Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition.

Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of.

I help my kids, but I don't expect them to help me. I want them to save their money to help their kids, otherwise I'm just taking from my grandkids.

Same when I help my siblings. If they pay me back, now I'm taking away from my nieces and nephews. Within friends/family, I think it's completely reasonably if the money flows "downhill".

This is the fundamental concept of the vast majority of taxes, including those that feed the poor/unemployed: that money is gone, somewhere between little and no personal return, but that usually makes sense, increasingly so with income.

Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of.

This calculator says that the median household in my county is not making a living wage, which is ridiculous on its face.

You're telling me this car insurance drives itself?

I was so lonely in this opinion for so long, and it is great to see it becoming mainstream. GHA is terrible.

The vast majority of engineers aren't refusing to use AI until it can do 100% of their job. They are just sick of being told it already can, when their direct experience contradicts that claim.

These posts are never, never made by someone who is responsible for shipping production code in a large, heavily used application. It's always someone at a director+ level who stopped production coding years ago, if they ever did, and is tired of their engineers trying to explain why something will take more than an hour.

It is also often low-proficiency developers with their minds blown over how quickly they can build something using frameworks / languages they never wanted to learn or understand.

Though even that group probably has some overlap with yours.