I think the “underpaid teacher” thing isn’t necessarily rooted in reality,. especially outside of the US. My wife is a teacher in the UK, and she’s a head of her subject. For many years her pay was similar to mine as a software engineer, but everyone often treated her as if she was poor and that I was rich.

A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

For Future Promises, you should also be prepared to walk when these promises aren’t kept. I once worked for a company that met my previous salary, but had in my contract that after 6 months I would get a £5k increase.

It didn’t happen, and after 6 months of chasing the CEO outright said to me “we don’t have to pay you what we agreed a year ago, we pay you based on what you’re worth now”.

I should have left, but in many ways I’m glad I didn’t, because in the end they went under during COVID and I got an awesome amount of severance from them - with a new job lined up after that paid much more.

When I was at school, Sunny D and Vodka was a recommended mix to make you ill enough to throw up and miss school the next day. I can’t believe people willingly drink this shit…

My hope is that Labour are playing this smart. They’ll bang on about how Brexit won’t change, but that “we’ll look to increase economic and social strengths via our relationship with the EU”. We’ll reintroduce entry to the single market, ensure freedom of movement, and basically rejoin in everything but name - and then eventually say “well, if we want to rejoin it’s basically a tick in a box”.

The EU will likely be happy for the UK to rejoin, even without punishment. The most reliable ally in the battle against Euroscepticism is a former Eurosceptic that can say how shit things were after leaving, and how much better they are since rejoining.

In many ways, it is an obscene amount of control, and I don’t disagree that this degree of wealth isn’t ethical - even examples like Taylor Swift aren’t from “hard work”, but rather backroom deals, undercutting other artists, etc.

IMO, the best alternative is going entirely the other way. Tell all billionaires in the US that they are subject to a wealth tax, and attempts to fight it will result in freezing assets, expulsion from the country, executive removal, etc. Drive all billionaires out of the country, and let them set up shop elsewhere (they won’t).

It’s a punishment, though. Perhaps they should be punished, but IMO an easier approach is to say “well done” and to tell them that as long as this money goes somewhere for societal gain it doesn’t really matter if they decide to pump tens of billions into making public roads the best roads in the country, it’s better than them just having that money in a fund somewhere.

Where this will likely get dicey is in ensuring that this money stays in home accounts, and in defining what is taxable wealth, and fighting avoidance. That’s where the system will be gamed, but ultimately it’s different to avoid tax that goes somewhere to avoiding your money being spent by you for public good.

I can’t remember who suggested it, but they framed the question differently around taxing billionaires.

Instead of making it a negative thing, they said it should be framed as a great honour to pay these “special” taxes. The billionaire tax should be kept separately from all other taxes, it should be pooled into a limited fund that they own, and should be distributed to areas where they want it to make a real impact. They should then be given additional benefits in society based on the impact generated by their fund. It notes that capitalism isn’t necessarily about accumulation of wealth, but profit, and that wealth should be taxed.

For example, if Elon Musk were taxed 50% as a wealth tax, he is personally invited to the White House to discuss his plans with the tax authorities and the president. He gets to attend specific meetings to see where his money has gone (let’s say to hospitals), and gets public praise for pumping several billion into public healthcare initiatives. Wealth is reframed into an opportunity to help society, whereas capitalism pushes profit.

While I don’t really like the idea of billionaires choosing where taxes go, if improvements are measured on societal impact it’s still better than before where they just hoard wealth.

deleted by creator

On one hand, Farage is a massive cunt, an enemy of the state, and the man responsible for irreparable damage to UK politics due to Brexit.

On the other, if Reform is going to run against the Tories, there’s a real opportunity his tinpot party takes the Gammon/flag-shagger vote away from Sunak’s populist run as Tory leader, and in a month we see the Tory party get absolutely annihilated.

Years ago, I said that it was quite sad to see that Conservative’s had lost their party to the populism of the Boris era, because many MP’s that wanted to see a strong union (bear in mind the full name of the Tories is the Conservative and Unionist Party) were expelled from the party and ostracised to make room for grifters under BoJo. While I’m no conservative, many voters value conservatism in their politics, and while I don’t like Starmer much either, he’s basically the closest thing to a Conservative AND a Liberal in major party politics in the UK.

My vote is probably with the Greens this year, but in many areas Labour should absolutely destroy the Tories, hopefully to the point where they become the third or fourth party in the UK.

All of big tech is really worried about this.

• Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
• Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
• Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
• Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.

Definitely not a US thing. Here in the UK I don’t think I’ve worked 9-5 for over 20 years…

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

Why would a company decide to grant you a working visa when you will primarily be remote? Furthermore, why would the government grant you a visa when you could, in theory, work from your own country?

Yep!

There is one reason I think onsite works, and that’s for relocation.

If you are from the US and you want to move to the UK, how do you intend to move via work if your work is remote?

I love remote work, but I’ve not heard a rebuttal for this other than “don’t let foreigners move here” or “let’s let people move based on their level of education”.

deleted by creator

The corporate jobs aren’t much better. The pay is great for tech workers, but no amount of money makes the 10% yearly cull, the added layoffs, and micromanagement easier.

To your last point, though, you’d be surprised at how hard it can be as a very experienced candidate from outside the US to land a role in the US. I have had multiple HM’s that have wanted to hire me for my experience in their market, but they have been forced to take domestic candidates or to run weeks of interviews with external candidates to rule out that a foreigner should get a tech role.

I’m in the UK, and First basically hold the monopoly in my city. There are so few buses that they often skip stops at rush hour because they’re already full, or because they’ve decided in the moment that your stop doesn’t matter.

Nothing wakes you up during your commute like listening to a woman get fired over the phone because she’s going to be late for work, despite still being 60 mins early for what should be a 20 min journey.