Honestly, nothing much really comes to mind as a special precaution that I would think of. Don’t go down alleys alone, don’t follow strangers that try to get you to go places. Don’t get drunk alone in unfamiliar areas that aren’t super populated. Don’t make flashy displays of wealth.

No real impact on daily life. I’ve gotten lost in bad parts of Detroit before and that was unideal, but that was because there’s still a lot of ability for people to know you don’t live there just based on appearance.

So, my intent is not to turn this into the misery Olympics or anything, so I’m just going to clarify a few points and say that the main thrust of my message was the end: if people are telling you what they can and can’t afford in a country you’re less familiar with, it’s probably better to assume they know their own economy better than you do, rather than deciding a nation of hundreds of millions of people are financially over cautious.

The $1000 figure is for all of the US, regardless of if it’s high income low cost of living or anything else, and refers to money that can be deposited in savings at the end of the month.
For example, the UK has this figure at roughly $1100 USD.

The city I live in has remarkably close to twice the expenses as yours. In the US a car isn’t optional unless you live in the biggest if cities though. It would take four hours for me to walk to my doctor’s office, and longer by bus, but there’s only four bus visits per day at the office. A fair bit of the roadway lacks sidewalks. Either way a doctor’s visit means taking a day off work if you don’t have a car.

The 25% rate isn’t poverty rate, it’s more a measure of financial safety margin. You can be well above the poverty line and still have zero net income, it just means you can’t tolerate changes in income or expenses without things becoming extremely problematic. Our poverty level is based on an idealized measure of food costs nationwide and does a poor job measuring things. It was originally put together before we had great knowledge of what contributed to poverty, and it’s been a political tool used as a lever to justify cutting assistance programs for a long time, so changing it has been difficult.

I think you got my description backwards. There’s an amount I pay no matter what, and a point after which I pay nothing (with caveats). So the most I pay is that $11k number, unless the insurance company decides a procedure was unnecessary or the provider was unsupported (if you end up in the hospital you might not be able to choose your doctors, and some of them might not be covered by your insurance, which you’ll find out later. Aforementioned baby delivery cost $650,000 . I paid $6,500. Then I got billed for another $12,000 and change because of stuff like the insurance company deciding some tests were unnecessary and not working with some of the nurses.). My insurance situation is pretty good though, since a lot of people have significantly less at a higher cost.

it sounds like you’re probably better off with any odd job in Europe if you put it that way

That is in many ways true. America has a higher cap on income but Europe generally has a better safety net. I’m fortunate to have ended up in a low cost of living area with a high salary job, so I’m currently better off where I am, but as children and myself get older, a social safety net that means my retirement isn’t at the whims of the stock market and an education system that won’t potentially put my children in debt for life has an increasingly large appeal.

San Diego is a very high cost of living area. $100,000 would be a modest income there that would get you a minimal comfortable life. Like, $3,000 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment.
San Diego is also one of the safest cities in the US. Fun fact: while confirming that I found out I live in one of the more dangerous cities in the country. So that’s fun.
So yeah, San Diego is gonna give you more wealthy people with higher costs of living and very low crime. Factor that in to your assessments.

Housing economics are very disparate between countries. You can’t directly compare them easily. A two story house is basic construction here, they tend to avoid building anything smaller because it’s not significantly cheaper to build or sell. Our houses are built with different objectives so they tend to be cheaper to make taller, and it’s just expected that it’ll get replaced in 50 or 60 years.
The person you talked to in San Diego was likely renting a house, which is often cheaper than an apartment. That fits with the price you mentioned.

understand this as over half Americans make less than 1400€ a month. I assume you were exaggerating a bit

After expenses and taxes the average American household brings in under $1000 dollars a month. It varies by region since cost of living and wages vary significantly. 25% of Americans have no net income after expenses, and 1/3 have a net worth of $0 or less. In euros that’s less than €800 a month.

Essential goods usually refers to medical expenses, but it’s also used to refer to food, rent and utilities. Even if you’re employed and have insurance medical costs can be high.
I’m not in a bad situation at all, I’m actually in a very good one, and I pay about $400 a month for insurance and have a yearly cap of $6500 in costs, not counting medicine or the actual cost of insurance (so I’ll pay at least $4800, and at most $11,300+the cost of medicine+the cost of anything the insurance company thinks I didn’t need after the fact. ). I’ve hit the max for the past two years, once because baby and again because baby got a nasty cough and they spent a little being observed for safety.

My example was not homeless people. That’s what happens if you become elderly and have financial difficulties earlier in life here. A lot of Americans simply can’t afford to stop working, ever. I don’t remember a time I haven’t seen at least a person who should definitely be retired doing menial labor, and wheelchair and oxygen is common enough that it’s not really not worthy.

Besides, I know many people doing odd jobs and working a couple days a week. Working this way allows them to safely rent a house, to have food and extra money for diversion as well as saving up for times in which there may be no available jobs. Most of them can probably go on one year without working with the minimal savings they have.

That is not how it is in America. Housing, food and recreation on a part time job is actually a laughable fantasy, and that’s before you add “having savings”.

America’s economic disparity and lack of social safety net makes risk taking exceptionally dangerous.

You seem like a worldly and well traveled person. Use that experience to understand that there’s a rational reason Americans tend to be risk adverse in this regard. We either actually can’t afford it, or we can’t afford it without a shocking risk.

Most of the country is not New York, and transportation is more expensive. Basing travel costs off of the cost at a major transit hub isn’t representative.

France requires you to file your visa applications before travel. If you show up on a travel visa and then apply for long term residency they’ll reject it because you didn’t follow the rules.
A residency visa requires €1400 a month in income, so good luck getting residency with €1000 cash. Particularly when a significant portion of Americans don’t have that to begin with.

No one said you had to be rich to leave America and move to France, just that it’s not available to most Americans.

I don’t see how losing one year of income could noticeably ruin your life

Says the person who is obviously not American.
https://www.norc.org/research/library/most-working-americans-would-face-economic-hardship-if-they-miss.html Remember that we don’t have a social safety system here like most countries do. Being unemployed means you don’t get medical treatment , and even if you’re employed the costs can be devastating in their own right. You can end up homeless, where housing assistance can have a wait list of more than a year, if it even exists. Same for food assistance. The only medical care you’re entitled to is that the ER must do the minimum necessary to stabilize a life threatening condition.
That’s what’s looming over Americans when we weigh taking financial risks. Loosing a month of income can create an unrecoverable financial burden.

That’s what I mean when I say most Americans can’t afford to fail at something like that. They may be able to afford to do it, and it might work out, but if it doesn’t the consequences are crippling.

How often do you see an elderly person in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank doing menial labor at a supermarket or hardware store?

I think you’re conflating the wealth of the nation and the wealth of individuals. Saying that if you really want to go to France it’s possible, you just need to sell or abandon your belongings, walk away from your debt, abandon your family and travel by steerage on a cargo ship to get to France and live illegally because you don’t qualify for any type of long term residency and you also can no longer return home because you’ll be homeless and left to die in the street is… Unrealistic.
A very significant number of Americans simply do not have the resources to fail at something like that.

Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.

It’s entirely dependent on which parts of the government you’re dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
In cases where it’s political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be… Fine.

It’s the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.

For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to “traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops” the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.

It’s why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current “let’s fire everyone and try to destroy the country” moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It’s the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.

As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.

Yup, that’s a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.

But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.

Not necessarily saying our system is wrong, just that the systems being so different can make people confused. :)

The alternatives involve pushing some of the financial costs of driving onto people who create less of these costs

I mean, our current model does that. All insurance does. You pool costs with the expectation that most people won’t need as much as they put in.
A significant amount of our costs are based on statistical, not individual, risks. A 23 year old male is going to be charged more for car insurance regardless of their driving record.

A better system might just be universal car insurance via vehicle registration. Bigger pool, easier to accommodate people who can’t afford adequate coverage, and it better ensures everyone’s cost is covered.
It’s also nice to not have a law forcing people to buy a product from a private company.

I can’t fault people for being confused or frustrated when we also have insurance that’s intended to work as the primary means of payment.

Having our crap tastic excuse for a medical payment system be based in insurance, and then having another mandatory insurance system that’s somehow less helpful is reasonably frustrating.

We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.

Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.

My standard for an orm is that if it’s doing something wrong or I need to do something special that it’s trivial to move it aside and either use plain SQL or it’s SQL generator myself.

In production code, plain SQL strings are a concern for me since they’re subject to the whole array of human errors and vulnerabilities.

Something like stmt = select(users).where(users.c.name == 'somename') is basically as flexible as the string, but it’s not going to forget a quote or neglect to use SQL escaping or parametrize the query.

And sometimes you just need it to get out of the way because your query is reaaaaaal weird, although at that point a view you wrap with the orm might be better.

If you’ve done things right though, most of the time you’ll be doing simple primary key lookups and joins with a few filters at most.

Oh, they totally will. It’ll be another website boom. A lot of the big web presences will be damaged by the bust and hosting costs will fall through the floor. Less barrier to entry for making your little website and some portion of those will become problematicly large due to cheap cost driving bad design and we’ll go through the third or fourth round of this.

Or, for deepest irony, some of the most optimally located datacenters could be converted into steel mills and industrial bakeries.

Also a good point!

Even the best company has an intrinsic unequal power dynamic with their workers, and competing interests.
That doesn’t mean that a company that has a policy of trying to be fair should be treated with the same attitude as one that doesn’t, it just means that their employees still would benefit from a union, and hopefully the union just has an easier time, since negotiations as equals are easier with a willing company.

Every anti-capitalist sentiment can be true of every company, while we still acknowledge that the ire doesn’t need to be directed uniformly.