My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work.
However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.
Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it)
IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.
As compared to Argo et al, I'll say it's pretty slick, but it is unquestionably very "do things the Palantir way" and thus even as slick as it is I don't think it's appropriate for just any ole random startup. It's also evidently just recently been exposed outside of Palantir so it definitely is v0.0.00000009-alpha when trying to use it in anger
It's mckinsey but with tech people, not consultant babys. they actually have people who know how to speak to politics people, & they don't come from think-tanks like some other brands of loser. think outside the box. not every company is "really" a product company, i.e. Google is not computers company, it's an ads company, & so on.
My family and I had terrible experiences using Nextdoor.
We were already used to seeing hateful and bigoted comments on Facebook, especially in various local groups, but the behavior on Nextdoor took things to another level. I was genuinely surprised to see people acting that way so openly.
I initially tried using Nextdoor to address a problem in our neighborhood. People were constantly running the stop sign in front of our home. What should have been a simple discussion turned into a huge ordeal, to the point where I felt the need to install additional security cameras out of concern for retaliation from others in the neighborhood.
Nextdoor is a hotbed of homicidal motorists, among other categories of terrible people. Often the murder-drivers are also the "community moderator". Overall the site is terrible.
I had to get the police involved, but they weren’t much help. So, I went directly to the mayor. He was very understanding and had a personal connection to my neighborhood—his grandmother had built the very first house there.
That same afternoon, after our conversation, he had officers stationed in a spot where they could monitor the stop sign. On the very first day, they issued nine tickets.
This all happened after I had already been threatened on Nextdoor—just for answering a question about identifying a repeat offender.
Someone had asked me to list the vehicles I frequently saw running the stop sign, so I did. One neighbor responded, “A silver F-150? You’ll have to be more specific than that—there are at least five silver F-150s in this neighborhood.”
So, I clarified and said, “It’s the silver F-150 with the Trump bumper sticker on the right side.”
I should have never said that. People immediately took it as an attack on Trump and his supporters. What followed was a wild few months.
Yeah, similarly I've heard people say that the Maine accent, particularly "down east" islanders, is similar to an English accent in some ways - I think specifically some region of England, like Yorkshire maybe??
It really is a nice accent. I spent my most formative years in the Caribbean, and I still have a bit of an islander accent when I'm around others who have one. There's a gentleman who works at a Publix near me who is from Trinidad. The first time I met him, I only caught a slight hint of his accent. I asked him about it, and when he told me where he was from, we both immediately started speaking in full-blown island accents.
I also had two friends during my time in the Caribbean who were originally from the Outer Banks. I don't remember which island exactly, but they both had noticeable accents that were unlike anything I had ever heard at the time.
Watching videos about the various Outer Banks accents definitely reminds me of them.
I'm not sure if bachelor's degrees should be abolished.
But we need to start recognizing that most college degrees aren't required to do most jobs, and it's basically rent-seeking behavior.
I've helped interview and hire three additional software engineers for my teams over the past 2.5 years. None of the applicants with a B.S. in SWE could hold a candle to the self-taught applicants. Those are my anecdotes, but we interviewed multiple applicants with B.S SWE degrees from Auburn, the University of Alabama, and the University of Tennessee. None of them were close to being as prepared as the applicants, who were a little older and had no college degrees but decided to pursue SWE independently.
I had a very successful career in construction when I was a young man. First, I wore a tool belt, and then I got into commercial construction management. I work for one of the Top 5 builders in the world. I decided to move back to the states and put down some roots. I expected to land a construction management job in Auburn easily. However, none of the companies would even give me a chance to interview because I didn't have a B.S. in Building Science from Auburn.
As it turns out, everyone and their mother has a Building Science degree from Auburn. So, I also decided to pursue one until I learned how much the people were earning. They were spending ~$100k on a degree only to graduate and earn far less than I earned while wearing a tool belt.
So, I put my tool belt back on and went to work.
I pivoted into SWE a few years ago without a degree. However, to get to the executive level, the head of our company suggested that I obtain a degree. So, I completed an SWE degree at WGU. I didn't learn anything while pursuing the degree, but at least I have that piece of paper hanging in my office now.
I have many more anecdotes I could share to show why I think most college degrees are rent-seeking behavior, but I guess anecdotes don't account for much at the end of the day.
As a self-taught SWE myself, I agree with your observations. Two of the most talented engineers I've ever met were self-taught. The interesting thing about the two people I'm thinking of is that, besides being self-taught, neither one of them actually even went to college. One of them actually dropped out of college, then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.
Me, I have a degree in math, but 97% of what I know is stuff I picked up either on the job, or because I found it interesting. Besides those that picked up CS as a major when it was a hot field, I'm betting that some of them get the love of tech beaten out of them by their college experience. I certainly know more than one science major who felt that way after graduating. (Not me, though. I'm weird, and I still love math just as much as I always did. Maybe even more.)
> One of them actually dropped out of ~~college~~ high school(!), then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.
Great colleges teach some people how to think. Most people cannot critically think, they simply parrot others, go with the herd, although some of those can perhaps communicate effectively. But for those that go to college and get some manner of STEM degree, something that requires analysis, these people can think from first principles. They are worth 10x what the others are at a technical company. Any college that manages to train students how to critically think is well worth the price. Our economy is quite literally held back by the fact that we do not have enough people who can actually think. Perhaps AI will help solve this problem, but so far, AI just seems to replicate the non-thinkers.
I know any number of people with STEM degrees who are unable to think critically or reason from first principles.
STEM are also, I think, the wrong field(s) in which to rely on critical thinking to, _broadly speaking_, be taught. The technical background - programming languages or maths or basic biology / chemistry - that have to be assimilated before reaching that point are too high a hurdle for most students. Humanities, with a natural-language corpus + common experience, are a more-accessible approach. (The trivium, if you're familiar with classical-education terminology.)
That's not to say STEM courses can't teach critical thinking - they can, and must - nor that educators in Humanities haven't done a piss-poor job of it over the last half-century or so. That is to say that the general decline in critical thinking skills is mostly attributed to the decline in the status of and standards within the Humanities disciplines.
Fair point. I agree that everyone should have an introductory background in both. The tide at the moment, though, is STEM, STEM, STEM... Which I don't think does society any favors. I emphasize Humanities because that's the corrective movement needed right now.
(1) Not entirely a function of bachelor's programs that produce conformant wage workers.
(2) Not worth the high tuition and debt at all.
I can't help but imagine that there have got to exist far better and cheaper ways to learn how to think. I would like to see more entrepreneurship colleges that force people to innovate, also to bootstrap without external investment.
I agree with your thesis, but I don't think there are 5 colleges or universities in the US that actually truly teach people how to think critically, with genuine curiosity. I despise people who are smart and educated, but not the least bit intellectually curious. The sad part is that the entire US education system is literally designed to beat the curiosity out of people, at least until you start talking about graduate schools.
I think it is very difficult to do it. You need professors who challenge assumptions and break with the crowd. In college you want many kinds of thinkers teaching the students, and even if you're successful, it takes years for those seeds to grow in young minds to break through prior indoctrinations. And if you think US school systems are bad, they are far better at this than the rest of the world. Please forgive me for the blanket statement, I speak generally not specifically of a particular country.
One of the things I was lucky to have as a part of my college
experience was access to a group of professors who, while they
certainly were not on the cutting edge of their fields in terms of
research, cared a lot about good teaching. I wasn't an lit major, or
a linguistics major, or a French major, but I was able to take
courses in contemporary literature, history of the English language,
and modern French literature with people who were, taught by experts
in those fields who were there for the sole purpose of doing so.
Then there was the course I took that was ostensibly a political
science course, titled simply "General seminar." General seminar was
a 1 credit course taught by one of our two political science
professors. The only required prerequisite was an invitation. He
taught the course generally once a year, and he'd invite 5-6
students, generally juniors and seniors, to literally come over to
his house once a week, eat dinner, and discuss a book that was the
chosen topic for the semester. There was a rotation for who was
supposed to be the facilitator for the evening, but that tended to be
an easy job. With ~5 hand-picked, upper division college studnets
from multiple majors, discussion generally chose its own direction
after the initial introduction and maybe a couple general questions
to the group to bootstrap things.
Because I came in to college with 8 college credits already from
having taken the calculus sequence at one of the local colleges,
rather than screw around with AP, I was nearly a semester ahead of
everyone else in my cohort when classes started freshman year. These
were not introductory courses, so, often, I'd be the only non-major
in the room. Even so, I was held to every bit the same standard as
they were.
With only 5 professors in the entire math department, the catalog
offerings were mostly limited to the basics: calculus I-III, linear
algebra, abstract algebra I-II, differential equations, geometry,
probability, mathematical statistics I, real analysis, and a course
in foundations that was a capstone course. I took literally all of
those, due to having started with those 8 extra credits.
I won't say it was a plus or a minus, but one property of going to a
school with only 1200 students is that people will get to know each
other. I swear, when I was in college, more people knew my name than
whose names I knew. But, that also led to me being able to take
independent study courses in elementary field theory, introductory
Galois theory, and axiomatic set theory.
Oh, and the foundations course? Yeah, that was a weird combo of like,
a month of elementary number theory, followed by a course in point
set topology. The topology portion was taught via the Moore method.
To this day, I still remember standing up in front of the class (all
5 of us ), and giving what was, and probably still is, to this day,
the world's worst correct proof that the real line is connected.
The classroom was a small auditorium, equipped with blackboards that
rolled up to reveal a second set of blackboards behind them. That
gave me 4 blackboards to fill up, and fill them up, I did! But, by
golly, when I put my piece of chalk down, Theorem 23 was proved, and
C (for "continuum") was well and truly known to be connected!
The point is, although I said in another comment that I now believe I
made a suboptimal choice by going to the school I did, given that I
was at a SLAC and not a large, research university, I also believe I
took full advantage of the resources and strengths of the school I
did go to. You might say I learned something about how to think and
formulate ideas during my undergrad, but I'd be willing to bet many
of those in my graduating class just did it for the piece of paper.
You know, the key that unlocks the gateway to the middle class.
I think you are making a fantastic point about what we would hope students would get out of a good college. And it doesn't need to be a big research university, or a top 10 college. The goal is to learn how to critically think, and while working with brilliant people can help with that, so can working with smart, intellectually curious people in a safe environment. In fact it is likely much better in most ways, because while the 'piece of paper' may be perceived to be worth less, the critical thinking skills are what pay back for decades into a professional career.
College degrees still make sense for things that involve math (like mechanical engineering or physics) because I have never met a single person who put the effort in to raise themselves to a professional level on their own.
Your self-disagreement, as manifested in your first two paragraphs, should be eating you alive, but it isn't because you haven't fully come to terms with it yet.
No one shoots themselves in the foot more often than GOP voters.
It’s wild to watch folks like my SIL (a teacher) and my BIL (a combat veteran with no other marketable skills) vote against their own self interests every time they select a GOP candidate.
These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.
> These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.
I don't know your SIL or BIL, but in general they line up to vote because the party promises to make life even more difficult for people unlike them. "I may be losing my job and health benefits, but on the bright side, some immigrant might be sent back to their country, or some blue haired lesbian might be driven to suicide!" That's the mentality we're dealing with.
See, the problem with two political parties is you get a lot of baggage for a couple of things you like. So you're basically voting for two piles of shit that may say one or two things you like. Did I like lockdowns? No, Do I like corrupt insurance, also no.
The way I see it is the Democrats are for the really poor people and the really rich people, of which I'm neither. The GOP is for the really rich people, of which I am not. Neither party has any interesting restoring any type of freedoms, they both want to ban stuff they don't like.
The middle class really has no real representation, and that's why we're dying.
In the last 4 years the Democrats expanded overtime eligibility, ramped up antitrust enforcement, got inflation under control, cracked down on junk fees, forgave billions in student loan debt, invested in domestic manufacturing, invested in infrastructure spending (unlike Trump's "infrastructure week" that was talked about for his entire term and never happened), prosecuted companies for union busting, added penalties for airlines who abuse customers, and so many other things.
Anyone who claims "both are the same" and "neither does not anything for the middle class" is being willfully ignorant.
Yea, you're right. Biden did some pretty good things for the middle class. I'm glad he got us out of Afghanistan finally, though it was pretty messy.
I'm more remembering Clinton's NAFTA and basically telling everyone to "learn to code," and Obama bailing out the banks but allowing middle class homes to be sold for pennies on the dollar to companies like Berkshire. It wasn't his mess, but the bailouts seemed one sided.
Biden also did some bad things, like the lockdowns, and threatening people's jobs if they didn't get the jab. Misrepresenting the efficacy of the vaccine, etc. I believe Pfizer made record profits off those policies, which was, for lack of a better word, "icky." The Twitter Files were pretty bad as well. I didn't like that he defended his 93 crime bill, one of our countries biggest mistakes. He also punted on legalizing pot, ensuring more of the drug war. That's kinda my point, with either party, we get a few good things and a lot of bad things. It always feels like a bad deal.
Not to mention that survey back in the day of Republican voters, "What if, instead of Obamacare, the government was to introduce an Affordable Care Act?"
Yes they were. They were also extended for multiple years under Biden. The no fly list for no jab under Biden, discharging military who refused the shot, Biden.
No they weren't. It was done, if at all in 2021, at the State level.
Vaccination requirements for travel were cross border, and there was never a "No fly list". The closest restrictions to what you may be thinking of was Hawaii's 5 day quarantine requirements for certain unvaccinated travelers, which continued until March 2022. Military have always had vaccination requirements.
Yes, you're right. It was for international flights. He also required anyone in-office to get the vaccine if they worked for a company with 100 or more people. That was shot down by the courts. People were scratching their heads why the corporate requirement existed and the airline requirement didn't.
Pretending that all the covid restrictions were only from Trump is just plain wrong.
>It was done, if at all in 2021, at the State level.
And greatly extended, sometimes for years by Democratic governors held in high regard by the party. This crushed small (middle class) businesses, but the large conglomerates (Walmart, etc) survived just fine. In fact they thrived because all their small business competition died off. Restaurants too. The ridiculous outdoor dining, what a mess, they were just winging it the whole time.
Once again you're wrong. Only non-citizens had to show proof of vaccination to enter the US.
The OSHA rule never went into effect. The NY Post is not a good representation of "people". OSHA has certain powers to regulate work safety. The Supreme Court said vaccination requirements for workplaces should be handled at the State and Local level. Limiting travel is much more fraught, plus it's limited and intermittent exposure.
You were talking about Biden, not State level decisions about how to weigh risks and handle an unprecedented health emergency.
Many people I know need some lessons in basic financial literacy.
I’ve been living in an apartment for the past 18 months while saving to build a house and I’ll be here until the home is completed in October.
It has been very alarming watching how my neighbors behave and spend money.
I myself come from an impoverished background. Single mom, multiple violent stepfathers, no money, left home at 16 to escape the abuse, etc.
I slept hard for many months and I’ve been without a home on three different occasions.
However, I firmly believe that poverty is a choice for a lot of people and it’s never been more evident until I lived in an apartment complex.
My across-the-hall neighbors order food delivery 10+ times per week. Last weekend, from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, they had food delivered 5 times.
I’ve only paid for food delivery once and that was when my son and I were stuck at home with Covid.
Many of my neighbors drive new $50k+ automobiles.
Then I hear the same across the hall neighbors arguing about money. She’s a teacher (I see her ID card hanging from the rearview of her CR-V. The husband works in a kitchen.
I’m guessing their combined gross income is maybe $100k and that’s being generous.
Yet they spend money on food delivery like they were making twice that amount.
My base salary is only $130k which is decent for Alabama, but I wouldn’t dare waste money on something like that.
I drive a 25 year old Land Cruiser that I maintain myself. Growing up poor, we didn’t pay anyone to do anything. I had to learn to repair things myself. I kept that habit through adulthood.
Sorry for the rant. It’s just wild seeing how some people live while also having to hear them complain about having no money.
A lot of people were conditioned to rely on food delivery when it was cheap. Pre-pandemic, restaurant food was much less expensive, delivery apps had low or no fees, and the options for tipping were much lower.
Now, of course, restaurant prices have skyrocketed, apps all charge significant fees and the tip expectation is around 20% (and don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is to base tipping on food cost when none of the tip goes to anyone involved preparing the food and a 10lb bag of mashed potatoes is cheaper than a 1/2 oz container of caviar).
But people now expect their meals to be brought to their door and have a lot of resistance to going out to get it or, god forbid, preparing it for themselves.
The trick is finding enough self-respect for yourself to break that conditioning.
I was conditioned to smoke tobacco, waste money on crappy food, vote against my own self interests every two years at the ballot box, buy a new car every five years, hate people who looked or behaved differently than me, say 'yes sir' and 'yes ma'am' and do as I'm told, etc.
I still find myself trying to break away from the stuff I learned as a child and as a young man. It takes life long effort.
I suspect there's a cultural element that I can't speak for outside of my own bubble.
For example, I grew up in a rural area, large family, single income. I don't know exact figures, but adjusting for inflation, I suspect my dad was making what would today be $50K USD / year, feeding 4 kids (and a bunch of farm animals and pets.) Going to a restaurant was inconvenient and expensive. The food from animal husbandry and farm crops was labor intensive, but vastly cheaper. Every meal was cooked or prepared at home. (e.g. we'd have cereal or pancakes, sandwiches for lunch, a meal of meat and potatoes and vegetables.)
If there's a point in this, it's that going out or having someone else do all the work of making a meal was a special treat. It was rare, it was exciting, it meant something.
But I know as an adult with the means to live very differently, we order out at least once a week, which feels like a ridiculous luxury. It doesn't feel special. It just feels more like, well we didn't need to be prepared and have the ingredients we need here at home, so we'll settle for something convenient. (Though where we live, we do not do delivery, but have to drive 10-15 minutes for pickup. We're usually already out because we take our dog to the park regularly.)
Obviously there's a much bigger discussion on general financial literacy, defining "need", "quality of life", what we feel we deserve, whether we think about how today's decisions impact our future and if we care enough to do something about it. But at least in respect to ordering food, I think at least some of that is going to come from culture and family influence. In my specific case, seeing how hesitant the provider of my family income was to spend money also gave me reason to stop and think a bit before spending as an adult, even as my income grew well beyond what my birth family was getting.
I looked up the average cost of living in Alabama. It says it is 54k for a family. Do you think that is realistic?
The reason why I ask is that US incomes always confuse me. Incomes seem quite high and I understand that taxes are much lower than here (Finland).
As an uninformed outsider with these costs of living 100k for a couple seems quite nice and a gross income 130k appears absolutely rich. Am I missing something?
IlJust very curious always as some of the income programmers with my experience get in the US seem absolutely unachievable here.
The numbers made my eyes jump out a little, though I need to remember that "six figures" when I was a ten would be over $250,000 now, a few decades later.
And I'm in the U.S., Pennsylvania instead of Alabama, though they should be similar. (COL site says PA is 20% more expensive on average.)
Of note, Alabama is one of the cheapest states to live in nationally. I would think that a $100K USD income would still allow for a healthy amount of extravagance and savings, though that would require financial literacy.
An easy way to check is look up basket prices. Average rent in America is quite high, food costs are high, tipping culture and other fees make food delivery an expensive venture. 100k for 2 people is a lot of money on a global ecale, but it's not really "rich" in the US unless you spend extremely smart for many years.
The cost of living (and everything else) varies wildly in the United States. Finland is maybe analogous to Rhode Island—not Massachusetts (Sweden) or Connecticut (Norway), but close. Alabama is then more like Albania—quite a bit cheaper… but do you want to live there?
(Sorry to all the Albanians, it’s not really fair to compare you to Alabama.)
Yeah, childcare costs are absolutely brutal nowadays. We are lucky enough to be able to hire a nanny 3 days a week with grandparents caring for them 2 days a week with young children. Daycare costs so much that this situation ends up being cost competitive.
Cost of living in my Texas city is about 10% lower than the national average, but I have friends shelling out $1400/month for 1 child. That's more than my mortgage payment from a house we got in 2020.
I haven't done looked at the FRED graphs, but I wonder how much people leaving the labor force due to the math not working out for childcare costs is happening.
I am sure these numbers seem kind of low to folks living in high cost of living areas, but the median household income here is just over $60K.
Middle class poverty traps look like what you describe. I don't understand the compulsion to spend all of what you make every month, and sometimes more, either.
A large portion of the population has poor impulse control. Many of them see nothing wrong with spending large portions of their income on discretionary expenses even when cheaper alternatives are available.
I understand where you're coming from. Some examples from people I know:
* Person making around $40K buying a $50K new vehicle
* Software engineer making $100K+ in a low cost of living area asking if $5K is a good enough down payment for a home (at least they questioned it!)
* Consultant complaining about money while taking Uber back and forth to work every day and getting all groceries delivered on Instacart
However, these examples are from people who have the means to make these poor decisions and access to credit to do so. I think you understand this from having grown up poor, but it's worth illustrating for readers who may seen your comment and blame most poorer people for their situation.
There's "poverty," and then there's poverty. The bottom 20% of households in the US make about $22K per year. People I've known working in construction get paid entirely in cash and have no credit, often having to choose between paying the water bill or the electric bill after an unforeseen emergency. At the level where you are paycheck to paycheck, assuming the paychecks are regular, you can't save for emergencies because every day is spent triaging the basics.
I don't know of the veracity of his claim, nor the definition he was using, but Bernie Sanders claimed in Omaha, NE last night that "60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck". If true (and it likely is for some definition of this), seems worth knowing.
My wife’s parents come from poverty (they attained middle class around when she was 8-10) and she always says there’s “people who are good at being poor and people who aren’t.” We are fortunate to make a lot of money, but even then I order delivery maybe a few times a year. I had back to back meetings the other day and was feeling sorry for myself and ordered some kabobs on Grubhub and she flipped out, lol.
it's a pretty brutal version of "financial literacy" but it sounds like you had it. Not sure how you broke the cycle though; what made you aware of an alternative?
We have an entire generation of NOT poor western young adults who grew up during essentially zero % interest rates. Their parents financed lifestyles well beyond their means; that was their financial literacy education. None of your neighbours actually "bought" a $50K+ automobile. They are all paying bi-weekly (or weekly!) finance payments. Combine with our focus on immediate gratification and society is pretty messed.
And it wasn't just consumers! Nobody runnning a small business has had to figure out to make the math with double-digit business loans work for some time. Massive fiscal spending growth has also made many businesses viable on government borrowing.
My number one tools are arrogance and self-respect.
I spent a few months visiting a therapist once per week. He said my arrogance is probably the most significant driver behind my success.
Statically speaking, I should be dead, in prison, or broke with multiple illegitimate children or addicted to drugs and alcohol.
I kept telling myself that I was better than my family members and peers who made those choices. I had to distinguish myself from my entire family to succeed.
I am a hyper-critical individual and most of that criticism is towards myself. Every time I do something or make a purchase, I ask myself if I'm treating myself with respect.
Growing up poor or with money problems, seeing that struggle. One does come out different. One can potentially be more understanding when people are just continuing the lifestyle they grew up with. In this case, 2 working adults, one white collar, used to be enough to rent an apartment and eat out/ have deliveries regularly, no? That’s just a story of middle class erosion and financialization of the economy.
What makes very little sense to me is seeing people go from having very little to making a lot, and the increases in lifestyle to match income. Aka lifestyle creep. Things that 2 years ago were not even a wish are now taken for granted. And it’s all the same as everyone else.
> In this case, 2 working adults, one white collar, used to be enough to rent an apartment and eat out/ have deliveries regularly, no?
That’s not true. I grew up in the 1990s, and my dad had a white collar job working for a government contractor. I remember that he made right around the median family household income in the early 1990s, which was at the time double the income for all households. (My mom didn’t work then.) Our neighbors were professionals, white collar federal government workers, etc. Our house was 1,100 square feet. We rarely got even pizza delivery. Maybe we went to Sizzler or Pizza Hut a few times a month. We had one car until 1998 (a Toyota Camry). My dad worked right outside of DC and took a bus to the train station, and then took the Metro to the office.
I got that $50k automobile. And it’s absolutely worth it. It has warranty and I don’t need to spent few hours every month fixing things, that shouldn’t break. Land Cruiser is bad example because of very good build quality and excellent durability. I don’t know how it’s in US, but pretty much everywhere else Land Cruiser is luxury. I personally pay gladly additional 200€ in a month to not to do 4-6 hours chores.
But yeah, the food delivery is expensive. Never do this. Try to teach the young guys in the office, that cooking is not rocket science. 3 smallish pieces of okayish meat cost 5€, add some rice. Grab paprika, tomato or cucumber and you have super healthy 3€ meal. Instead of 7-10€ microwave crap from supermarket.
Financial literacy should be a topic in school. Repeated every couple years going from simple budget planning to mortgages, stock market and exotic derivatives. Plus a course about all the scams and basic computer security. Heck we even modeled back then strategies of fake company before graduation. But that was special school.
The "50k automobile" sounds like almost an aside in this conversation, but it's still bothering me.
I know there are reasons that new car prices have gone up so much in recent years, but is $50k still "reasonable" in the context of a financial literacy conversation? I too ended up going down the path of buying new cars when I became an adult, partially due to having no car repair education (something I only gained on my own later in life), partially due to living in apartments with no place to work on them early in my career, but mainly due to the incredible pressure to be able to get to work reliably in a society without adequate public transit.
But my new cars cost more like $18k (2009), $26k (2014), and $31k (2019). Each felt like a luxury at the time, having grown up with used cars generally 15-20 years older than the year we drove them in. Is $50k not still a good $20k more than a base model Camry? It sure still sounds like a luxury to me.
My BMW 328xi had tired automatic gearbox. Only Tesla wanted to have it for trade in, because the gearbox was still working more or less normal. No person would buy it in such shape, trade-in elsewhere didn’t work either. I was also driving a lot in that time. 110€ weekly gas bill. And Tesla had a small discount plus zero interest offer at the time. I signed for it and got model y long range. My first new car in whole life.
My alternatives were dire: repair the gearbox for 8k. Ditch bmw and get some used vehicle for 25k. Take some other new vehicle with 6-8% interest rate. Or buy some 15 year old crap car and spend tons of money repairing it.
Fast forward to today: I forgot broken bmw, got used to comfy, fast family car. My current workplace offers free electricity as a benefit, so I use supercharger only few times a year on vacation. Financially it looks good: gas and repair costs are gone.
I can tell only one thing: each buy or not to buy decision is very individual. If bmw wouldn’t start falling apart after 80k miles I would keep it as long as I can. I also wouldn’t buy Tesla in first place if somebody else would buy bmw. I wouldn’t need a car at all if I had no relative to care for 30 miles away.
I buy a half-cow from a rancher every 6-7 months. I prepare all of my meals and all of my son's meals. I cook fresh meals for us six nights per week and take my lunch to work daily.
We eat out exactly once per week, and it's always the same place. It has counter service, so no tipping is expected.
It's the only restaurant in the area that prepares a meal better than I can at home. I know the owner, and we text each other occasionally and lift together at the same gym.
I've only had one issue at his restaurant, which was resolved by simply calling him.
My Land Cruiser costs me <$3k per year to own. That includes gas, insurance, and maintenance parts. I spent fewer than five hours on yearly maintenance for the four years I've owned it. The only exception was last year when I had to do the timing service, and that repair alone took me ~11 hours. It was much cheaper than the $2600 the import shop wanted for the repair.
I bought it because the 100 Series is probably the most reliable vehicle ever.
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