Notices by Inga is looking for a job (ingalovinde@embracing.space)

@tillshadeisgone @sapphicseagoat
But I don't dispute the homeownership rate! I only dispute the conclusions drawn from that rate.

> but I'm sorry I just don't find it very convincing to say that housing can still be secretly awful when very nearly 90% of people own a home. That's stretching credulity.

As I mentioned already, I spent most of my life, until recent few years, in Russia. Technically, homeownership rate there is over 90% (92.6% according to some statistics). The housing situation is still (very openly, not secretly) awful for people of our generation.
You're probably approaching this from the US perspective, where people become homeowners in a certain way, and this brings certain implications. It would be incorrect to translate this logic to Russia (or, from what I have heard, China).

The fact that someone technically owns 1/10th of the small apartment their parents or grandparents live in (because they too lived there in early 90s when it was "privatised"), in a small town with no jobs, doesn't mean anything (except that even if their parents are unwilling, they can still go back to that small town and force their way into the apartment and secure themselves a bed there and call the cops in case of kicking out). But this is a very popular scenario in Russia! This is exactly the way how most people aged 25-50 came to be "homeowners" in Russia.
Half of the people living in Moscow are renting (and paying half of their salary on rent); most of them are technically homeowners of _something_ (of a small share in their parents' apartment hundreds or thousands of kilometers away); most of them will also never be able to buy their own housing in the city they live in, and will have to pay half of their salary on rent for the foreseeable future. Maybe that's "stretching credulity", but that's just the way how things are.

I'm not saying that the situation or history of homeownership is completely the same in China (I'm not an expert on China), I'm just saying that it would be incorrect to make any such assumptions about housing from the percentage of homeowners when it comes to countries that didn't have the same economic system as US or Europe did for the last 100 years. (And China in that regard is much closer to Russia than it is to US or Europe.)

> One video said they live in Weihan and $200 a month in rent will get you very comfortable

You mean Weihai? The median salary there is apparently a bit under $600/month.
It's a small city by Chinese standards, and they don't have any form of rapid public transit apparently. Of course in any more or less dense city the situation is still going to be way better than it is in US suburbs.
Weihai is also very... diverse. As in, what's technically considered to be Weihai is a huge area, large parts of it very rural. So I'd expect that the prices vary very significantly too, "$200 a month in rent" doesn't say much unless you know where exactly in this territory it is.

(I can also mention that the going rate for decent single-bedroom apartments in the urbanized outskirts of my home city (population over a million people, in an area of less than a thousand of square kilometers / around 200-300sq.mi.) is also around $200/month; while typical going rate for single-room apartments within 3km of the central city square is around $400.
Doesn't mean that people's lives are good there; they are not, I have enough first-hand and second-hand knowledge of this. What matters is not the absolute cost of rent, but cost of rent relative to income. $200 for rent in my home city absolutely is not the same and does not have the same implications as $200 for rent in, say, Chicago or Seattle would be; it would just be incorrect to compare them this way! It is similarly incorrect to translate Weihai rental prices to USA without accounting for the huge difference in incomes.)

> I will say a LOT of people in China live in cities other than Shanghai

Yeah I only mentioned Shanghai because it is one of the cities where $3k/month salary (from the first video you mentioned) is at least realistic for some people of the upper middle class.

> however I just looked today to see more Shanghai specific prices and they are saying anywhere from $300 a month to $1000 a month for rent

I wonder where did you look? Because I looked too (but maybe my sources are bad, I looked at discussions on reddit (for example there is this thread from 3 years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/shanghai/comments/r5pk43/is_it_possible_to_live_in_shanghai_with_a_bit/ )), and it seems that $300 (2200 CNY) will only get one a small delapidated apartment in a village way outside of Shanghai proper, like 1.5 hours away from it by public transit; while $1k might get you a decent one-bedroom apartment around outer ring road. (And that's with median salary, as reported by the government-owned media, being $1500 in Shanghai.)
This corroborates what I heard directly from local people living in (other) major cities in China years ago.

And housing affordability crisis in Shanghai is a very well-known problem, I've seen the government mentioning it many times, they're building a lot of subsidized housing in Shanghai to address it (but still not nearly enough, not even making a dent), and rent that housing to workers for nominal pay (but those apartments that are rented for nominal pay, are rented via participating employers... so basically for the worker this means that employer provides them with the cheap rental housing on top of the salary. If you're lucky to work for such an employer.)

@tillshadeisgone @Stoori ah I see, I misunderstood that is a single video!

And I'm not saying that things are better in Berlin than they are in China, I didn't even compare the goodness of things between them! Just that the higher utility prices don't mean one is being screwed, but can be a logical consequence of generally higher wage level. And that some of the things your post implied are good in China because it's good, are just a norm basically everywhere outside of USA.

I'm not saying these commenters are lying. That said, I heard that these two-hour breaks are a common occurence with 996 system ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system ), maybe that's where these commenters are coming from. That is, information on lunch breaks by itself doesn't say much out of context, and the context is when their work starts and when does it end.

And I'm not minimizing the experiences of these people, I disagree with the conclusions your post seems to draw from these experiences, and provide context (e.g. about that $3k/month salary).

Is life in China much better than what the propaganda in USA is saying? Probably! (I don't really know what the propaganda is saying, but I can guess)
Do they have it "good", compared to Europe? Better in some aspects, worse in others, so the overall comparison depends on which aspects does one consider to be more important and which ones to be less important.
Is it all unicorns and rainbows and huge salaries and homeownership and short working hours? Absolutely not!

@tillshadeisgone @sapphicseagoat I don't know much about where does this rate come from.
But I'm originally from ex-Soviet Russia (you mentioned that I'm European in your previous reply, but I lived all my life there, only having moved to Germany a few years ago), which has similar homeownership rate; as in "90% of people own _a_ housing", not "90% of people own the housing they live in".
Technically, I was a homeowner since birth, and almost everybody I knew were too. That's just because in USSR, everybody in the cities were "renting" from the government, and in early 90s, this rent was converted into homeownership for all tenants. Like, a large family lives in a tiny single room apartment in a delapidated building in a small town? Everybody, even the toddlers, own a tiny piece of it now! Maybe it was good in 90s; but it doesn't help much now in 2020s when there is no work in this town and the real estate in this town is almost worthless, and the real estate in the cities is super expensive. But on paper everybody is a homeowner, yes.
I'm not saying that the situation is the same in China, just that high rate of homeownership by itself doesn't have the same meaning in countries like Russia or China as it would in the US. (And a while ago I've seen many similar posts from the people on the West saying how regular people have good lives in Russia, while regular people in Russia absolutely Did Not; and this, I know first-hand.)

And apparently when one measures homeownership rates in cities like Shanghai, the results are entirely different, with a huge generational gap: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03793-w
The exorbitant prices of housing in major cities in China are a very well known problem (and acknowledged by the government afaik), exorbitant to the degree when for a regular worker who doesn't own a housing they can sell or mortgage and rent out already, buying a housing is literally impossible.
I'm sure that there are many videos from people who are renting in cities like Shanghai, telling how much is the rent :)

@tillshadeisgone @Stoori I wonder what is his job? Some software engineers in CA also make lot of money and also (used to?) have long lunch breaks and play games, but that's absolutely not the day to day life in USA.
There are many different reports about salaries in China, with more or less similar data. For example this one, published at newspaper owned by the Chinese government (which has no reason to make numbers appear lower than they actually are): https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/595051

> Shenzhen has the third-highest average monthly salary among Chinese mainland cities, at 12,400 yuan. The median salary in Shenzhen is 10,000 yuan.
> Shanghai continues to lead, with an average salary of 13,544 yuan and a median of 11,000 yuan. Beijing ranks second, with an average of 13,119 yuan and a median of 10,500 yuan.

That's $1850 average / $1500 median in Shanghai, $1800 / $1450 in Beijing, $1700 / $1350 in Shenzhen, which are the three richest cities in China (and there is also a huge gap between incomes in urban and rural China afaik). Even by the standards of these three richest cities of urban China, $3000 is _a lot_. (And, incidentally, these days even $3000 won't give you any chance to own your own home in one of these richest cities, with apartment prices on the order of $10k/sq.m.)
(For comparison, median salary in Chengdu seems to be around 6500 yuan, or under $900/month.)
This person is nowhere near typical! One could have as well watched an youtube video from a high-ranking engineer at Google, describing how well they live and how they own a huge mansion and how they only spend a third of their income and how their lunch break is great and how they have a game room in the office, and then draw conclusions about day to day life in USA from that :)

And regarding utilities... depending on the apartment size, $120 would not be unheard of in western EU as well (let alone eastern countries); but it makes total sense that with lower salaries, it would be cheaper in China. For example, our building with ~400 apartments in Berlin has a 24-hour "concierge" service, so utility bills include 40 euro/month for it as a separate line, for every apartment. Which makes total sense because you need to pay salaries and taxes to multiple people, including larger pay for work at night or on the weekend. This is just one most obvious example, but a half of our utility bills is basically paying people to do a thing, so it's basically tied to salaries. That the bills in China are lower doesn't mean that we're getting screwed in Berlin, just that workers (who get paid off these bills) are paid more in Germany.

And long paid parental leave and free schools are more or less the norm in most of the world, USA is a notable exception here.

@sapphicseagoat @tillshadeisgone ...assuming that you pay off your home. Which seems to be almost impossible for our generation in China just like (or even worse than how) it is almost impossible for our generation in USA or in EU (unless you already own some housing or have a huge downpayment), with prices per square meter (in cities in China) being comparable to median annual salary (like, these days median net salary would get you maybe a couple of square meters if you're in Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen, or maybe five square meters if you're in Berlin).

The days when one could just buy housing from zero just from their honest bluecollar worker salary were nice, but they're long past in USA, long past in EU, and long past in China too.

@lanodan @chjara @dysfun Can Ada? Only if she enthusiastically consents

@raphaelmorgan @Mab_813 "stable democracy" is when nobody declares the martial law (because they don't have to, they already have all the power) or sends the tanks to the streets (they don't have to because nobody is on the streets) or impeaches the president unanimously (because the president's own party will always support the president) 🙃

I'm looking for a software engineering job.
I'm best described as a "Staff Software Engineer", but I'm very much willing to consider lower-level positions (as long as they pay around the average software engineer salary for Berlin; I don't really need mountains of gold), it's not really about the title. Even if you hire me into a middle-level role, a few months later you'll likely find that I'm doing what you'd expect from a Staff engineer.

Covid is not over, so I only consider mostly remote work for now (occasional (monthly) visits to the office within 10 hours one-way from Berlin, or rare (quarterly) visits within 24 hours one-way from Berlin are fine, "hybrid" roles requiring weekly office presence even in Berlin are not).

My area of work is working long-term on large-scale products mapping real world to software, with complex business requirements, expectations of maintainability etc.
If you are building for example a payment system of the future or CRM for healthcare companies, I'm the right person; if you are building Linux kernel drivers, I'm not (it would be an interesting challenge for me, but you are looking for another kind of person). If you are a product company, I'm the right person; if you are software house where people jump projects and clients multiple times a year, I'm not.

My career in professional software engineering started 20 years ago, it includes many years of working as a Systems Architect and Tech Lead and Team Lead (but I get my hands dirty with code anyway).
I spent most of my time writing code, but my work, what I'm good at, typically also involves interacting with product owner to identify the problems we are trying to solve (and to come up with business requirements), coming up with technical / architectural design for these requirements, improving the quality of the codebase (I pay a lot of attention to quality and maintainability), doing large refactorings, mentoring other developers, helping them to improve quality of their work, reducing friction of their work by addressing their developer experience pains (including CI/CD stuff); and generally taking a lot of responsibility.
My strong side is understanding the entire system and identifying ideal clear boundaries between components and then bringing these boundaries to life. I have stellar feedback from coworkers at basically all the previous workplaces.

I'm most proficient in webdev with Node.js / TypeScript / React (can work on backend and on frontend, prefer full-stack roles with focus on backend, but I'm pretty flexible on that). To the point that when coworkers have any questions about or any problems with TypeScript or React, I'm the one they approach. To the point that when a company wants to migrate their legacy JS app to typescript but doesn't think this is really possible or manageable because of the scope, I can deliver the impossible all by my own, within much shorter timeframe than they expect, and do it while preserving perfect backwards compatibility but also actually leveraging the benefits of TS (using strictest TS mode with strictest linting).
Additionally, I was proficient with C#/.NET/ASP.NET, but my skills in that area are a bit outdated. I'm open to working with and learning other stacks as well (especially interested in stuff like Zig, Rust, Scheme / Lisp, Elixir, F# etc; way less interested in stuff like PHP, Python or Ruby), but of course in this case I won't be able to make architectural or code quality decisions for new platforms, not at first at least.

I'm open to pretty much all reasonable industries (exceptions are working on generative AI bullshit, cryptocurrencies bullshit, fossil fuels, gambling, cops... you get the idea). But also, as an added bonus, I have a lot of experience in fintechs.

I can start pretty much immediately; and my CV is way better than you expect.
I also tend to hyperfocus on development and to care a lot, so you'll get way better and comprehensive results than you expect.

Anybody looking for someone like me to add to their team (in EU / Germany, as a full time employee)?

CV upon request, some examples of my work on personal projects are at https://oomza.cutegay.software/inga-lovinde

#FediHire #GetFediHired

@lynnesbian you're joking but this is literally the premise of "Permutation City" that it is enough to know that a program (e.g. a program running the virtual world) exists; actually executing it on an actual hardware is unnecessary.

@lanodan @domi @fluoriteByte @lnl if I was a malware, I would also start seeding myself. Therefore, it makes sense that the torrents with the highest seeders count are infected with malware :rollsafe:

@chjara just use several different linuces on top of each other

@schratze U-Haul lesbians: "this is the same picture"

@lanodan @domi @elly can highly recommend using larger handtruck for less pain, we even transported a couch from kleinanzeigen with it (cw for potential eye contact)

@lanodan @s0 who called it public transit to Venus and not pubic transit

@clarity @lazerwalker would be even better to see the plastic packaging (including plastic bottles) to be regulated out of existence... like, my tomatoes absolutely don't have to be in this plastic box, and mineral water would be just as fine in a can.
In Germany it's words because the deposit for glass bottles (reusable many times, but very heavy and therefore with large transport footprint) is just 8c, the deposit for cans (almost infinitely recyclable and very lightweight) is 25c, and the deposit for plastic bottles (almost non-recyclable, so the deposit basically only means that they end up in one heap rather than spread all over the city) is the same 25c. A scheme that I suspect was devised by plastic manufacturers to evade responsibility.

@schratze I too only have weak personal pronouns

@lanodan @siina well where do you think shit from sewage plants goes? :blobcatgiggle:

@icedquinn @siina there is a saying in Russian (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Ordinary_Miracle_(1978_film) ), "I chased you [through blizzard] for three days to tell you how I don't care about you"

Just came across a photo of a newborn Giruno on a stroller! :blobcataww:
Makes you smile a little.

@lnl it's easy, gray is the name of color between black and white, while grey is the name of colour between black and white