Demographics also weighs down on a healthcare system and maybe a few other things as well.

Yeah, they quadrupled the cost of ER visits here, from 5 EUR to 20 EUR, to stop people from going, as the system isn’t doing too well. Supposedly one reason is that a lot of people go for no reason (which is funny because the stereotype is that an Estonian man doesn’t get a single checkup unless his wife orders him to)

Anyway

I’m not a big fan of US American ideas about society but you have a good point with the 401k. The tax exemption is a nice idea. And I also think the current workforce shouldn’t pay for the current pensioners. It should be a fund and an investment.

Long ass rant incoming

We have something similar in Estonia tbh. Used to be mandatory for people born after a certain year, but now you can opt out and if you do you can’t rejoin for 10 years which is even worse.

Essentially, 2% (now upgradable to 4 or 6 voluntarily) of your pre-tax salary goes to a fund of your choice, and the government puts in another 4% (comes from your own social tax - if you opt out of the system, your employer pays 4 percentage points less social tax).

The conservatives delivered on their promise of bringing everyone freedom and making the formerly mandatory fund opt-out, so 23% of people who had those funds, withdrew everything immediately (you can withdraw 3 times a year and 152k people aka 23% of people this affected, did so in the first withdrawal period). By now it’s over 250k withdrawals. What effect did this have on society? Well, property prices that already rose during covid, rose even more obviously as a lot of people used newly unlocked funds to make a down payment on a mortgage (understandable use case tbh). Secondly, it means that in the future, all these people are dependent entirely on the national pension system, so either they’re completely fucked, or we’re going to have to start collecting more money off the people who DO work.

Personally I plug my numbers into my bank’s pension prognosis calculator and assume there’s a 6% rate of returns (low for a composite fund consisting of multiple index ETFs I’d say) and I maximize my contribution at 6%, it tells me more than half my eventual pension is going to be from the now-voluntary fund, called the “second pillar”. The first pillar, or national pension, contributes less than half. This is based on the assumption that the national pension keeps rising at the same rate as it has been.

If I were to choose to max out tax-free contributions into the third pillar as well (this one has no government matching, but does come with deferred taxation (you get to claim back on your tax return) and once you’re old enough, you get to withdraw the funds with a smaller income tax rate, or get monthly payouts, also with smaller income tax rate), that would actually overshadow the prognosis for the second pillar, making the national pension less than 30% of my total pension. Assume a 10% return (average long term return of the S&P 500 for an example), and my prognosis is 8x that of the national (first pillar) pension prognosis.

So the question is, how are the people who get a third or less of what I should theoretically get, going to live? Am I going to have to pay more taxes out of my pension to fund those who volunteered out of a system where they were going to get tax-free investments with free government matching?

With forced investments, I feel we literally were going to have close to the best of both worlds: Universal coverage AND self-funded retirement.

The constitution says that everyone HAS to be guaranteed a retirement, so either the young are going to pay significantly more tax (disguised as “employer-paid” taxes of course), or our retirees will live on scraps. All because the conservatives delivered on their populist promise of letting people live better today at the expense of tomorrow.

All those prognoses are of course only predictions based on 1) national pensions rising, 2) my salary rising (the model actually uses a smaller YoY raise than I normally get in my career), 3) global stockmarkets not going to absolute shit. So it could all go wrong and maybe my retirement will also be worth nothing. But just in case, I shifted my funds to one that includes more EU based ETFs and fewer US based ones.

Honestly? We can’t eventually afford to pay for everyone’s retirement.

American system with the 401Ks and stuff is looking better by the day, as there you’re supposed to earn your pension and it keeps earning interest while you’re still working. It’s still not an ideal system, but if you take that, increase the tax benefits, and in addition to employer matching, add government matching…

Of course what good is money when there’s nobody to work and actually produce things… But at least it would take most of the burden off young people.

Right now, 12% of what I earn goes to the pension system to fund current retirees. This is going by the full salary fund not gross income, because in Estonia, gross income isn’t actually gross income (there are employer side taxes so us employees don’t think about how much our income is really taxed). The funniest thing of course is that “social tax” only comes out of salaries, never dividends. So while they’ll say companies are paying it, it’s directly based on what the company’s paying it’s employees. In all honesty, it’s the employees paying it via reduced gross salaries.

So 12% isn’t much, but consider that in 1994 the retirement age was 60 for men and 55 for women. In 1998 it was decided that by 2016 it would be 63 for both. In 2009 they decided it’d be 65 by 2026. Starting 2027 it’ll rise as life expectancy rises. National pension prediction calculator says my estimated retirement age is 69. In all reality, I don’t expect to ever be able to retire, not on national pension anyway. There won’t be enough young people to pay for my retirement. But I have to keep paying for the current old people, who got to retire at 63, some of them even younger. Amazing system.

Well, sure. But they don’t have time to pay for it or manufacture them right now, because they need to work hard to make sure the current old people get their pensions.

Nothing wrong with the system - if people die young enough and there’s enough young people. But a nationalized pension system like most developed countries have is a huge burden once the population ages too much, and the fact that people are regularly living to be over 80 isn’t helping it.

Who’s paying for it? All the old people going to work?

Uh… You posted it. Why post a video you didn’t watch?

Dataset bias, what else?

Women get paid less -> articles talking about women getting paid less exist. Possibly the dataset also includes actual payroll data from some org that has leaked out?

And no matter how much people hype it, ChatGPT is NOT smart enough to realize that men and women should be paid equally. That would require actual reasoning, not the funny fake reasoning/thinking that LLMs do (the DeepSeek one I tried to run locally thought very explicitly how it’s a CHINESE LLM and needs to give the appropriate information when I asked about Tiananmen Square; end result was that it “couldn’t answer about specific historic events”)

Man I must’ve been having worries since birth because I’ve never been able to fall asleep quickly

This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?

Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days

NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.

Not a perfect idea but not the worst?

Does this come with fewer mental health issues than conduwuit? Because I remember the latter had an author that was a… Mtf puppydog? And had 4 years of work experience at like 19? Who claimed that the entirety of the nix, queer and some other communities were waging a conspiracy against her and her users?

th th th

The icons in the article aren’t even the default behavior. Mine all still have color. At least on the home screen and app drawer. The control center icons are translucent but those barely had any style before. And crucially, wifi, bluetooth etc buttons still have color to indicate status.

I literally haven’t had a Netflix sub since that year and I sometimes miss the convenience of it even. Haven’t been very frequent on reddit in 2 years. Neither company is going to miss me though.

Soon it’ll just be piracy and the fediverse for me, and maybe I’ll be able to show my daughter how to download movies and shows, but I’m sure within within her lifetime, piracy will just become so unpopular that all the good sources of content die out. I do hope the fediverse will stay around though. It has a similar problem to piracy: It’s not that it’s hard, it’s more that the people making everything work get tired and it’s hard to convert people.

Kids probably are there just to extort the baby daddies for money tbh. Child support doesn’t count as income for the parent, at least in my country. You can get child support from multiple men and then continue to receive disability benefits for your migraine, end up with more than minimum wage and all you need to do is find the next guy, because he’ll help raise the kids while you sit around doing nothing, and eventually he’ll have to pay you child support too.

This type of woman is like 0.1% of the general populace though, maybe less. I was baby daddy #2, but we cooperated to get our kids back from the abuser and now she actually has held a job for a whole 2 and a half weeks, which nobody thought possible.

When I was still with her, she was burning through 3-4x national median pay per month and we literally didn’t have food money halfway through the month.

Got a funeral in the family? Thrice the fare for you.

Personally I can survive the extra heat in the daytime, when it’s the hottest. It’s trying to get any sleep in tropical weather in my actual house that’s becoming a bigger issue these days. I’m assuming that by going from the 3.5C max to 5-6C max would also raise the average from 0.6 to 1.0 hopefully.

My problems are as follows:

First off, with thick as hell walls and now for the last few years triple glazing instead of the original leaky two panes separated by an air gap, the heat just doesn’t want to escape. I live in an area where it also gets really cold in the winter. Winter of 23/24, I stayed up till 3 AM heating the furnace, woke up 8-9 AM to put a new batch of logs and briquettes in as the fire hadn’t completely died yet by morning. I actually kept the fire going for 2-3 weeks. Normally it’s been 1-2 fires per day and they die out in between. So that’s why the house needs to have as good insulation as possible.

Now the insulation is great at the beginning of the summer, when the walls are still cold. Doesn’t get too hot indoors, cools down nicely at night. It just sucks later in the summer when everything is already warm.

Secondly, it used to be that you’d consistently get <20C at night so you just open up the windows and things cool down and you finally get some fresh air in the house. Last week or so, I’ve had to keep the windows closed at night because the air outside is actually hotter at night too.

Thirdly, the bedrooms, which unfortunately are on the top floor (yay convection - helpful in the winter, makes you pull your hair out in the summer), have blackout roller curtains because, and I’m not making this up, there’s only 4-5 hours of dark in the summer here. It’s going to be light outside by 3 AM today and it’s not even midsummer day. So even if it IS colder than 20C outside, you can’t actually get air in through these windows, because then it’s too bright to sleep. There’s no ventilation either. My grandpa built this house in the soviet era. Ventilation was always “eh the windows leak enough, and we can open them if needed”. It’s not a McMansion, it’s the only place I can live rent-free and just happens to have multiple small half-floors, which makes convection heat up the upper half-floor…

Fourth, between all the stress I have and my already bad eating habits, I’ve gotten overweight which makes me hate heat more, and developed sleep apnea, which means I constantly feel like I’m suffocating when going to sleep. I fucking hate life.

I’m honestly just venting because I hate heat. I also hate climate change, but climate change is making it so that I have to turn on the heat pump in cooling mode and sleep on the couch. Which means I’m contributing to further climate change with the energy use.

The real long term solution is to get rid of the dark concrete walls and replace them with something that reflects more of the heat away, then add some sort of external blinds, and finally, a proper ventilation system. Unfortunately, I don’t have money for that this year and even when I will, I’ll have to do the roof first, as it’s leaking.

Probably. Sounds like actual effort to install as opposed to some tin foil taped to the windows though

Well, disadvantage of only barely affecting temperatures though. 3.5C max, 0.6 average is not nothing, but for me at least, part of the problem is the fact that if I don’t run AC, the temperatures just keep on climbing indoors. The 5-6C drop of tinfoil sounds more useful, but then they didn’t really mention what the average drop is.

Granted, I realize most people would rather get light through their windows. But personally in bedrooms I’d rather take 0 light as otherwise you only really get 3-4 hours of dark per day in the summer. For other rooms - maybe some of those heat-reflective films? 3M claims theirs manages reduce heating by quite a lot, but probably not as much as foil.

Well assuming half the people pirated it and half bought it, that’s still under 10% of the population of the world. Also Minecraft items having labels is a fairly new thing. There were no labels when I did most of my playing, but there were when I last played. I think they added them in Beta so about 2010, 2011?

Diesel doesn’t even burn that well on its own. For it to do anything, you must’ve already had a pretty decent fire going without it.

I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable as you, but I do have an actual furnace for heating in the winter, so I have some experience. I can also vouch for structural stability being a hindrance: If I build it too well, there are usually logs or bricks that don’t catch fire until a long time later.

And in case someone doesn’t: You don’t need to take the entire bark off the wood. Just the outermost layers. So you can even take some from a live tree without worries in a pinch.

And if you have no idea what birch looks like, it’s the white barked one.