I suppose visible is subjective. But they are also key component and raw material suppliers for essentially everything high value as well. The west simply does not have the heavy industrial or resource extraction base to account for anything else to be the case. Every time I’ve looked into literally any product China is at the start of the supply chain if lot much further into it.
And yes, I am alleging outright fraud and misrepresentation when it comes to stuff supposedly required to be entirely domestically sourced due to national security. If China froze all exports to the US and its allies, the US manufacturing base would simply cease to exist in rather short order. The China link might be 35 steps down the supply chain and buried 4 countries deep - but it’s almost always there.
This is not what people mean by passive income. Yeah, if you have a few million dollars of capital already you can easily just toss it in the market and collect 4% every year indefinitely. Pretty much one of the only truly passive income streams there is.
The problem is how long and what you have to do to get that 3-5 million number. No one who is drawn to the “passive income” hustle is thinking “work a normal job for 30 years, live under my means, and invest everything I can”. They want to get much more immediate results so they can enjoy life on easy street because grinding it out for so long sounds extremely depressing.
What you describe is a retirement plan, not a passive income lifestyle. Kinda the opposite of escaping.
This is literally the traditional definition of passive income - using your capital to generate more capital.
There is no free lunch, you need to provide something to get $$$. If you are providing labour it is by definition not really passive. That leaves land or capital.
The point is though, that no one pitches it this way. Everyone knows if you have millions of dollars you can generate passive income. That's simply not interesting to anyone.
If you have to grind out making millions over the course of a decade or three, that's simply called having a regular job. That's the status quo.
The passive income folk are all about finding some "hack" where you can be clever or smart or out-hustle the next guy and unlock some secret method to making passive income without capital. That's the entire "industry" in a nutshell. They are not going to folks with $1m in the bank telling them how to make 4% returns on it by tossing it into low cost ETFs. They are going to folks grinding out a living saying they have a shortcut to not needing that capital base to start off with.
tldr; If you already have capital, you don't need to think about passive income. It just happens.
‘everyone knows’ is doing a lot of work here. you still need to spend time, and make a lot of good judgement calls (not easy!) to earn a useful amount of passive income on investments without losing your principal.
being a professional investor (what you’re referring to) is especially terrifying in a low interest rate environment.
Passive income through assets is the basis of our entire society, trying to out earn the base line is the entire economy. Banks wouldnt lend, employers would do something else, if they didnt believe they could earn more doing what they do, instead of owning US treasuries or earning dividends from stocks.
You don't need millions - if things go modestly well and you have a high savings rate, you can get out in 5-10 and draw enough to cover modest means. I do agree that people eying passive income maybe have a different patience / willingness to sacrifice & self-teach threshold but the calculus of grinding for a few years to escape has its adherents.
Yup. This was my approach. Left my business a decade ago with low six figures cash in my pocket. It would have lasted about 18 months at my existing burn rate.
So I moved to a cabin in the woods in a country with a low cost of living, and stuck pretty much all of it in the markets.
Had I not done that, I would have had to go back to work - instead I lived a modest life (€500/mo, max) off the income from putting my apartment on Airbnb, and regained my sanity after a decade of relentless work while my investments did their thing.
Anyway, it’s a decade on, still haven’t done a jot of “work”, and the assets are now worth several million, and are being redeployed to continue to maximise value growth - and we now treat ourselves to spending months travelling at exorbitant budgets, real estate, expensive toys - and had enough stability to decide to have a kid.
So yeah, it’s possible - although had we grown at 6%/yr rather than an average of 80%/yr, it would be a different picture - but I firmly believe there are plenty of other opportunities for rapid capital growth elsewhere in the markets, and yet to come. I’m just some average dude who buys equities on vibes and then sits on them for a decade. If I of all people managed it, others can.
Way to bury the lede. Being able to average 80%/yr returns takes talent and skill and is a type of work. The type of work, by the way, that is rewarded with millions at finance companies in NYC, or even more if you launch your own trading shop.
I’d sooner eat crow than work for a living again - and this ain’t work. I just think while I’m out for a hike, driving, whatever, and decide to make some investments in X, Y, Z next time there’s a decent looking moment to realise and reallocate some profits.
Plus, the kind of investing I do would never fly in a hedge fund - I’d just make the risk desk piss itself with laughter.
Nope. I just think about the probable shape of the future, and who benefits.
I stick with the fields I know and understand - tech, engineering, sciences - don’t go for long bets so much as “if this relatively predictable set of circumstances arises, who will inevitably benefit”.
For example, in 2017 I was keeping abreast with ML research, and realised that within a decade this stuff was going to be huge - so I bought Nvidia and their supply chain and sat on it. Also Tesla as I figured as if I saw them as an adjacent incumbent beneficiary of an AI boom, then others would, too.
I’ve followed that chain of logic through - caught the nuclear renaissance in its entirety, as well as predictable resource squeezes.
So - that’s just one of my trees of bets - but my whole thesis is “predict a future, model out what that looks like, place bets accordingly”.
As a counterpoint, I have a website that generates a few thousand dollars per month and sometimes I improve bits about it but sometimes I also don't touch it (or its emails or anything) for a year.
Not just one word though. Also hard work and grit. Telling someone interested in escaping the rat race (who is not in the top 10% of income earners) to just stick with a job they despise for 15-25 years is just not going to hit home. They know they can grind out a miserable life. That's the status quo they currently live.
Sure there are the scammer/grifter types who just want a super easy mode get rich quick scheme, but a lot of these folks are somewhere in the middle which is where they get taken by the actual scammers. They get told if they just hustle harder than everyone else for a few years they can achieve escape velocity.
Military spending has been trending downwards the entire time I’ve been alive. All that’s happened is increased spending elsewhere and even more debt. With very little apparent improvement to those social services spending outcomes. Usually the the opposite.
I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.
I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.
TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.
Maybe we should approach this from the opposite angle. If it isn't military spending, what do you think the differentiator is between the US and those "social democracies" that OP mentioned? Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
> Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.
It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.
Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the average citizen for so long is up for debate.
Your friend was heavily using a cheap tool at a job site. After the first one broke, the course of action is to go to home depot and buy the prosumer Milwaukee or Dewalt and return the harbor freight as time allows.
The point is you only need the expensive stuff rarely. You don’t triple down on cheap crap you actually use and abuse.
I’ve yet to see anyone lose money (including accounting for time) with this strategy. Going for stuff that costs 4-12x more right off the bat - unless for professional “mission critical” work - is going to average out to be a poor use of money for the vast majority of tool buyers.
There is of course an absolute floor here. No name brand tools on Amazon are going to perhaps be zero use, but they seem rather trivial to spot to me most of the time. Buying that Gearwrench socket set vs the Snap-on is almost always going to be a win for 99% of people unless you are a professional mechanic that relies on 100% uptime to make a living.
The best rule of thumb for tools, at least if you have a decent collection of them for diverse but hobby/homeowner level projects is buy the cheapest to do the immediate job and then replace it with an expensive one if it breaks or you use it often and the better version improves efficiency or quality of life.
Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty.
This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once.
My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
I find it is better to find the middle ground. There are often some "mid grade tools" that are plenty good for me and high quality. And I don't have the worry about something breaking or failing to perform.
I always figure if I was hiring a pro to do a task they would have good tools, so the first time I can get the good tool and be even money - the second time I have the tool and so I'm saving. (I also rent some tools, but that is for tasks that need an expensive tool I rarely use)
Buying the cheapest one initially also often teaches me what attributes I should value when I buy the more expensive version. Will I actually use this feature or that feature, or what ergonomic design choice works better for me?
Electricians. Top skilled folks for the most part who can do industrial level conduit work and the type who can operate switching gear and control systems. There is enough of this ongoing work for these huge facilities to effectively employ a half dozen full time contractors or more. One of the facilities I work the most in has electrical contractors on-site every single day, with at least a few trucks in the parking lot. These are local union guys. Always something breaking, needing maintenance, or a new area of the facility being refreshed. The facility is over a decade old and the work has never slowed down.
Plumbers. Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work. And it's also typically some of the highest skilled plumbing needed outside of refinery and other manufacturing plant work. When you have 50 giant chillers running 24x7 at least one is undergoing some form of maintenance at any given time.
Probably overlapping with the above, but HVAC technicians. Again, the scale of these facilities means constant work being available as you are operating at miniature city sized installations.
Security guards of course. Not really material though. I've noticed more armed guards than before, with at least two on duty 24x7. As these places get more controversial, I imagine this sort of staffing will increase.
On-site (IT) technicians. For facilities these sizes, you will be staffing it 24x7 and have a large enough crew to get basic refresh projects done. Hard to really estimate this, but in the dozens of full time labor for these giant projects. Think folks who can pull cable, troubleshoot basic hardware, swap drives/bad RAM sticks, etc. For the larger refresh projects contractors typically get flown in during a surge so on-site staffing is relatively minimal, but very few facilities are operating "lights out".
Then you have facility management - highly skilled positions that know how to operate all the electric/mechanical and cooling equipment during emergencies. Every facility I've worked in is staffed by a crew of around half a dozen of these folks or so, with the top tier subject matter experts being flown in during critical emergencies. These are the guys generally coordinating all the contract labor above.
Probably a couple mid-tier network engineers and higher skilled sysadmin types as well depending on who is operating it. Everyone loves to pretend these are highly automated and copy/paste facilities hyperscalers are just perfect at executing - but there is a lot of "dirty" hands-on work to be done since that stuff is not nearly as perfect as advertised and often requires hands-on problem solving and on the spot hacks to get stuff going. As anywhere, how the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than the marketing.
Once you get out of the highly competent hyperscalers, the above numbers go way up. Enterprise datacenter operators are going to need far more on-site labor due to simply not being great at this sort of work. The stories I hear of some current builds are rather humorous in how many people it's taking to get stuff working - basically solving what should be automated via manual processes.
It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.
> It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.
For the size and resources they are using you can build a lot of other things here that will employ significantly North of 100 (this is too many but lets keep it for the sake of argument) employees with significantly North benefit to the population than F'ing data centers.
I mean yes, but that would require demand right? The demand is currently for building data centers, should you just wait around for better things to be in demand? It’s definitely a strategy, but it doesn’t seem like the obviously necessary strategy
If someone wants to build a DC out in the middle of nowhere in a non-populated areas of whatever state, be my guest, I won't complain. I was specifically talking about where I live ( https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/virginia/ ), few of the top-10 most affluent counties in USA are here but also the most DCs in the world are here. There is a huge demand here for non-Data Centers that would bring a lot more to the economy than buildings guarded and surrounded by fences that you have to drive next to every day
This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.
If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.
There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.
The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.
> There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.
> This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...
> gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible
Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...
> Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.
And you only need stupid designs like tiny natural gas turbines on-site because NIMBY and lack of investment for a couple generations on the power infrastructure side. I find it difficult to be very sympathetic to our society on this issue, since I've been following it far before AI Datacenters became the thing to rage about. It was coming for us either way.
> There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...
I have lived near ones. Not datacenter alley scale, but nowhere in the world is at that level where you live. I had zero issues with them, and no one visiting even knew they existed. I've certainly seen horrible designs that should not have been permitted or built where they are, but a 500k sqft facility in the middle of 50 acres is just... not an issue to live near.
> Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...
Sure. Building a datacenter in the middle of a residential area is a bit silly. But we're not talking about that here. At some point you need industry to actually build things, and as industry goes this is about as light and least impactful to the local environment as it gets.
I guess their point is that of all possible industrial usecases, data centers are the least obnoxious one. I live in one of the countries that actually manufactures things, unlike the US, and I find it hard to argue with that. Any noise pollution caused by data centers is far far less than most industrial setups. It's the same with every other resource, water, electricity, effect on local shared infrastructure like roads and commerce, etc,. Other industries are an order of magnitude worse.
Given that you _have_ to have some industrial setup unless you want to import everything (tokens, in this case), datacenters are far and away the best choice.
I'll add a qualifier to the above, modifying it to say that of all industrial setups generating atleast X dollars of economic value, datacenters are far and away the best in terms of impact on nbhd.
The jobs argument also falls apart, when you consider that it's essentially 100 jobs in return for just an office building worth of space. If you want a thousand job plant just build that as well next town over, it will take way way more space and other resources though. The reason that didnt happen even before this datacenter boom is because most manufacturing setups are fairly infeasible in rich countries like the US. I can't imagine the response to a textile plant or a steel plant if this is the response to datacenters.
I agree however, that if you colocate a gigantic power plant, then you get the worst of both worlds. Fewer jobs and the hindrance of a big power plant near residential areas. Grid expansion being slow in developed areas like most of the US is not surprising though.
But this is pretty much the best case scenario. Tolerating the power plant until the grid expands is the way to go I suppose.
That's only if you co-locate a power plant near it. With proper setbacks and decent design, there is very little to no noise pollution for the vast majority of these facilities.
Most folks near them do not even know they exist. Plus you typically put them in the middle of a field with berms around them, or in a light industrial park. Not across the street from homes.
Trucking traffic creates far more noise pollution. HVAC fans spinning at optimal speed simply are not a problem for the vast majority of facilities.
Generators running during a power outage? Sure. But those typically are relatively rare events. Testing each month for an hour is just not a material complaint to me.
Sounds good to me. As far as industrial neighbors go it doesn't get any better than a glorified warehouse. The scale of these facilities means keeping a few local contractors in the trades in business indefinitely - electricians, plumbers, etc. Not ideal in terms of number of jobs gained, but those jobs tend to be high quality.
Power costs are a concern, but it doesn't matter if it's across the street from me or 100 miles away on the same PJM interconnect. In the end it likely would strengthen the local grid where I live.
Water usage is just overblown social media rage bait for the most part in most locations at least. So long as it's not a stupid ridiculous design go for it.
The only thing I'd rage against are tax credits. But I'd be strongly against those no matter the project going in. The only public money spent should be on adding traffic lights or improving road access if needed, and I'd want to see that being justified.
This assumes an actual datacenter. Not one with a co-located power plant. These are different things.
Many folks lived near datacenters and had utterly no clue or care until they were told to be mad about it. I'd point them out to visitors or when traveling to family and they'd never have known the difference otherwise. It's effectively living next to an office park.
> Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.
I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, rent continues to creep up. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.
You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs or whatever totally irrelevant culture war topic of the day. It's societal bike shedding.
I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens. There is zero consideration for the amount of sheer effort, will, and constant vigilance it took to build and maintain such a state of being.
If you are going to be drinking 6 cans of soda a day, then diet soda is going to be better for you based on all available evidence today. By a large margin.
Drinking zero cans of soda is quite obviously better than either of those options.
Those who tend to indulge in large amounts of these substances typically have other unhealthy eating (and other) habits so good luck figuring out causation here.
I lost 100lbs coming from close to morbid obesity. Diet soda is the single vice I refuse to give up for mental health reasons. Of all the vices (eating, drinking, substances, etc.) I had before, this seems like the least concerning. Some people don't need that mental blowoff valve, but if I'm going to maintain the rest of my healthy habits I've found I require such a thing.
It is easy to get off soda once you get off it already and drink water. As when you do eventually get back to it and go "Maybe I'll have a coke" what you will find will be severely disappointing. Mouthfeel is terrible. Every sip you try and get that taste in your imagination of what you think is coke but you end up just tasting fructose concoction and carbonation. Makes you feel dehydrated after, like you have to chug a pint of water just to make your saliva not so viscous. The only sugary drink I tolerate now is lemonade I make myself. And I'm drinking it partially for carb load.
So really, get off the soda. It isn't even a great mental reward. Have a piece of chocolate instead. There are gut health benefits with chocolate.
I was off it for 6mo or so while I lost the weight. It wasn’t especially hard to stop, but water is in no way a replacement for it in any way.
It’s the thing I prefer. Don’t like chocolate or really other sweet things in general. Even full sugar soda is far too sugary for me, outside of some niche drinks out of Europe.
The available scientific evidence on fake sugars tends to skew towards “fairly safe, but not entirely so” until you get into observational studies as mentioned in the article. The few everyone loves to continually cite that show otherwise are using mouse or rat models with some absurd 10x safe daily ingestion rates to show what amounts to rather mild impacts.
There really is nothing like an ice cold Diet Coke for me after working hard in the back yard in the summer heat. Or something to sip on during horrible corporate meetings.
I’ve also wore a glucose monitor for fun, and it in no way impacts blood sugar levels - one of the leading bro science hot takes. I definitely can see how it can be involved in habits though and trigger mental signals to overindulge in other substances during and after consumption. Having one certainly begets the impulse to have another I need to watch out for.
I did pick up a (black) coffee habit to reduce consumption a bit, but I’m not convinced that’s any healthier.
If you think an ice cold diet coke is nice, wait till you try ice cold water after working hard. Ambrosia. Clean on the teeth feeling too. Happy chemicals firing off in your head. Besides, what you really need are carbs at this point for recovery. This is why people riding bikes 100 miles are eating straight up honey packets. Or filling a spare water bottle with sugar water, like actual home mix table sugar and water. Carbs are your actual fuel for that sort of thing. But again you have to match the carb load to the effort or risk calories in/out imbalance and weight gain. No issue for cyclists of course on that front.
Dealing with boredom with a shot of anything probably isn't a healthy coping mechanism if we are being honest. Better to train to have the resolve to steel over this sort of thing than to form some Pavlovian dependency.
And yes, I am alleging outright fraud and misrepresentation when it comes to stuff supposedly required to be entirely domestically sourced due to national security. If China froze all exports to the US and its allies, the US manufacturing base would simply cease to exist in rather short order. The China link might be 35 steps down the supply chain and buried 4 countries deep - but it’s almost always there.
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