I sometimes make it at home. Just sliced avocado with salt and pepper on toast is pretty good and simple. Avocados are only $0.50-$1 where I live, so I never got the “buying a house” statement, but I’m guessing avocado toast is more expensive at coffee shops or something.

Yeah, but it influences the job market; there probably are jobs you or your colleagues can get from US companies, and some may take, which results in a healthy job market.

You are correct that I’m a generalist and that may be hurting me; I have designed and implemented ETL pipelines, but I’m more of a “jack of all trades master of none” kinda guy. On the other hand, being a generalist can be beneficial at a Staff level (on another foot, US companies are all about “efficiency” right now, and purging their more senior, expensive employees).

To be clear, I’m not really upset about offshoring to most of those countries. It kinda sucks for me, but it’s fair game if you can do the job better than me. I can live in most of the US fairly comfortably with Spain salaries. The offshoring to India is what upsets me, because they pay and treat them like shit. One company I interviewed with “assured” me that the Indian teams worked US EST, and that’s just ridiculous to force software engineers to work night shift for such little pay or reason. And I can’t really live comfortably in most places in the US for what they pay Indian engineers (could make similar money as a fast-food worker in the US).

Is this just because many prominent right-wing influencers/propagandists/social media platforms are also not with Trump on this Epstein stuff? I.e. they’re still just being manipulated? I also wonder if this is the result of monied interest turning on Trump (i.e. Musk and others being hurt by tariff shenanigans and all the other crazy stuff).

Key word is “serious.” Overstaying a visa visit is a civil offense, not even a criminal misdemeanor where the punishment may just be a small fine.

Being in Spain kind of explains the difference. There’s a big push for offshoring US software engineering jobs right now, and I know Spain is one of the countries where some dev jobs are being offshored to (along with Eastern Europe, LATAM, and India). I’ve interviewed with a few startups, and their dev teams were in India, and they just wanted a US tech-lead/manager.

Problem is students treat traditional 4 year colleges like job training, which they aren’t, and employers require degrees when they’re not needed.

May depend on location and experience. I used to have so many recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn (1-2 years ago), I hid my account. Now, when I’m actually looking for a job, I get maybe 1 random recruiter contact me per month, and then ghost me even before the first call. I’ve probably applied to over 750 job postings, had maybe 7-8 interviews, and no offers. 14 yoe, mostly in web-dev at small companies and startups with unrecognizable names; my last role was staff-level. The city I live in is probably one of the most impacted by tech layoffs; was one of the cities tons of people and businesses flocked to during covid, now it’s shedding businesses, jobs, and software engineers.

They are black boxes, and can even use the same NN architectures as the generative models (variations of transformers). They’re just not trained to be general-purpose all-in-one solutions, and have much more well-defined and constrained objectives, so it’s easier to evaluate how their performance may be in the real-world (unforeseen deficiencies, and unexpected failure modes are still a problem though).

WV? In the 90s, I remember my uncle still didn’t have a septic tank or sewage; the family still used an outhouse. For breakfast, they’d often make biscuits and gravy with this weird, and I assume cheap, canned-gravy I’ve never seen anywhere else (was good, but likely very unhealthy). Most of my family from there are dead now (drugs, shit-life-syndrome).

Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today’s dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don’t know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.

Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren’t treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.

What you’re describing is basically stagflation. It doesn’t necessarily mean a crash. It’s possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.

I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that’s enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I’ve read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won’t be like 2008.

AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.

The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn’t appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to “buy the dip” by the quick Covid recovery.

The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.