Meltrax @ Meltrax @lemmy.world

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2

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349

Joined

2 yr. ago

Businesses sometimes need to consolidate expenses for long term planning. I understand this.

What should be illegal is laying off regular employees while awarding record high pay, raises, and bonuses to c-suite level employees.

Yeah we are basically serfs here.

Well it doesn't help that our health insurance is directly tied to our employment. So if you get laid off then need a prescription you're right fucked.

I started therapy a year ago.

I enjoy walking my dog (usually) and sitting with my cat.

I spend way, way more time exercising than is normal or mentally healthy probably, but it's been my coping mechanism for years and I leaned into it.

I try to invite friends over when people have time. It's not often. I'm that age where people are starting to get married and have kids and move away.

I'm miserable most of the time. I try to ignore the shitty politics, the news, the cost of housing, the cost of food, the quicksand it feels like we are all slowly sinking into.

I've decided I'm never having kids. They don't deserve to be forced to exist in this.

The only consolation I've found is an answer to a similar post to this on Reddit a couple years ago - someone in their 60s or so was explaining that for what it's worth, the world is always on fire if you only focus on that part. They grew up in the cold war, doing bomb shelter drills and hearing how they were going to get nuked by Russia. The economy has its issues then. The government has its issues then. I think those issues are worse now, but honestly who knows. You have to look for moments of brightness and try to avoid focusing on the morass of terribleness that everyone is trying to shove down your throat. It's not easy. But the alternative is worse.

$500k houses don't exist in popular cities.

In Boston, where I live? $500k is an unheated garage.

Even better - it's a debt. It lowers their income to below 0. It's a tax break.

$140k won't buy you a house in almost any even remotely popular city or its suburbs.

210k.

Condos in my area, part of Greater Boston, are going for $1.1mil at least, usually more in the $1.4mil range.

Even if I could somehow scrounge together 20% down that's monthly payments of over $7k at today's interest rates. After taxes 210 is more like 126, which is monthly a little over $10k. If I'm not saving anything for retirement and basically barely holding together the rest of my expenses and hoping to God nothing happens to my car, my body, my dog, my cat, or the condo, then I could afford the monthly payments.

Now imagine if I had jumped into that situation and then gotten laid off, like I was.

EDIT: it's worth clarifying that in big cities, the points talked about in this article are still true, just scaled up. Adults in their late 20s/early 30s working in tech are easily making 150k+. College grads in Computer Science are getting 6 figures easily. Making $200k was the high end of average but nothing unheard of.

And the prices here adjust to that, happily.

Lol I was making nearly twice that before a layoff and still couldn't afford a condo that amounts to half or one third of a house in the neighborhood I live in.

This is a dumb take.

SO and I keep the Disney/Hulu bundle because one of my credit cards covers the cost. Everything else we cancelled and I built a little Jellyfin server.

Yeah this too. Ads and telemetry. Those make money.

It's not. It's massively expensive though. There's money pouring into it because it's the next big thing. Eventually, the companies that can afford to consistently power a massive LLM learning server farm will be the ones to keep going, the rest will flounder, get acquired, or disappear. Mozilla isn't a big enough fish and won't get acquired. AI is not a fad, but it's not a sustainable business model for a company like Mozilla so I hope all their eggs aren't going in that basket.

You should be able to remove all the "friends" that Spotify ported in years ago from your Facebook account like it did for everyone.

The catch is that it applies to city officials, not state or national level. So, not to any of the Republicans who sponsored or supported it.

After drinking some Bone Apple Tea.

Glorious.

Probably not, honestly, but I truly can't think of a justification for making them illegal. How is outlawing diversity training and knowledge useful to anyone?