[HN Gopher] The Myth of the Second Chance
___________________________________________________________________
The Myth of the Second Chance
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 304 points
Date : 2024-04-28 16:54 UTC (1 days ago)
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| gnabgib wrote:
| Previously [0] (18 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40162438
| flappyeagle wrote:
| It was flagged for some reason?
| layer8 wrote:
| It's amusing that it got a second chance.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Partly true only.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| bckr wrote:
| 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| 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.
| Remnant44 wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| >> 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...
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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?
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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 :-)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| He wanted to write 10 x, but then realized a bit shift of
| 10 places would be a better estimate.
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Well, you did not realize that the relationship-choice-of-
| person itself was the problem, until that pattern got
| broken.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| npilk wrote:
| 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."
| polishdude20 wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| "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.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| That's also on Charles Bukowskis tombstone.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Close enough. It's "Don't try"
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Life has no way. It can't remind you of anything.
| pbronez wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| simmerup wrote:
| Sylvia Plath ended up committing suicide is good context here
| imtringued wrote:
| Liquidity preference is one hell of a drug.
| gwd wrote:
| Reminds me of the Existential Ad Agency:
|
| https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204
| Shinchy wrote:
| That's a great analogy, I'm now going to have to read this
| book.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| purpleteam81 wrote:
| "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.
| jowdones wrote:
| 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".
| sandspar wrote:
| 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.
| mlazos wrote:
| 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.
| danbruc wrote:
| _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.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| Draiken wrote:
| > 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.
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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".
| art-not wrote:
| And then there's millions more that didn't even try
| adamomada wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| > 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."
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Man, I wish my problems were shaped like that.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
| richk449 wrote:
| What about Jonathon Franzen?
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| julienchastang wrote:
| 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...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| grobgambit wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| 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_.
| foobar1962 wrote:
| 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...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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.
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| 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
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| robertn702 wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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...
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| eszed wrote:
| If you (or your partner) have complex medical history /
| needs then a budget plan won't cut it. $35k is a very
| realistic figure.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| 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?
| tombert wrote:
| > 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.
| tome wrote:
| 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.)
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| lnsru wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| pif wrote:
| > 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > 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).
| ptk921 wrote:
| 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.
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| My brother's college roommate became an actor instead of a
| lawyer.
|
| Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong
| decision."
| BeetleB wrote:
| No shortages of lawyers who think the same - way before they
| hit 50 :-)
| usgroup wrote:
| 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!
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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)
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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?"
| braza wrote:
| 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.
| alimw wrote:
| > 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.
| techno_tsar wrote:
| 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.
| usgroup wrote:
| 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.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| I also find people mostly unable to move beyond their initial
| judgement. First impressions seriously, seriously matter.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's a somewhat better assumption for repeated, routine
| transactions.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| "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."
| jncfhnb wrote:
| > 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
| lanstin wrote:
| Not for me. I like new things.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Your ideal life at 15 probably included novelty
| JoshGG wrote:
| Opinion unencumbered by data.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Can't believe the question of free will hasn't popped up yet.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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.
| zwnow wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| Isn't this the same in most countries?
| zwnow wrote:
| 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.
| jowdones wrote:
| 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.
| zwnow wrote:
| 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.
| ido wrote:
| 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 EUR100s per year overhead. Today
| (when my company is turning over several EUR100Ks per
| year) it's a couple EUR1000s 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).
| zwnow wrote:
| I might do, it's just way more work than in other
| countries. 90% of which I really don't want to bother
| with.
| ido wrote:
| 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.
| yobbo wrote:
| > 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%.
| vidarh wrote:
| _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%)
| vidarh wrote:
| 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)
| tristramb wrote:
| "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?
| hgomersall wrote:
| The bank? The ones whose job is literally to turn risk into
| premium on loans?
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| "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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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).
| eru wrote:
| > 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?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| 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.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| 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.
| floating-io wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-
| bulletin/2014/q1/m...
| floating-io wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| That document is published by the Bank of England. I'm
| not sure what higher authority would convince you.
| floating-io wrote:
| I never said it was false; only that it suggests fraud.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm going to have a hard time understanding how it's
| fraud if it's legal.
| neilwilson wrote:
| 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.
| floating-io wrote:
| 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. :)
| hgomersall wrote:
| Clearly that's not true as the bank note analogy shows.
| If you print trillions of PS50 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| nootropicat wrote:
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| And as usual, 'modern monetary theory' rears its ugly
| head, too.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarter
| ly-...
| JackFr wrote:
| Fractional reserve banking.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-
| reserve_banking
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.)
| nootropicat wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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...
| kd5bjo wrote:
| 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")
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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!
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| 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.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| "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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Investors like Y Combinator can pool risk, so even if most
| of their startups fail they're still net ahead.
| raincole wrote:
| 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?
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| 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.
| WalterSear wrote:
| And his butcher.
| filoleg wrote:
| 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.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > 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?
| bende511 wrote:
| 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?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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?
| bende511 wrote:
| 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).
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| bende511 wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| koonsolo wrote:
| 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.
| repomies69 wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| That would be a good idea.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| 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)
| bumby wrote:
| > _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
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| 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...
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| > 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)
| trashtester wrote:
| 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....
| bumby wrote:
| 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?
| greenavocado wrote:
| 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 Eroffnung 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 "retablissement 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.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| 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.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Do some countries not have a concept of bankruptcy?
| kome wrote:
| I would say, most of countries in Europe do not have
| bankruptcy laws that are lenient like in the US.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| 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.
| scherlock wrote:
| 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.
| threemux wrote:
| > 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/
| itronitron wrote:
| >> "wet streets cause rain"
|
| So are you saying that 2/3 of personal bankruptcy cause
| medical debt?
| threemux wrote:
| No I'm saying that the conditions that lead to one
| declaring bankruptcy can also cause one to rack up
| medical debt.
| hklgny wrote:
| Having medical issues and no way to pay for them?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| threemux wrote:
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| threemux wrote:
| 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.
| trashtester wrote:
| 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".
| bumby wrote:
| 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?
| jdewerd wrote:
| Because the goal is to discredit the 2/3 number by any
| means necessary.
| bumby wrote:
| Tbf, the authors cite (their own) previous work
| indicating hospitalizations do not cause bankruptcy in
| the elderly
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| 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.
| eadmund wrote:
| 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_.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| adamomada wrote:
| 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...
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > 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.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 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.
| nerdawson wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| pge wrote:
| equity financing rather than debt
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| 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.
| helveticar wrote:
| 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.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| 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.
| eadmund wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Does GMbH not afford limited liability for loans?
| zwnow wrote:
| It does, but it's about 10kEUR and you need to meet certain
| requirements.
|
| Recovering from a 10kEUR loss will take some time in a
| country with extremely high taxes.
| 0x073 wrote:
| And there is UG if you have no 10kEUR
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| Then use a "UG (haftungsbeschrankt)"
| heisenbit wrote:
| Bank's tend not go give loans to newly formed GmbH without
| a real person being on the hook.
| fransje26 wrote:
| 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..
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| fransje26 wrote:
| 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.
| geraldhh wrote:
| please elaborate how germany is different in structuring risk
| of business failure
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| 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...
| acron0 wrote:
| 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.
| abtinf wrote:
| This has nothing at all to do with the article.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| anonylizard wrote:
| "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.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| 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.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| The clown car eventually drives into a gold mine, given enough
| gas.
| baursak wrote:
| 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."
| luxuryballs wrote:
| >...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!
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| datascienced wrote:
| #00F grass!
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| 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!
| didgetmaster wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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".
| imtringued wrote:
| Rumination and depression evolved to help humans survive.
| They aren't useless.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Maybe they helped humanity but sure they ain't helping me
| now. I think of them the same we "evolved" wisdom teeth and
| appendicitis.
| andoando wrote:
| Very untrue. Evolution didnt evolve depression, just as
| evolution didnt evolve every other disease or defect. These
| are byproducts of convulated systems.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| 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.
| pascalcrysis wrote:
| 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.
| draven wrote:
| 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.
| bombdailer wrote:
| 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.
| hoc wrote:
| 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.
| metalspoon wrote:
| > 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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.
| walterburns wrote:
| 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!"
| tpdly wrote:
| 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.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 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"
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| 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."
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| tome wrote:
| I love this comment. Do you have a blog or other published
| writing?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Very kind of you. Blog is sadly on another identity. And if
| I'm being honest, quality is highly variable.
| purpleteam81 wrote:
| 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.
| thread_id wrote:
| "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!
| datascienced wrote:
| You can be all that, and still be good or be evil. Maybe that
| is the point!
| Cacti wrote:
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| affgrff2 wrote:
| 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?
| pineaux wrote:
| 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.
| vjk800 wrote:
| 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".
| helloplanets wrote:
| > 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.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| BS. There are second, and third, and tenth chances. Besides, you
| can always adjust your definition of "success", it's in fact
| pretty flexible :)
| p1dda wrote:
| Dr. Phil has a great speech about starting new late in life, I
| highly recommend it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| 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 :-)
| dee_s101 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OtnGAenWEs
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| 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.
| ogou wrote:
| 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.
| pif wrote:
| > 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.
| ogou wrote:
| 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.
| pif wrote:
| 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!
| 2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote:
| "Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate
| yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody
| else's."
| alexcpn wrote:
| 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 )
| resource_waste wrote:
| 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.
| qgin wrote:
| 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.
| 0dayz wrote:
| 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.
| gexla wrote:
| 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.
| resource_waste wrote:
| 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.
| usgroup wrote:
| 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.
| fab1an wrote:
| 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."
| rayiner wrote:
| > 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.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| 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
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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).
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| grvdrm wrote:
| 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.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Life ends at 24
| anonnon wrote:
| It won't be a myth if life extension ever pans out.
| jcalx wrote:
| 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...
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Thanks for link, great insights here.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| 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...
| twic wrote:
| 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...
| thebaine wrote:
| 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.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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
| ngvrnd wrote:
| 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.
| w10-1 wrote:
| 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?
| rfwhyte wrote:
| 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.
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