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(courtesy of xylogx@lemmy.world who also posted this)

If you read my other comment, basically I’ve heard from other commenters online that some collective bargaining agreements restrict individual bargaining. That would suck. If the union only sets floors instead of absolutes or ranges, that is another thing entirely and something that I’m very much in favor of.

It’s ridiculous.

Numbers are funny, anyway. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth is closer to yours and mine than it is to Elon Musk (Forbes list currently placing them at ~100 bill and ~250 bill respectively). But that’s only in absolute terms. In reality, Jensen’s got like 8 or 9 orders of magnitude more wealth than I do depending on how far into the month we are, and on the same order of magnitude as Musk.

Either one losing 99% of their wealth would still be above a billion.

Oh I agree that even 2 billion is too much, but my reasoning is that proponents of capitalism often make the claim that capitalism drives innovation (you try to fill some market niche in order to get rich) so if they are right, then 2 billion should be enough that this still works.

I had yachts depreciating to zero in my example because it’s estimated that you have to spend about 10% of its’ purchase price annually anyway, so anyone keeping a 20 year old yacht around is going to be spending a lot of money on it that will fuel other parts of the economy.

Okay, that’s actually a good thing. I’ve heard unions in the US apparently often restrict individual bargaining, as that would undermine the collective bargaining of the union. So in that case, your coworker who’s been working for 20 years, will make twice as much as you do at your 2 years, despite the fact that all he does all day is scratch his balls, while you bust your ass off. And you have no way of earning more than them.

Either way it doesn’t affect me because I’m in Estonia and in a field where we generally get paid well enough even without unions. But I also know this won’t last forever, because right now there’s way too many unemployed software engineers.

Any billionaire can lose 90% of their wealth and have above 100 million left.

Many can lose 99% and have above 100 million left.

Some can lose 99% and still be billionaires.

The 100 millionaire will still have a million or more left after losing 99%, but that’s not “live like hogs in the fat house forever” money at least. It’s just “I don’t have to worry if I lose my job” money.

A hundredbillionaire can lose 99% of their money and not make any perceptible changes in their lifestyle.

I propose the following:

Gap individual wealth at 50000x the national median annual income. Max wealth anyone in the US could have is, at present, under 2 billion. Other countries will vary, but generally it’s plenty enough to motivate people to innovate, but nobody gets to be Bezos or Musk wealthy. Yachts should count towards this wealth gap, at a depreciation rate of 5% a year off the build cost. Primary residence doesn’t count unless it’s also used for generating income. You get to have one car, regardless of price, that doesn’t get counted towards it, and the other ones count at market value. So you can have your classic car that appreciates in price, and a daily driver - without having to worry about the classic car’s effect on your wealth limit.

Side effect is that now suddenly rich people near the gap will be a lot more interested in paying better wages to the working class. Why? Because then they’d get to keep more of their money. And to raise the median efficiently, you need to be raising wages for the poorest among us first and foremost.

There’s a caveat:

Don’t unions really restrict your salary growth in fields where there’s actual potential for it?

I’m in software engineering and I reckon a whole bunch of people would be unhappy if their salary was in a direct relationship with their years of experience.

Though if the gravy train ever ends, I’ll be the first to advocate for an union.

Ours has decided that she’s no longer a princess, she’s now Skye. I think mommy was Everest and I’m Rubble. It’s funny, because I always associated myself with Rubble the most, particularly after watching the Mighty Movie where Rubble goes “what, did you think I was going to watch the space thingy of a lifetime without snacks?” (exact wording may differ; I have to watch it in Estonian)

That’s only half the story, too.

The phone with the $1300 launch price is also obsolete, it hasn’t gotten a major Android version update since 13, released in 2022. The phone itself was released in 2021.

Apple also discontinued support for some older phones with their 2022 OS release. Namely, they dropped anything older than the iPhone 8, released in 2017. So the oldest Sony I to get a major OS version update in 2022 was made in 2021, the oldest iPhone was made in 2017.

By the way, this comes from someone who used to love Sony and still does. My Arc S was awesome, it was even designed in such a way that if you dropped it, nothing would happen generally (okay, the battery would fall out if you dropped from high enough). But they’ve really dropped the ball on software support.

Gender neutral pronouns might be pretty huge too, but nobody’s private data is getting hacked because of gendered pronoun use.

I’m seriously considering dropping everything and jumping to Rust because of Cargo.

Well if you’re into game dev, ECS and Rust, there’s like a 99% chance you know of it, but just in case you don’t: We have bevy, now with an extra full-time dev (Alice, who’d been working hard at it for years, I think she’s a bigger contributor than the author himself at this point lol)

I’m not a teacher, and I don’t want to become one tbh.

That said, something like Python is standard, and for good reason IMO. For OOP they usually teach Java here, though I’m not a huge fan. I think Kotlin would be better to teach nowadays. There are other OO languages of course, but I’m of the opinion that after messing around with Python, students should probably use something strongly typed, so that’s JavaScript out - I suppose TypeScript could be used, but IMO it’d be best to keep JS/TS in a web dev specific course.

That’s because C++ is such a high performance language, it gets things done faster

Yeah but then it would be vaporware

Now, I’m not sure what you do for a living, but personally, as a software engineer, I know that most people in my career line usually end up as either carpenters or farmers as their career peak. I’m more partial to the farming branch myself, but if you go carpenter, you can leave your grandkids some fancy ass furniture.

The issue is that you lump people closer to the peasant class in with the modern feudal lord class.

The CEOs and major shareholders of said companies already have all the wealth they could ever need. They do it just to make number go up. They COULD spend their money and time on enterprises that benefit humanity, but that’s just not profitable so it’s not fun. Most employees, however, could last maybe a year or 2 without their salaries if they’ve been saving up a lot. Or maybe a week if they haven’t. Average case for software engineers at huge companies, probably a few months.

They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.

There’s just a lot less money in that, and thus fewer jobs (and the ones that DO exist, pay worse).

If you want to retire early, or if you have kids whose future you want to secure, you want to get the best paying job possible. It’s well known in my country that the online casino software companies pay way more than most non-casino software companies. You know when people start looking into those jobs? When they start families.

Let’s take a look at an example here: You’re currently being paid to work on the Windows operating system itself. Certainly spies on its users, puts ads everywhere, etc. Good news, there ARE companies that develop counter products. You could work at Apple (comes with its’ own ethical issues), or at one of the companies working on desktop Linux distros. So mainly Red Hat or Canonical, because most desktop Linux distros are community-driven, but Fedora and Ubuntu are two great examples that have paid devs.

Canonical is trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (through enshittifying the desktop with snaps and ads, as well as selling you on Ubuntu Pro), whereas Red Hat is… trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (by reducing source accessibility of their enterprise offering, though at least they’re not doing that with Fedora). Oops!

What IS the alternative here? Work on desktop Linux software for free, in your free time. But that doesn’t put food on the table, so you’ll still have to work at one of those evil corps.

Similarly for Meta. Facebook is huge. What are the alternatives? Lemmy for Threads, Friendica for Facebook itself. What are the devs being paid? Nothing, really. I think Dessalines is slowly starting to approach a livable salary for Lemmy, looking at his Patreon. Friendica’s Tobias doesn’t even seem to have a donation page anywhere.

If you’ve got the luxury of plentiful free time, definitely contribute to open source alternatives to commercial projects. But if you don’t, you have to put bread on the table somehow…

How hard is it to get into Microsoft?

The privacy nutter part of my brain hates them about as much as the other (insert acronym here) companies. The “I have a family” part wants me to get paid enough to secure our future, so I’m looking into getting a US tech job in the next ~5-10 years (I’m aware that it’s a PAIN of a process if I need sponsorship, but luckily Microsoft has EU offices too)

It’s stitched together, it’s not a taco bell ad, it’s a meme.

I’d certainly vote if I was a citizen. Let’s maybe see about that again in say 20 years?

Hey now, boner pills aren’t useless!

Could the same scientists have been working on cancer treatments? Maybe, but it’s not nearly as fun to test.