I'm not trying to specifically give you a hard time, but this needs to be called out in the public square until it stops being a hallmark of HN threads: you're passing off speculation and bald opinion as fact.
You don't know how competent the software engineers are in Europe, and saying "$140k for a software job is extremely high" is an arbitrary value judgment.
140k places you in the top 1-2% of the entire planet in earnings.
I can think of 2 US companies I know of off the top of my head that deliberately hire Europeans since they get talent at a steep discount (especially if you pay them remotely). From what I've seen Ukraine and Estonia are considered goldmines of cheap talent. I doubt they are the only ones.
Bald speculation and opinion would be that this massive imbalance between earnings is causally tied to merit to a degree strong enough that we can confidently say European software engineers are as a whole a whopping 50% less competent than US counterparts. This to me is ridiculous, not because it sounds offensive or anything, it's just obviously untrue for Europe. This is just how we've set up our geopolitics with downstream affects being massive imbalance between earnings of countries.
> A 50,000 home new town in Kent is blocked because they found nests full of agitated Chupacabras following the government's 'reintroduction' of the cryptid to British arable land. Your deposit requirement increases by £5000.
On a log scale (you can select this on your graph) we're basically moving on the same trend line as we have been since 1960. Covid caused a big jump but the years of stagnation since then mean we're back to normal.
It works under the same principle as pressure washing, as long as the water pressure is high enough the final result is completely clean. Too high pressure can lead to material flying around everywhere but there's a very large range where the pressure is high enough to clean you but not enough to spray things around.
Drying is a personal preference and isn't as important anymore as you're clean down there now. Toilet paper is one option but you don't have to do it (I don't dry for reference) as it'll dry out by itself in a few minutes once you put your underwear on to absorb the water (which is fine because you're completely clean down there so it really is just clean water left).
Hanania also has similarly scathing things to say about low class and low end white people. He's not partisan at all, or if he is, he's biased against the more "pathetic" parts of humanity, if you wish to put it like that, rather than having a Dem/Rep bias.
By being very good. Mostly the Uber-geniuses thing, but I wouldn't call them geniuses. You do have a bit of the harder working but it's quite minor and of course sometime you benefit from being in the right place at the right time (luck). I'd say elite network is probably the least important conditional on you having a decent network that you can get at any top 20 school if you put in the effort (be involved in tech societies etc.)