to Goa. That guy lost his wife, his company and his house in one afternoon and went straight to ER with a heart attack.
And his butcher.
That too.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I imagine if you have your own butcher in the first place, you are somewhat particular and specific about what you want (kind of similar to a lot of people clinging onto their usual hair stylist/barber for their dear life, once they find one that does things the way they like). And I would bet that the number of barber options around would be much larger than that for butchers.
> But you should be able to 'separate' your professional and personal life, even as an entrepreneur.
Why? In case of success, you have the personal benefit from it. So why should other people and society take the bill in case of your fail? Or how exactly is this supposed tor work?
This is pretty much exactly the point of limited companies: You can tell that you're dealing with a limited company because of the name suffix, and you know (or should know) that if that company fails, you risk losing anything they owe you and there's very low chance of going after the proprietors.
If I go to open a restaurant and I can convince a bank to lend me capital to start the business, and then it fails, I can see an argument for why they shouldnt lend me money to open a second restaurant, at least not right away. But why should I be penalized in personal life for a business failing. Should the bank get to take my house if my restaurant fails? Should I be prevented from getting a credit card?
Where is the money coming from? And who should pay the bill you have left, when you fail? It will not disappear, and for the health of the system it can't disappear, so where is it going?
The party lending the money is knowingly taking the risk, and they get compensated for that risk by charging an interest rate that both sides agree to. There is nothing inherently nefarious about business loans. Some loans work out, others don't, and a competent lender will usually come out ahead in the long run.
well, thats the risk the bank takes when they lend my business the money, that I might not be able to pay it all back. they eat the loss, minus whatever they can recover from assets left over. and I get a mark that says you should think twice before lending me money for a restaurant again. but my life isnt ruined. i get to keep my house, i can still participate in financial society. the alternative is, as someone else pointed out, only those with lots of resources can afford to try to create new businesses. the US policy is that its worth it to have a more lenient bankruptcy process, with more bankruptcies that are less ruinous, since it leads to more risk taking (ie new business formation).
In Germany, your life is not ruined if you go bankrupt and have to pay for the fail you created. Society still gives you shelter, food, healthcare, even if you have lost your luxury. So there is no reason to make wasting resources and harming society simple.
Germany has limited companies - it's what GmbH's and AG's are for.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where "wasting resources and harming society" by having a company with limited liability go bankrupt isn't fairly simple.
Germany, like some other companies in Europe has fairly "high" requirements of share capital, but it's still only 25k Euro.
"Fairly high"?
In the UK it's £1. 25k Euros is ridiculously high!
well, its not harming society, its harming the lender. we obviously want to have protections against people taking advantage, but ultimately its up to the lender to make sure that the borrower has a realistic plan to pay back the loan, at least within whatever risk parameters they are willing to accept. In the end, its a tradeoff, the US has higher new business formation, especially from less well-off members of society, but more of those businesses fail.
When you harm the lender, you raise the rates and fees they charge their non-malfeasant customers. This benefits the wrongdoer while harming society.
Or you incentivice the lender to do better due diligence, and you weed out the less competent lenders?
Maybe it's a bit of both
I could not possibly disagree. But in a world with fewer lenders who have more rigorous qualification practices, are we paying lower rates? Kinda seems like no but we are now in the land of fourth order effects so who is to say.
Liability limitation exists in order for people to take risks without losing everything. A person or persons can form a company (such as a corporation or limited liability company), invest assets in it and so long as they conduct business properly their personal assets are safe from business creditors. Part of conducting business properly is typically that counterparties know that they are dealing with a limited-liability structure (e.g. by ‘inc.’ or ‘limited’ in the name); another part is complying with the law (e.g. typically failure to pay employees can lead to claims on personal assets).
This offloads some risk from the owners of the company to its business partners, it ended up enabling a real revolution in business formation and ownership. In a lot of ways it has had a democratising effect, as many more folks can afford to invest in a company than just those who are wealthy enough to bear the risk of unlimited liability.
You generally have to either have a ton of capital or a great idea to get started without any personal liability though. Nobody's going to loan money to an LLC with no assets without a personal surety.
Without liability limitation one would need even more (an order of magnitude?) capital, and given the risk it might not be worth it at all.
> Nobody's going to loan money to an LLC with no assets without a personal surety.
I think that’s the system working. Customers, vendors and other business partners are also free to adjust their expectations accordingly.
If a large corporation takes out a loan, even a substantial one, and fails, the corporation can just go bust and the people behind it have no responsibility.
A new business generally requires a director's guarantee to get a loan, completely defeating the point of a limited company.
A new business hasn't proven itself viable therefore it's a huge risk to a bank.
Between personally guaranteeing a loan and not having the funding available at all, I'd take the former.
Once the business has been trading for a while and shows it has a working model, it shouldn't have any problem financing without a personal guarantee.
Either way, limited liability remains crucial. You're still in control of how much personal risk you're accepting, putting a backstop on any loss.
But that's the norm almost everywhere. Try going into a regular US bank and ask for a loan for an LLC. Almost everywhere will expect collateral and/or a business plan and/or personal guarantees if the business is new. Some countries have more risk-averse banks than others, but it's a matter of degree not a fundamental difference, and generally reflected in interest. And it then just changes the calculus of when you look for investors rather than lenders.
Il am not sure I think that, but as a matter of fact successful people tend to be bankrolled by either friends, family, or some kind of extended network that allows them to fail several times. I think it is unfair, and I find it really obnoxious when they lecture us about grit and bootstraps instead of being grateful for their network or luck, but it is what it is.
Yes, exactly this. A second chance is a safety net, available mostly to those with the circumstances or resources to deploy it. One helpful circumstance being youth (plenty of time), while an obvious resource is personal or, more likely for the younger, parental wealth.
Attitudes to risk taking are similar, e.g. your fear of high wire walking depends hugely on whether you have a safety line or not. Wealthy kids might pride them themselves on taking chances where the reality is that in their whole existence they have never been exposed to the possibility of paying the price for failure.
I think in US you can declare yourself bankrupt and start over. The only loan that doesn't work like that is a student loan.
Ah that's why they're complaining about the student loans.
In The European countries I have been living in, the concept of personal bankcrupty doesn't exist in the same way, at least. People who get too much loans kind of just hang with them, after 15-20 years they are forgiven AFAIK.
Btw, my suggestion for the US would be to remove that special bankruptcy exception for new student loans.
That's because once you do that, the supply of new student loans would most likely dry up. Thus shutting off the money fountain for the education industry.
Your suggestion wouldn’t work because nearly all student loans (over 90%) are issued by the federal government, which does not (and for political reasons, never will) evaluate credit risk.
> nearly all student loans (over 90%) are issued by the federal government
Not claiming you are wrong, because I genuinely don’t know, but how does it gel with the fact that the federal student loans for undergrads cap out at the max of around $9.5-12k for independent students and $5.5-7.5k for dependent students per year[0]?
Given all the outrage I see online, where people claim paying upwards of $20-40k/yr for attendance, wouldn’t they need to supplement it with private loans?
I dont doubt that there are more federal loans out there than private ones (because it always makes sense to get the federal ones first, and only go for private ones later if needed, so pretty much everyone who has private loans also has federal ones). But what about in terms of the actual loan dollar amount?
0. https://financialaid.umbc.edu/types-of-aid/federal-loans/dir... (this is an UMBC page, but it breaks down the federal student aid limits that apply everywhere)
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera... (“As of the first quarter of 2023, student loan debt in the U.S. stands at a total of over $1.77 trillion. More than 92% of this is federal student loan debt while the remaining amount is owed on private student loans, according to Federal Student Aid (an office of the Department of Education).”).
That 92% figure is in terms of debt amount, not number of loans.
The limits you mention are per student. Parent PLUS loans are limited only by the school’s official cost of attendance: https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/paren... (“The maximum PLUS loan amount you can borrow is the cost of attendance at the school your child will attend minus any other financial assistance your child receives. The cost of attendance is determined by the school.”). Schools are extremely aggressive about ensuring parents are on the hook for the loans so students can take out the maximum.
That’s a good point, thanks for bringing it up. It pretty much resolves the conundrum I was having in my original comment.
Small caveat (that ultimately doesn’t negate your point): PLUS loans have credit check requirements for determing eligibility[0] (with exceptions available in certain cases if you can satisfy additional requirements, like bringing an eligible cosigner who can pass the credit check).
0. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/paren...
An alternative is to tie the federal student loan program to a regulation in school cost. If the school exceeds some threshold, their students are no longer qualify for federally-backed loans. Granted, it creates administrative burden but it’s the only proposal I’ve heard that seems to address the root problem of tuition costs and almost unfettered access to collateral-free loans.
That's unlikely to be accepted for other reasons. Putting a limit means most will approach that limit, and those that exceed the limit will be even more unaffordable. Plus no one will agree on what the limit should be. Which makes them extremely unpopular (except for benefits to individuals which of course should have the lowest limit possible nationwide)
>Plus no one will agree on what the limit should be.
We do this with drug reimbursement costs and construction already and I’m pretty sure those for-profit companies would also disagree on what the limit should be. I also don’t think it needs to be a one-size-fits all threshold; it could be adjusted to COL and/or job prospects that are tied to graduate statistics. IMO that goes a long way to aligning the incentives of the student and the institution.
I’m curious if you have an alternative solution
Yeah, I intentionally didn't say it wouldn't happen, just unlikely :)
Personally I think limits (and significantly higher grants to make student loans unnecessary for a basic post-secondary education) are needed. But I think it's worth recognizing that limits will make what's already a very divisive issue, even more divisive...
I think more thoughtful limits would be a good idea. I also think the reduction of aid money has been part of the problem. I just don't know where the money comes from to shore up that problem.
I have seen other pilot programs. I think it was Purdue who was considering "buying stock" in students, where the student would pay a portion of their income for a certain number of years in exchange for a scholarship.
That would be a good idea.
> [...] and almost unfettered access to collateral-free loans.
If people voluntarily want to pay high costs, and other people voluntarily want to make loans, who are we to judge?
We just need to get tax payer money out of the game. Afterwards, people can go nuts with their own money.
We are to judge because we are the taxpayers who guarantee the vast majority of those loans. That’s the mail reason I said “collateral-free.” Most of those loans would not happen in a private market because teenagers, in general, do not have collateral to secure the loan, meaning they have little to lose by defaulting.
Their degree and future earning potential is supposed to be the collateral.
Unfortunately, the earning potential of a generic bachelor's degree seems to have mysteriously fallen at roughly the same time a flood of students were offered huge loans to achieve them. Maybe some day we'll be able to find the connection.
I don’t think that’s correct. You can’t put up “future earning potential” as collateral while simultaneously allowing for discharge of debt in bankruptcy. That results in an incentive to incur as much debt as possible and then declare bankruptcy shortly after graduation when the impact is negligible. That’s the whole reason why student loans aren’t generally dischargable in bankruptcy.
Yeah exactly. That's the original theory. It... doesn't seem like you disagree with me.
I do not disagree, I’m just curious what ideas are out there to manage the unintended consequences.
I'm glad you don't disagree, but that makes it confusing that you started your response with "I don't think that's correct"
I agree that's the theory, I disagree that it actually is what would happen in practice. E.g., if the government stops guaranteeing the loans I seriously doubt banks will accept "future earning potential" as collateral. So I disagree that it's actually collateral (your initial claim). The real collateral is the govt promise to back up the loan.
So the question still stands: if the government no longer guarantees the loans, what is the proposed solution to prevent banks from no longer lending to students?
> We are to judge because we are the taxpayers who guarantee the vast majority of those loans.
Yes, get the taxpayer out of the loan guarantee business. Sorry, I thought that was a given.
I’m not against that, but I do think just getting rid of federally backed loans previously causes more problems. (Ie it’s one of those simple cures that may ignore blowback) Do you think there is an opportunity gap to be closed? If so, how do you think that would work?
> (Ie it’s one of those simple cures that may ignore blowback)
I actually want exactly the 'blowback': I want student loan creation to fall off a clip.
> Do you think there is an opportunity gap to be closed?
What is an opportunity gap?
> If so, how do you think that would work?
I'm guessing here what you mean by opportunity gap. I think the cheapest way is to open the US labour market to virtually anyone on the globe. That would be good for the US economy, wouldn't cost the tax payer anything (in fact you would save on border enforcement), and the people with the least opportunities globally would benefit enormously.
If you only care about Americans, I would suggest to give poor people money, and let them decide what to do with it.
Eg whatever the cost to subsidise education (including subsidised student loans) right now, just pay it out to poor people. Than they can buy education, or whatever else they deem more necessary.
>whatever the cost to subsidise education (including subsidised student loans) right now
It sounds like you may not understand how the system works. It doesn’t cost the government anything, with the exception of the loan repayment pause surrounding COVID.
I know the simple solutions like “Just give away money” can be seductive, but IMO they generally don’t work well in complex and nuanced problems. People aren’t rational actors by and large, and it’s a mistake to assume they can be modeled as such in many cases.
> People aren’t rational actors by and large, and it’s a mistake to assume they can be modeled as such in many cases.
You'd still be on the hook explaining why you know what's better for people than they do.
> It sounds like you may not understand how the system works. It doesn’t cost the government anything, [...]
There are always opportunity costs. But what parts of the 'system' are you talking about?
I'm talking about real costs. The government doesn't lose money by guaranteeing loans (in fact they make money, which is a totally different — but reasonable —argument against the current setup). I assume you mean opportunity costs as in "what else could the govt fund" with that money; if that's your claim, it again belies a misunderstanding of what's going on. You seem to have created this false narrative in your head that doesn't reflect reality.
There is much research, especially in behavioral economics, that shows that more objective decisions can be made by creating systems that facilitate more rational decisions. So my current position is that we should set up systems/institutions to foster those better decisions rather than push everything down to the individual, given the complexities of modern life. So to directly answer your question, there's decades of research that shows individuals aren't great at making rational decisions at the individual level. It's also interesting that you simultaneously seem to claim the "state" should make decisions, but also that institutions don't know what's better than individuals. It doesn't make for a very cohesive take.
> I'm talking about real costs. The government doesn't lose money by guaranteeing loans (in fact they make money, which is a totally different — but reasonable —argument against the current setup).
The government guaranteeing arbitrary loans isn't free in economic terms. Just like eg increasing the length of patents from 20 years to 40 years ain't free, even though it won't show up as a cost on any government balance sheet.
So what do you think the non-monetary realized cost is? And that cost compare to the benefit of a more educated populace?
At least with your patent example, we can measure it in economic terms, since patents are a commercial protection. Once we start getting into wishy-washy measures, people can make just about any arbitrary point to fit their narrative.
Lots of bankruptcies just after people finish their education would still ring some political alarm bells.
Just make the college a guarantor for the student loan. That would solve a lot of the issues with higher ed in the US today....
I think that's a potential part, but to play devil's advocate: don't you think this may exacerbate the opportunity gap? I.e., those who are the best bets (in terms of not defaulting) are also those who come from well-off backgrounds?
Unless someone else (like parents) stand as guarantors, I think the greatest predictor for a default will be how competent the candidate is after finishing the education.
Also, instead of allowing a bankruptcy at any time, student loan down payment could be limited to max 25% of income after tax OR 10% of net worth, whichever is greater, with any balance after 30 years transferred to the college.
Objectives: 1) Reduce the incentive for colleges to offer education tracks that they KNOW (or should have known) will never lead to much beyond a minimum pay job. 2) Prevent unlucky or unsuccessful students to get stuck with an impossibly large loan that just keeps growing, absorbing all they earn or own. 3) Ensure that students still do feel some pain when this happens, but not so much that they lose all incentive to build themselves up. They still keep 75% of their income after tax AND they're guaranteed that the loan will end within 30 years. 4) Incentivize pricing of of the student loans in ways that reflect the risks involved. If students that study "lesbian dance theory" have to pay a 10% interest rate while Physics students pay only 5%, that's a pretty strong indication that the "credit score" for the former is pretty bad. 5) Also incentivize minimizing cost while maximize the useful learning for the college, to minimize the risk that they'll be stuck with too much of the debt.
If this leads to some (presumed worthy) students having fewer opportunities than they otherwise would have, it's still possible for the collages, government or others to provide stipends or other similar forms of support.
That's why we shouldn't subsidise education in the first place.
The net benefits of education accrue to more than 100% to the customer. And, people from well-off backgrounds can and do take more advantage of education.
We should just give poor people money, and let them decide for themselves how they want to spend it. If they want to spend it on (unsubsidised) education, that would be fine choice for them to make.
I do agree that when you subsidize something you get more of it. So there’s a case that in some instances like education, it’s a good thing. Most people probably agree that a more educated society is better than a less educated one (although I agree there’s still room for debate on what that education should entail). The issue with an open-ended handout is that you don’t know what you’ll be getting more of.
> So there’s a case that in some instances like education, it’s a good thing.
That's where we disagree, I guess.
I don't mind education in the sense of people learning something. That's harmless enough (but doesn't need special subsidies. Just give money to the needy, and let them decide whether they want to invest it in a library membership.)
What I'm against specifically is education in the sense of getting a certificate at the end. A degree etc.
That sort of education has negative externalities and should be highly taxed, not subsidised. It leads to an arms race of credentialism, and is a big reason why eg a high school graduate can't get a decent job these days.
(There are plenty of jobs that used to be done by high school dropouts, that haven't changed all that much. But now require a degree, if you want to be considered for an interview.)
I think we actually agree largely on the education piece, that’s why I gave the parenthetical. I don't get the impression you really think a more educated populace is worse, but we may disagree on how one gets educated. There are many routes to education, and I think it’s wrong to think all people need the same route. But I think you’re committing the same error by assuming the library route works for everybody.
I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries). But I wouldn’t go so far to say credentialism as a whole is worthless. I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
What I do see on HN is that the crowd generally biases towards libertarian autodidacts and that colors much of their worldview.
> I think we actually agree largely on the education piece, that’s why I gave the parenthetical. I don't get the impression you really think a more educated populace is worse, but we may disagree on how one gets educated. There are many routes to education, and I think it’s wrong to think all people need the same route. But I think you’re committing the same error by assuming the library route works for everybody.
The library was just an example. People can use their own money and time to pursue whatever route they wish. They can attend schools (and pay the fees), they can go to the library, they can read Wikipedia, they can do an apprenticeship, etc, whatever works for them.
> I do also think over-credentialism is a problem, but that is largely up to the employer. All they have to do is start hiring people without credentials if they aren’t warranted and the problem is solved (for non regulated industries).
Alas, no. Employers aren't stupid (and neither are workers). Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
For an individual worker and an individual company, the credential is a useful signal. Just like it's useful for an individual country to get some extra nukes.
But from an economy-wide perspective, it's just an arms race. (Similarly, there's no global benefit from every country getting some extra nukes each.)
> I’m glad the food I buy is credentialed by the FDA, and the doctor I e see is credentialed as is the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across to get to work.
I'm not an American, but I think the FDA is pretty much useless. (But that's mostly because it's a federal agency, and the relevant authorities should probably sit at the state level at the highest or even lower. With voluntary coordination between the different states. Very similar to how traffic signs and rules are regulated and coordinated.)
I think your response is overly cynical. As the Oscar Wilde quote goes, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The FDA is far from perfect, but I have much more confidence buying a drug regulated by then than some pills sold at the convenient store.
>Employers are paying attention to the credentials because they signal useful qualities in the prospective employee. Mostly compliance and conformity.
Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
I personally think employers use credentials because they are incentivized to be risk adverse. It’s easier to defend a binary credential than to accurately gauge skillset and cultural fit through a behavioral interview. HR is concerned more with reducing false positives than letting a good candidate slip through the cracks.
I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden. I suspect that’s why you see a convergence on societies setting up a “council of elders” (ie govt) when they get to a certain size. Most of the people who lean into the unnuanced libertarian ideal tend to also lean towards certain troubles managing social dynamics.
> I think your response is overly cynical. As the Oscar Wilde quote goes, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The FDA is far from perfect, but I have much more confidence buying a drug regulated by then than some pills sold at the convenient store.
I suggested that state level agencies can do that regulation. Why do you bring up the straw man of unregulated drugs?
Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs. In fact, many countries are even smaller than many US states. So it should be certainly possible for US states to regulate drugs. (Especially since they can cooperate, just like they do on traffic rules or the Uniform Commercial Code.)
I'm not sure why you want to paint my position here as some radical 'libertarian' fanatic? Even the Catholic Church likes subsidiarity, and it's (in theory) one of the guiding principles of the European Union. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> Again, I think this is overly cynical and lacking nuance. There is debate in the economics circles on how much a college credential is signal for culture fit and how much is signal fit skills. It’s far from settled, and almost certainly a mixture of the two.
Aren't you the cynical one? I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots and know what they are doing. And you suggest 'hold one, they probably are idiots'.
> I also disagree with the coordination piece at large scale. When societies get big enough, we don’t have the individual bandwidth to manage every interaction so we rely on institutions to shoulder some of that burden.
Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way. We have examples from successful societies in other parts of the world and in other parts of history doing just fine with a lot less of that. So your argument from universal convergence doesn't fly, when there is no universal convergence in the first place.
>Why do you bring up...unregulated drugs?
Because it illustrates the problems of scale. Much of commerce is regulated at the federal level because crossing state lines makes the complexity of the problem much harder to manage. UCC is not a very good example; it has barely changed in half a century, in part because getting all states to update and agree becomes onerous. As an effect, the UCC largely boils down to a contract law policy of "shut up, pay me." That type of approach isn't great for handling nuanced problems.
>Most countries are smaller than the US, and still manage to get safe drugs.
You do understand much of this is predicated on the very institutions you are maligning. A vast and disproportionate amount of pharma R&D is done in, and regulated by, the U.S. Other countries generally use that information as a proxy for in-house regulation. Ever wonder how small countries manage to regulate their aircraft without much overhead? It's because they accept the US FAA certifications. They effectively outsource the oversight to the US.
>I am suggesting that most likely employers and employees ain't idiots
If you review my comments, I'm don't think you'll find me using the word "idiot." What you will find is that I claim individuals act irrationally and also struggle to manage information when the complexity of society gets high.
>Sure, but that doesn't mean subsidising credentialism is the only way.
If you read carefully, I have not been an advocate for subsidizing education per se. What I am saying is we need to be careful of the blowback of simple solutions. If the intent is to increase education, subsizing it is one way, but it obviously has unintended consequences. Simply removing subsidies does not necessary fix the problem without creating second order problems of its own. I'm saying we need to be cognizant of that, and asked for solutions that effectively manage those consequences. Generally, those simple fixes like "remove subsidies" or "just give people money" belie a lack of nuanced understanding and risk creating more problems than they solve. Most of your perspective seems to be built on an overly simple model of human behavior that tends to break down on complex situations.
Actually it sounds really good
Germany has Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren. The individual's credit rating will be negatively affected for several years after the completion of the procedure. The insolvency proceedings are recorded in a public register, which can be accessed by anyone. The process typically lasts for six years, during which the individual must adhere to a strict budget and make payments to creditors. After completing the six-year period, the remaining debts are discharged, provided the individual has adhered to the terms of the insolvency plan.
Step 1 is außergerichtliches Schuldenbereinigungsverfahren where the debtor attempts to reach an out-of-court settlement with creditors. This stage usually lasts up to 6 months.
Then there is Eröffnung des Insolvenzverfahrens where if the out-of-court settlement fails, the debtor files for insolvency with the local court. The court appoints a trustee to manage the debtor's assets and liaise with creditors. This stage typically takes 1-2 months.
Next there is either Regelinsolvenzverfahren or vereinfachtes Insolvenzverfahren. In the latter if the debtor's assets are insufficient to cover the costs of the proceedings, the court may initiate a simplified insolvency process. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan to the creditors, which includes a 6-year repayment period. If the plan is accepted, the court approves it, and the debtor begins making payments.
In the former, if the debtor's assets are sufficient to cover the costs, regular insolvency proceedings take place. The trustee liquidates the debtor's assets and distributes the proceeds among creditors. The debtor proposes an insolvency plan, which typically includes a 6-year repayment period.
After the insolvency plan is approved, the debtor enters a 6-year good conduct phase called Wohlverhaltensperiode. During this period, the debtor must adhere to the repayment plan, maintain gainful employment, and inform the trustee of any changes in their financial situation. The debtor is allowed to keep a portion of their income for living expenses.
If the debtor complies with the terms of the insolvency plan during the good conduct phase, the court grants a discharge of the remaining debts called Restschuldbefreiung. This typically occurs 6 years after the opening of insolvency proceedings.
This is really not that different from bankruptcies in America. I think Europeans are simply unaware of their options.
In the US Chapter 7 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 10 years, making it difficult to obtain credit, secure housing, or find employment. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a matter of public record, which can be accessed by anyone. The process is relatively quick, typically lasting 4-6 months. Most unsecured debts, such as credit card balances and medical bills, are discharged upon completion of the process.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy will remain on the individual's credit report for up to 7 years, which is less than Chapter 7. Like Chapter 7, Chapter 13 bankruptcy is a matter of public record. The repayment plan typically lasts for 3-5 years, during which the individual must make regular payments to creditors. After completing the repayment plan, the remaining eligible debts are discharged.
Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren lasts longer (6 years) than both Chapter 7 (4-6 months) and Chapter 13 (3-5 years). Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 involve a repayment plan, while Chapter 7 does not. Chapter 7 has a longer-lasting impact on credit ratings (10 years) compared to Verbraucherinsolvenzverfahren and Chapter 13 (6-7 years).
France has a procedure called "rétablissement personnel," which is similar to Chapter 7 in the US, allowing individuals to liquidate their assets and discharge their debts. In the UK, individuals can file for bankruptcy or enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), which is similar to Chapter 13 in the US.
My student loan is my pain..
You declare bankruptcy and walk away, more or less without serious consequences so long as you were not deliberately fraudulent. You may have trouble getting another loan or conversely you may find it easier now that you have relatively more experience than before.
Germany in particular takes a moralistic approach to finances that IMO harms the economy quite a bit and constrains entrepreneurship to the well connected and already established. You are only supposed to start businesses that succeed.
In reality money is not a real thing, money is numbers in a computer database that we collectively signal and coordinate the economic activity and utilization of the resources that hold the real value. As such a certain amount of default well above zero is optimal to maximize the amount of real world value being generated.
>> As such a certain amount of default well above zero is optimal to maximize the amount of real world value being generated.
Someone who had worked in banking once told me they adjust lending standards to maximize profit. I was shocked that this meant about a 6-7 percent default rate on the mortgage loans. If you are too stringent you won't lend any money and if you let it flow freely you'll fail under all the defaults, so yes there is an optimal amount of failure even for the lender.
Bookmarked this post when I saw it here a while ago, seems the optimal amount of anything “bad” is non-zero
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
> you may find it easier now that you have relatively more experience than before
There's a dude on twitter who has been detailing his process of going through a bankruptcy over the last few months. I think he lost about $4M. He's discussed another business idea that he's had and his plans for implementing it. Now, a month after his bankruptcy has been final, it seems that that some investors are very interested in going forward with him on this new venture. It's likely that his openness about everything was what caught their attention.
This is how bankruptcy is supposed to work: fail at something and there's a path to recovery.
> Germany in particular takes a moralistic approach to finances that IMO harms the economy quite a bit and constrains entrepreneurship to the well connected and already established. You are only supposed to start businesses that succeed.
It's more pragmatic, than moralistic. Germany aims for high quality in business and workers, the whole system is based around this. USA seems more aiming for quantity. Just throw money at it, and see what sticks. But the difference is, USA is very big and wealthy in resources and manpower, so it can afford this. Germany, like other European countries, is rather small and lives from connecting with others. So efficiency is very important.
My experience is incomplete I will admit and possibly outdated besides, however I speak German, regularly consume a fair about of German news, and I spent a few months living in Munich. The attitude I've observed, especially among older Germans, is that buying with credit is a moral shortcoming while paying with cash is virtuous. High interest rates are considered good because they reward savers, conversely people complain about low interest rates as an injustice.
Also, Germany has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so not as large as the US or China, but I wouldn't exactly call them "small" economically.
> Also, Germany has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so not as large as the US or China, but I wouldn't exactly call them "small" economically.
US GDP: $28.7T China GDP: $18.5T Germany: $4.5T
Also, Germany is relatively small when it comes to land area, has to import most of the raw materials, and heavily relies on subcontractors from China. They do not really play in the same league as US and China.
The alternative is VC / investors. They don't get their money back if your buisness fails, but you have given away much of your equity if you succeed.
Generally a much better deal for first time founders.
"What's the alternative to, if someone fails to open a business, taking them out back and shooting them in the head?"
I am unable to rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question.
Not in American tech venture capital. They expect to make a positive ROI on only maybe 20-10% of their investments.
Bankruptcy in the US for example, is way more straightforward for businesses compared to individuals. Its not nearly as frowned upon for businesses. Take for instance:
In Silicon Valley for instance, many founders of successful businesses had multiple failures founding other startups first, it seemingly is part of the Silicon Valley ethos, almost looked at with a badge of honor.
equity financing rather than debt
Does GMbH not afford limited liability for loans?
Bank's tend not go give loans to newly formed GmbH without a real person being on the hook.
I've also heard first hand of banks requiring from business owners to be personally liable for the loans even for well-established, successful businesses. And when you are trying to extend your facilities, the loans are not in the 10k range..
It was mind-boggling..
If the banks gave cheap credit to businesses without any collateral or any real liability, they would quickly go out of business because of people taking advantage of them. Credit without collateral is available (e.g. credit cards), but it’s not cheap, and it’s limited in size.
We are not talking about consumer loans for financially illiterate pigeons ready to be plucked.
As stated, we are talking about established, multi-generational businesses with high-end equipment already in use, that would more than cover the necessary collateral by orders of magnitude.
It does, but it's about 10k€ and you need to meet certain requirements.
Recovering from a 10k€ loss will take some time in a country with extremely high taxes.
Then use a "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)"
And there is UG if you have no 10k€
please elaborate how germany is different in structuring risk of business failure
From what I could find it bankruptcy in Germany takes 3 years after a change in 2020, which I find is pretty reasonable and is the same length as in the US...
Isn't this the same in most countries?
It is, but in Germany your taxes on wage is very high. It's easier to save up a financial safety net in countries with higher wages and less taxes.
Well it's high in Europe in general. And seems quite similar like in the US. That is you can use a rough estimate of 40%, meaning half the time you're working for the state. So the problem is not taxation as much as low wages. Germany has lower wages than US, Romania has lower wages than Germany. State skims half what you make anywhere. It's the absolute amount you are left with that makes the difference and that's why Americans have more money to spend on businesses than Europe and Europe has more than Asia and Asia more than Africa.
I agree, it's difficult in most countries. Germany has tons of additional laws regarding taxation too. I for myself wouldn't even want to try opening up a business solely due to the taxation expertise I'd have to look up into. Don't get me started on international business too... It's just too much. Kudos to whoever manages to get through all that as a one man business owner.
As someone running a business in Germany I think you're overestimating it. I have a steuerberater (accountant/tax-advisor) who is also doing my bookkeeping and he takes care of all that. When my UG was young paying him was a few €100s per year overhead. Today (when my company is turning over several €100Ks per year) it's a couple €1000s per year (so relatively negligible expense for my business).
There's still plenty to complain about regarding bureaucracy and red tape but don't let this alone deter you from running a business (especially not a software startup).
I might do, it's just way more work than in other countries. 90% of which I really don't want to bother with.
I'm pretty sure it's pretty much like that in most other countries (at least most other European countries). I believe its the US/UK that are unusually easy to open a company in.
> That is you can use a rough estimate of 40%
No. But it's complicated ... For example, income tax is charged on the employee, after the employer has been charged employer/social fees of 30-40%. And then, sale of most goods are charged ~20% VAT.
The total taxation pressure "per hour worked" is far above 40%.
Total tax wedge (including employer/social fees) for a single person with no children earning 167% of the average worker in Germany was 49.2% in 2023 according to OECD Taxing Wages. Most of the other categories they measure (a matrix of single vs married, no vs 2 children, and 67%, 100% and 167% of average wage for one of the partners w/ the other person at 100%) end up closer to the 40% mark (as low as 28.4%)...
But most people do not count employer contributions, because they are not part of the negotiated salary, and most people don't even know what they are. Yes, they of course affect how high salaries businesses will offer.
In terms of income tax and employee contributions, in the OECD scenarios Germany maxes out at 41.2% (the OECD average is 30%; the US is at 29.1%). As a comparison, Belgium is "always" worst in class on this in Europe, w/47.8%.
Overall Germany is still one of the highest tax countries in Europe, but it also has a higher difference than most countries the highest taxed (high income single earners) and families with children in total effective tax rate - for the later, Germany is much closer to the pack, to the point of being near or below the OECD average for a couple of categories.
VAT in most countries add very little, because most of your gross income does not go towards VAT rates products - for starters you're first paying tax, and then covering housing and most places exclude a number of others things from VAT as well. Depending on country and income level and spending patterns, it does add a few percentage points, but it's rarely significantly skewing the overall taxation level all that much (last time I did the numbers, at a far above average income, VAT increased my total taxation by about 4%)
The US tax levels are lower than Europe, but it mostly events out when you account for health insurance with exception of a few of the highest tax European countries (Belgium always being the extreme outlier, and Germany is usually second, at least of the OECD countries, depending on your specific circumstances)
"In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life"
So instead you ruin other people's lives?
I'm sure the executives at Chase or JP Morgan struggle to wipe the tears of loss from their eyes with 100 dollar bills once you default on a loan their underlings made to you.
The very purpose of even smaller banks is to spread risk across multiple loans and investments in such a way that a client's bankruptcy doesn't ruin them at all. Given the interest rates they charge on certain financial services, they seem to have no problem not going under themselves in most cases.
The bank? The ones whose job is literally to turn risk into premium on loans?
Yes, exactly. It's amazing how people don't see that the _whole_ point of banks is to aggregate defaulting risks across a very large number of loans to power the economy.
Banks have more than one point and function.
Eg they also provide 'checking' accounts. There's no conceptual reason why that function needs to be bundled with the 'aggregating default risk' function; but it happens to be so in many countries.
To illustrate, on the one hand, think of an institution that takes deposits and lets you transfer money to pay your rent etc, but doesn't make any 'real' investments: all they do is park the deposits in government loans.
On the other hand, think of exchange traded funds that invest in a wide array of bonds (or even equities). They diversify defaulting risk across the economy, without taking deposits, like your typical bank does.
The ability to provide loans from nothing is the special feature of a bank, which is why they are so heavily regulated. The deposits are just the opposite half of the loan creation. No bank invest deposits - they're a liability to the bank.
Banks don't create loans from nothing.
(And if banks could create loans from 'nothing', so could any other company that can issues bonds.)
There have been episodes in history with very lightly regulated banks, and they were very stable banking systems by and large. See the 'free banking episodes' in eg Canada, Scotland, Australia and China. There was no 'creating loans from nothing' that needed to be regulated away.
If a company issues a bond and I buy it then I have to give my own existing money in exchange.
If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
> If a company issues a bond and I buy it then I have to give my own existing money in exchange.
> If a company takes out a loan from the bank, the bank isn’t putting up existing money, it just creates a new asset and starts accounting for it. Hence new money is created from nothing.
Sorry, your analogy doesn't work out, because the roles are reversed.
Look at the situation where a company sells me a bond, to be paid back in ten years. But instead of me handing money over to them, I give them an IOU (or credit line) that they can draw down any time they wish to.
We can create this pair of bond and IOU out of nothing, just like the bank can create deposit-loan pairs out of nothing.
However, just like with the bank, people don't borrow money to let it just sit there. They want to invest.
So they spend their deposit, and draw down their IOU.
And once your customer does that, you better have some money in your 'safe' that you can hand to them.
In the classic case, that money comes from outside deposits.
> What stops the bank from creating too many loans is that the bank would become insolvent and all the workers have to carry their stuff out in cardboard boxes (except the execs they probably have someone to do that for them).
How would they go insolvent in your model?
They do.
DR Loan, CR Deposit.
Job done.
No need to issue bonds or do anything. It's just splitting the zero in accounting.
Any operation can do that. Generally there is legislation that then brings these 'deposit holders' under specific requirements.
> DR Loan, CR Deposit.
> Job done.
You can do that, sure. And if that was all there was to banking, it would be a fantastic business to be in.
Alas, the whole point of taking out a loan is to spend the money on something, eg to invest it.
And once the bank's customer withdraws the deposit half of that newly created pair of anti-particles, the situation isn't nearly as symmetrical and neat anymore: the bank better have some money in the vault to be able to satisfy that withdrawal request.
(Slightly less antiquated: the customer will likely spend their borrowed money electronically, but then just means that you need to have the funds available to settle with the bank who runs the account on the receiving end of that transaction.)
> Generally there is legislation that then brings these 'deposit holders' under specific requirements.
Even without legislation or specific requirements, you can't just keep creating these loan/deposit pairs out of thin air. At least not, if your customers are supposed to be able to spend their borrowed funds.
"And once the bank's customer withdraws the deposit"
Withdrawing is always just transferring to another bank - even if that bank is the central bank.
Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank. That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Everything else is a collateral optimisation.
There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
> Withdrawing is always just transferring to another bank - even if that bank is the central bank.
No. You can withdraw cash. But you are right, that the common case is a transfer.
> Banks settle with each other by the target bank taking over the deposit in the source bank.
That's one way they can settle. But at the end of the day (or whatever the relevant period is), they send each other the net difference in the underlying base money. These days, that's deposits at the central bank.
> That is how correspondent banking has worked for at least four hundred years.
Correspondent banking being important is mostly an American thing (and perhaps a 18th and 19th century English, but not Scottish, thing, too.)
> There is never any "money" in a vault. There might be some receipts for money, but that's about it.
These days, the 'vault' is (mostly) an account at the central bank.
A bank can just magic up an account with $1M in your name, sure, but when you show up to withdraw the money they have to source that currency from somewhere— Their loans won’t be held in very high regard if you can’t then use the loaned money to, for example, pay for all of the various labor and materials you need to build your new house.
That somewhere is the bank’s depositors.
Except that they don't have to source that currency from somewhere - it really is literally magicked up out of thin air! When you come to spend it, that amount is transferred to another bank, that they can then offset against their own magic money.
The only relationship with deposits (which are actually liabilities) and assets is that enforced by regulators.
This is how money creation works in the modern economy - so the money supply can grow as economic activity increases, all guided by central banks / governments with levers such as interest rates, open market activities (QE), and regulations.
Again - banks really do create money from nothing, all day, every day.
No they don't, banks have accounts with the central bank. They also have their assets and liabilities. They have to manage the system so that they can manage external withdrawals. When assets outweigh liabilities it's a bankruptcy. When current demand for withdrawals exceeds short term liquid reserves it's a liquidity issue. At no point do banks create base money. A balance in a bank is just an iou for base (central bank's) money.
The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.
Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.
I suggest taking a look at what an actual central bank, The Bank of England, have to say on this rather than a lot of stuff on YouTube: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
That document completely agrees with ‘nootropicat, except for a difference in terminology— What ‘nootropicat calls “money” the BoE calls “base money.”
(And, for the record, this is also what I’ve been meaning by “currency”)
So if someone pays you using a credit card, or using money they derived from a bank loan, presumably you don't accept that money because it's not a loan from the central bank - it's not "base money"?
Incidentally, the only claim you as a lowly individual ever have on central bank money in most (all?) current currency areas is as physical currency, and even then for the most part you only ever get to exchange it for commercial bank money. For the purposes of this discussion, all digital money between most normal entities is commercial bank money. Commercial bank money _is_ money.
I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance, so I’m happy to accept any form of payment that results in an appropriate increase in that number— Just because I draw a distinction between currency and commercial money doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that the latter is money.
And I rarely exchange physical currency for digital money these days— Usually I’m exchanging it for food instead.
> I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance
It (probably) is, but if all of your bank's account holders asked for that at the same time it would be what's known as a "run on the bank" and you'd very quickly find out that they don't have anywhere near enough physical currency to cover even a fraction of their account holders.
It must be peculiar living in such a backward nation that still relies on physical currency to buy food.
I just wave my phone at a terminal.
That's a silly comment.
It's important that you _can_ get physical currency on demand. It's not nearly as important whether you personally actually make that demand.
> At no point do banks create base money.
This is true, and most of the rest of what you are saying is also true.
> The only entity that creates money is the central bank.
This is not true. Banks really can take arbitrary assets and turn them into money. Just not base money!
My comment has opened up a lot of 'confidently incorrect' and misinformed replies.
Thankyou to hgomersail for providing the definitive answer, from the BoE no less!
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Citation needed. I do not believe this for even a single moment.
The only institution that can "create" money from thin air is the government. And even that is a polite fiction when you realize that "printing more money" also inherently devalues the money already in the system.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
I only skimmed this briefly (no time), but things operating as suggested (eg the banks loaning money they do not have) would fall into the category of fraud IMO.
Whether that's currently legal or not is another matter that I cannot comment on.
I'm going to have a hard time understanding how it's fraud if it's legal.
That document is published by the Bank of England. I'm not sure what higher authority would convince you.
I never said it was false; only that it suggests fraud.
What he wrote is a popular myth that originated in a misunderstanding how fractional reserve works, it just means they have long term assets to cover short term liabilities. There's a lot of this stuff on youtube.
If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.
Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
This topic and thread is a great example that HN'rs often have very little understanding of certain subjects that get posted here.
If it is VC or SF Tech related, I usually learn something. Anything around Banking, Finance, Trading, Crypto etc... not so much.
And as usual, 'modern monetary theory' rears its ugly head, too.
You can only really hold the "printing more money" analogy in your head, if you are prepared to balance your thinking and accept that taxation and loan repayment "shred money" and that financial savings is "putting money in a drawer".
At which point you will realise there can be no devaluation since money is destroyed as it moves around, and money in drawers may as well not be there.
I do not personally see money in those terms.
I see money as units of resource allocation. There are only so many available resources at any given moment. More units of allocation means less resources allocated per unit.
I'm also not an economist. :)
Money is the oil in the engine not the petrol.
There isn't and never has been a one-to-one relationship between money and stuff. At best it is inductive.
Just as with electrical engineering, the real world requires a reactive supply, which is what allows electrical innovation beyond direct resistive loads.
Electrical supply engineers hate reactive power, but without it we don't get iPhones.
The power triangle gives the best engineering analogy to the way the monetary system works.
Clearly that's not true as the bank note analogy shows. If you print trillions of £50 pound notes and stuff them into an empty coal mine guarded by many competent people with guns, that's not going to have any impact on prices whatsoever.
That sounds like 'modern monetary theory', which is neither modern nor monetary.
But it is both novel and correct. As in it has both novel and correct parts.
While I disagree with somewhereoutth and mostly agree with you, it is true that banks can create money.
However banks don't create money out of thin air. However they can create it out of assets.
As a silly thought experiment: if your bank has a vault full of valuable assets, like diamonds and deeds to houses in prime real estate, stocks etc, they can in principle create loan/deposit pairs (ie make loans and credit the borrowed funds to the borrower account).
When people make withdrawals, especially when they make more withdrawals than the bank has reserves, they just sell some of their assets to cover the difference. That's all pretty normal and boring.
Customers think of their deposits of 100% like money and economically behave as if that was true, but in practice they are backed by 10% money, ie reserves, and 90% other assets.
(The percentages are for illustration only.
Also we ignore minimum reserve requirements and other laws here. Many countries don't have minimum reserve requirements anyway.)
Except none of that is true.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
That's a long PDF. What do you want to refer to in particular?
Btw, you might want to study the section 'Managing the risks associated with making loans'.
The pdf is pretty vague about the limits of creating these loan/deposit pairs in general. But there's eg this:
> One way in which they do this is by making sure that they attract relatively stable deposits to match their new loans, that is, deposits that are unlikely or unable to be withdrawn in large amounts. This can act as an additional limit to how much banks can lend. For example, if all of the deposits that a bank held were in the form of instant access accounts, such as current accounts, then the bank might run the risk of lots of these deposits being withdrawn in a short period of time.
In general, the limit to loan/deposit pair creation is withdrawals and transfers of the new deposits.
---
Btw, I agree that fractional reserve banking can create money. (Just not base money, and not without limits.)
No, the limit is Basel III: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III
Fractional reserve banking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
Fractional reserve banking does not work like this.
You still need assets in fractional reserve banking. Those assets just don't need to be reserves.
Ie 90% of your assets could be diamonds in the vault, and 10% could be reserve cash in the vault. That would be fractional reserve banking, but you still have 100% assets. (In practice, you have more than 100% assets. The excess is your equity cushion.)
If your liabilities outstrip your assets, that's when you are bankrupt. Fractional reserve banking doesn't help you there.
The 90% is not diamonds, it's loans I've made.
I have two customers A & B. A has $1000 on deposit. B has $500 on deposit. I have $1500 in my safe. Assets = $1500, Liabilities = $1500.
B borrows $500, which for simplicity's sake he deposits in his account.
Now A has $1000 on deposit, B has $1000 on deposit. I have $1500 cash in my safe and a note from B for $500. Assets = $2000, Liabilities = $2000.
I just created $500. It's really that simple.
Yes, IOUs of credit worthy people can be part of your assets. But so can be diamonds or stocks.
> B borrows $500, which for simplicity's sake he deposits in his account.
If you stop there, your analysis is indeed correct. However, people don't typically take out loans to stuff the borrowed money into their accounts until the loan comes due.
They go out and buy stuff with the proceeds. So B withdraws the money.
So now you have:
- Assets: 1000$ cash in your safe plus an IOU of 500$ from B = 1500$.
- Liabilities: 1000$ deposit from A + 500$ deposit from B = 1500$.
So far so good.
You can repeat that game two more times, and then you run out of cash to withdraw.
So if you repeated it a third time, you'd need to sell the loan from B to a third party for cash, so you can fulfill B's withdrawal request.
If B is credit worthy, you will generally be able to make that sale. (But it takes time and hassle to organise.) Ie you have short term liquidity trouble, but you ain't insolvent.
If B is a deadbeat, you won't be able to sell that loan for enough to cover the withdrawal request, and now you are insolvent, and go into bankruptcy.
B is creditworthy. That’s why I leant it to him. If I have an issue with liquidity I go to the discount window of my central bank and they will lend me the money.
That’s why central banks typically make the rules about reserves, etc.
> B is creditworthy. That’s why I leant it to him. If I have an issue with liquidity I go to the discount window of my central bank and they will lend me the money.
Yes. But that means you got newly created base money from the central bank. Which sort of goes against the original claim.
> When you come to spend it, that amount is transferred to another bank, that they can then offset against their own magic money.
No. The other banks demand settlement in outside currency. In the olden days, they shipped gold around every so often. Nowadays, in the end you settle in central bank deposits.
Not really. The process is as follows.
You go to a bank with an asset. In this case the new house. The bank then creates a new financial asset called a 'mortgage' that goes on the asset side of their balance sheet. Against that they create a liability called an 'advance' that they give to you.
You then give the advance to the builder in return for the house, where it becomes a deposit of the builder than they can then transfer to anybody else in payment for goods and services.
If any of them happen to be at another bank then all that happens is the deposit is transferred to the bank and it becomes an 'inter bank loan'. The target bank then simply creates another deposit in its books to balance that loan and that is allocated to the customer being paid.
It's all just debits and credits. What limits bank money creation is the assets they are prepared to discount and the creditworthiness of the individuals they choose to advance to and whether the bank believes they can pay the current price of money.
I think you’re glossing over some important details regarding the inter-bank loans. As far as I understand, they are not automatic and must be negotiated in the same way as any other bank loan.
Modulo some amount of transaction batching, when one bank’s customer initiates a payment to an account at another bank, reserves are actually transferred between the two banks (these days, in the form of central bank account transfers).
Each bank’s main concern is managing its daily cashflow— They need to have sufficient reserves each day to cover that day’s net outflow of payments. But holding reserves is expensive; they would much rather use that currency as an advance payment for a new loan if they can, so that somebody else is stuck with the currency.
And here’s where the inter-bank loans come into play: Because most of a bank’s outflows happen on an irregular schedule as directed by their depositors, and they have an incentive to hold as few reserves as possible, they may find themselves in a position where they would need to suspend payments. When this happens, they borrow reserves from another bank in order to continue operating. If the borrowing bank is considered trustworthy by the banking community, they generally have no trouble securing such a loan on standard terms.
Of course, if a bank systematically misjudges the default risk of their borrowers, they may have a bigger problem that their assets (future loan repayments) won’t cover their liabilities (future withdrawals by depositors). If that imbalance isn’t corrected quickly, they will eventually find themselves unable to secure future inter-bank loans because they will have become an unacceptable default risk to the other banks.
"As far as I understand, they are not automatic and must be negotiated in the same way as any other bank loan."
Not in the slightest.
If the bank doesn't take over the deposit in the source bank, then their customer doesn't get paid. At which point they will close their account and move to the source bank. That's a deposit outflow they won't want to have.
Both the source and the destination bank have an interest in ensuring the payment clear. Therefore it does.
Inter bank loan negotiation is about shuffling the risk around for a price afterwards.
"reserves are actually transferred between the two bank"
Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Correspondent banking is the base for payments, and is still used for most international currency payments - even with the advent of the CLS central clearing mechanism.
> If the bank doesn't take over the deposit in the source bank, then their customer doesn't get paid. At which point they will close their account and move to the source bank. That's a deposit outflow they won't want to have.
The destination bank can demand to withdraw that balance. And they typically do that with the net flows at the end of the settlement period.
(And they don't withdraw physical currency these days. The 'withdrawal' comes in the form of a transfer of electronic central bank reserves.)
> Reserves don't exist in aggregate. Central banking is a collateral optimisation of correspondent banking.
No? This is easiest to see in a gold standard system: your physical gold are your reserves.
In typical modern fiat system, the reserves are account entries at the central bank (and vault cash, but that's a small-ish amount).
Private commercial banks can create 'money' via their normal commercial operations. But they can't create central bank reserves that way, nor are they allowed to print central bank notes.
> There was no such thing as reserves in the UK banking system for three hundred years, for example.
Citation needed. And also an explanation of exactly what you mean by reserves.
(Btw, talking about the 'UK banking system' over the last three hundred years already makes me very suspicious of your argument. During most of that time, Scottish banking differs remarkably from English banking. So there are not many blanket statement about the 'UK banking system' that are true.)
Investors like Y Combinator can pool risk, so even if most of their startups fail they're still net ahead.
The clown car eventually drives into a gold mine, given enough gas.
This is critical and often overlooked when it comes to fully appreciating socio-economic factors that influence a person's capacity to "succeed". People with the resources are simply allowed to fail and recover more times than those without.
The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt and be resilient is hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants chasing the American dream.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".
Is the typical attribution error.
[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
> The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt is sometimes hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants searching for the American dream.
Isn't that an example of a 2nd chance? A person fails in his own country and gets another chance (2nd chance) in another country?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
This was really my takeaway as well.
The finality of decisions is highly situational.
The article doesn’t hold true for me, I have used myriad chances to fail, and have so far lived 3 distinct epochs in my life, each one a life unto itself. I owe this to the simple decision of my father to buy 5 acres of raw land a couple of miles out of town and teach me to use tools.
On the basis of that I have never had to rent, I have had my own shelter (starting with a simple cabin and an outhouse) from the age of 16, and I have never been overly dependent on a job to where I wasn’t willing to walk away.
Having simple shelter made it so I could fuck around and find out until I found something that worked a little, then iterate.
I spent many years of my life intermittently in poverty, getting my food from food banks and buying expired surplus from food thrifts, gardening, etc and relying on social programs for medicine, but I was never at risk of being homeless. Always a place to fall back to.
I have parlayed that into a pretty good life, comfortable, productive, and a small economic engine that provides for several families in the community.
My advice for anyone having children: buy land if you can. Not structures, but land. A few miles out of town is fine, because vehicles and bicycles exist. Teach your kids basic carpentry, electrical, mechanical, and masonry skills. Those are the basis of civilisation.
Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed.
I have done this with my children and because of that, they enjoy the same benefits that I had, and are finding their way having known nothing but self determination as the fundamental principle of their lives.
Debt -Free Land you control without many restrictions, not “real estate” is what makes it possible to live better than most people do while technically being in “poverty” by income. That is what makes it possible to take risks. Risks are what makes it possible to find a working solution.
Of course, if you are born into financial privilege, that’s also a great start, but that wasn’t my case. I often struggled to even pay the (very low) property tax.
Without the freedom and willingness to take risks, and the resilience and willingness to endure hardships, you may have to endure being a servant to someone unless you are very lucky, and luck works better if you can make your own.
This might read like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps “ rant, but it is not. For most people, they are trapped in a situation designed to keep them in service of some goal not their own. It is very difficult to escape, and impossible without the proper training for self sufficient action and the complete lack of debt (or the willingness to lose anything you owe money on) You also might have to sacrifice your comfort, security, and literally risk your life or health to obtain the foothold from which you can launch a self determined life.
That is a position of extreme privilege, but it is one that can be obtained if you want it bad enough and are willing to roll the dice, and accept the finality of failure if you do not succeed (looping back to the article).
My point is that that kind of privilege is more within reach that most people understand. But you might’ve have to be willing to give up everything at first to use it. Most people are simply not prepared for the hardship and sacrifice that entails.
Land is still cheap all over the world. Unless you live on an island, You can probably get an acre of land for a months wages at a fast food place (in the USA) within a weeks bicycle ride of where you are. But that won’t do you any good unless you know how to turn that into a place to live and work from.
"Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed."
Sounds like typical American arrogance.
Everything you mentioned about building up a piece of land from zero, is predicated on a stable legal and economic framework, that protects and values private property. And every country that has that framework, tends to have high land prices already. Try this in some non-developed country, and you'll soon see why the world is considered unjust.
The issue is that folks who "try that in a non developed country" often know what they need to do to protect their own private property, which is to hire thugs who will shoot at folks who try to squat.
It’s really not that bad. Instead of paying property taxes like you would in a developed nation, you just make small contributions to political campaigns and help to build a new cuartel for the police in your local town. It’s way less expensive than property taxes and you get very personalised services when your name is engraved on the local police station.
lol. Sounds like typical developing nation defeatism .
I am doing it right now in a developing nation.
I settled here on Hispaniola in 2007.
I am working and living right now in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We’re building up new infrastructure in agriculture, education, and startup incubation. We have already launched a couple of successful ventures.
Here are not the least stable places, but they’re hardly the most stable either. But the rewards are huge for those that can stomach the risks.
Anyone who wants to try this needs to watch and internalise the film “empire of dust” (2013). It’s A documentary about how to not succeed in a developing nation.
There’s basically zero competition at the early stages because, like you, no one thinks you can do anything.
My kids have established a beachhead in Mauritius and northern India, and we are looking at Madagascar and some demographically collapsing areas in the eastern United States as a possible next step.
> Here are not the least stable places
Honestly, while you'd probably know better if you're on the ground there, Haiti does look like the least stable place right now.
The article doesn't hold true because of the MASSIVE safety net you've had.
Land, house, zero rent for a long ass time. Your ability to fail and come back is high due to that. And family support.
Yeah that’s what I said, basically. I had land. I built a cabin and an outhouse from salvaged lumber. Hauled water in 5 gallon jugs. Built up from there.
You don’t need a lot to have a huge advantage. Just a roof. And that can start with a couple thousand dollars for a chunk of land somewhere with some kind of dirt road to it that is passable at least most of the year. That opportunity still exists for many, many people.
i think the reality is that people want the luxury of modern society even if it means they are chained to it. Its either that, or people are born in the chains and dont even realize they can break them.
Thats certainly how i feel as a white collar office professional in the US.
Yeah, it’s not a glamorous trade-off. But it’s a >0 starting point that makes it so you can risk losing your comforts.
Your willingness to try great things is more predicted on What happens if you fail rather than what happens if you succeed.
If the worst that can happen to me is that I go back to my cozy but inconvenient cabin and do contracting until I can save up enough money to give it another go, that’s way different than the lose everything I own and live on the streets scenario.
And you simply can learn from failure
This has nothing at all to do with the article.
It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.
"Never try"
— H. Simpson
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
That's a great approach to this issue. I believe this is exactly what happened to me, and to most people who are not "lucky" in having all the necessary conditions for their original "dream" to be realized. Anyway, the older I get, the more I believe there's no way a person can just have "one" dream the want to pursue their whole life, what you really want keeps changing every decade or less. I still remember what my dream was when I was 12 years old or 20, and I can tell you with confidence I am happy I ended up in a different place 30 years later.
Apart from that intial quote which to me sounds like road to absolute passiveness, thats my life so far.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
I feel similarly. Pick the most interesting opportunity you’re aware of, seasoned with some realism. Excel to the best of your ability. Continuously increase your abilities. Leave everything better than you found it; but don’t exhaust yourself needlessly. Leverage the advantages you have and don’t mourn the ones you don’t.
Life has no way. It can't remind you of anything.
That's also on Charles Bukowskis tombstone.
Close enough. It's "Don't try"
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Do you go around harassing everyone who uses 'he' when it could possibly be a man or a woman they're referring to?
To be fair, “anime protagonists” are not the same category as “arbitrary human” so in this context saying “she” actually does come off more like virtue signaling given the statistical prevalence of male anime protagonists
Statistical prevalence is irrelevant when talking about a specific person's experiences watching anime. They may predominantly watch shows with female protagonists, or they may have had just a few particular female-protagonist shows in mind when they wrote the comment.
Personally speaking (as someone who watches very little anime and has mostly only seen the famous ones, like Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service), I think only ~10-20% of the animes I have watched have had male protagonists. It is surprising to me to hear that protagonists in that genre are mostly male, given my own overwhelming experience, and I'm not totally sure I believe it.
If you watch very little anime.. why would you presume to weigh in on this topic? Shōnen is the most popular category of manga / anime and it’s targeted at adolescent males with mostly male protagonists.
Because we aren't talking about anime in general. We are talking about one specific person's personal experiences with the subset of anime they watch.
If I say "she" when talking about generic protagonists in some Miyazaki films I've seen, are you going to say I'm wrong and should say "he" instead because some genre of anime I've never heard of is popular with some demographic I'm not a part of?
If that's really how you think, then do you also opine that we should say "she" rather than "he" when talking about generic human beings, seeing as women outnumber men? Somehow I suspect not.
Is there much Shonen that you'd describe as "heartwarming", though? I like stories about personal emotional growth, and magic. Wasn't using "she" for virtue signalling, just as what seemed to me to be a statistical fact. There's one I can think of with a male protagonist, and his great aspiration in life is to be murderer, and he targets his classmate, who is a tall and slightly dim-witted model ... and ends up filled with protective feelings toward her, which begin when he impulsively lends her his intended murder weapon (a boxcutter) to cut some card for a school project ... and by the end of the series they're going round a mall together at Christmas, holding hands. That was a pretty good one. Recommendations for ones with male protags are welcome, if they're not full of tanks and battles and so on.
Sylvia Plath ended up committing suicide is good context here
Reminds me of the Existential Ad Agency:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204
Chop down the tree and build a house with the lumber if there are no more figs.
That's a great analogy, I'm now going to have to read this book.
Liquidity preference is one hell of a drug.
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What a pessimistic view of life.
I don't know how you figure that affordable place means you can't be a developer, when software engineering is probably one of the little professions where this doesn't apply.
Also doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while. What I earned in a 3 month internship was enough to pay my remaining studies and anything I wanted to buy for a long time. Don't take for granted what you get.
The dev jobs obviously still exist but they aren’t financially viable anymore and I would need to change careers to fit the local market.
> doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while
yes and at the end of my big travels I’ll come back to a 1k/month rent increase for an even lower quality of life. This is not a viable long term plan. I already need to spend an extra 800 to rent the same unit I’m in if I was on the market today
>I would need to change careers to fit the local market.
I think eddd-ddde was implying doing remote work.
> "I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is"
That's an astonishing level of confidence / hubris. Also, many people choose to enjoy extended travel -- having saved $ in advance, and typically finding ways to live with much less luxury than your FAANG lifestyle takes for granted, and/or doing odd jobs or remote work/gigs, or teaching....
I would recommend that you find a way to broaden your horizons, either literally w/ travel or by way of books and ideally interactions with people outside the very narrow band of your current environs and perspective.
> much less luxury than your FAANG lifestyle
I live in a tiny old 1 bedroom apartment with no car and spend less than $100 on entertainment most months. You Americans are extremely spoiled. I’ve been doing this for 3 years already and I still can’t even afford a 2 bedroom condo. I need to save and live like this for 3 more years before I’ll have enough
What country are you from? Obviously this is all context dependent.
I do agree that thinking you’ve always made the best decision is a contradiction at the very least. You never know it’s the right decision until after the fact but also it’s impossible to guess how other outcomes would play out.
I’m Canadian. The only thing I could have done better is move to the states. I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice in the long term despite the low pay but it’s a huge mistake. My life is a dead end right now and I need to get out. Until then I just sit here and cope and seethe
The mistake is Canada, not FAANG. Essentially no career choice pays enough to afford RE in Canada without supplementation. I recommend moving because things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Saying "FAANG" without clarifying "in Canada" was completely misleading. Since the only reason you brought it up was to signal high income, it must have been deliberate.
Also, you went straight from "I've always known what the best choice is" to "I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice... but it's a huge mistake." You're spouting nonsense and contradicting yourself.
Everyone else, sorry for having accidentally fed a troll.
Are you illiterate? I said in my original post that my compensation is adjusted for my own country.
> I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is and the “path” is which trade offs I choose. There are no good options
Why do you act like I chose to work here on purpose? I wasn’t smart enough for the jobs i wanted so I picked the best option that was available to me. I was wrong. I know that an American FAANG job is better
> You Americans are extremely spoiled
Well, yes. This is the aim of a civilisation, isn’t it? To render banal what was previously trying, and raise to daily concern what was previously trivial.
Not to belittle your situation, which I know nothing about, but there’s nothing unusual about living very modestly the first few years of one’s career.
May I ask how old you are?
Maybe take a loan, if you want to buy an apartment that is, and enjoy your life.
No, when someone does not make a lot of money, the answer is not “get a loan.”
I don’t qualify for a loan (mortgage) big enough to buy an apartment unless I put several hundred thousand dollars down. That’s why I save.
A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
I believe in the Myth of Second Chance and Third and so on. It is what we tell ourselves to keep going. Nothing wrong with that.
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
Hindsight living, is like hindsight investing (I should have bought Apple stock in 1999) useless.
With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.
Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.
But everything good in my life has come from this one path.
I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.
It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.
But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.
No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.
I can relate 100% to that with my own experience coming from a poor economic background and coming to a more affluent background right now where any misstep can make me goes back 10+ years of economic development.
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like: - Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered) - Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail - Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions - Avoid any drugs - Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.
Now I'm a happy feller. I'm married to a fortune teller, I get my fortune told for free
100% correct but I think what more people should do is post-mortems on import decisions.
Too many people blame others for their current situation. Try taking a philosophy that we have more control and look back upon decisions we made and why we made them.
Not "I should have bought apple stock". but "why didn't I buy apple stock?"
> Nothing wrong with that.
One thing wrong with it is that the myth leads us to blame ourselves for the failure to recover as well.
Yes. False beliefs breed more false beliefs, and at some point they catch up with us.
I had a colleague who was fanatically into soccer. I asked how does he feel when his team loses? It is devastating for many especially in big games. But he said he is willing to take the risk of rooting for a specific team and possibly losing because it gives him excitement. It's a bit like a drug really you get addicted to your team winning. It's a bit like any gambling addiction.
If you had no interest in the outcome of a soccer-match you wouldn't get very excited watching it.
In reality most people don't have a real interest in a soccer-game since they don't gamble money on it. Therefore it seems people pick a soccer-team to root for BECAUSE we want to get excited. We want that adrenaline. (or is it dopamine?) We want to believe that the arch of history tends towards our team winning.
False Belief 1: If my soccer-team wins I'll be much better off, much happier.
Consequent False Belief: Since my team did not win I must now be desolate. I must feel bad.
I agree. If you have two narratives about your life, and both are true, it is literally pointless to hang onto the negative one.
One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.
We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.
My brother's college roommate became an actor instead of a lawyer.
Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
> My brother's college roommate became an actor instead of a lawyer.
> Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
Don't worry; many lawyers, at age 57, are saying the same thing!
(There are more lawyers of the Saul Goodman size of practice than the LA Law type of practice)
No shortages of lawyers who think the same - way before they hit 50 :-)
Yes precisely. If I had a pound for each time a dev told me they wish they were a doctor, and another pound for each time a doctor told me they wish they were something else!
Then do both!
I had a friend who was an engineer for a few years, decided to do something different, and now she's a physician.
"everyone who has straight hair wants curly hair, and everyone with curly hair wants straight hair"
I've many regrets similar in vein to that of your friend. Over time I've decided that it's rather reductionist to think that things connect together so simplistically. The "how my life could have been better if X, ceteris paribus" can be a really painful analysis, but -- in this case favourably -- there is no "ceteris paribus" in real lives.
There's a collection of techniques in the mental health field called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is about helping people identify and replace these negative stories. If folks are having a hard time applying these ideas themselves alone, look into this therapy as it can be good to have a therapist help you through using the technique.
I think the idea that our lives are a set of branching paths, where once you go down one path you can't go down others, is partly a consequence of how the academic path of many careers is designed to "weed out" promising students from others. This "branching tree of time" illusion is created by the elitist, rejecting attitude of the gatekeepers of our society... and by our sensitivity to taking rejection personally in our young and formative years.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
Ay, that's the spirit, lad.
To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".
And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.
As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.
Pull yourself together!
Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"
This simply cannot be overstated: to be paralyzed into inaction is nonetheless yet another action. The curse of choice is common to us all. To quote my mentor (and the actual fatherly mentor of Tony Robbins) Jim Rohn: "To wish it away is to wish your life away."
There is a retrospective and a prospective reading of this advice. I agree with your take when this advice is applied retrospectively, but I find it downright sobering when thinking about my future. I am in the process of making some big decisions, and perhaps I have been a bit to casual about them.
Perhaps, or perhaps you merely let the entirety of your brain make the decision, and more optimally so for your circumstances, instead of the limited executive function. Maybe. Or maybe that was just the lizard brain. Really hard for the executive brain to discern between the "all of my brain / know it in the gut / good instincts" and the "lizard brain want"
agreed. not everything that's true is wise.
The myth is that that there is one optimal path through life that will make you happy and that any deviation from it will cause you to lose that happiness. While mistakes might take you down a path that you didn't anticipate and you might regret it for some time; they might also have opened up doors that would never have presented themselves.
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.
That's exactly my thought reading the piece: it talks about "errors", "mistakes", "irrecoverable damage" where everything could be viewed as "non-optimal choices." And they are judged with the benefit of hindsight, because they could have been the most logical choices with the information available at the time.
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
I look at it as the impossibility of having regret once you understand that every decision you made in the past was the best decision you could have made. Which is to say you were some specific person, with a particular ego and relation to self and to world. Any decision made was being made withing some particular frame of mind - mood, energy, memories, as well as their relevance and salience mappings.
Making a decision while angry? If one has not the capacity to see through anger when making a decision - a lack of mindfulness perhaps, then that decision even when made in anger is the best they could do at that point. If one practices mindfulness and can often deal with anger but fails this time, that is still the best that person could do given who they are when a decision is being made. There is nobody to blame.
Even perceived self-sabotage is still acting within some particular framing. If that person Knew something different about the nature of their being at a perspective and participatory level, they likely would have made different more constructive choices.
Everything emerges exactly as it should due to what is Known and is at any particular time. The nature of self being a lifelong quest to understand, the more we understand about it the better the decision we can make. Probably explains the importance of 'Know thyself' to Socrates. But there is never a wrong choice as you say, only non-optimal. Only that which was made due to you having not been some particular other potential version of you.
Learning makes change possible. Not all learning is good for you. You never know you're learning as you're doing it - for if you're self aware you aren't paying attention as so can't learn, but if you are paying attention you're not aware about "learning". Thus we should pay attention to what is good and trust that we are learning. And trust that we are also learning when we pay attention to what is bad for us.
Right, rumination is bad serves no useful purpose. It is good to analyze our previous mistakes but we should not lament our previous behavior because we cannot change it anyhow. We can only try to be better next time.
The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
Rumination and depression evolved to help humans survive. They aren't useless.
Maybe they helped humanity but sure they ain't helping me now. I think of them the same we "evolved" wisdom teeth and appendicitis.
I really can’t conceive of a way in which depression helps humanity survive. Just because we have a trait doesn’t mean it’s adaptive. More likely, it is a dysfunction of a related emotional state with actual utility (pessimism, paranoia, etc), but it is incorrect to say it helps us survive. It’s just not so maladaptive that it outweighs the benefit of the well functioning adaptation, on a population level.
Andrews PW, Thomson JA Jr. The bright side of being blue: depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychol Rev. 2009 Jul
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/
Very untrue. Evolution didnt evolve depression, just as evolution didnt evolve every other disease or defect. These are byproducts of convulated systems.
Great point. Some things evolved (by evolution). Then some complications arose because of the different things evolving to their local maximal fitness.
Inability for the human body to cope with something is not the result of evolution but the lack of evolution. Evolution is still going on.
Yeah, I'm wondering what is the actual point of the article, and you're touching on where I'm coming from. It's very retrospective, and gives very little time to forethought. Yet the author establishes that they see peers step into life decisions with relatable distress, or indoctrinated softness, people facing the future, but doesn't explore much beyond that. See, to me, this is grasping for an answer, where next step is "and how many of those people who took the step casually or overtly seriously had that have an equivalent impact on their life?"
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities? Like really that’s an example? Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined. This article is just too pessimistic for me.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities?
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
And then there's millions more that didn't even try
A part of their success has to be dependent on millions of people not trying to do the exact same thing, no? What a disaster it would truly be if everyone had the same realizations
I'm not sure. Since I've never seen a situation where millions of people earnestly try for something they want, I would only be theorizing on the outcome. I think certainly there'd end up with more than 2 or 3 success stories, which is mainly my point though
Because the struggle is with yourself. The parent post is correct when they say:
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.
I don't know. My experience is that as you get older, you're constantly evaluated against what could have been, and experiences that in youth would have been seen positively become discounted or, strangely, even held against you.
It often feels as if a second chance at a certain point in life requires more than a change in yourself; it requires an even bigger change than earlier, once over to make the real change, and twice over to convince others or overcome their biases. Either that or the luck of finding someone who understands second chances and is willing to give them.
As you get older, probably you are the one doing the evaluating and realizing you won't be a heart surgeon or discover a major math theorem (that was two from my own teenagerhood). Mostly people not you don't give it two thoughts. But whatever. Learn from your life and don't judge it. I mean sure being old is held against a lot of people but that's just some political social change you can work for a little. Other people's opinions aren't the truth and it seems hard to get a few decades in and not realize this. You can make your own chances each morning, especially to be free and to be helpful to others.
The narratives change when we’re older; but I think there are still “sorting my life out”, or “taking on a new adventure”, narratives that work. And that’s all this side of things is - a story to tell yourself and others while the real work of changing habits and working consistently toward a goal occurs.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
When looking for guidance for life, a good example might be Jesus. Did he make the best decisions in his life? He didn't really care about his life, he gave it away. He only cared about the well-being of others.
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What nonsense. What makes it hard is everything around it. People can't choose to take a 50% pay cut to change careers. They can't let their families starve or lose their homes for it. They can't move move when they need to take care of a loved one.
This idea that changing your mind is the hard part is absolute bonkers unless you're so privileged that you don't care about the real externalities of those choices, or you don't have any.
Phrases like this one only worsen the situation, as for the majority of the world, that's simply not true. If, for you, all you have to do is change your mindset then good for you. You're very, very lucky. But please, don't assume everyone is as privileged.
The big trouble with the article is exactly looking at their failed friends.
The peer group, ever the reserve of the lazy journalist for "facts".
[dead]
> Nothing is better than a comeback story
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
When he won in 2016 i remember thinking. The campaign was so long and so intense and for all of it it seemed clear that he would lose. I remember thinking, this guy in every other respect is a despicable person, but I can't help but be impressed that he just kept going.
Anything can be relatively easy if you've either already succeeded the first time based on sheer determination and/or you've successfully done other harder things that were at least as abstract as having a successful career. This article is not about the moment you make a decision, because that's as easy as it's set up to be based on all of the previous dice rolls of your life, but about the likelihood that you'll be able to bounce back from rolling snake eyes on what seemed like a sure thing at a time when time itself was cheap.
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
Man, I wish my problems were shaped like that.
I think this is quite terrible advice because our (Western) culture is already way too biased towards quarter and mid-life crises, ageism and fatalism when there is objectively little reason to panic.
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
Totally agree. This article is just terrible.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
There's Orwell's essay Such, Such Were the Joys, where a horrible ordeal of preparation, in a preparatory school, for a scholarship and a successful future in Edwardian society, is completely nullified by coinciding with the First World War and the nature of society changing.
The problem is people want to enjoy their lives and starting over means forfeiting many years of that life, as well as potentially closing doors they wanted to leverage. People often put their lives on complete hold for a phd. Discovering that was a waste is awful.
From my experience, the number of chances you have is not the limiting factor in life. I see people making the same kind of mistakes over and over again. The problem is often the pattern of reaction to externalities. The pattern is then the problem, and it is very hard to break habits.
Yes! Many bad decisions—choosing the wrong partner, making bad health choices, or even getting the wrong degree, can be changed in 6-36 months, if the mistake is realized.
But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.
That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.
In my case it took a few decades to plumb utterly the idea that perfecting myself, or trying extremely hard to do so, would not make a bad relationship good. It was a hard lesson for me but I learned it in every cell of my system. Not that I am against being flexible, but some people need life to really beat that lesson into them.
Well, you did not realize that the relationship-choice-of-person itself was the problem, until that pattern got broken.
At least in relationships that's not the case. Unless you are naturally extroverted or charismatic, if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s then you may as well give up. American society just isn't built for finding love outside of school/college.
I had a dreadful marriage that ended in my forties and am now ten years into a relationship where I am so persistently happy I had to rescale my idea of happiness. Maybe by a factor of 1024 or more. I have step kids and my kids have a step mom but they all have been exposed to more happiness than before. And I finally got able to be myself and found a spouse who can talk math with me and gets me in a way I was too blind to conceptualize as a young adult.
This is one of those areas where money can solve your problem. It's a lot harder to rebuild if you're not making good money. Especially for those who are on the hook for alimony & child support.
> I had to rescale my idea of happiness. Maybe by a factor of 1024 or more.
Tell me you're a programmer without telling me you're a programmer :-)
He wanted to write 10 x, but then realized a bit shift of 10 places would be a better estimate.
That's a pretty strong claim to make completely unsupported by evidence. In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
>> if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s
> In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
I did not interpret GP post to mean "If you haven't settled down and started a family by 30, you may as well give up".
I interpreted it more as "If you haven't made a decent sized social network, or haven't figured out how to approach strangers, or haven't been in a committed/long-term/love/etc relationship, or didn't socialise enough to develop socialisation skills, etc... THEN you may as well give up!"
I think the GP's point is that those people who are settling down in their 30s and starting families, well, they didn't mess up, and figured things out before age 30.
Maybe he'll clarify, but I agree with my interpretation: if you haven't figured out romantic relationships by age 30, you may as well give up, because post-30 it's exceedingly difficult to find an environment with lots of socialising with peers.
Almost impossible, in fact, because, as you said, most people are already out of that scene anyway...
I also disagree strongly with that. I live in Seattle (a city well known for being not social and welcoming - aka the seattle freeze), and didn't recover from being a shy introvert until around 30. The skills and mindset for human connection was hard for sure, but I found many pockets of really welcoming social environments around shared interests. My personal interests run to the outdoors, so for me it was hiking/biking/mountaineering/run clubs. However, groups and clubs around shared activities exist for almost any interest, and the whole point of them is to socialize and meet people! It DOES take some effort and discomfort, but it's not even close to "almost impossible".
Obviously it is in the West in tech circles where everyone is introverted and they work 14 hour days. The protestant work ethic has decimated society and all that matters.
This is a incel mindset and very toxic.
In reality this isn't black/white, but a spectrum. Some may have a harder time than others, but giving up is reductionary and depressing and leads nowhere.
> This is a incel mindset and very toxic.
Is it really necessary to both slip in an insult and try to shame opposing ideas into silence before stating your point?
Easier to identify and work around your characteristic errors. Go slow into romance, or make sure to lint and test the code, or be wary of saying yes to things you don't really care about, maybe offload some judgment calls to a trusted delegate. Whatever it is, we all have weaknesses and we can learn to work with them better. And realize when they crop up it isn't uniquely shameful to have broken bits.
A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know. And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
The point is more about reflecting on things that are false, but we tell ourselves to feel better. We don't like to think of a 17 year old as a finished person, however in other ways we try to make them that way.
The reality is that our expectations are much less realistic and bleaker. We love to talk about second chances and failing your way to success. On the other hand, 80% of us live in a very different world.
If you are on the following track which most of us are: high-school -> professional training -> early career -> senior career -> management -> senior management it's almost the opposite as described and downright bleak if you haven't always been a mega achiever.
Now I should possibly distinguish self-employed business people, entrepreneurs, and certain artists. Honestly even these exempt professions it can be like that, and there's exceptions to traditional professions.
Anyway, for most of us it's all about demonstrating perfect success every step of the way. You may be able to "get away" with certain things, but they can all still seriously hurt you. It doesn't take much before you can be perceived as valueless. Sometimes we talk about this, but we seem cautious about admitting it works this way.
So, contrary to the idea that being a failure is okay, most of the time the process looks more like detecting ANY failure in your past and not letting you in the door. After all there's 20 candidates that didn't get a D in 3rd grade biology.
I've met some people who have that outlook, and almost all of them have come from competitive high schools on the coasts, with successful parents who put a lot of expectations on them to achieve from a young age.
If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."
As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.
Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)
But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.
It's worth hearing all opinions, but I don't agree with this sentiment. This applies to many people in a variety of fields. Contrary to our values about achievement we line up for people that purchased their way to credibility.
Same with companies. The truth is that you kinda do know what you're getting more.
Robert Frost's, often misinterpreted [0], “The Road Not Taken” also comes to mind here.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...
For almost all of us, the truth is that life could have been better -- there are mistakes that can not be wholly erased or undone -- but life could also be much worse. And you'll be a lot happier if you don't hyper focus on regretting your mistakes.
Life probably could have been much better for all of us, but also the life we’re imaging that might be much better benefits greatly from being untarnished by reality.
#00F grass!
If you count the mistakes as educational then how can you regret them. They were your mistakes going from where you were to where you are, this one unique and fascinating life.
On the job side, this is a scary consequence of specialization. If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is. If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
> If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.
It seems like my only options are:
1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.
2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.
3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.
4) Start a business.
5) Just live with it.
Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.
I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.
If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.
BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
> If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I didn't word it terribly well, so apologies for that, but for "really need" I was talking about subsistence wages in this case. I make perfectly fine money, and I do save/invest as much as I can, and I do own my house in NYC, so I do alright. I do hope to retire somewhat early, at least by American standards, but it's not like I'm making "fuck you" money.
> BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
Outside of something I did with my dad a few months ago, not really. I have a decent job now that's not psychotic about non-competes, so I've been ramping up to build something.
Well, I think the suggestion remains: live on subsistence income whilst working for as long as it takes to be able to live on subsistence income whilst not working. (All the while you can be attempting to effect changes that allow you to earn more than subsistence income at something you enjoy going.)
Yeah, I don't really disagree; I'm still trying to get out of debt from the six months I was unemployed last year (which also ate a bit into my savings, but I live kind of boring so it wasn't super bad). Hopefully that should be coming to a close pretty soon (even sooner if Gemini actually reimburses the money that they ponzi'd out of me like they claim they will). I've been trying to invest in a combo of relatively-low-risk ETFs (VOO and VTI primarily) and US Treasury Bills, to give myself a combo of potentially-higher-than-inflation-reward but also zero-risk-and-still-higher-than-bank-interest money.
Once my wife starts working, we figured that we'd put nearly 100% of her paycheck into some forms of savings to accelerate the process a bit further, since my salary has traditionally been enough to cover the bills. I'd like to have enough money to retire comfortably by my mid-to-late 40's. I think that's realistic.
2023 was one of the worst years of my life, maybe the worst. It was really horrible being laid off twice and having to spend so much time on LinkedIn and doing Zoom whiteboard interviews and waking up to dozens of rejections every morning, not to mention that being laid off twice in a year makes your resume look insanely bad (each stint being about 3 months). As a result, I think I've become more frustrated than I probably should, and grown a strong resentment towards companies, with a nearly-complete lack of optimism that they'll ever do anything even remotely actually-technical.
My current gig seems a lot better but I've learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. We'll see if it lasts more than three months.
I'm very sorry to hear about the double layoff! That must be very difficult to experience.
The statement "my options on who will hire me are kind of limited" is a bit misleading. Limited compared to whom? Your options are abundant compared to most people.
It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.
This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.
> It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
I mean this with all the respect in the world, but no shit. That's what I'm frustrated about. I feel like the entire thing I wrote was specifically because I am aware of these tradeoff. Just because the tradeoffs exist doesn't mean I have to like them.
I know that my dream job doesn't really exist, at least not in numbers large enough to even bother considering, and I'm not naive enough to really think that pivoting to another career will suddenly solve all my problems and frustrations.
> I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.
So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.
So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.
I've debated doing that exact move as well, simply because I do enjoy making "incorrectly" designed code "correct", by either moving to a simpler model or utilizing a more tried-and-true way of doing things, and since no one wants to be in "maintenance" it might afford me some more freedom.
At a previous job, I would occasionally spend time on the weekend rewriting and simplifying code because there wasn't really a "maintenance" team and I knew the only way that it would ever get better was if I fixed myself on my own time. I've since drawn a line in the sand that I do not work for companies on weekends but I did sort of enjoy that process.
I guess you’re in USA. Luckily I am in poor Germany with way lower salaries. Which opens me another option 6) go into trades. Becoming certified electrician takes a lot of time or money or both. My university degree with an expensive course was enough. Salary stays the same as long as I am self employed.
Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.
This is your chance to decide what your values in life are. Money or fulfillment. Maybe you can alter the software job somehow to make it more fulfilling to you. An organization with a purpose or mission that you believe in. A role with different type of expectations or work. Maybe writing on the side or starting a family.
Yeah, I don't really disagree with that.
I think Americans are kind of trained by the propaganda machine that you need to find fulfillment from your job, but fundamentally I think you're right and I need to take things into my own hands.
I have a few ideas that I think I might be able to turn into papers, and might even be able to get them published in a real journal. I doubt that my current gig will have too much of a problem with that (they're much more in the chemistry/healthcare space than pure CS), so I might be able to have some fun with that while giving myself an excuse to use pure math.
Possible other option: I hope to soon go part-time. IE keep my current job with the pay rate, but change the balance of hours worked. And if it doesn't work how I like, go back to full time.
I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.
Yeah, I've debated doing that; just doing contracting work half-time and spend the other half of my time focusing on the stuff I actually enjoy. The thing that stops me is health insurance.
My wife is wrapping up her school this year, so once she's working then I might be able to use her insurance and give this experiment a try.
Insurance is a fair point I hadn't thought of. I guess there is some link between "full time" vs "part time" and insurance in that sense.
I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
I'm in Australia so this isn't a thing for me.
> Insurance is a fair point I hadn't thought of. I guess there is some link between "full time" vs "part time" and insurance in that sense.
It can depend somewhat on the job. When I was a part time adjunct last year teaching two classes (six credit hours) at a public university, I was given the option for health insurance. I don't remember what the premiums were but I remember they were lower than marketplace plans.
> I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
Since the Affordable Care Act, the prices are somewhat more regulated and they're not really allowed to "decline" you anymore, so the "bargaining power" thing isn't as bad as it used to be. Paying out of pocket for insurance is expensive but not insurmountable for basically anyone working in tech, and certainly you can factor into an hourly rate. In NYC there's the MetroPlus system, and the cheaper plan on that is around $1250/month for two people, which equates to roughly $15,000/year [1]. An employer plan in NYC will still typically have anywhere between ~$100-$600 monthly premium for a family plan, so anywhere between $1200-$7200 per year of just premiums (not counting what you pay before reaching your deductible), depending on the company and which plan you choose within the company. The US healthcare system is needlessly complicated.
Still, it would certainly be better to not pay $15,000/year if I can avoid it, so before I try doing half-time contracting I am going to wait for my wife to start working.
[1] https://metroplus.org/plans/individual-family/marketplace/br...
I'm in the US. I just had to turn down my dream job because it doesn't have health insurance benefits. The cost of insurance on your own is so ridiculous that we were around 35k apart in salary just to make up the insurance difference.
So I had to say no to it. This is life in the US.
Obviously don't dox yourself, but roughly where do you live? I just looked up insurance premiums for Oscar Health and it was $2,000/month for one of the budget plans, so about $24,000/year?
It can be extremely variable between cities so I'm not saying that this applies to everyone, but when I checked against my NYC zip code, that's the number it gave me.
If you (or your partner) have complex medical history / needs then a budget plan won't cut it. $35k is a very realistic figure.
Bingo.
There's no requirement to put qualifications or experience on the CV that aren't necessary for the role. Hiring managers make a lot of assumptions, and if specialisation is going to limit opportunity then leave it out.
There are jobs (e.g. database engine development) where knowledge of distributed systems algorithms comes in handy. Most likely not nearly at the level of your theoretical PhD, but also much more stimulating that adding fields to JSON.
I've never worked on database engine stuff, so I cannot speak to it, but I've worked a million jobs, many of which have titles like "Distributed Systems Engineer".
My frustrations come from the fact that "Distributed Systems Engineer" seems to broadly translate to "we use Kafka to glue two services together" for most companies. While that can still require some level of clever engineering, it doesn't really require a ton of theory. At multiple companies, when I do on rare occasion come across a project that requires some more elaborate planning, I will try suggesting using TLA+ to test things out, and management will look at me like I suggested kicking a puppy or something. "Math" is sort of a dirty word in industry, at least in the places I've worked. Maybe I just don't do a great job selling it. In every single job I've ever had, I've always been "that weird math guy", despite the fact that I really don't think I suggest anything that arcane, at least shouldn't be to a software crowd.
Again, it's hardly something to complain about; "Woe is me, I'm making yuppie money but I don't feel fulfilled all the time". It's just something that annoys me.
Lots of us are increasingly interested in formal methods coming out of the labs and ivory tower and seeing more casual usage in industry.
But pitching this sort of thing to management is hard, where if they’ve heard of it at all then they associate it with big brain critical path shit at the highest levels of huge orgs like nasa or aws.
Can’t blame people for not seeing the value yet though.. we need to make things easier/cheaper. Plain old testing is often seen as a cost/effort sink that dev teams and management resent and so of course Model checking looks like a whole different layer of ambiguously-worthwhile effort.
Mere advocacy here won’t win people over, because they care more about costs than “correctness” as an abstract virtue. We probably need progress on things like generating code from models and models from code if we want to see more adoption
I agree, and part of the issue is that if the formal methods work as intended, then by design nothing interesting happens, making their success less visible to managers that aren't paying close attention. Ideally something like TLA+ would catch a bug that you wouldn't notice for multiple years (e.g. infinite money glitches), but that means that value becomes less obvious because it can take multiple years to manifest, and that means you're waiting multiple years for TLA+ to show its value, which would be "nothing happened", which can be harder to measure.
I've debated trying to write a PlusCal->Java transpiler [1], and I haven't really ruled that out yet; while I don't think it should be necessary to have that for PlusCal to be useful, I think it would potentially sweeten the sales pitch.
[1] I think PlusCal would translate better to a sequential Java style program than raw TLA+ would.
Why don't you try using PlusCal/TLA+ on some portion of the code at work (if you still care to stay there) to prove its effectiveness? Whittle down the code to something basic to show how it'd work so your manager/co-workers can see for themselves on code that they're reasonably familiar with.
Unless your manager/colleagues are intimately familiar with such tools, I'd think that your touting their usage at work, is more like wishful thinking.
Just do the math and don't worry about management. If you are generally productive you can take a quarter here and there to focus on a thing only you know the value of.
Yeah, I've taken to occasionally testing some of the simpler stuff I write in PlusCal without telling managers. If they think I'm dicking around with "theoretical" math stuff they might get annoyed but if I submit code that works correctly within a deadline I suspect they'll be alright.
My long term plan on this is to submit a bunch of code that works correctly the first time, and eventually once I am established at this job as "clever" I'll reveal the PlusCal/TLA+ specs and hopefully have a decent sales pitch.
What you’re describing are just run of the mill backend jobs. They aren’t very sophisticated in terms of algorithms or theory. What I had in mind is working on say Cassandra or ElasticSearch, or internally within FAANG on one of their database engines. If you’re high enough there (which, granted, may take multiple years) to decide on the future direction of the engine, you get to ponder a lot of theoretical or at least very complex stuff.
I did try applying to MongoDB a few times, even made it relatively far in the interview process both times but eventually get the "We regret to inform you..." emails for it. I also failed a phone-screen for CockroachDB though I'm actually not 100% sure why. ElasticSearch never got back to me. I certainly applied for these kinds of jobs (and many, many more), but there's not much more I can do than wait for the companies to recognize my brilliance.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
> If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is.
And you will find a very crowded place, populated with all the other guys who leant the job yesterday.
> I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software,
You are describing demand and offer: nothing more, nothing less.
What I'm describing is friction. In a market where demand changes over time, supply friction affects efficiency. The time scale over which the market reaches equilibrium and that time scale's affect on the people providing supply is what I'm talking about.
As a counterpoint, see The Trouble With Optionality [1] as a critique of keeping your options open to forestall a single "decisive mistake":
> This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
> The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
> This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencem...
Oh no, someone who might have become megarich settles for... upper class and we treat this like it's something worth critiquing?
Optionality stuff like what you're describing is rationale and leads to by far the best expected returns on life satisfaction. Less stupid risk taking, more careful decision making would do a lot to make the world better.
Thanks for link, great insights here.
This viewpoint seems a bit fear based or conservative to me. I wouldn't be shocked if the author wants a high degree of wealth as well. I guess that is a defensible approach but there is another approach of trusting the process, learn from your experience (and the experience of others if you can) and bring a perspective that most experiences have a positive aspect that you can focus on. Why be afraid, you die either way. Life isn't a zero sum game where if you get divorced or don't become a famous person or a really rich person it has no interest. Everyone has interesting experiences and the chance to learn and form connections and help out and find meaning strewn all over. And even the wrong career will give you skills and perspectives that you find yourself drawing on when you get the perfect career. Even if only to deeply appreciate the perfection, that is worth a lot of lifetime savings.
The trouble with this viewpoint lies in the "all hope of the life you wanted" part. To enter into this game is the start of the losing outcome. As the saying goes, the only way not to lose the game, is not to play it at all. If you don't want to lose at football, then don't play football. It's a stupid sport.
What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.
Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.
A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.
Trying to classify this philosophy:
Taoism with a dash of Existentialism?
Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.
I have no idea. I guess it's tailored to me, but maybe someone else finds it useful. And this IS the way I solve pains. But I don't have physical pain or PTSD.
I find in general, what works for me in pretty much everything gets to be so far out from textbook that I have to invent ways to even describe it.
The writer is 42. As someone approching to that age in a few years, these are standard "mid-life crisis" thoughts. I get them when I feel like shit.
Bottomline:
- These thoughts don't serve you
- You have more effective/productive years ahead of you then before
Figure out what you want, and grind at it. The rest is noise.
Speaking of which...
Well, it depends on what is meant, by "second chance."
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
"If it is a complete reversion to the path"
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
There is a novel in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Life's Lottery, by Kim Newman [1]. It follows a character from birth to adulthood, with the reader constantly making decisions which will shape his life. Things can go well, or (very) badly. I'm not sure if the chapters form a tree or a more general DAG, but i do know that the book splits into two completely separate sets of outcomes according to your very first choice, which is, at age, six whether your favourite character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin.
[1] https://safe.menlosecurity.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
> But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.
“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.
Most who write articles like this don't even know the life they want much less a feasible way to get there. All they really know is the life they have is the life they don't want. When you think like that then every decision you ever made is viewed as a mistake because they all led you to where you are.
Came here to say the same thing. Everyone says "don't compare yourself to others", but comparing your life to an imaginary one you dreamed up in your head generates pointless misery too
One of the problems of this article is that although many of these things are true, a lot of times you must play the cards you're dealt, cause not playing will be even worse. Its like in poker where you are playing one on one against a player with a substantially bigger stack and the blinds are just eating you up. In such situations, waiting for a better hand is a bad decision in many cases. Then when you lose because you bluffed and lost, you will blame yourself for this mistake, but actually it could just be the best chance you had. 6 more blinds would have destroyed you anyway. You thought you had a good enough hand and played it. You lost, but you still made the best decision. Life is like that. Another example: you are a 37 year oldwoman and you feel your fertility slip away. You take a man and make some children. The man turns out to be an idiot... Your lifes dreams destroyed by an asshole man and your childrens needs. But maybe this was the best you could do... Maybe not taking that choice at that moment would have left you childless and maybe you would have been very sad about that. Regretting not taking the chances. I know quite a few people that waited for the best partner to have children, but never had them. Now old, they feel it is their greatest regret.
There are some in the "advice-instrustial complex" that give such advice. The Stoics have a technique where you imagine losing all you have, and this creates a feeling of gratitude for what you do have, and prepares you for losing it (as we all must do, in time). The Buddhists say that "Life is suffering".
But yes, this notion that your life is a one-shot, and you may very well outlive the potential for your life to achieve what you wanted, or thought it might, is not common advice. At times mean-spirited people will say that so-and-so celebrity is "over the hill" or "past their prime", but of course this applies (in a good faith way) to us all at some point. When the barb is targeted at someone who's earned a lot and is no longer earning it is less painful and socially acceptable than when targeted at someone who never knew success at all.
Nature is interesting because She seems to play around with lifetime duration quite a lot. Most life is very short lived; they are one-shots. But it doesn't matter because there are so many. But the few, the long-lived, the lives with so many resources behind them, She plays with these too. And honestly it's not clear that they are so successful. They tend to exist at the top of a food chain and accumulate damage over time, requiring sophisticated repair mechanisms. Such creatures are also more sensitive to environmental issues, accumulating poisons much faster than those before them in the food chain. Humans exist in this sensitive, precarious place in the ecosystem and I think we often outlive our usefulness, as evidenced by pre-industrial poor-houses stocked mostly by the old and infirm.
That seems true. You can't repair everything. Perhaps recognizing when you're at an inflection point in the curve is a skill. Some of us just happen upon these. Others recognize them.
Speaking of football, Messi is renowned for not running all the time. He strikes at crucial moments, accelerating out, one touch to move away, a dribble past the next, a fantastic shot. There are others who run more miles than him per game, even in his role.
An interesting parallel. I credit luck with my chances. My wife and I got close after I was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident. I found the job that made my career because a friend sent me the link the day I smashed my knee in a skateboarding accident and couldn't move. I moved to America because a friend was going and urged me to move with him. My wife and I have a genetic condition and embryo sequencing arrives just as we decide to have children. Many second chances after I'd first made another choice.
There's only the world and you. You can only constraint solve within the constraints and there's not much to be done about that. A one-legged man will not run the 100m at the Olympics.
Internet forums are littered with those who claim they are that man and the one who wins gold at 100m is just naturally gifted. But I know many strivers and while some would be considered failures, far fewer are than the ones who do not try at anything since they've got the one leg.
The other man always has an extra leg. The other man always has the sharper eye. The other man always has the more handsome face.
Perhaps this is natural. Cells know when they're failures. Perhaps people do too. Perhaps that is adaptive of species.
The reason why so many failures lead to success is that only those who strive fail. And you must strive to succeed. Those who do not try at all do not fail and do not succeed. That's okay. We form the infrastructure of the species.
I love this comment. Do you have a blog or other published writing?
Very kind of you. Blog is sadly on another identity. And if I'm being honest, quality is highly variable.
> A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own ( Atonement).
That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).
This sounds so true yet false. For absolutely every successful life there is a trail of failed lives left behind and restarted. And I dont mean like movie star or Nobel prize success; just plain vanilla happy and almost boring life. It is a real cliche, but it is true; never ever give up easily. That means that you may need to admit and give up things that never would have worked out, but hold on to things that may; and to know the difference is impossible; you have to trust in your principles; the right principles may extract a terrible initial cost but lead to great happiness in the end. Amen (And you can get Principles here - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34536488-principles )
Buddy if I drop my life right now, my 6 kids lose their 200k/yr income.
Some decisions you make are permanent.
I suppose I could reject conventional morality and just bail lol. I'm not sure you really want to promote a society like such.
There's merit to this but it's not the advice that most people need. Most of us already worry too much about making mistakes and need to know that course correction, at least to some degree, is almost always possible.
For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.
Life is hell. There are no second chances, because there weren't even a first chance to begin with. There is no escape because this is hell and there are no escape from hell. Live through it.
Circular logic, endless torments, eternal regrets.
Fixed points of the ethereal planes drawing souls like moths towards burning elevation.
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life.
Dear Author, you seem not to know the concept of trying (harder). As you stop trying at the first mistake, of course you didn't get a second chance.
There's a second "myth" that you could have recognized it was the wrong decision at the time. And that's not always true either.
Neoclassical economics is not only built around that idea, you also have the ability to predict the behaviour of others accurately.
If you don't have those two things, then it doesn't work.
It's a somewhat better assumption for repeated, routine transactions.
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
You can be all that, and still be good or be evil. Maybe that is the point!
Honestly I don’t get the appeal. It reads like something one would write in the middle of puberty and then throw away when you’re a few years older and embarrassed.
That was a beautiful summation of path dependence.
I remember another comment on HN where someone talked about their 50s and looking through the rear view mirror wistfully.
It's not like you can do nothing when you get older, it's more like you know you can't do everything.
You reach an age when life becomes a (text) adventure game: you wake up in a field next to a mailbox with a letter in it, and on the ground is a bag with items some of which are useful now, some that may be useful later, and others that are not useful at all.
It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...
Well, in the "advice-industrial complex" as the OP correctly identifies it, the OP being in the advice business (sort of) himself, has two choices: join the inflationary 'self-help, you can do it' camp and have a hard time getting himself remarked from the crowd, or join the tried and true 'contrarian' camp, yielding much better results for a minority who wants to hear and feel 'different'.
Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".
I genuinely think it's neat how all of our impulses have been commoditized. People want to feel "different"? Great, there's ways to make money from that. Money is such a spur for creativity.
There are beliefs that are true, and there are beliefs that are beneficial. Sometimes they are the same. But in this case, knowing that you cannot turn back and fix things mostly just leads to depression, whereas faith that you can turn around can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other case, knowing as a youngster that wrong choices can screw up your whole life doesn't bring anything new — it's not like people want to make bad choices to begin with!
There is just too much randomness in life and control is an illusion. Of course, it is true that some life choices will close or open doors, but, again, life is messy for everyone. By the way, when did mindfulness fall out of favor with tech people? I have the feeling there is a whole new generation that again has to learn the benefits of contemplative practices from scratch. Anyone here read Search inside yourself etc. ten years ago?
Decision tree vs. Turing machine
Variation in overall size, branch angle/length/node distance influence the resulting number of possible steps, as well a the limited run time and state complexity does. This also lets "fail often, fail early" look like that simple approach for a massive wide step zig zag approach to life; only if assuming no life-relevant costs per step, that is.
Still, a state machine with loops allows for second chances in general, while the underlying environment also changes in parallel. So your outlook for the second try might as well be better.
To describe a backwards directed re-play, a decision tree might be a tempting structure. But just because the "truth" is too complex to describe and not visible to you in its entirety anyway.
Don't get discouraged by these kind of undercomplex views on life. There's still lot of environmental problems/limitations to be solved, to make everybody's run a bit smoother and less dependend on their environment, though, even though, or because, all the runs and the environment are basically the same thing.
This kind of pessimism seems to come when people want to justify surrender. Why bother trying another path if there are no second chances, right? Now in middle age, I have found the 100s of small choices we make to be just as important as any of the big ones. Sometimes these are more important. I have seen it in my peers as well. People who choice the same path had different outcomes from all the small choices they made along the way. It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.
In the other extreme, it makes me think of the generations that have grown up with respawn video games. When you die you just respawn. Those games are ONLY second chances. It's rare that anyone plays any game all the way through on the first life they're given. If you grow up immersed in worlds without consequences it can paralyze your decision making in real life. Not always, but I have seen some people retreat into these kinds of worlds and not want IRL decisions.
> It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.
You need luck, or privilege, for your perseverance to bear fruit.
You need both! I'm stunned by how many people cannot grasp this simple concept. Typically, people who have luck tend not to notice it, and attribute everything to their merit. At the opposite, people who didn't get their fair share of luck, tend to ignore the effort part and paint all successful people as lucky slackers.
I disagree with that completely. You are arguing for a surrender of personal power and self-determination. It's a short journey between 'luck' as a concept and fate, magic, religion, or just random occurrence. If that's really your belief, then why try anything? I don't live like that. I have been able to succeed on merit or work and despite negative environments. Many, many others have as well, throughout human history.
1 - I said very clearly that you need both of them.
2 - Have you ever been an innocent victim in a serious car accident? Have you ever been diagnosed a debilitating illness independent of your habits? Have you ever lost all your material belongings in an earthquake? I suppose you didn't. Thus you are lucky.
And thank you for confirming what I had written: lucky people often don't even realise they're lucky - and I'll add: especially if they believe that idiocy called prosperity gospel!
This argument is so dear to so many people: that guy is not successful because he works hard, it's because he's privileged and can afford to fail, so he can take chances, and second chances and third chances. I'm not privileged, so I'm not successful.
The reality is that the difference between success and failure is in the majority of cases due to consistent small choices with compounding consequences. The decision to stay late at night and finish an assignment, the decision to not drink a lot at that party, to go to a summer school rather than a trip, to not cheat on a girlfriend, etc, etc. Later on in life, when the nerds get to get their "revenge", well, it was due to privilege all along ...
While I think it is true that mistakes cannot be undone, it's also the case that most mistakes (even fairly bad ones) are not a sentence of doom. There are still choices to be made in the future (if you think there are choices) and you can always take the stoic route which is imo quite useful regardless of the question of free will.
> In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. ... This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist.
Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.
What about Jonathon Franzen?
You have to be dead for a while to be part of the canon. Until then you’re a “popular writer” at best.
It’s the opposite of the Nobels in this regard.
I mean if you're 30 and (taking from the article) married badly, chose sciences instead of humanities or did a misjudgement, you absolutely definitely can fix it up. Even at 40, it just gets harder and people don't always find the supposed effort worth it but you totally can.
I am in my fifties and taking a masters degree mostly for fun while keeping my software engineering job. I am working a lot harder than I have in a long time, specifically in an intense super hard homework due in 8 hours crank it out way. I do learn a lot of complicated stuff at work, but mostly can optimize for well rested and ready to learn and don't use it till I am confident kind of mode. Kids and work was hard but for different reasons. But when I forget my age and just dig in, I do feel younger. But also I am way more mature and able to talk to professors with less fear and like send that email asking stupid question or let people know ahead if I will have logistic problems etc. Best of both worlds except so much hard work.
Well done! I've studied with people in their 60s who decided they wanted to expand their knowledge or change domain, very inspiring.
Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.
I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D
(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)
It is obvious that you cannot undo the past.
It is also obvious that time flows in one direction, that you cannot recover time you have spent on one thing over another.
It is likewise obvious, though strangely difficult for people, especially the young, to grasp, that time spent waffling in FOMO-land is time totally wasted grasping in vain at everything, never attaining anything. "Decision" comes from the Latin "decidere", itself from "de" and "caedere", meaning to "cut off" [0]. Yes, to decide is to cut off, to give up options for the sake of the higher good, in order to proceed.
And lastly, it is equally obvious that obsessing over a past that we imagine that could have been is also a complete waste of time. The clock is ticking, time is running out, and instead of focusing on what can be done now, what can be done with the time left, how to make the best of where you are and what is possible and prudent, you blow away whatever time remains all the more.
Now, if one has indeed made mistakes, the last thing one should do is deny that one has. Denial is opposed to integrity and renders a person impotent, stagnant, and numb, with the worm of guilt gnawing at the soul. Admit it, and if necessary, make reparations, do your penance, obtain absolution. Then move on. Life does not stand still for anyone. Salvage from the wreckage what is good, and go foward. No one said you will be able to recover the life you lost, or thought you lost. Actions are not unitary operations. They have no inverse. Life is an append-only log, a directed acyclic graph. Persisting in attachments to what was ostensibly lost blinds you to what you should do next. Move on. Keep tilling the land for the harvest. Dismiss whatever draws you away and weakens your commitment to the objective good.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decision#etymonline_v_857
If I'm still breathing, I can still have another go. At least at things I'm not legally or culturally barred from due to age or diagnoses, e.g., no flying planes for me because ADHD.
But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.
The myth is not in second chances or our ability to adapt, this is sometimes extremely hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by the elite or those "who have made it".
[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
After reading many comments in this thread: I wonder if we could emulate this problem digitally. To have a digital recording of the decision we'd made and can change the pivotal moments and have the program follow through with decisions we could be making...etc.
I don't know, I'm a bit tipsy. But this could be fun.
This article is essentially a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy camouflaging as analysis. The world is full of turnarounds, and stories where "mistakes" turn out to be happy accidents: "maybe so, maybe not."
This, I think is why all (most) old people are conservative while young people tend to be more liberal (both in politics and in personal life). If you know that a single mistake can ruin everything, you focus on not doing that mistake over anything else. And the only way to do that with limited information of the world is to just keep everything running the same way it's always been running.
I've gone from being a capitalist libertarian to being some sort of a self-defined eco hippie because of this. I realized that the capital fueled "progress" changes things a lot and we can't guarantee that all those changes are good (even if we now think they are, we might later find out they weren't). On the other hand, when you change the ecosystem or the planet, it's changed for good and there's no going back. Therefore it's best not to meddle with shit we don't understand. Stop building new stuff, stop making new roads, stop destroying things to make them "better".
I can't find the original of this story but it goes something like this:
- Father was a lawyer
- Aged early 40s: is married, has kids, successful career as a lawyer
- Quits law to go to medical school
- Becomes successful pediatrician
- Loves it
I will always remember the quote from the son (who is telling the story):
"At age 12 I remember thinking: this is a little strange. Now that I'm in my late 30s with kids, I realize how absolutely wild my dad's decision was. Anyway, here is a picture with him and one of his pediatric patients" (cue picture of dad with a big smile on his face holding a baby).
I guess once you've sorted the wife, kids and career then trying something else is relatively low risk. He could always have gone back to lawyering if it didn't work out.
I've got a friend a bit like that - husband kids successful law career but quit because she hates being a lawyer. It allowed her to go from poor to wealthy though so served its purpose.
This is me!
Wife, kids, solid insurance career. But I quit to join a start up in cybersecurity because I was too curious not to give it a shot.
Unfortunately just recently laid off but I don’t look back and regret the decision. And now I can go back to insurance if I want to.
Some times the second chance succeeds because you rely on the expertise of someone else rather than your own.
When Durian became available locally, I purchased the smallest fruit available. I used it as part of my smoothie. Yes, it was pungent while at the same time a very light and pleasing fragrant aroma.
I didn't purchase it again as I needed more understanding of flavor melding. However, I enjoyed the puff pastry filled with Durian a few years later while visiting China and only tasted the fragrant aroma.
No. I disagree with the sentiment strongly. I've seen so many of my friends alone turn their life around from bad choices. Truth is, this article is most likely just attribution bias. Life is rich enough to allow for manueverability. And for the record i hate everything that makes life seems a more hostile place. I take it my personal responsibility to have the opposite effect to people.
Hacker News is in love with this genre of “everything is so much more serious and terrible than you think” and I’m not sure exactly why.
I would imagine it comes from the programmer culture, in that you have to take everything as if life depends on it.
At least compared to most "manual" labor such as electrician, you can be a lot more chill and only focus on what you have to learn and nothing more if you want.
Older crowd.
"Many people are miserable and accepting of it" does not disprove that you can, in fact, make career moves after 30, or study the humanities you ignored in undergrad at a later point. Many people are fragile; does that mean that you shouldn't try to be resilient?
You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."
> You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Easily yes
Not for me. I like new things.
Your ideal life at 15 probably included novelty
In some sense life is obviously path dependent, since everything you've done is at least dependent on what didn't happen to you.
In another sense, there are many paths which lead to similar things, and path dependency can be Markovian, wherein the whole path doesn't matter in the first place, just the last bit.
I also find people mostly unable to move beyond their initial judgement. First impressions seriously, seriously matter.
Life is path-dependent, but it is more about the awareness and acknowledgment of your choices in the forks. Unaware, the path becomes constrained and thus dependent on your previous choices. Once aware, your choices opens up.
> The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement.
I don't think that's it. The misjudgment is invariably going to be just a sample in a pattern of similar such misjudgments.
In Shogun, the titular lord chastises his son for still "playing the game of friends and enemies".
What if we just stop telling stories, negative or positive?
Then perhaps less commenting on commenters commenting on authors writing stories?
Opinion unencumbered by data.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? How you answer that question may very well shape how you view the pivotal moments of your youth.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life." ― Jean-Luc Picard.
Second chances are yet another of the many, many privileges afforded exclusively to the rich in our society. For the rest of us, one mistake can literally be terminal.
Mistakes cost time and money, neither of which the majority of people have in abundance, and one mistake can set you on a path that is impossible to deviate from.
Choose the wrong career, chose the wrong spouse, have a couple of kids, and suddenly you find yourself stuck in a job, a relationship and a home you literally cannot afford to escape from. 50%+ OF ALL PEOPLE IN THE WESTERN WORLD are one paycheck away from financial insolvency and living on the streets. They literally cannot afford to quit their job to "Retrain" for a new career, as that training costs real money most folks don't have, and unless you're in a special / protected group no one is giving you a dime to pay for school let alone cover your food / housing / medical bills while you "Retrain" for a "Better future." It's a nice pipe dream / political talking-point to say truckers can all become coders, but when those truckers have mortgage payments, groceries, medical bills, kid's clothes / school fees, etc., to pay for, and when there's not even a dime of assistance money available to them, and they have nothing in the way of savings, how the hell are they supposed to be able to afford live for months or years at a time while they learn to code?
Folks can't even leave relationships these day, as moving also COSTS MONEY and the majority of people can't afford to pay for movers, put up first and last months rent, etc., making moving to a new home or a new city, too expensive a proposition to be realistic for the vast majority of low to mid income earners. The real kicker though is in basically any city in the US or Canada, if you're moving out of a rental home, the next place you live will be 50%-100% more expensive! Rents have gone up so fast in so many places that a great many people can literally never leave the place they are living as the market has gone up so fast around them they literally cannot afford to move.
It's all well and good to say people should just move for better opportunities, or just "Retrain" for a new career, but when the cost involved in either of those actions means unless they immediately pay off the person in question would find themselves destitute and homeless after bearing the involved expenses, it just goes to show how callous, self-serving and entitled our societies attitudes towards the poor and less fortunate have become.
Started out ok, then disintegrated into a rambling analogy to soccer.
Dr. Phil has a great speech about starting new late in life, I highly recommend it.
If you have a link, maybe.
I'm a little biased against the Dr Phil type of advice because, from what little I heard from him, it isn't really good advice.
But, I'm open to changing my mind based on a video from a trusted source, like a fellow HN reader :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OtnGAenWEs
Can't believe the question of free will hasn't popped up yet.
It won't be a myth if life extension ever pans out.
I think lots of times this is the essence of agism: that old dogs can't learn new tricks etc. I'm not sure path dependence needs to be as strong as it is, but it often is because society disallows it.
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life.
'Mangling a life' is shooting way over the top.
Is having to deal with going down a school track that didn't turn out to be your bag what you can justify calling a mangled life? Isn't that just what we call life? The issue is that we'll almost always be able to find issues in our decisions in hindsight, if we really look for them. Even a ten million dollar exit can feel like a failure if you were shooting for a hundred.
If we forego using bombastic words for things that they shouldn't be applied to, the hollowness of the premise is revealed, and the illusion crumbles:
> Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can have a negative effect on your life.
Yawn. This sort of thing is baseless whining. I’m reinventing myself and graduate with a Masters in a STEM field I enjoy this weekend after losing my extremely lucrative career to illness.
By all accounts I had every reason to give up and lay down and die, and yet I didn’t. This sort of defeatist mindset is a poison. Will I ever fully recover and make it back to where I was? Maybe, maybe not, but the probability of success is zero if you don’t keep going.
Meh. Like many things in life it isn't one or the other.
If you want to be an extreme outlier, you likely will need some extreme outlier events to occur - depending on what your desire is. For many of us, we're not able to influence many aspects and outcomes in that extreme.
And so I like someone's quote: Life is what happens while you're planning other things.
Life ends at 24
BS. There are second, and third, and tenth chances. Besides, you can always adjust your definition of "success", it's in fact pretty flexible :)
“Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.”
Partly true only.
>…the vast international appeal of football. “It’s the only sport which is usually decided by one goal,” he theorised, “so the pressure on the moment is more intense in football than any other sport.”
Ice hockey has entered the chat!
Previously [0] (18 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40162438
It’s amusing that it got a second chance.
It was flagged for some reason?
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