Those are real wages. We would expect to see that during a sudden jump in inflation. Wages tend to lag inflation.
The other interesting part in that article is that excluding fuel and food still shows 2.8% inflation - only 1% attributable to food and fuel. Makes it seem like the main article and this article have different spins.
Edit: Wow people are jumping on this. The point is that food and fuel increases account for about 26% of the overall inflation number, meaning that the bulk of inflation is not related directly to fuel. The original article makes it it seem different.
I will say, this past inflation spike has completely broken the assumptions I had from 1970s economics that employers would raise their 'cost of living' raises to keep pace with inflation. My employer seems to think 2.5% is fine, as they've done it multiple years in recent past with only one extraordinary year netting 4%. I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
The driver of real wages is the economic level of the whole country, which moves at a pretty slow pace (if at all) for an advanced economy. Many jobs today pay around the same as they did 30 years ago, because dollars (currency) aren't a measure of true value, and lots if not most jobs produce the same relative value today as they did 30 years ago.
To put that more plainly, lower class, middle class, and upper class defining jobs pretty much stay the same.
> I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
The wage-price spiral now happens when people move. I've definitely noticed that average salaries for my role (data person) have increased singificantly since 2020 or so.
Fuel and food are excluded from core inflation not because they're unimportant (they are in fact incredibly important) but because they are much more volatile in price--going up and down in bigger increments--so that you get a more stable view of inflation by excluding them.
But it's a bit of a nasty trick because food, in particular, has inflated in price a lot the past 3 years. Some items, like sugar, are legitimately double the price they were.
What do you mean by this? If adding food and fuel raises CPI by 1%, then the food and fuel prices have necessarily raised by _more_ than the combined 3.8%.
Most SWEs are not top 5%. The median is about $135/yr, and a significant portion of us make under that.
The point was that a 1% increase in inflation due to food and fuel wasnt the end of the world. Does a 1% cost of living increase hurt? Sure, for many people on the margin of making ends meet it can be bad. For most people, $1 more out of $100 is survivable.
Usually from what I have seen, most SWE's partners are also in tech or "white collar adjacent" making similar money. Which makes a household income of $270k, putting them in somewhere around the top ~7.5%.
I have seen some of that, but there is still plenty of non-tech partners, especially if the tech half is at a non-tech company. In my experience, the managers are the ones most likely to have a high earning spouse. It seems like most of the managers I know have a spouse making $100k+. I don't make as much as others, but I can't even imagine how good my life could be if my wife made the same amount as me so we had a combined income close to $200k.
It's also kind of wild to think that 1 out of 6 households in the US is making $200k+. I get that many of them are in higher cost of living areas where wages are higher, but still WTF. On the other hand, it's something like 1 out of 4 households are making under $50k. Makes me wonder how many of those are retirees vs working age, and what the median household income would be for 25-55yo vs the entire population.
> but I can't even imagine how good my life could be if my wife made the same amount as me so we had a combined income close to $200k.
Outside of a VHCOL, $200k mostly buys you peace of mind, if you live modestly. You get to build savings to be able to say F you to your employer and maybe take time off and spend a few thousand without worry if a family member needs medical attention.
Inside of a VHCOL, $200k merely helps you get a downpayment for a half decent home.
I think you're misinterpreting that. Everything other than food and fuel went up 2.8%. Everything (including food and fuel) went up 3.8%. Therefore food and fuel went up more than 3.8%.
We can see that advertised on every corner, too. Gas costs for me locally went from $3 pre-war to over $5 now. My "investment" in EVs and solar is feeling really good right now.
You have food and fuel, which is some fraction of the economy - call that F. You have a rate of inflation in fuel and food - call that f. And you have a rate of inflation in everything else - call that e. Then you have
3.8 = e(1-F) + fF.
You also have e = 2.8.
I think what you're claiming is that fF = 1.0, so that e(1-F) = 2.8. And I think that's wrong. When they say inflation apart from food and fuel is 2.8, they mean e, not e(1-F).
You're over complicating it because you don't need rates within subcategories when looking at the whole - e is given and f is useless.
3.8 - 2.8 = 1
The overall inflation is 3.8. Overall inflation without food and fuel is 2.8. The overall inflation attributable to food and fuel must then be 1 (this is different than rste of inflation within food and fuel as a category, f).
The very first time I thought "That's it, Trump is done, it's over" is when he complained wages were too high in the US.
Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.
Part of the reason people voted for "no more wars" was because of the long history of more wars from both parties. Desperate people make desperate choices.
Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include:
Seems balanced when you put them in a simple list like that, so it might not be obvious that the republican started wars cost many, many orders of magnitude more lives and treasure than the tiny actions attributed to dems.
If sending military advisors to a country is starting a war, the list of wars started by each President will get MUCH larger.
(For some reason most people associate the Vietnam war with the President who deliberately lied to congress to get a use of force authorization and then literally sent over half a million troops into war.)
If you're going to get technical, you need to pick apart the AUMF for Iraq.
In any case, I personally don't think the US interventions in Bosnia or Haiti rose to the level of the colloquial understanding of "no more wars." This is to the extent that the public of 2024 was even broadly aware of those interventions.
Major point is this: in the last 50 years, every GOP president has started a trillion-dollar boondoggle in the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or more (count is still running in Iran, which the President credibly threatens to nuke every other week). Democratic presidents have initiated e.g. peacekeeping missions or the like with definite endpoints and missions. "Both sides" elides all of this as if they are the remotely equivalent.
(I'm on record suggesting that the US military should be reduced to a footprint necessary to defend only the US states and not foreign interests. 75%+ cuts in budget as a start. 11 carrier battle groups to ~4, two per coast. etc.)
This point came up in a discussion of whether the Iran war is the first US war to be started and lost by the exact same team. Vietnam was floated, but they had a few shift changes before defeat was clear.
Yes, MAGA ran on a broad platform of chaos, griefing, and personal vendettas. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots and know war was on the agenda.
aside from the first term? guy lost his marbles after 2020 but there were no new wars in the first term and that was evidence. turns out he has different handlers this time. and dementia. but there were 4 years with no new wars. I liked that.
There weren't any "new wars" during Obama's and Biden's terms either, and Trump was clearly for years before he ran in 2016.
Ukraine is something Russia started and the cost to the US is DoD dollars and military hardware.
Iran is something the US and Israel started. It has led to casualties among American soldiers, civilians in Gulf countries, as well as economic cost that is falling on all of us.
There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars and Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term and reduced troop deployments in places where existing conflicts were active so I'm not sure what you mean by no evidence. Supporters were happy about that aspect of his first term.
But, like I said, desperate people make desperate choices. If you're a person who feels strongly about something the establishment wing of both parties agrees on, anti-establishment candidates look very appealing, warts and all.
The level of moral fatuousness and practical nonsense your post involves is appalling and hard to unpack.
> There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars
Literally just the US invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War. There were no "new wars" during the Obama Administration or the Biden Administration. You'd have to stretch the meaning of the word "war" rather far to argue otherwise. This Iran war is a totally unnecessary actual war that has claimed the lives of American soldiers, as well as others.
If someone votes for an openly bellicose, jingoistic, bigoted wanna be "strongman" dictator, they aren't voting for less war. How stupid.
I voted for the only candidate (Chase Oliver) that appeared on my ballot that was basically 100% certain to not get us into wars, and I've had absolute vitriol spewed at me (including here on HN) because I was informed it was a default to Trump.
There's no way to act where you won't be hated by someone. Even if you stop paying taxes for the bombs someone will scream that you hate old people or the children.
Idealism is for the primaries. You knew with certainty that Chase Oliver wasn't going to win the presidency, which meant you were okay with either of the two candidates that definitely was going to win the presidency
The rich being in control of both sides does not make both sides equivalent when it comes to impacts on the commoner. The country is done for in large part because too many apathetic people are unable to discern very real differences in their political options, and instead of participating, you eject and poison the well on the way out which is exactly what the "rich" want you to do. You're not high-minded for your stance, you haven't figured out some secret, you're quite literally playing into their hand. Go vote in a Democratic primary and do something useful with yourself.
This just reminds me of that old meme where a product manager says something like "Why am I paying you $200k/yr when I can just copy code from StackOverflow?" and the engineer responded "You pay me that because I make sure the code you copied is the right code". I have a feeling we're in a similar situation here for AI. Sure, anyone can create AI slop code, but to fully take advantage of it, you need someone that understands the whole chain of design and development to make it fully work and integrate with existing systems.
I think we're in for an era where many folks will be filtered out and those who know and understand code, will be in high-demand.
There is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai generated images vs. AI generated image detection.
In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.
Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.
Wait, was this an oversight on his part about the biometric unlock? My MacBook biometric gets disabled after a bit and requires a password if the lid was closed for substantial amount of time.
I honestly think that Waymo's reaction was spot on. I drop off and pick up my kid from school every day. The parking lots can be a bit of a messy wild west. My biggest concern is the size of cars especially those huge SUV or pickup trucks that have big covers on the back. You can't see anything incoming unless you stick your head out.
I wish! I travel quite a bit for work, so it breaks my legs every time it happens. Plus family, kids activities, etc. ML was brutal this semester, but hoping the curve will help a bit.
But it's ok, slow and steady is the way to go. Besides, I'm doing this for the fun of it; I don't need the diploma for career or anything.
I eyed this program last year but resigned my desires because I didn't think I'd be able to juggle it.
Would you say that a 1 class/semester pace is too much for someone with a full time job, two littles < 3 years, and a spouse that expects a nonzero amount of interaction?
The program is quite intensive, so you'd have to be thoughtful selecting courses, and potentially making some trade-offs -- negotiate some weekends off with your spouse, use vacation days for studying, etc.
I have a demanding full time job, frequent travel for work, and two kids (although they're older, so not as time consuming as in your case). At times it has been tough to juggle (inc many late nights), but doable so far.
The workload goes anywhere from 8-10h/week per class for the easiest courses, to north of 25-30h+ for the hardest ones (GA, ML). Of course YMMV, depending on your background on each topic. Also, some classes are front loaded and release all projects early, so you can pace yourself. Others (I'd guess the majority) are released as you go, and you need to keep up with the schedule.
Another approach I use is to take advantage of the break between semesters to study the content in advance. This way I have some buffer when I need to travel for work, etc.
Feel free to drop me a note if you want to chat more. Email in my profile.
I got Battle.net working through Steam. The way I have it is I add the battle.net installer into steam, add proton compatibility, once you run it it installs, but next time you run it, it just opens the launcher unless it needs an update. Then you can install World of Warcraft and other games there and run.
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