I'm retired and I disagree with every sentence that starts with "You loose".
Yeah, I made it halfway through the article before I decided that I should have quit with the first paragraph. Sure, if retirement to you means sitting on the front porch, you’re going to have a bad time of it (or maybe not; you do you). It also means all you did was work, which doesn’t prepare you for retirement. Yeesh, get a hobby, go volunteer.
I didn’t retire because I didn’t like to work. I retired because work got in the way of other things I wanted to do. Not a single sentence that I read in TFA applies to me. Not a word of it. If it applies to you, I’ll be so bold as to suggest making a few changes in life.
I think a lot of the anxiety i get is that our industry is still young enough (it existed for a while but the huge boost in number of people working came in the 90s-10s and most of those people haven’t yet reached retirement age) that I don’t actually know a lot of people who retired. I’m 43 and know a few people in my profession in their 50s and a handful in their 60s.
I know nobody older in my profession (when I started 20 years ago the oldest people at work were maybe 20 years older than me at the time). I occasionally chat online with my first boss from early on in my career - I estimate he is in his mid to late 50s and still works as a programmer. My brother in law is 60 and is probably the oldest working programmer I know.
I literally cant think of anyone I worked with who retired while I was working with them- I think this lack of familiarity makes it seem scarier than it should be.
Does this mean HN users are only happy when US companies are forced to follow whatever regulations HN users like, but not others? Seems hypocritical.
It just means HN hasn’t yet held the vote to decide what we collectively think on the matter. The vote takes place tomorrow, and you need 500 karma to be eligible to vote.
In seriousness, what an immature view of the world to think an online forum has a hive mind that can be called out for hypocrisy.
You probably realise that this website has a voting system (that’s what the small icons next to all comments do; they are not meant to be triangles but arrows). Through this voting system users can show their support or disapproval of any content posted by other users. When a majority of users consistently upvote the same set of opinions positively, you can tell how that majority feels about some matter.
> When a majority of users consistently upvote the same set of opinions positively, you can tell how that majority feels about some matter.
Assuming everyone actually does vote, which seems like a large assumption to make. Maybe what, 10% of people browsing/commentating actually votes? Less? So you have a small intersection much less than "majority of users".
Just read what people read, stop caring about irrelevant numbers, and participate faithfully in the discussions, the points matters nothing, either for if the comment is true or not, or if the rest of the HN community likes the comment or not, it simply doesn't matter.
Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for.
“Factual statement“, that’s hilarious. Nothing wrong with an op-ed, but with an opening like that you might want to step back and re-examine those “facts”.
OP wrote it poorly, but isn't wrong. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.
Social security is a direct transfer of money from people currently working to people no longer working. The amount you get is vaguely based on how much you earned when you worked, but it's not like the money you paid in went into a savings account for you. It went to the people who were already retired. Remember, the first recipients of SS never paid in anything. It's been a long chain of working paying non-working ever since.
401k's are usually based on stocks. The value of stocks is based on the labor of the people who work at the company. The dividends and interest come from that labor too. Once again, at one point you were that labor, but your labor was going to retired people, and now it's "your turn".
And rental income comes from people giving you the money they get from their labor. You used your labor to buy the house, but the current money comes from their labor.
Now the rest of what they are saying is flawed because two of those three would go away if AI replaced all labor. But they are correct in saying that your cashflow in retirement comes from other people's labor, just as your labor went to other people when you were working.
Let's say you take 10% of each paycheck, withdraw it as cash, and put it in a safe in my basement from my first paycheck to my last one 40 years later. The safe is a safe. It earns no interest. No one else contributes to the monetary value of the contents of the safe in any way.
The 40 years are up. You need to pay for groceries. You go down to my basement and behold the fruits of four decades of toil. You take some of it to the grocery store... and it takes up a far, far larger percentage of your cash pile than you thought it would.
Inflation got you. In fact, if we're talking about 40 years ending this last April, it shaved 66.6% off of the purchasing power of the money in that safe.
Uh oh.
So how do you deal with inflation? Instead of putting your money in a safe, you put it in a retirement account. That retirement account creates wealth for you by investing your money into equities, bonds, and other assets.
Equities and bonds typically grow in value by backing the asset with the surplus value generated by the labor of the people who are doing work for the entity that issued the equity or the bond.
Could you also invest in assets that don't get their returns off of other people's labor? Of course, but most retirement accounts in the US today do not do this.
So, yes, you're living off of money that you did not labor for, at least after you exhaust the inflation-adjusted value of the principal you put up for your retirement savings.
I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but that's not what I'm saying you're doing, and I think you know it.
I'm saying people chase returns. If you find out that one mutual fund is going to give you reasonably higher returns than your current mutual fund, you're likely to at least consider the option of switching to that competing mutual fund, regardless of how they get the increased returns.
Multiply that times a few dozen million people and you start to see some effects on the economy, like laying off workers in favor of using AI.
And I’m saying that there’s so many dots to connect to reach your conclusion that it becomes no conclusion at all, let alone having much to do with the decision-making of oldsters.
It's almost as if this is a complex system of human behavior and incentives that spans an entire society. That being said, if you pay attention to what's going on, it's fairly obvious to see.
Gens Y and Z make up the largest population cohort in the US by size, but hold only 10.5% of total wealth in the US. Baby Boomers hold about half. [0]
Baby Boomers are of retirement age. That means that many of them are drawing off of retirement accounts. Since you can't save for retirement without compensating for inflation, you have to find ways to grow the money. Most people do this through investments backed by stocks and bonds.
Stocks and bonds derive their value from the labor of the people working at the organizations that issued the stocks and bonds. More and more, those people aren't Baby Boomers. They're retired.
So that money is coming from people who are still working: Gens X, Y, and Z.
To increase returns on those stocks and bonds, you have to reduce the amount of money going to the people doing the work so that they can go to shareholders. Those shareholders are often people with retirement accounts.
so $130 for most drivers is actually a bargain in the US too.
I’d have to drive an EV about 35% more miles each year to make it to break even on tax versus our 35 mpg ICE car. It’s no bargain, it’s punishment for driving an EV.
EVs are also much harsher on roads because of their weight.
My Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs less than the most popular vehicle in the US: the F-150. I don’t see those getting special taxes.
How do you pay more taxes on EVs when you factor in gas taxes?
Huh? Simple math?
$MILES_PER_YEAR/$200 (EV tax in WA) vs. $GALLONS_USED * $0.18 in the ICE car. I pay more in taxes to run the EV in a year than I do for equivalent miles in a 35mpg ICE. IOW, if I drove the Scion xB all the time, I’d pay less tax.
The alternative is them checking the odometer each year on the EVs, which would be fairer, but I feel like Americans would complain that’s an invasion of their privacy or something. Or it would upset the rural voters who have disproportionate power in this country.
Modern cars are full of phone home shenanigans, many of them with cameras and ToS that allow them to observe everything and sell all of the data to anyone that can rub two cents together. IIRC laws coming into effect next year mandate even more of it. If Americans care about privacy of their cars they have a funny way of showing it. The odometer read would actually be a great privacy improvement compared to that.
I think they should just tax tires. It sounds easier to administer and if it was a natural tax it would alleviate the main weakness it seemed to have: That's you buy your tires in the state with the lowest tire tax.
I drove 15,000 miles last year and paid 33.3 cents per gallon to my state. That’s around 833.33 gallons of gas so I paid about $278 dollars. $20 more. Assuming 18mpg.
For an EV I’d pay $258.90 extra to register.
My state must be factoring in average miles driven to come up with the $258 number instead of charging per mile driven.
If you want an “honest framing”, raise the federal fuel tax to match inflation, then we’ll talk about EVs. Plain and simple, this is just a move to punish EV use.
my understand was that the federal govt won't be collecting this tax. they are mandating that the states collect it, and if they refuse there is punitive language about withholding federal transportation grants.
It's a kind of crab bucket thing in the sense that people see other people getting slightly ahead on something and instead of looking for their own way to get ahead they reach up and try to pull the other person back down into the bucket.
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