Yes, but this only works as long as the economy remains competitive. Europe is rapidly squandering the human and economic capital it has accumulated over centuries, while the US and Asia continue to grow. Welfare exists as long as someone pays for it.
This is a problem, but unrelated to what the parent is saying. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires it looks like it would pay for social security, medicare, and medicaid for about a year and a half.
You still need a strong economy and middle class tax base to have any sort of welfare state.
The best cars were built between 2000 and 2010. Pretty much the pinnacle of the internal combustion engine without all the millions of lines of buggy code that apparently no longer allow you to open your car freely.
In ~2005 I worked with a world-renowned expert on industrial automation and computer control of machines. He drove a 1989 Mercedes 300 sedan with a manual transmission, which he claimed was the last car made with no software in it at all. These two facts are not un-related.
By the 80s electronics were common with fuel injection, but I consider them more like factory controllers than what we call a computer. They're little 8080 variants running closed loops and activating or deactivating output pins
pre 1997/8 Dodge 2500/3500 diesel trucks have mechanical engines in them. Other than the starter you really only need one other wire... goes to the shut off solenoid.
One of my cars is a 2011 Volvo XC90 with ~250K miles on it and I plan to drive into the ground. It's definitely the tail end of that sweet spot and it's quite surprising that it's (technologically) as simple as it is. It has a basic AWD system and only a simple cruise control system but it's the perfect feature set and I use it 80% of the time I'm driving. (I've driven late model rentals which have "smart cruise control" systems and find their "corrections" very unnerving.) For A/V, it doesn't have a backup camera (admittedly kind of a bummer), any LCD screens or touch screens and it doesn't even have Bluetooth for auxiliary audio input. The keys and fobs are about the only aspect of it that I'd say are over-complicated, as it's never had a working fob since I've owned it and getting one is prohibitively expensive ($500+).
That all being said, it's (probably?) not spying on me and isn't likely to do anything unexpected and weird on the highway like the post mentions. I can also totally work on it myself or get my local mechanic to. Although, unsurprisingly, parts are hard to find and more expensive than they are for my Honda.
I've taken it into the Volvo dealership for service on a few occasions and they legitimately laugh at me. ("How many miles are you looking to put on this thing?") I trust their technicians and am willing to pay for certain jobs and diagnoses (probably their most valuable offering) but their service and salespeople look down their noses at me and it's unpleasant. As others have said, Volvo was absolutely a great car company in the past but it doesn't seem to one anymore. Despite how much I like my car, I can't imagine buying one of their modern, tech-centric models -- in part because of posts like this one.
Yep. Many of them are still good and are on the road even with 100,000s of miles on them. Best car I had was a 2007 Vauxhall Astra. Did about 150,000 miles (and I really ragged it). Still on the road apparently. The 2012 Vauxhall Insignia I have isn't great and I regret selling the Astra. Will be selling that car soon.
unless things have changed their remote policy is pretty much a no remote policy. to be fair to them, I last interacted with them 6 or 7 years ago so things could certainly have changed, but at least at the time I felt like "Remote" was a bait and switch there
One of my coworkers had an offer for Datadog that was ostensibly sold to him as remote before being rug-pulled to a hybrid offer at the last minute. Best course of action here is to simply swap out "Hybrid" wherever Datadog states "remote".
Anecdotally, but my company adopted Datadog a few months ago and all their sales / solution engineering folks would usually be calling in from an in-person office. Rules out 100% remote, if nothing else.
The reality is: they have the data and the data shows that productivity is more or less the same. However, they (the execs) prefer to have everyone back in the office to keep tax incentives, real estate value and probably also because they (old school executives with strong people skills) genuinely think that in office is better.
I work remotely and I'am a big remote work enthusiast and I think that Meta is right on this one.
They are (at least at the moment) one of the most remote friendly company among the big tech ones and I think that they are following the plan that Zuck draw. He never said that Meta would become a fully remote company overnight. In fact in may 2020 he said the he expects half of the company to work remotely in 5 to 10 years[1]. Around 25% of the Meta workforce is remote and this figure could increase.
They are also the only company that admitted that onboarding is harder remotely. This can happen for a number of reasons (for example, processes not optimized for remote workers and not for an inherently inferiority of remote work) and the fact that they also said that engineers that switch from office/hybrid to remote performs the same as the ones in offices suggests that they are not done with remote work.
I guess we'll see how it will end, but I don't think that a cautios approach to remote work must necessarily be considered negative.
Please don't work for Meta. You'd be helping further the largest privacy-violating data collection scheme in the world.
There are also plenty of other companies that offer fully remote arrangements, many of whom haven't sunk untold millions of dollars into commercial real estate and need to be able to justify their investment.
I'd just like to point out that I think you confused another person who replied (Our_Benefactors) with me, and my read of that person's comments is that they were trying to justify you accepting a job with Meta, not discourage you from taking it.
That said, while I absolutely appreciate the need to provide for your family, if you can get a job offer from Meta, you could get a job offer at countless other companies that aren't directly contributing to the downfall of civilization.
> I'd just like to point out that I think you confused another person who replied (Our_Benefactors) with me,
Oops, sorry :)
> if you can get a job offer from Meta, you could get a job offer at countless other companies that aren't directly contributing to the downfall of civilization.
I've been unemployed for 5 months now, and looking hard.
You may be trivially correct, if I end up not getting an offer from Meta. ;)
Now, as you might expect, I don't seek the downfall of civilization. But I can't think of a single employer whose work is entirely safe from that accusation, so it's a question of tradeoffs and guesses regardless.
They’re trying to pay you more than you currently make, or offer some kind of career growth you don’t currently have, and you have bills to pay and ambitions in life. It’s not complicated. Telling yourself so is only making excuses for the company.
Well said. I appreciated the tone. Thanks for defending yourself and your career decisions against those that no nothing about your personal circumstances.
I don’t see how this offers a different take than what I posted. They’re offering you more money than you currently make and you have necessary expenses. So you’re considering it.
Here are the parts of your post with which I disagree:
> It’s not complicated.
You didn't know what tradeoffs I have to consider, so I doubt you can know if the decision is complicated or not.
In actuality, my decision involves guessing at the likelihood of various outcomes, and how they relate to competing ideological goals.
> Telling yourself so is only making excuses for the company.
You guessed (wrongly) about my thought process. Furthermore, I don't see why you had any confidence to make that guess, let alone chastising me based on that guess.
I think that the Gartner hype cycle can be applied to remote work. The peak was in 2022 and now we are in the trough of disillusionment. I think that an improvement in market conditions (low rates), the realization that remote first/fully remote can work at scale (it's a matter of time before the remote startups founded in the last 3 years will become unicorn/decacorn) and a stabilization in the commercial real estate and service sector (a huge crash is an hard pill to swallow, let the market adjust slowly) will push remote work In The slope of enlightenment.
