Why every company in Europe uses a saas provider that’s run like a damn lemonade stand is beyond me.

Is Britain more relaxed than the EU around imports?

It used to be the case that a "data engineer" was just a software engineer that was good at data-related things (maybe they were good at Kafka, airflow, DBT, knew why you'd pick postgres for one job and Clickhouse for another, etc).

Then the BI people (who had never written a line of code except maybe some SQL) got jealous, started calling themselves "data engineers", broke everything ("what do you mean 'we need tests???'"), and ruined the title.

I have a different take on this. I have a friend who used to work at a bank as an analyst, and he had a hardcore finance/math background, and was a self-taught R/Python/SQL coder before this whole 'big data' thing became popular a decade ago.

Back then his bank started building a data science/engineering dept, and he jumped ship, and essentially did the same work for 2x the salary. Let me tell you, understanding Black-Scholes and what the data actually means and how to source it, as well as what finance people actually are looking for is a skill that's 1000x as difficult to get as learning R/Python/Pandas etc.

Once upon a time they were called DBAs.

Meanwhile living car-free enables me to splurge on holidays and likely retire several years earlier than if I owned one. And I still drive! Just use hourly rental now and then.

I wish this option were available to all.

I’m “living the dream” in outer NYC, and I own a motorcycle for funzies. Best of both worlds. I do not have the blessing of children, so I expect that would change everything.

Last time I was in Brooklyn I was delighted by how many kids in cargo bikes I saw!

Going car free dwarfs basically all budgeting advice. The amount of money you save is obscene.

I always found it funny (and a bit sad) how most of the finances-savy people on social networks explains how to become miserable by eating rice and chicken every single day to save a few hundred bucks a year, while they never ever consider going car free.

Even for your physical and mental health, not spending a big part of your life stuck in a metal box is so much positive!

"Rice and chicken every single day" is doing it wrong. A miserable existence is more like rice and beans. If you can budget for real meat on a regular basis, then you also have room to plan for considerable flexibility. Assuming you rarely eat out, pay attention to sales (it helps to have an idea of "baseline" prices for things you'd eat regularly) and avoid overpriced packaged food, you get pretty sharply diminishing returns after that.

But yes, that's still small compared to going car free. Or reconsidering your housing situation, for that matter. (For some people, it might also be worth auditing entertainment/hobby/clothing/etc. expenses.)

It's very hard to arrange your life that way, though. And if you have to be stuck in a metal box anyway, there's usually good reasons to prefer that metal box to be your private vehicle rather than a public subway or bus.

In fairness mrmoneymoustache has always decried car dependency.

Rural here, and I gave up commuting to work when I realised that not only was I paying a huge amount of money for fuel and automotive overhead, there was the unpaid time driving, but the finnal insult was the realisation that durring the fall, winter and early spring, I would leave in, the dark, get home in the dark, so go to bed sunday night, and then see my place by the light of day, next saturday morning. Took the property of grid, and work from my shop with my own business , but all the work goes to the city, and I can do multiple site visits and personal chores all in one trip. Now driving 20% max of previous situation, making more money, spending less, and the business write offs are considerable. On topic, I will likely have to do a retro electric conversion to get the work truck/farm I need, there is nothing availible new and the price would be prohibitive even if it was availible.

Glad you found something that works. It's generally said to be a lot harder out in the country, but.

Good for you! Unfortunately, it's not an option for me: I live in a suburb and have three young-ish kids - a good deal of the driving I do is getting them to their activities. Sometimes, that's not easy to coordinate even with two parents and two cars. :(

This is not a judgement of you as you’re pretty much in the default situation. But I think it’s a shame society in general has fallen in to this situation where parents are forced to drive their kids around to a bunch of activities.

Kid activities used to be riding bikes around the local streets or other things they could walk / bus to. And I think it’s putting a massive toll on parents who have to spend all this time driving their kids around.

Amen to that. Literally moved to a new country so our kids could bike around safely.

It’s like a damn Norman Rockwell painting here. Kids biking in groups with fishing rods is one of my favourite sights.

Yeah, I live in a suburb with two young kids, but it’s extremely well designed (Houten, Netherlands). Suburban life can be very good for car-free living if it’s well designed.

>I wish this option were available to all.

In my experience, the main opposition to this are the car owners themselves. Try to start a high speed rail project and they complain about the costs, how it needs to pay for itself, etc etc etc. Ask them if they would use the train, the answer is no with various dumb excuses like "too far to get to station without a car" "train doesn't go anywhere I need to" etc etc etc.

I'm car free and very smug about it because these people are the reason rail transportation isn't better funded. They are the first people to actively block it. So I make sure to wave at them and smile as my train passes them stuck in gridlock. I'm glad the price of cars nearly doubled in the last 5 years. I hope they double again in the next five years. The only way to fix this is to price them out.

There are a lot of other factors derailing (pun intended) such projects. It seems like choosing the route is a big one, as is acquiring the land/right-of-way. And of course, those two issues interact and complicate each other.

Of course car drivers think the train wouldn't work for them; they haven't seen good examples of it. Change takes time, especially when you have a bunch of buildings in the way in very inconvenient places. But yes, overall I still find them short-sighted; it seems like they expect to be able to park on narrow streets lined with small businesses and still be able to use those streets as roads with a high average speed. Then they'll blame everything that isn't a car for taking up space. (Not to mention how awful traffic lights are for the gridlock.)

Incidentally, it's definitely a thing around here (Toronto, Canada) for people to drive to a public transit station (certain subway terminus stations, as well as intercity rail) and proceed (especially downtown) from there. That avoids congestion and probably saves a bunch on parking, too. But that also has its drawbacks.

Man, I envy you, but sadly in the US it's nearly impossible unless NYC/Chicago/SF/Seattle. There is no way for me to take a bus or a train in Miami without first driving to the station. Yea, it's the municipalities, funds reallocation, but that's here to stay.

IIRC Miami is about the most dangerous city in the US to walk in. Stay safe :-\

I think I was lucky to get a taste of car free life in a -somewhat- bike friendly town (San Luis Obispo) in college and after that any place that I had to own a car in felt like crap. My wife and I tried car free life in San Diego even and it was sorta barely doable (we lived in South Park) with car2go and a Vespa.

Tragically, places that you can live without the expense of a car tend to be very expensive.

That's not a coincidence.

Of course (I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but if you make it illegal to build new nice places, people will outbid each other as much as possible to live in one of the few pre-existing nice places)

Of course, the US did one better and destroyed most of their _existing_ nice neighborhoods in addition to making new ones illegal to build.

I just looked for elementary schools in Carbondale, IL and they were at the edge of town on high speed stroads.

This is not the level of discourse expected on HN, and doesn't make your cause look good.

With how horrible American has gotten at building any major infrastructure, high speed rail and cars are not comparable. Because I can reliably get a car in less than 10 years, for less than 10X its supposed complete price, without a long series of political dramas and lawsuits.

And even if America had a world-leading high speed rail network, that could not replace 95% of current car usage.

High speed rail is a distraction. Light rail, bike infra, metros, and infill are what can actually solve car dependency. I don’t own a car but I can still fly places after all (not great for earth, sadly, but still doesn’t require a car)

Nobody ever said you'd ride an ebike for those distances, though. My point was that for someone to live car-free, local transit is much more important than high speed rail. And we don't always need to build _more_ transit, building more homes near the transit we already have would make a big difference! BART stations have a lot of pretty low density single family housing around them. Or even parking! Which could make sense at a terminus for park and ride but not for most stations. Sacramento's light rail similarly has a lot of stations where few people live or work.

For what it's worth, improving biking infra improves the catchment for existing rail too. Vacaville Amtrak is in an annoying location but would be easier to get to with proper separated bike infra, and make commuting to the bay easier.

Also, I've taken the train Seattle to Portland and Boston to NYC several times and both are pretty decent. HSR would help but not massively so I suspect. BOS-NYP is 4 hours.

For SF-LA, HSR would be nice but flying is also fine. Just having the coast starlight run _less horribly slow_ would help.

On the other hand, it always amused me that the best way to go from New York to Portland, Maine (I have family there) was to take the train to Boston south, get out and walk 20 minutes, and then get on the train to Portland. There's a lot of other examples of missing links and just plain deficient planning. Why is it you could only get light rail to LAX as of very recently?

True. But which of those don't suffer from "how horrible America has gotten at building..." problems?

And beyond infill, there's simple density. If everyone's dream is a McMansion with a 2 acre lawn, there are precious few transportation infra options.

For all of America's many problems, if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense. Do you want to make $400k a year, have great investment options, and retire at 40, or make €80-100k a year with extremely heavy taxes?

(Bias disclosure: grew up in norcal, moved to Europe from California in 2013. I like living here but it certainly wasn't great for my career. It's like living in a forgotten backwater. You watch the future being built from abroad.)

It seems the optimal solution is to move to the US for your early earning years, build a nest egg, then leave once you get older and especially once you plan to start a family, for a number of (non-exhaustive) reasons:

* Vacation time in the US is paltry and often downright exploitative.

* Our for-profit healthcare system can easily wipe out any wealth you've accumulated upon a major medical episode, depending on what kind of coverage your insurance provides. Said coverage is usually determined by your employer.

* Education in the US is a joke compared to virtually every other developed nation.

* The homocide rate in the US is higher than 75% of other countries.

* Consumer protections in the US are virtually non-existent.

* Food quality is poor - e.g., virtually all foods have tons of corn syrup and other sugars added.

* The country as a whole is overly car-centric. Your day-to-day in the US virtually requires the use of a car, as most cities are not designed with walking or biking in mind, and only a few have useful public transportation.

Yeah, big part of why I live in the Netherlands. Though having lived in NL and IE I wouldn't say the health care I've had here has been particularly good.

Food - well that varies. Dutch food is... unexciting, to say the least.

> if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense

I entirely agree with this conclusion, especially if you don't plan to raise a family in the US, but still I think the difference isn't as great as what you say.

You have similar investment options in the EU vs US. Tax is high in California. And you probably won't retire at 40 with $400 a year unless you've been very agressive and lucky with your investment.

I can talk about my person situation, big tech in EU, I contemplated relocation in the US (which my company would sponsor). I'd be better off financially in the US after a few years but worse job security and WLB, but it's not night and day. Main issue in EU + UK is lack opportunities compared other US, but there are some.

Retirement is going to be pretty boring for a high performer, so you either have to convert that cash into starting your own business or likely keep working the same job you already have. Entrepreneurship might have a certain appeal, so I wouldn't discount that to those who have that dream, but if you stay in a job then you have to start asking what all that money is going to actually buy you. Both incomes are going to get you to a point where you already won't be able to spend it all.

Realistically, the question isn't meaningfully answered in isolation. One would have to see the bigger picture to put it into context.

would solar + a house battery not help with grid congestion? Seems like it would mean less power transmitted overall.

They do. And you can guess the influx of battery installation companies that are now pushing their services. It's basically went from solar to batteries.

But they are quite big, so you need good place to put them. That doesn't work too well for people in apartment buildings or a lot of terraced houses.

I'm not the commentor but, in my area storage batteries for solar are not permitted in or near homes. They can be in a shed or away from the home. That doesnt help apartments or attached style homes.

Meanwhile the motorways are untolled and public transit fares rise.

That the motorways are untolled is not the only relevant number. There is also the tax in petrol which is quite far from being 'untolled'. Taxing petrol is much better for privacy in general than a toll for the roads.

Well, it means that people who need petrol are basically paying for EV owners to use the roads. I also worry about privacy but ANPR is everywhere is it not?

I remember paying for tolls with cash, but then, I'm ancient...

The damage to roads by heavy vehicles is the fifth power of the weight. So it’s trucks that are subsidizing your driving an EV and that’s perfectly fine.

Well I don’t have a car and pay for everyone! But ultimately we don’t price externalities well

Here (New Zealand) we pay road user charges on distance traveled as recorded by the odometer

Of course you can possibly cheat, but mostly we are law abiding

Some people will cheat any system, but in a functioning society, not many.

I remember thinking "why the hell are cars allowed on Capel street?" the whole time I lived there. Delighted they finally fixed it.

Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.