I saw that Reddit post a while back. It’s interesting, but I wonder how much it really applies to all of the super wealthy. There are certainly billionaires and centimillionaires who reject that lifestyle out of hand (I know I certainly would). The average person doesn’t know their name and they prefer it that way. Even the local billionaire near where I lived for a while was pretty modest, all considered (his kids not so much). I was surprised to see him and his family sit down next to mine at a restaurant one day. Could overhear him talking about the local farmers market and commenting about the tomatoes of the season haha
There is certainly a wide spectrum in how people behave, and an important factor is also how they would like to be perceived by others. Rundowns on how wealthy people live will tend to overindex on the behavior of people who want others to know they’re wealthy.
As an example, there’s a culture among what people refer to as "old money" families in the US northeast (with generational wealth from long ago), wherein they tend to avoid seeming outwardly wealthy or really talking about money at all…generally aiming to project an unpretentious vibe, eschewing designer clothes and driving 20 year old Volvos, but still spending vacations at long-owned family getaways worth tens of millions, flying first or charter, and send their kids to specific, expensive schools to socialize with others of similar backgrounds.
What wealth buys you is the freedom and opportunity to make that choice. It’s not that you have to use your influence; it’s that if your local billionaire whose name nobody knew decided to make a phone call or two, people would still pick up his call.
The local billionaires here own a large family business. The founders (parents) were great people. They lived life poor for the first 50 years of their lives. They were super down to earth.
The next generation are mostly good people. They're involved in politics at the state level and have some philanthropic organizations that really do good work with zero strings attached.
The grandkids, who all have known nothing but having immense wealth are garbage humans. They're entitled, awful, mean spirited assholes. Every. Last. One. They frequent local businesses, and the number of times I've heard, "don't you know who I am" is astounding.
The business mostly runs itself at this point, but I genuinely fear for the future in this area. There's already undercurrents of the family using its connections to bail out one of the grandkids when he was drunk driving. I believe the first murder will happen within the next decade.
The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
> The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
I wonder if they somewhat expected it. The 'third generation curse' is a widely known effect. Question is whether there is anything that could have been done to avoid it.
Donate their wealth before they die and leave only a token amount for the kids. Enough to give them a headstart, but not enough that they never have to try.
There's definitely a whole spectrum, and not every ultra-wealthy person is out there collecting yachts and private islands. Some just want comfort, privacy, and to be left alone to enjoy the little things
Do most people really want an internet without ads, flights with large seats and plenty of space, high-quality local food — or do most people just say they want that? Because when push comes to shove and these options temporarily become available for some reason (e.g., a new farmers market, a premium streaming plan that removes ads, etc.), most people don't spring for the higher quality option. The cheapest option still seems to consistently win out overall.
I'm certainly not saying "blame the consumer", but if people really don't like ads so much (to the extent that they stop clicking on them), really dislike the subpar streaming services so much (to the extent that they unsubscribe) — then why haven't they abandoned these products?
There are other countries where valuing quality seems to be more deeply embedded in the culture, and most people in these countries will reject subpar offerings altogether. I think the U.S. has had a uniquely precipitous fall in this regard — the average person just doesn't seem to care that much. Why this is the case, I'm not sure, but it's not surprising that since Silicon Valley is located in the U.S., the region simply optimizes on whatever (revealed) consumer preferences return the most. Tech companies are certainly not unique in this regard.
Why not? You’re exactly right that people will rant and rave about wanting a higher quality option all day long, but as soon as one comes along very few people will actually pay for it.
This happens with niche product preferences too. For years it felt like the consensus across the internet was that phones are too big and if Apple would make a smaller phone it would sell like hotcakes. Apple finally did make a smaller phone and it had relatively few sales.
> I think the U.S. has had a uniquely precipitous fall in this regard.
I disagree about this, though. The more I’ve traveled and been exposed to other cultures, the more I appreciate how much choice and opportunity we have. I have slowly learned that U.S. consumers have some of the most insatiably high expectations, though. It leads to a lot of disappointment, but when you go below the surface you discover then wants are for something that checks all boxes without any compromises (good, fast, cheap) or they want we already have but think the cost should be negligible or even free. There’s another variation where we want quality to go up, the workers to be paid more, but the prices to go down.
> I'm certainly not saying "blame the consumer", but if people really don't like ads so much (to the extent that they stop clicking on them), really disliked streaming so much (to the extent that they unsubscribe) — then why haven't they?
In my observation/bubble, people actually do:
- I rarely click on ads (though I admit the reason is typically much more mundane: nearly all ad networks don't really "get" my interests. When they (rarely) actually do, the common situation is that I recently bought such a product, and thus clearly don't need another one when the advertising networks realize my interest and show me ads).
- Many people install ad blockers.
- Many people that I am aware of who are annoyed of streaming either did cancel some subscription(s) or never got one.
Well I thought so too. I match those behaviors, and I don't even watch television. But then I worked at a tech company where I could see the actual data on consumer preferences and behaviors, and it's fairly undeniable: most people aren't like you, me, or the average commenter on Hacker News.
Exactly this. Because capitalism tells us to pay people the minimum (which isn’t enough) and charge them the maximum (which is too much) and suddenly living is unaffordable for the majority.
I mean, my simple theory is people buy everything cheap because most people are broke. Small businesses die because as much as people want to support them, they can't spend more. They can only afford to buy goods from businesses that take advantage of economies of scale, and small businesses by definition are usually locked out of that.
That's a fair point actually, and perhaps we are only seeing these problems increase recently because "locally optimal" capitalism had historically sort of prevented the global algorithmic optimizations we're seeing now across industries. E.g., rental price fixing via algorithms.
It will be interesting if/when these models start proving major open problems, e.g. the Riemann Hypothesis. The sociological impact on the mathematical community would certainly be acute, and likely lead to a seismic shift in the understanding of what research-level mathematics is 'for'. This discussion already appears to be in progress. As an outsider I have no idea what the timeline is for such things (2 years? 10? 100?).
On the plus side, AlphaProof has the benefit over ordinary LLMs in their current form in that it does not pollute our common epistemological well, and its output is eminently interrogable (if you know Lean at last).
Humans are terrible at anything you learn at university and incredibly good at most things you learn at trade school. In absolute terms, mathematics is much easier than laying bricks or cutting hair.
I would say that "narrow" mathematics (finding a proof of a given statement that we suspect has a proof using a formal language) is much easier that "generally" laying brick or cutting hair.
But I cannot see how consistently doing general mathematics (as in finding interesting and useful statements to proof, and then finding the proofs) is easier than consistently cutting hair/driving a car.
We might get LLM level mathematics, but not Human level mathematics, in the same way that we can get LLM level films (something like Avengers, or the final season of GoT), but we are not going to get Human level films.
I suspect that there are no general level mathematics without the geometric experience of humans, so for general level mathematics one has to go through perceptions and interactions with reality first. In that case, general mathematics is one level over "laying bricks or cutting hair", so more complex. And the paradox is only a paradox for superficial reasoning.
> But I cannot see how consistently doing general mathematics (as in finding interesting and useful statements to proof, and then finding the proofs) is easier than consistently cutting hair/driving a car.
The main "absolute" difficulty there is in understanding and shaping what the mathematical audience thinks is "interesting". So it's really a marketing problem. Given how these tools are being used for marketing, I would have high hopes, at least for this particular aspect...
Is it really marketing in general? I can agree with some of it, but for me the existence of the term "low hanging fruit" to describe some statements says otherwise...
Sure but checking everything is correctly wired, plug-in, cut etc. Everything needes is thought of? There is plenty of things an AI could do to help a trades man.
Not the endgame by far. Maybe the endgame for LLMs, and I am not even convinced.
Maths is detached from reality. An AI capable of doing math better than humans may not be able do drive a car, as driving a car requires a good understanding of the world, it has to recognize object and understand their behavior, for example, understanding that a tree won't move but a person might, but it will move slower than another car. It has to understand the physics of the car: inertia, grip, control,... It may even have to understand human psychology and make ethical choices.
If "better than humans" means when you give it a real world problem, it gives you a mathematical model to describe it (and does it better than human experts), then yes, it's the end game.
If it just solves a few formalized problems with formalized theorems, not so much. You can write a program that solves ALL the problems under formalized theorems already. It just runs very slowly.
I don’t think you can gloss over the importance of computational tractability here. A human could also start enumerating every possible statement in ZFC, but clearly that doesn’t make them a mathematician.
I doubt it. Math has the property that you have a way to 100% verify that what you're doing is correct with little cost (as it is done with Lean). Most problems don't have anything close to that.
Math doesn't have a property that you can verify everything you're doing is correct with little cost. Humans simply tend to prefer theorems and proofs that are simpler.
You can, in principle, formalize any correct mathematical proof and verify its validity procedurally with a "simple" algorithm, that actually exists (See Coq, Lean...). Coming up with the proof is much harder, and deciding what to attempt to prove even harder, though.
You can verify it with a simple algorithm, but that verification won't always be cheap. If it was, curry-howard would be incredibly uninteresting. It only seems cheap because we usually have little interest in exploring the expensive theorems. Sometimes we do though and get things like the 4 color theorem whose proof verification amounts to combinatorial search.
These kind of experiments are many times orders of magnitude more costly (time, energy, money, safety, etc.) than verifying a mathematical proof with something like Lean.
That's why many think math will be one of the first to crack with AI as there is a relatively cheap and fast feedback loop available.
Computers have been better than us at calculation since about a week after computers were invented.
If a computer proves the Reimann Hypothesis, someone will say "Oh of course, writing a proof doesn't require intelligence, it's merely the dumb application of logical rules, but only a human could have thought of the conjecture to begin with."
The quality of AI algorithms is not based on formal mathematics at all. (For example, I'm unaware of even one theorem relevant to going from GPT-1 to GPT-4.) Possibly in the future it'll be otherwise though.
This concept of a blameless culture reminds me of one time when I was talking to a SWE at Facebook around 2010. I don’t know whether the story is actually true or just folklore, but apparently someone brought down the whole site on accident once, and it was pretty obvious who did it.
Zuckerberg was in the office and walked up to the guy and said something along the lines of “Just so you are aware, it would probably take a lifetime or more to recoup the revenue lost during that outage. But we don’t assign blame during these sorts of events, so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again.”
Whenever this happens to someone it's always a horrible feeling where one feels very guilty and ashamed no matter what people say to you and unfortunately mistakes like these are almost the bread and butter of any extremely experienced grey beard so it's kind of normal that something like this happens to someone at some point sooner or later. The only people who never make costly mistakes are those who were never trusted with responsibility in the first place.
So having said that I would like to emphasise that the cost which often gets quoted with those mistakes is not a real cost, it's an unrealised opportunity cost and sure it hurts, but you know what, the same company culture that allows such mistakes to happen and miss out on opportunity costs is the same culture which also allows engineers to quickly roll out important features and updates and therefore create more opportunity in the first place, and much faster as a whole, so in theory the cost doesn't come without the opportunity and it all evens itself out. Don't feel too bad about it.
> the cost which often gets quoted with those mistakes is not a real cost
It is still money they would have made that now weren't made. It is very important to explain to people how much value is lost during these events so that we also correctly value the work to prevent such events in the future.
You're comparing "reality where accident happened" to "an alternate reality where everything is exactly the same but the accident did not happen" and this is not a sensible comparison.
The reality we have produced the accident. You can't have that reality and have it not produce the accident, because it was set up to produce the accident. Proof: it produced the accident.
To avoid the accident, you need an alternative reality that is sufficiently different so as not to produce the accident, and some of those differences may well have resulted in lower profit overall.
(You may argue that you're able to set up an alternate reality that does not produce the accident and results in higher profit overall – that's a completely different argument, but it also requires you to specify some more details to make it a falsifiable hypothesis. Without those details we can not guarantee a higher profit in that alternate reality.)
And to add to that - the number is almost always wrong because people tend to just count the money hose throughput times the downtime. But many of the people who would have spent money on the downtime will do so later. I guess maybe that's not true of advertising revenue? Although I imagine advertisers tend to have some monthly spend.
Sure, the probability that things that have happened will have happened is 1.
The real test for hard determinists is being able to conclude that the probability of things that will happen is also 1. At that point there's no such thing as "falsifiable".
If your shop takes $3600 an hour in revenue, but there's a problem with the till which means that people can't pay for 10 seconds, you haven't lost $10 in revenue, you've just shifted revenue from $1/second to $0/second for 10 seconds and $2/second for the next 10 seconds.
Yup, the only "real" cost there is a customer who decides not to buy after all, or buys elsewhere instead. But that's pretty unlikely, especially for short outages. And it's even less of an issue for entities with a lot of stickiness like social networks (Facebook, Twitter) or shopping websites with robust loyalty programs (Amazon Prime).
It's also hard to understand because it's largely illusory. If, say, Facebook is down and ad spending ceases for an hour, that money didn't just go up in smoke. It's still in somebody's ad budget, and there's a very good chance they're still going to spend it on ads. Thus, while there will be a temporary slow down in ad spend rate, over the course of the quarter the average may be completely unaffected due to catch up spending to use the budget.
Some usage (sales, ad views, whatever) will be delayed, some usage will be done somewhere else, some usage will be abandoned.
But costs are likely down too. If there's any paid transit, that usually drops during an incident. If you're paying for electricity usage, that drops too.
And significant outages can generate news stories which can lead to more usage later. Of course, it can also contribute to a brand of unreliability that may deter some use.
> the cost which often gets quoted with those mistakes is not a real cost
Oh that depends entirely on the industry.. in social media maybe not, in banking and Fintech those can most certainly be real costs. And can tell you - that feels even worse
But that isn't quite what you want in a blameless culture. The right response looks something like ignoring the engineer, gathering the tech leads and having an extremely detailed walkthrough of exactly what went wrong, how they managed to put an engineer in a position where an expensive outage happened and then they explain why it is never going to happen again. And anyone talks about disciplining the responsible engineer shout at them.
Also maybe check a month later and if anything bad happened to the engineer responsible as a result of the outage, probably sack their manager. That manager is a threat to the corporate culture.
Maybe Zuck did all that too of course. What do I know. But the story emphasises inaction and inaction after a crisis is bad.
They'll also be the person most able to identify what went wrong with your processes to allow the failure to occur and think through a mechanism to systematically avoid it happening again.
Also, they're probably the person least likely to make that class of mistake again. If you can keep them, you've added a lot of experiential value to your team.
Perhaps one slight amendment - maybe don't ignore the engineer, but ask them (in a separate, private meeting) if they have any thoughts on the factors that lead to it, and any ideas they have on how it could be avoided in future. Could be useful when sanity-checking the tech-leads ideas
Describing my last company’s incident process exactly.
We’d have like 3 levels of peer review on the breakdown too.
Once there was an incorrect environment variable configured for a big client’s instance which caused 2 hours of downtime (as we figured out what was wrong) and I had to write a 2 page report on why it happened.
That whole thing got tossed into our incident report black hole.
Personally I feel like the right thing to do is let the engineer closest to the incident lead the response and subsequent action items. If they do well commend them, if they don't take it seriously then it may be time to look for a new job.
I don’t think “blameless” and “shared responsibility” are mutually exclusive, in fact, they are two halves to this same coin. The dictionary definition of “blameless” does not encompass the practical application of a “blameless” culture, which can be confusing.
The “blameless” part here means the individual who directly triggered the event is not culpable as long as they acted reasonably and per procedure. The “shared responsibility” part is how the organization views the problem and thus how they approach mitigating for the future.
But when I think of “shared responsibility”, I think of everyone as sharing fault.
When something goes wrong, I think someone, somewhere likely could have mitigated it to some degree. Even if you’re following procedures, you could question the procedure if you don’t fully understand the implications. Sure, that’s a high bar, but I think it’s a preferrable to pointing the finger at the people who wrote the procedures.
On that note, someone or some group being at fault doesn’t necessitate punitive action.
> ... but I think it’s a preferrable to pointing the finger at the people who wrote the procedures ...
It is better to point the finger at the people who wrote the procedures. Their work resulted in a system failure.
If the person doing the work is expected to second guess the procedures, then there was little point having procedures in the first place, and management loses all control of the situation because they can't expect people to follow procedures any more.
Sure the person involved can literally ask questions, but after they ask questions the only option they have is to follow the procedure, so there isn't much they can do to avert problems.
When I was only a few years into my career I accidentally deleted all the Cisco phones in the municipality where I was a sowtware developer. I did it following the instructions of the IT operations guy in charge of them, but it was still my fault. My reaction was to go directly to the IT (who wasn’t my) boss and tell him about it.
He told me he wasn’t happy about the clean up they now needed to do, but that he was very happy about my way of handling the situation. He told me that everyone makes mistakes, but as long as you’re capable of owning them as quickly as possible, then you’re the best type of employee because then we can get to fix what is wrong fast, and nobody has to investigate. He also told me that he expected me to learn from it. Then he sent me on my way. A few hours later they had restored the most vital phone lines, but it took a week to get it all back up.
It was a good response, and it’s stuck with me since. It was also something I made sure to bring into my own management style for the period I was into that.
So I think it’s perfectly natural to react this way. It’s also why CEOs who fuck up have an easy time finding new jobs, despite a lot of people wondering why that is. It’s because mistakes are learning experiences.
I'd much rather hear about a problem from a team member than hear about it from the alert system, or an angry customer.
plus when the big fuckup happens and the person causing it is there, there is an immediate root cause, and I can save cycles on diagnosis; straight into troubleshooting and remedy.
I don’t know when this was turned into a Facebook trope, but I’ve heard it before as an engineer asking “Am I being fired?”, to which the director responds “We just invested four million dollars in your education. You are now one of our most valuable employees!”
Four million is definitely in the range of an outage at peak, that's not counting reallocated engineering resources to root cause and fix the problem, the opportunity cost of that fix in lost features, extra work by PR, potential contractual obligations for uptime, outage aftershocks, recruiting implications, customer support implications, etc.
If you have a once a year outage, how many employee-hours do you think you are going to lose to socially talking about it and not getting work done that day?
$116.6 Billion in revenue is ~13 million an hour. Outages usually happen under greater load, so very likely closer to ~25 mil an hour in practice.
> revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage
If that little blip cascades briefly and causes 1000 users to see an error page, and a mere five of them (0.5%) to give up on purchasing, boom you just lost those $700 (at least in the travel industry where ticket size is very high). Probably much more.
An error page can be enough for a handful of customers to decide to “come back later” or go with a competitor website.
If you think about experiments with button colors and other nearly imperceptible adjustments, that we know can affect conversion rates, an error page is orders of magnitude more impactful.
Probably, though when your business is making billions this is still just a few hours outage, or one long-running experiment dragging your conversion down by a few percentage points.
> Just so you are aware, it would probably take a lifetime or more to recoup the revenue lost during that outage. But we don’t assign blame
Assuming that’s accurate, it’s a pretty shitty way to put it. “Hey man, just so you know you should owe me for life (and I pay your salary so I decide that), but instead of demanding your unending servitude, I’m going to be a chill dude and let it slide. I’m still going to point it out so you feel worse than you already do and think about it every time you see me or make even the smallest mistake, though. Take care, see you around”.
It’s the kind of response someone would give after reading the Bob Hoover fuelling incident¹ or the similar Thomas Watson quote² and trying to be as magnanimous in their forgiveness while making it a priority that everyone knows how nice they were (thus completely undermining the gesture).
But it’s just as likely (if not more so) the Zuckerberg event never happened and it’s just someone bungling the Thomas Watson story.
I was an FB infra engineer in 2010. It's not accurate, there was already a "retro" SEV analysis process with a formal meeting run by Mike Schroepfer, who was then Director of Engineering. I attended many of them. He is a genuinely kind person who wouldn't have said anything so passive-aggressive. Also, many engineers broke the site at one time or another. I agree this is just a mutation of the Watson quote.
The only time I ever saw an engineer get roasted in the meeting was when they broke the site via some poor engineering (it happens), acknowledged the problem (great), promised to fix it, then the site went down two weeks later for the same reason (not great but it happens) and they tried to weasel out of responsibility by lying. Unfortunately for them there were a bunch of smart people in the room who saw right through it.
Look to your left, look to your right, count the heads. Now divide the money that was lost through the number of heads. This is the theoretical ceeling- how much you could make if there were no shareholders and you had your own company - or had a union.
> Now divide the money that was lost through the number of heads. This is the theoretical ceeling
So, if we assume a $10 million loss divided by 100 heads, that means your ceiling is -$100,000 if you were to organize yourself.
Let's see: Six months to build a Facebook clone on an average developer salary plus some other business costs will put you in the red by approximately $100k, and then you'll give up when you realize that the world doesn't need another Facebook clone. So, yeah, a -$100,000 ceiling sounds just about right.
Eh, that’s a really strange way to phrase it. Singling out the engineer isn’t blameless. Sure it’s a learning opportunity but it’s a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn’t be able to take the site down. I have always thought of those situations as “failing together.”
Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do.
> Sure it's a learning opportunity but it's a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn't be able to take the site down.
The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerberg said.
> Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do.
What you’re describing isn’t blamlessness, it’s forgiveness. It’s still putting the blame on someone but not punishing them for it (except making them feel worse by pointing it out). Blamelessness would be not singling them out in any way, treating the event as if no one person had caused it.
> The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerberg said.
Allegedly. Let’s also keep in mind we only have a rumour as the source of this story. It’s more likely that it never happened and this is a recounting of the Thomas Watson quote in other comments.
> But we don’t assign blame during these sorts of events, so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again.
It's the latter half of the sentence that makes it blameless. Zuckerberg is very clearly saying the problem is that it was allowed at all.
sometimes the root cause is someone fucking up, if you're not willing to attribute the root cause to someone making a mistake then being blameless is far less useful.
What part of "so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again" doesn't mean that it's happened, but let's see how we get there.
"It should not have been possible for one person to take the site down" - yes, and that's exactly what Zuck is addressing here? May be such controls are there across the development teams and some SRE did something to bring it down and now there needs to be even better controls in that department as well?
As told this is clearly not a Zuck quote because it’s shitty leadership. There’s no way Facebook got where it is with such incompetence. This is clearly a mistelling of older more coherent anecdotes.
Not really. If you single someone out as CEO that's a punishment. Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again. He should have left it with the engineer's line manager to make that comment, if at all because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already.
> because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already.
The employee did not know that the CEO would be so forgiving. And it helps set that culture as other's here about the incidence and response.
Also, why is this so important? If your punishment for bringing down Facebook is your boss' boss telling you "Hey even if this is a serious mistake, I don't want you to worry that you're going to be out of a job. Consider this a learning opportunity," than that seems more than fair to me.
> Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again.
The person being told that may feel that way, but IMO nothing from his phrasing implies that:
"let's just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can't happen again"
Note the "can't" in the "can't happen again" - he isn't telling the employee "don't you dare do that again!" as you seem to be saying, he's saying "let's all figure out how to protect our systems from such mistakes".
Strange way to describe the same situation and Zuck's thrust there in different words. Zuck is literally saying "failing together" and "learning together".
The other story you are referencing is "this was an expensive education in which you have learnt to not do stupid stuff".
This is framed as "this was an expensive learning opportunity for us to learn that we have a gap in our systems that allowed this downtime to happen".
These are different sentiments! To me the above quote is very explicitly the latter and directly refutes the notion of "this was expensive training for you" by stating that it's impossible for an individual to apply that learning in a way that would recoup the loss.
Related to this problem is the interesting tradeoff between fairness and harm minimization. The idea of fairness is that no individual should have a higher probability of a guilty verdict or punishment than any other individual due to factors that are outside of their control. But there is an inherent conflict between fairness and our ability to reduce harm that results from crime.
For example, consider two hypothetical but identical individuals: one born into a low-income neighborhood and one born into a high-income neighborhood. If you develop a model to predict what we currently categorize as "crime" (the definition of which is its own separate issue), you will find that the income of a neighborhood is inversely correlated with the density of crime. If this is the only factor in your predictive model, then you will more effectively reduce crime by directing attention toward the low-income neighborhood. But now there is an inherent unfairness, because the additional scrutiny toward the low-income neighborhood means that individual 1 is more likely to be caught for a crime than individual 2, despite both individuals having an equal likelihood of committing a crime. This also creates a self-reinforcing situation where having more statistics on the low-income subset of the population now allows you to improve your predictive model even further by using additional variables that are only relevant to that subset of the population, meanwhile neglecting other variables that would be relevant to predicting crime in high-income neighborhoods. Repeat this process a few times and soon you have a massive amount of unfairness in society.
It's probably impossible to eliminate all unfairness while still maintaining any sort of ability to control crime, but what is the appropriate threshold for this tradeoff?
I work at one of the well-known tech companies. We have recently gone on a consultant hiring spree after previously having avoided external contractors for years.
With a team of five consultants and their manager, months of useless hour long meetings to answer simple questions that can be looked up in the documentation, and plenty of slideshows and design docs that are mostly filled with fluff, they’ve produced... a dashboard that I could have put together in about 30 minutes.
Whatever social purpose this contract fulfills is a total mystery to me, but all I can think of is what a waste of human time this is.
I've always wondered why we don't see more people with $50M-$100M saved up over a lifetime. The average person can't do it, but there are plenty of doctor/lawyer or tech manager couples in the Bay Area or NYC that can save $100k-$150k per year. Max out retirement accounts, invest in index funds, assume 7% return, assume a long life of 90 years, and... that ends up being a lot of money.
Not saying that couples who are capable of saving that much per year are actually doing it, but rather, you would think it would at least be more common than it is.
Anyone who isn't a business owner or high level executive would retire far before they reach the amount of money required to have $50M when they die. Most people aren't trying to just accumulate wealth. Even those that do accumulate massive wealth are doing it because they enjoy the job/power that comes with the job, not because they need more money.
Some of it's keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, some of it's that living anywhere that's particularly pleasant to live and also near your employment, is usually expensive because other people want to live there, too, and some of it's that those with the means tend to spend a ton more directly on their kids in hopes of advantaging their kids in life—college tuition, say, so this comes out of the parents' savings rather than being debt on the kids, or tutoring, or "experiences" that their prep school councilor said the admissions guy he's friends with at Stanford really likes to see, or whatever—and, especially in the well-off-but-not-rich range (so there's a kind of trap here where people tend to get stuck moving "up the ladder", burn lots of cash in zero-sum competition with each other over housing that hits the sweet spot between commute time and quality of public schools (those above this level just send their kids to private schools).
Then there's the tendency of US medical or elder care (say, for your not-rich parents) to put a huge dent in one's savings in a relatively short span of time.
$50M is a lot. Unless you assume the person is working 40 years with $10k/month invested at 7% return - you're not even cracking $25M. And 40 years would mean you've been investing $10k/month since the early 1980s at this point. So, yeah, of course almost no one was freaking doing that back then.
Very few people are investing that much and very few are interested in working for that long when they do have that much.
Most people here with $10M+ in NW didn't get it through hardwork over 40 years - they got it through an IPO or some big lawsuit or whatever.
Probably because people want to spend what they make. If you live in SV, you see people driving Teslas, and you think, "I want to do that too." So, next time you fly first class for the family vacation, and stay at the pricey villa. On your next trip, you add a couple of private tours, and can't find a good return flight, so you buy some NetJets credits. Next thing you know, you're spending 65k/year for a nanny (to support those high-paying Google T6 jobs), and it's eating into the 200k/year savings it would take to reach that level of wealth.
Most people end up spending close to what they make. Most people don't save like what 100M would require you to save.
> Probably because people want to spend what they make. If you live in SV, you see people driving Teslas, and you think, "I want to do that too." So, next time you fly first class for the family vacation, and stay at the pricey villa. On your next trip, you add a couple of private tours, and can't find a good return flight, so you buy some NetJets credits. Next thing you know, you're spending 65k/year for a nanny (to support those high-paying Google T6 jobs), and it's eating into the 200k/year savings it would take to reach that level of wealth.
Don't forget to blog about the struggle of being a working parent in tech, but how great it is that you manage to make space in your schedule for plenty of quality time with your kids anyway, while forgetting to mention the double-median-income amount of money you're dropping on child care every year ("newborns are so hard you guys LOL #blessed #stressed" has a "night nanny" and sleeps great most every night).
Bonus points if post it while a startup founder or "CEO".
One thing is, the benefit of IRAs and 401Ks are capped so that you can't put more than (20-25K?) in them each year. Anything else you want to save comes from after-tax income. Still, even with only half of your income available after tax, a lot of professional couples would be able to put aside 75-100K or so if they really stretched and maybe lived a bit below their means.
But I think the real reason you don't see people with 50MM, is that long before that you'd not need to work anymore. Why would you keep going to work every day if you had 10MM in the bank? It's more than you could spend in the remainder of your life. You'd need to spend 700K per year just to keep up with your passive earnings, and that's with a paid-off house and no debt.
Also, if you're a person who has been happily frugal for your working life, you're not going to change into a spendthrift overnight. You already came to the realization that an expensive car is meaningless, you're probably living in a place you are happy in already, near friends and family, etc. You're a person who will be making more per year than they ever could in a job, so why try to make more?
IRAs/401ks are top out at upper middle class. They assuming you are deferring 15% of income until you hit $26,000, i.e. and income of @173,000. Employer match and HSAs save you some more.
Then you start using rich people tax breaks like long term gains, insurance products, real estate, etc.
If they were simply workers, and not business owners, my guess is they would have bailed out long before. Being the owner of a successful business is a far cry from being a 9-5'er. I'd imagine it's intrinsically rewarding to grow your own company
Fairly sure there's a lot of people at amazon and elsewhere who've passed that threshold and are still working. Sure, maybe they "love what they do", but that seems like a relevant point, much more so than the US$10M.
I suddenly became afraid of flying when I started working for one of the companies known for having some of the best software engineers in the world and seeing how many bugs made it into prod. I can't imagine who is programming the flight computers for Boeing and what they're being paid. It's gotten bad enough that I refuse to fly on any plane that was released in the last decade. At least the older planes have some decent trip statistics to back up their safety.
I worry about this. My wife and I had an agreement before we got married that if I got a good job offer in tech, I could take it, but we would live three years on the west coast max before moving back to be closer to family.
Well, I lucked out and did get a great job, and so we moved to the Bay Area a few years ago. Right when I was trying to figure out what to do since my three years would be up, the pandemic occurred and my company announced permanent remote work. With a new baby and wildfire smoke everywhere, we decided to move back six months early. I took my job with me, and we've been in the southeast since last fall.
I absolutely hate being back here. There's no one in my field or industry, I don't fit in with the culture of this place, and I miss almost everything about the Bay Area. We currently live in a little tourist town at the moment which is sort of nice, but my wife doesn't like it and wants to move again back to her hometown (which has neither jobs nor anything interesting to do).
So I guess I'll sit in a little room by myself on Zoom all day with coworkers 2,200 miles away, make 8x the median household income, and do nothing but invest it while living in the middle of nowhere for the next 20 years and despising every minute of it. At this point I'm just waiting until my kid is 18 and then I'll buy a tiny second home somewhere that I actually like and just travel there by myself occasionally I guess.
Get involved in youth... whatever. Sports, robotics, scouts, chess club, something. Spread knowledge and problem solving skills. Buy a spot on a lake or a river. Doesn't have to have a house - somewhere you can camp. Put up a yurt if you need something more solid than a tent. Float down wild rivers. Go fishing. Restore a car. Learn how to work with fiberglass. Don't sit there for 20 years and hate it.
