This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.
If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU, Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either. Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews, one hour each? If that's not enough to judge a potential hire then I don't know what is. Once the hiring is fixed you should have lots of great candidates available.
You don't even need to go out of the US. Plenty of good US people are down to live in non-FAANG COL areas and thus can have more take-home for less upfront pay.
I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.
A big part of that is contractors have to pay Bay Area costs to operate. Other parts of the country $1000 a square is strictly "brand new really nice mansion" territory.
There's so much demand for housing and construction in the Bay Area, that with the stroke of a pen (figuratively), you could increase building activity by 100x. That would create a huge price spike at first, but construction businesses would expand and others would move to the area, more housing would be available for workers outside of the highest income bands, which would increase supply. It would be a virtuous cycle that could continue for quite a while.
We often reach for black and white thinking which makes political discussions difficult. Both sides do it, and it stunts our empathy for why people vote the way they do.
There are horrible consequences and people are suffering, totally. So then what? How do we get others to understand the impacts and start to change their mind?
Honestly, I'm increasingly cynical that it's even possible. From what I've seen, it seems like people mostly crystalize their beliefs by 30 and then don't change their beliefs without some sort of immense personal suffering. And few who aren't affected by bigotry are going to go through that to change their mind. There are exceptions, but nowhere near enough to swing political trends.
I think Trump's idiotic economic policies will probably result in losing voters as they're harmed directly, but that's just more of people caring about themselves. It's not a fundamental change in people's beliefs about the homeless, lgbt people, racial minorities, etc.--if people aren't affected by how Trump harms those people, they aren't going to change how they feel about those people. And even a swing against Trump due to his economics harming voters won't matter if we don't even get to vote in 2028.
The only way I see anything changing is that the boomers die of old age. My own generation (millenials) are more compassionate, but have basically been hamstrung by an older generation that has kept all the money and power. And honestly, I'm not sure we'll do much better when the boomers die--we're cynical, and tired from living our entire adult lives in this bullshit, and on average just content if we can survive. Gen Z seems on average to have even more compassion than millenials, and some more nuanced understandings of how to treat our fellow humans well, and seem to still want something better for themselves, so my hope is on them.
We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.
This weakens the US against China. Europeans have no stake in a big Pacific conflict and will be much less interested to back US war mongering now. It’s short sighted for us to forego alliances that were helping us build a world order and a trading bloc that isolated China.
China will benefit the most from this. Europe has zero interest in backing up the US in a fight for Pacific dominance. Good luck trying to form a trading block that excludes China now.
Donald Trump just turned the USA into a liability. I don't know how anyone can think this is a good idea.
Like people thinking killing USAID was a good idea. Guess who is going to pick up to collect the good will USAID gave? China, or possibly some other country that thinks the US hegemony was a bad thing.
How can people not see that Trump is weakening USA?
If China wants to start paying for queer theater in Lesotho, I say they are more than welcome to! But I wouldn't hold my breath for this to happen... Have a Nice Day :)
Don't be silly. Have a look at all the waste that is being claimed and you will notice that the things that are questionable (apart from the irrigation in Afghanistan, which had some unfortunate effects) all sin up to less than a half percent of the USAID budget.
Plus that the people doing the cutting have no clue what they are doing. First the 50 millions dollars for hamas condoms and then not even knowing how government contracts work. It is like watching the evening of amateurs, but where the stakes are people's lives and the world order.
If there's any mineral, water, or food supply advantage to doing so they'll be there with Pink Yuen before the undrunk US coffees cool on the table.
China is nothing if not pragmatic and there's central party policy vs. China's regulated but somewhat free market here.
It was the US after all that forced the sale of Grindr by the Chinese Beijing Kunlun Tech to San Vicente Acquisition for ~ $600 million. I dare say fear of communists having a direct line to toe tapping Republicans drove that.
We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.
Because they are a part of NATO and have basically zero military to speak of on their own. There's a reason all of their proposed plans to support Ukraine include an American backstop: because they can't stand on their own and have relied on US military spending for decades to prop themselves up.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO and has no significant mutual defense treaty with America. We intervened nonetheless, to protect Europe. I think we should continue intervening, but I also think it's ludicrous for the EU to threaten to not support America, when they've allowed their military infrastructure to rot away at our expense.
Why do you think the US is going to remain in NATO for the next 4 years? Trump loves to say the quiet part out loud and he’s been repeatedly threatening to pull out.
If the US pulls out of NATO, then it's true that Europe has very little reason to support American interests (unless America "pulls out" of NATO by renegotiating a new mutual defense pact, in which case the countries in that treaty obviously will have plenty of reason to support America — similar to how Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA in his first term; which is also what Trump has said he wants to do with NATO).
However, that is an "if" statement that has not come to pass.
Well, threatening to seize an ally's territory kind of put the ally bit in question doesn't it? For all intents and purposes NATO ended existing with Trumps speculation to use military force to seize Greenland. After that statement nobody can consider the US a reliable ally anymore. So.. the US may not have pulled out of NATO^ but there is absolutely no reason to believe in any kind of support being available from the US either.
^which by-the-by is difficult to achieve on a practical level. Notifications of withdrawal have to be handed in to the US government
If you were correct, then European countries wouldn't keep asking that the US sign an agreement to backstop a Ukraine deal — after all, regardless of the paper, the US wouldn't be trusted to do it.
But they are asking for that; I think you should consider why.
The US has successfully created a system that integrates the US economy with Europe, limiting Europe's choices and greatly enriching the US for decades... and then last week JD Vance in Munich yelled at everyone and claimed the EU was somehow stealing money from the US.
The really funny thing is: Vance is ~right that the Europeans "steal money" from the US. What I do not get is why that is a bad thing. A "trade" nowadays basically always involves one side getting something tangible that they want, be that goods or services or commodities. And the other side getting something intangible claims or money.
If I can get something inherently valuable for essentially nothing but an empty promise? That's an extremely comfortable position to be in..
Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.
