2022년 5월 14일 토요일 – Mountain View 생활 31주차

Breakfast

I don’t like the meal which company cafes serve, but one of them provides a good breakfast. Breakfast is from 8 to 10 am, and I usually go at 9 am. I grab some food and coffee, which makes me not feel hungry at noon.

Birth Rate

Anyway, having breakfast with other folks, I found that other countries are also facing the depopulation problem. I didn’t expect that the population in China would decrease. India is neutral. So, they would also get in trouble.

Age of abundant

Someone said that robot technology would liberate people from work. And it would improve the quality of life, and people would have their babies. I absolutely disagree with this idea. That age never comes.

Poor people would stop the chain of poverty. The disparity would be getting more severe since the world doesn’t depend on low-wage workers anymore. I don’t believe that politicians will take care of their life.

Inflation

Even though the minimum wage in California has been increased to $15-$16 per hour, workers hardly sustain their lives. Their income has been increased by only 7%-14%, but the average inflation rate is higher than 30%. Actually, their purchase power has decreased by 18%.

That’s why people surge to Costco. I don’t know how many products were in Costco. I feel that they are still cheap. But people say that they were cheaper than that.

Stock market

It was a great decision to sell all Softbank stock after Coupang’s IPO. It recorded the lowest price a few days ago, and It bumped up to $13.34.

Everyone knows that the part is over. The popular Korean reality TV show that panels compete with their yields in the stock market has closed. The success story has disappeared on the Internet.

What would the future be? FRB has raised the interest rate. Russian-Ukraine. China shutdown. Global warming. Broken supply chain. Big failure in the cryptocurrency market.

India

I’m surprised whenever I hear something about India. At lunch, I told one of my colleagues from India that every service in the US allows people to cut in the line if they pay an extra charge.

For example, when scheduling a driving test, some people can get a next-day appointment by paying money. Since it is not official, I think it is a bribe.

When I told him this, he laughed and said that you could get a license in India without taking a test if I paid a bribe. And if I spent more, they would deliver it to my home. He said that even if the police officer caught me, I could get back my driver’s license if I paid $10. It reminded me of the scene in the 1980s in the Korean movie.

Runa coin

I’m curious whether the founder would be murdered or not. If he survives, it would be the proof of the low opportunity cost for fraud which damaged millions of people.

Boring

This city is peaceful and boring. Whenever people say something, the topic is boring. I hardly come up with a topic to chat about. Except for a work-related topic, I am not interested in the conversation.

Engineers Survival Guide

While thinking about the next three years of my career, I found this book and read it yesterday. This book contains some tips which L5 seniors advised me before. I haven’t read the entire chapters and only read when the topic was interesting. Every chapter had a summarization that helped me to finish the book in a few hours. Anyway, I got a hint to which direction I should go.