* For us, maybe not for you.

You and he are in different language games. His is an existential philosophical one, yours is the financial planning one.

Both make sense. I'm trying to transition to his, but I'm not ready yet.

What's the Point? is exactly the question we should be asking ourselves.

Electricity is even worse.

Petroleum also impacts industrial goods prices, flight costs, etc. It's more than just a talking point for drivers.

Are we doing studies ourselves? Of course not. Are we reviewing a multitude of papers ourselves? We generally don't have the time.

It's a good balance to care about science while still maintaining a human brain with independent thoughts.

Urbanization means exposure to chemicals and pollution and stress, and even if there are higher life expectancy, it's probably correlated with wealth since cities are increasingly for affluent people.

I love it! And posts on HN about Big Ideas and uses corpspeak to justify driving people to long hours. The engineer who's picked up talking points of his employer because he's well-paid and trapped on the spectrum, making it hard to comprehend a life of Play outside of work.

And it doesn't help that we are "low value capital" to these people.

Real estate? You've got taxes on that in the US, it's how our governments can pretend to not tax us as much as in Europe while still taxing us as much as in Europe (property tax goes to schools)

What's left?

I recently took the risk there by having it run xattr commands to fix some MacOS bug with Tahoe that broke auto update for what seems like all software.

Late career is a different story. Tech is Up or Out. A lot of people here are off-the-grid contractor types living in LCOL areas, fully remote, with varying degrees of financial comfort. Those people in HCOL areas who got used to expensive lifestyles - sometimes because, let's face it, return to office meant living in a HCOL area, and eventually buying when the rents got tiringly highter - well some of us have choices to make. You can be not wealthy enough to retire, but still trapped in expenses, and seeing how you can pivot to continue the high.

Then the planning begins to where you'll live in a LCOL area.

Some others in early career are really suffering. People who were laid off are having issues at the moment. It's K-shaped.

So enjoy your mid-career bump. Or, you're in the lucky few late-career types with googleable reputations, you accumulated FANG money/shares, and then you're golden.