>For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account
This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism.
But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings account.
I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development.
I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth.
As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more.
So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally.
But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc.
While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house.
So yeah it’s just different.
Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage
It's not that they're "intuitively better" it's that prior generations of them have passes less insane state and local law and they're not at the tail end of a ~20yr industry boom so "pay down my house and cash out to somewhere cheaper" doesn't make sense as a retirement strategy for as many of them.
Many people here might be in a similar situation to me, but I took an online masters program that allowed for continuing education following completion of the degree. This has become one of my hobbies; I can take classes at my own expense, not worry about my grades, and just enjoy learning. I can push myself as much as I want and since the classes are hard, just completing 1 assignment is enough to force me to "think". Just sharing my experience for people who might be looking for ways to challenge themselves intellectually.
So much of my professional SWE jobs isn't even programming - I feel like this is a detail missed by so many. Generally people just stereotype SWE as a programmer, but being an engineer (in any discipline) is so much more than that. You solve problems. AI will speed up the programming work-streams, but there is so much more to our jobs than that.
Most of the work brought to me gets done before I even think about sitting down to type.
And it's interesting to see the divide here between "pure coder" and "coder + more". A lot of people seem to be in the job to just do what the PM, designer and business people ask. A lot of work is pushing back against some of those requests. In conversations here in HN about "essential complexity" I even see commenters arguing that the spec brought to you is entirely essential. It's not.
^This 100%. Junior SWE here. Agentic coding has kinda felt like a promotion for me. I code less by hand and spend more time on the actual engineering side of things. There’s hype in both directions though. I don’t AI is replacing me anytime soon(fingers crossed), but it’s already way more useful than the skeptics give it credit for. Like most things the truth’s somewhere in the middle.
There is also so much more you can automate and use AI agents for than "programming". It's the world's best rubber duck, for one. It also can dig through code bases and compile information on data flows, data models and so on. Hell, it can automate effectively any task you do on the terminal.
Is there a way to instantly, quickly prompt it in the terminal, without loading the full UI? Just to get a short response without filling the terminal page.
like to just get a short response - for simple things like "what's a nm and grep command to find this symbol in these 3 folders". I use gemini alot for this type of thing already
Both allow you to switch between models, send short prompts from a CLI, optionally attach some context. I prefer mods because it's an easier install and I never need to worry about Python envs and other insanity.
If you uv install llm
Then grab my shelllm scripts github.com/irthomasthomas/shelllm and source them in your terminal then you can use premade prompt functions like shelp "what's a nm and grep command to find this symbol in these 3 folders" -m gemini-pro
There's also wrappers that place the command directly in your terminal prompt if you run shelp-c
I wonder what the incentives are here. I am a FAANG engineer with a clearance - but would gladly serve my country in a role if the pay cut wasn't so severe
Today? In this current version of America? You like the idea of being deployed internally against protestors? Or maybe, Greenland sounds like a nice holiday spot?
This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism.
But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings account.