Both in terms the amount of food we grow and the types of food we choose to produce we are way past the necessity of feeding ourselves and firmly in the territory of producing luxury goods that harm both ourselves and our environment. It's not as different as it seems at first glance
I’ve worked for big tech in the Silicon Valley, worked for big tech in NYC, worked for big tech in Berlin. Though I make way less money here in Germany, I’d never move back to the US.
The money makes up for being far away from family as well as homesickness.
Living in the EU means you are far away from family as well with the added negative that unless you're Vietnamese in CEE and Paris, Fujianese in Central Italy, or Mirpuri in Scandinavia, there isn't a large Asian community in most EU states.
If I want Sikkimese, Pahari, Marathi, Chettinad, Maithili, or some other ethnic group's cultural services, cuisine, and/or goods I can always find that represented in American tech hubs. On the other hand it's nonexistent in Europe.
I think you're of European heritage, so for you your cultural heritage's goods, services, and cuisine are well represented across Europe. That isn't true for Indians, Chinese (China is not a monoculture), and Koreans.
For Indian, Chinese, and Korean nationals on a work visa in the US, you can earn a European salary in the old country while being close to family. This is why Europe is not enticing, because immigration is hard and if the only incentive is to have a lower take home, then there's no reason to go to Europe.
I’m also living a 15h flight away from my country/culture/people and I never felt the need for money to make up for it. Sounds like you just value money?
Also Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam et all are large, diverse metropolises. Not sure where the idea comes from that you wouldn’t be able to find your tribe or your cuisine in these cities.
> Also Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam et all are large, diverse metropolises. Not sure where the idea comes from that you wouldn’t be able to find your tribe or your cuisine in these cities.
Because they do not. The only European country with a large Indian diaspora is the UK, and that disaspora is overwhelmingly just Gujarati and Punjabi. Same for overseas Chinese and the Korean diaspora as well.
What worked for you is good for you, but the culture shift for someone from much of Asia to the EU is severe compared to the US where Asian immigration has been the norm for over a century.
> Sounds like you just value money?
Why leave India or China to earn a €70k salary when you can demand the same in Hyderabad or Hangzhou? Why move from Palo Alto to Paris, when you can move back to Pune or Pudong and earn the exact same, while also not facing culture shock and being close to family.
Also, having to become fluent in a French or German or Dutch or some other European language that isn't English is a severe blocker in much of Asia - where English is prioritized.
> Because Europe offers clean safe cities and good WLB
So does Australia and New Zealand.
And you are much closer to family as a result and in a countries where Asians are well represented and with the added bonus that they are Anglophone countries so no need to learn German, French, or some other European language that isn't English.
Look, Germany is a good country, but it legitimately isn't enticing for the kind of Indian or Chinese national who came to the US on a work visa.
> If all you want is to be in a big Indian diaspora and make a lot of money then I guess California is a good fit for you. Glad you like it
That's what most diasporas want. Look at the statistics of where the Indian, Chinese, and Korean diaspora are clustered. Amongst western countries it's overwhelmingly North America, Australia, and the UK
> then I guess California is a good fit for you
It is. I've been here since I was 1 years old when my parents were part of the initial work visa expansion in the 90s which brought tens of thousands of us Indian, Chinese, and Korean Americans to the US.
If I were to leave, I'd probably go to Singapore because I can take advantage of Asian dealflow while remaining in an Anglophone country where we are overrepresented.
I think if someone forfeits stability for money then that's their choice. I personally think that's an extremely strange one to make, but I'm one of those people who left the US for more stability, safety, so maybe I'm biased.
I really don't know why are you are getting so worked up about this.
At a macro level, the majority of Asian diasporas in the Western world are in North America, Australia, the UK, and New Zealand.
All I'm saying is for the majority of Asians, mainland Europe just doesn't have the same pull factor that the Anglophone has because we have never had a significant population in Europe.
It's the same way a management consultant with roots in Turkiye or Morocco will be biased to work in Frankfurt instead of NY simply because there's a massive pre-existing community no matter where you go in Germany and they will be close to family in Turkiye.
Most Indians in Germany are primarily from Maharashtra or Punjab.
And those numbers are minuscule compared to the diaspora in the UK, let alone Australia, New Zealand, and Canada which are all much more friendly to Asians than Europe.
In Germany, access to health care is becoming a major problem. I have two young kids and I’ve experienced on multiple occasions not being able to get appointments with specialists for them. Sometimes you offer to “self pay” - basically paying full cost with no insurance - and sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.
Germany has a major doctor shortage and it can’t just attract foreign doctors like Anglo countries due to language requirements. This issue will continue to get worse as the population ages.
People act like there are no wait times in the US.
I remember a few years ago, I noticed a mole on my arm suddenly looking very irregular. I kind of panicked, thinking it was potentially skin cancer. I have decent PPO insurance, no worries, I can go call up and schedule an appointment with a dermatologist directly. I live in one of the largest metro areas in the US, tons of doctors, should be a breeze to get it checked out.
I load up the find a doctor website on my insurance company's website. There's like 30 dermatologists within an hour or so drive from me, awesome. I start calling. Not taking new patients right now. Can't be seen for 6 months, 8 months, we could get you in next year. Next year, when I might have quickly growing skin cancer?
Luckily when I finally talked to my wife about it, she reminded me she had poked my arm with a permanent marker. Some solvent, and my mole looks normal again. I still make sure to keep my dermatologist appointments, just so I don't have to deal with the new patient issues and the "we're not taking anyone new these days".
I had a different issue with extreme nystagmus come upon me. Bedridden for days, I couldn't even open my eyes without having extreme vertigo. Calling ENTs to try and get help, none would be able to see me for weeks. Luckily a friend who works with ENTs managed to get a doctor to see me but if it wasn't for that I probably would have just had to suffer at home with no answers as to what was happening.
I now know that unless I'm practically about to die, seeing a doctor that will do more than run extremely basic labs and very basic healthcare is weeks away in the US even if you have decent insurance.
I paid out of pocket and went directly to a dermatologist in a week, where insurance wanted me to go through my doctor (my local doctor has no appointment times) first. It was skin cancer. I ended up bypassing insurance because I was scared to wait the months navigating their system would take. But also because it was supposed to be cheaper (I price shopped) than my deductible. Guess what, when you price shop, the price they tell you has no relevance to the final price.
You lived out what I had only feared. I'm sorry that happened to you, this kind of thing shouldn't happen to anyone.
> Guess what, when you price shop, the price they tell you has no relevance to the final price.
I've found they often can't realistically give any kind of useful quote. I remember getting a total cost estimate from the hospital when my second child was born, anywhere from $20k to $160k before insurance, please sign here.
I can get an MRI in a few hours for a couple hundred bucks out of pocket. I can go get blood drawn in a half hour and lab results tomorrow morning. Tons of private labs and imaging centers are looking for anyone to fill the machine or get stuck. That's not the problem. The problem is getting an M.D. to read the results and actually tell me what's wrong and a good course of action.
In both examples, just getting an MRI would have told me practically nothing. Maybe for the nystagmus, it would have told me if there was significant brain cancer. Maybe a blood test would have told me something about cancer, but there's a good chance it would have been inconclusive, I needed a biopsy (or, in hindsight, a bit of rubbing alcohol).
I've seen a case of both providers of ACA "marketplace" plans in a state each including only one of the four closest hospitals to me as "in network", with similar extremely-spotty coverage for everything else. And one excluded the massive children's hospital in the city that'd also gobbled up every pediatric care office in 50 miles, so there was, practically, only one insurer you could pick if you had kids (those two providers were the only ones offering individual insurance in that state at all, everyone else had pulled back to only doing group plans in that state; both were also companies I'd never heard of before).
This was in an actual city. Things can be even worse out in the sticks, where hospitals are much farther apart and often offer only some of the services you expect from a big-city hospital.
Lots of these plans also only cover a small geographical area, except for ER visits (which I think they have to cover). So don't get sick in a way that gets you discharged from the ER into a regular hospital bed, but still unable to get home, while traveling within your own country, if you don't want to go bankrupt.
Like it truly wouldn't have been crazy for someone on one of those plans to get some kind of travel insurance while traveling in the US. That's how fucked up our healthcare system is.
I'm sure it depends on where you live and the healthcare provider you have. I have Kaiser and can get seen within a week or so and usually the same with any specialist. Kaiser does everything in house, which helps with reducing delays.
Here in the USA, my wife had an infection in the root of a tooth (long story), and was trying to get in to see an oral surgeon to get proper treatment.
Even with an active infection, that could have cost her her jaw or her life if it had been left unchecked, it took months to get anyone to even make an appointment for an initial consultation. We were very fortunate that the oral surgeon we were finally able to talk to was able to fit her in for surgery within a short time after that, due to a cancellation.
People talk dismissively about the "long wait times" you get with some public healthcare systems, but always oh-so-conveniently ignore the fact that there are long wait times here too. Sometimes catastrophically so.
Almost universally, when you dig into it, the "long wait times" that exist in those systems fall into one of two categories: either they are wait times for elective procedures, where your long-term health is not at risk, or they are caused by shortages that are symptoms of unrelated problems.
Long wait times are not exclusive to public healthcare. My dermatology appointment to examine a concerning mole was scheduled 9 months out. And of course I pay for the privilege.
I'm in the US and I hav regular 6-8 month waits for non-specialists and very hit or miss luck with specialist appointments. What you describe is not solved by the us approach
When I worked in the US I had “Kaiser Permanente” which seemed to be something like an all-in-one system. You have specialists, GPs, labs and pharmacy all in one building covered by one insurance. Could something like that scale to the whole country?
> When I worked in the US I had “Kaiser Permanente” which seemed to be something like an all-in-one system. You have specialists, GPs, labs and pharmacy all in one building covered by one insurance. Could something like that scale to the whole country?
We can't even scale out broadband to the entire US.
It can scale to a whole province of 5 million people.
I had Kaiser Permanente when I was in the US. Now that I'm in BC, Canada, it is very similar. I walk into any hospital in the province and every doctor and specialist in the building are part of the same system (technically they are broken up into three geographic subunits, but to the patient it basically doesn't matter). If I need some sort of treatment that hospital doesn't offer, they can immediately refer me to the correct hospital. For emergency cases the provincial ambulance service will transport you to another hospital by road or air at no cost.
There are still independent specialists and doctors outside of the hospital system, but they have access to the same records systems and the billing is so seamless that I suspect that most people don't realize it is happening since it never involves the patient outside of providing your ID.
Of course the approach works, we can see it work at various scales. I think what prevents it from working is that it works best when it is the only option. I don't think we could support 5 kaiser permanentes. And that feeds into insurance - there are a lot of insurance plans, and each of them would likely only support their specific kaisers
So ideally there is one insurance, with one provider that has vertical integration everywhere and then indies outside the network you can go out of pocket for, and oops I invented single payer
Organizations like this have existed in some places in the US as well. I remember growing up in Houston we would go to the Kelsey-Seybold clinic. They had a lot of GPs but also a ton of specialists all under the same network and sharing the same building.
>can’t just attract foreign doctors like Anglo countries due to language requirements
That is a serious and real obstacle. German has a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to learn. I'm pretty good at learning languages but German is extremely difficult to speak properly unless you are raised in it.
Similar situation in Poland with appointments for specialists in at least 6 months and often much longer.
German public health insurances are concerned right now about their unusually high deficits. Because many millions refugees are not working they only get paid a reduced amount towards the mandatory health insurance but have the same full service. Bringing the already substituted public health insurance into insubstantial deficits and now they are increasing the rates for the working class and probably they will need additional tax money too.
Neoliberal fiscal policy to underfund public goods has slowly crept into non-American western health systems, the undercutting of the UK NHS as a leading example of a regressor. It makes everything in the system less efficient - increases calls for even less efficient privatization of healthcare. It doesn't save money for an economy except at the most superficial narrow view level of accounting.
"Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value?
Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful."
Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to
how hard or how long someone worked on it.
> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today
This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.
In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
Value is something that motivates people to do work (that creates value). It's like bartering (I'll fix your car if you mow my yard), but currency makes work fungible (I'll fix your car for $80, and then pay another guy $80 to mow the yard). Key to this is understanding that someone might be willing to cut the yard for $75, and someone else might do it for $60. Probably no one for $20 though.
Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).
Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.
>Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
To me what you're describing sounds like market price discovery versus value, which can also be functional usefulness or social worth, in the vein of the diamond–water paradox. A price is what someone is willing to pay, but value is something's worth. For example while selling a car if nobody is currently interested nearby it's market value is $0, but it's functional value as transportation persists.
On the other hand I might pay much less for something than its value would be through price discovery. For example I might be willing to pay an extremely high price for a life saving medication, but rules or laws deliberately limit price discovery, because leaving it to the market would be considered unjust for similar reasons to laws regarding externalities via the tragedy of the commons.
>if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This is already somewhat done with teachers. Those who teach wealthy children such as at a prep or private school make more money than those who teach poor children. The salary does not directly scale with the quality of teaching - for example a 2x better teacher might make 10x the salary, because the bidding power of the wealthy parent is much greater.
Because currency is unevenly distributed, voting with dollars reflects the wealth and preferences of those with more money, skewing prices. In an extreme example if person A can pay $1,000 for a life-saving treatment and person B $10,000, does that make person B’s outcome ten times more valuable? In that sense, market prices aren’t neutral measures of value and are more like an economic version of ‘might makes right'.
I think there is a conflation between different types/definitions of "value" that always runs things off the rails.
Economic value is a distinct thing that arises from markets and price discovery. It doesn't really cover social or personal values, despite them constantly leaking into discussions.
Pretty much everyone agrees teachers are valuable, but their economic value is relatively low or their market is distorted. As hellishly capitalistic as it sounds, a teacher that could reliably produce all star workers would probably be paid handsomely as a student conveyor belt to Megacorp, by Megacorp.
Also medicine breaks discussions of markets/economics, the value of a shot that saves your is infinite.
Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics.
There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.
You could organize an economy around labor-as-value, at least in terms of how workers are paid and goods are priced, but you have to be extremely diligent that you're directing work towards useful endeavors.
You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.
Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: the definition of "value" is reversed so that the system rewards the least valuable actors (investment bankers, middlemen, rent-seekers) and punishes the most valuable actors (teachers, firefighters, plumbers, sewage treatment plant workers, garbage collectors).
Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?
The problem is that huge swaths of people can do those "most valuable" jobs, so they will chronically undercut each other to a stable salary point.
There is no conspiracy or scheme going on. Most people who set out to become a teacher or sewage plant worker are successful in doing so. Very few people who set out to be investment banker VP or real estate moguls succeed, but we hyper focus on those who do, ignoring (more likely unaware of) the graveyard of broke losers who didn't make it.
On the flip-side, if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This argument really breaks down when you consider that it requires a lot more training to become a teacher than an investment banker, and there is a massive shortage of teachers, and none of these factors makes teaching a lucrative career.
Becoming a teacher is far easier than successfully becoming an investment banker. Most people who try end up making teacher territory pay to push paper in a cubicle all day. And they don't even get summers off.
That's no necessarily true since teaching requires a degree and certification, at least in the USA. Also it's an extremely hard job compared to investment banking - the hours are long, you must take your work home, you're usually on your feet a significant portion of the day, and you must function as a social worker and a live performer for a significant portion of the day. Every single day for a term.
And the pressure is enormous, you're in charge of making sure the kids get the tools they need for their life, all while making sure they can survive the arbitrary stuff like standardized testing.
People drop dead in Japan from their jobs frequently as well, regardless of industry. This hasn't anything to do with the job being hard and everything to do with work culture.
I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.
Your first paragraph I interpret as basically saying that the reason things are is because these jobs exist in a labor market, so that's just a restatement of my point that this is a negative aspect of capitalism.
The third paragraph argues for even more market mechanics involved in this labor market which I of course disagree would improve the situation.
Also there's a serious shortage of teachers in the USA which undermines your point imo.
Jira really seems to have degraded as it has become increasingly bloated. I grit my teeth every time I hear platform ops say "hey, that deployment ticket last week... we noticed you didn't fill out the x, and z fields and also didn't create a follow-up ticket for future deployment to prod with the correct link to the implementation ticket"
Ah, sorry I think I communicated in an unclear way. Yeah, we have some annoying processes at my office but a big reason that this sort of request sucks for me is that Jira is bloated, slow, confusing and buggy in a way it wasn't 5-10 years ago.
My experience is that if you give a “better” tool to a bad team they’ll just do something outside the tool. I have never worked with a team who has had a roadmap in jira - there’s always a corresponding excel sheet for that. The best defence against this practice is strong leadership and buy in to the value of the tool.
Personally I run myself on a bullet ish journal and I’d probably run my team on Trello given the choice.
> ...and I’d probably run my team on Trello given the choice.
For how much longer, though? Been quite a while since Trello was bought by Atlassian; dunno how badly Jira-fied it is by now, but I can only imagine it's going to get more and more so.
// NOTE in the meantime, we added asynchronous loaders everywhere using
// a third party library which makes the page even slower to load, and
// increased the recommended CPU and RAM requirements for both the server
// and the client.
// We also added a noscript tag to tell the users they can't load the page
// without JavaScript so the loaders can load.
To me this brings the phrase to mind: "perfect is the enemy of the good."
Ideally tech debt or code-smell encountered like this would be captured/tracked/described better but often-times this means context switching or engaging in some kind of high-friction activity (like filling out a JIRA ticket) and that just discourages tracking it at all. At least inline TODOs are captured somewhere. And they can be for doing.
I'm sure in larger codebases it can get unwieldy with tons of TODOs from a lot of different people, but for personal projects I've always found them a good compromise.
For me it's saying "yeah I know it could be better but I'm not going to break my train of thought over this and context switch. It's not so critical as to break functionality, this would just be nicer."
I really do appreciate TODO hilighting in editors for the odd occasion where I get back to something on a whim and feel like doing a quick fix then. (It's probably not realistically that common though and most will sit there indefinitely)
I think the main thing is sometimes you want the signal that there is work to be done in the code. In that case even if you track it on JIRA, GH issues etc. you'd still want to link it. And a reference is a bet on continuity so without a description in the comment as well you might lose the meaning someday.
Most commits people make are rather bad. Instead of taking us back to the stone age with TODOs, why not encourage better tool usage? Many don't commit often enough and instead tangle together unrelated changes. The cherry on top is when the commit message is just "updating somefile.py" or something similarly unhelpful.
How would that be discovered? If I inline a TODO comment calling out some tech-debt that I (we, our team) had to take on, then in the future when the next person touches that logic they will see that comment and might address it. If it's in a commit message it might as well be invisible.
Discovered by the rest of your org? I don't see how a TODO in the code is more visible than a git commit message. In fact, at least it's possible that non-devs may still be able to see the git commit messages in a feed or have read access to repos.
`git blame` is to answer the question "who did this, when and why?", where the who and when are automatic and the "why" is a responsibility of the committer (and reviewers).
Instead of relying on people actively checking the git-blame for all of the code they're reading, why not just put a clearly obvious comment within the code itself?
What I take issue with is low quality writing. TODOs are a low quality comment. Commit messages that only tell "what" and not "why" are also low quality. Generally just not having a clean history to look at is bad project management.
I'd rather see a TODO in the source file than in the commit message because of discoverability issues with commit messages.
Maybe that can be fixed? If I need to git blame the right line, and while ignoring miscellaneous commits like formatting changes, renames, and additional comment additions, then I'm probably not going to find the commit message. Also, if you do all of that just to find a vague commit message, then why bother digging next time?
Best tech-debt tracking I've seen is in the form of TODOs with mandatory links to the issue tracker (thanks to a silly regex pre-commit/pre-submit check) coupled with a team culture of adding such TODOs, as just adding the regex check will just cause lazy and sloppy engineers to not add a TODO at all, especially when facing pressure from other teams.
No, I knew there's some trickery to avoid part of the noise in git, but it's not enough as I won't be looking at that log or blame everytime I read a file. Using a TODO comment still seems better to me.
A TODO surfaces details where it wouldn't even occur to me that there's something interesting hidden in the log. Trying to find them feels like smashing the action button everywhere to get a random secret in a game, like secret doors in rtcw or finding stuff with the shovel in zelda.
Do you not use an IDE? It's fairly trivial to run macros or add something to the command palette. Maybe some personal scripts you have been honing over the years?
Usually strong opinions like this come with a more developed workflow.
Well, I guess emacs might qualify as an IDE. Magit is great, but my point about discoverability in practice still stands. I won't be looking for logs from all files, and logs only show recent changes, so long foretold issues like scaling or reasoning won't be there either.
Yes, that's fine. Developers can also put TODOs in their git commit message.
> Most commits people make are rather bad. Instead of taking us back to the stone age with TODOs, why not encourage better tool usage?
I have a tool which fails if it finds a TODO in a comment without a Jira link on the same line. Since it fails if it finds such things, it's great for CI/CD piplines to block PRs until all of the oddball ends have been tied up and made visible to the product team.
Alas, if we could get the product team to prioritize those TODOs then they can start to be removed from the codebase...
Same reason anything else keeps getting built when the price drops. Builders are not investors. As the price drops the cost of acquiring new land to build on also drops. As long as a builder has a margin between land + construction cost, they will build.
A huge part of the cost of building a house right now is the excessive regulation. By deregulating we will be able to build houses for less money and so builders will be able to sell them for less money. In addition apartments and especially larger apartment buildings are straight up illegal in many areas even though demand is high. Legalizing these units which are much cheaper than SFHs would allow all housing prices to decrease as some of the people competing for SFHs instead buy a condo.
reply