Growing up in the midwest prior to working FAANG in the Bay Area, this is my exact experience. With a graduate degree and making ridiculous money, I and my peers had no realistic path to homeownership on any reasonable time-scale in the Bay. Family members working HVAC, plumbing, electrician or other skilled blue-collar jobs in low-cost of living areas bought beautiful craftsman bungalows within walking distance to a decent school for $80K. Professionals with either no student debt or a few thousand from land-grant state university degree paid off in 5-7 years. This has knock-on effects to family formation and number of children. Many of my high school classmates had their first kid at 24-25 and have 3-5 kids now, versus Bay Area average of what seems like 1-2 starting in your late 30s. When you feel like you can finally afford it. I started making plans to leave as soon as I got there, it truly was "structurally hostile to families."
You make a very good point. People dramatically underestimate how much more you need to make in the Bay Area to have the same quality of life as living in low cost of living areas.
It is even more striking that it's written in the first person, so the error sounds like it's coming from the monk and not the writer. For the HN reader not aware, the Cistercians "broke away" from the Benedictines in the 11th century and are still very much "in" the Catholic Church. My great uncle is a Trappist monk and I have great memories of visiting the monastery to see him as a child.
So I'm obviously not a monk but I've known some and that doesn't surprise me too much.
Outside of some orders that highly value education, I think monastic life generally discourages knowing things for the sake of knowing them.
The political origins of a monastic order are not spiritually or theologically significant to a monk in that order really. Like sure they should know but I can imagine how it would come about that one would not.
I don't think their weighing of learning has changed just social needs changed around it.
"Able to read the Bible" was considered important for monks so they were literate. It still is, but now everyone else is literate too so it's not notable anymore.
I think you should look into what medieval monks have done for science and philosophy. It wasn't just that they were literate. You're very much underestimating that.
Marketing spend, especially online, is one of the most studied inputs to business strategy. Long term lift studies of both brand and direct response advertising show that it absolutely drives consumer behavior. Whether or not that's good for consumers might be debatable. I'm happy to buy unbranded consumer packaged goods if I can ensure quality but there's a reason Procter and Gamble can make >50% gross margins.
I used to work at a startup called Trusker doing the same thing, I can't give your comment enough up votes on 1. not very tech savvy, 2. margins were low, 3. too much hand holding and I would add 4. a 1200 mile trip between commercial locations with weird hours and instructions is nothing like the intracity taxi markets.
>We are always wary of guiding for mean reversion. But, if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years (particularly when global demand growth is below trend), there are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.
I find this title to be misleading. The above quote can be paraphrased as, "We think profit margins will revert to the mean. If they don't, we will be really surprised that capitalism isn't working as we think it should."
I've often wondered about the reasons someone might be unbanked. I've only ever considered the lack of immigration status or proof of address, as most unbanked people I've come in contact with were Latin American immigrants to the United States. I've never considered the "playing close to $0" and the effect it could have if your account was closed and you were placed on a blacklist. That would seem to underline the parent commenter's assertion that money transfer should be treated as a right.
An anecdotal example of my own: I was 'playing close to $0' and my bank (BofA) was clearly manipulating the order of my transactions to maximize overdraft fees [1].
After fruitlessly disputing the fees, I simply opened an account elsewhere and changed my direct deposit through my employer, leaving my BofA account in the red. After about two months without issue, my new bank informed me that they would be closing my account because I'd been reported to ChexSystems by BofA and blacklisted. They wouldn't tell me the reason for the blacklisting (though I obviously knew what it was). I was not even allowed to withdraw my existing funds and had to wait for a check to be sent to my home in 7-10 business days.
I ended up getting a TD Ameritrade debit card through a pseudo-checking/brokerage account they offer and have been getting direct deposits there ever since. It was an infuriating and dehumanizing process overall.
Not to nitpick, but in my experience growing up in the Midwest of the US most "poor, but educated, families" like mine pushed children into state schools where they pay in-state tuition and graduate with $10-40k in debt. Most careers are open to them and you would almost definitely not be working at McDs or in jail.
So ok, we're comparing realities that might not be comparable. I also didn't have as bad as others, but in my case something like "in-state tuition" was essentially unthinkable as well as any sort of debt. If you have nothing, first it's unlikely someone would borrow you the money and second it's a terrifying prospect and a lot of money.
The US poverty line is about 15k for a two-person family. That would mean that earning that much would make 1-3 years of family income in debt.
Not only that, but the degree to which you have nothing directly affects the amount of aid (loans) they are willing to provide.
I have a twin sister whom was better at saving than I. When it came time to apply for FAFSA loans, she had $2k in the bank and I didn't. She qualified for exactly $2k less in loans than I did.
Absolutely. In the book "Ahead of the Curve" the author describes his MBA classmates at HBS emptying their bank accounts by buying BMWs so that they qualify for more student aid. I've also seen medical doctors in private practice leave for a public health or VA job when their children are nearing college so that they can qualify for more aid, then return to private practice after the children finish college. When the system is set up to charge a high sticker price and then discount based on an "ability to pay" formula, people will do everything in their power to adjust their finances to appear unable to pay.
The lesson there is that those whom are irresponsible get further ahead (by having the irresponsibility discharged).
This is what always irked me about how the bailouts were handled. They should have been controlled government regulated destructors that would tear off and re-attach resources that were viable to other companies and leave the investors with none of their investment.
For many people who have nothing and earn little, being free of debt is an absolute core value, far beyond the mere numberical delta. To people who perceive zero debt as a central measure of personal achievement and self-valuation ("at least I am not in debt"), going deep into the negative for some quasi-entrepreneurial investment that may or may not pay off feels extremely wrong.
People on HN may ridicule them for being stuck in an optimization for a terribly low local maximum, but the danger of feeling "rich" on a fat loan is real: "if it's ok to burn through a decade worth of low wages to get to where I can easily pay it pack, what difference does it make if I burn through a few years more?" Valuing debtlessness is the established safeguard against that and going deep to exit high would be perceived as close to amoral by their peers.
>why not skip OpenRefine and teach them numpy/scipy/pandas/matplotlib for analysis and visualization
OpenRefine is fantastic for cleaning and imputing missing data, especially for this audience. I don't think they are teaching users to do a lot of analysis and visualization in OpenRefine.
