That's like 10 bucks on amazon? Skip 2 meals, or panhandle for 4 hours. Done - soldering iron.
I had forgotten the pathetic level of funding science PhDs get in Britain. £12k is possibly on the low end, but a PhD with this funding was on the fourth page of the main site listing them [1].
Minimum wage assuming a 40-hour working week is £19,760 per year, and after taxes works out to £17,100. In other words, they are probably already skipping meals.
For comparison, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen is paid £47,500 per annum [2], or £31,000 after tax (probably more, I think there's a tax discount for foreign researchers).
[1] https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CMM286/phd-studentship-achieve-ne...
[2] https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen...
I used to be a junior software developer (hence username) earning £40k - far above median income.
Post tax, rent, bills I could save over the year to purchase the £5k electron microscope I mentioned quite easily.
But then I'd need to rent space for it. And purchase the rest of the equipment.
My points aren't some "look how bad I have it" gotcha. It's highlighting the perspective that this student is lucky to be supported with the resources to excel in his passion. Even if his use case is quite exceptional
Others have highlighted for Americans this probably represents a family in the top 5-10% of earners. A realm which American software developers can fall into
For myself, the chance to work in a lab of equipment costing the order of six figures required a career change and significant pay cut. But that's just me
To clarify. I am mind blown he has pulled this off. It's an extraordinary feat. All I can be is envious of his skills and privilege
The article says the microscope was $1k. That's about 750 GBP. The kid didn't make the purchase at the market rate when he just happpened to feel like it. He jumped at the right point when an opportunity presented itself. Everyone immersed in some hobby dealing with old equipment comes across such opportunities now and then.
A homeowner who earns middle class wages would have the space for a home lab/shop (without renting additional space) and would be able to pay a couple thousand dollars for their son's hobby. The stereotypical middle-class soccer mom spends more than that a year on her kid's activities. This is representative of at least the top 50% of American earners, not just the top 5-10%. This kid's father is the owner of a small sheet metal fabrication shop and he probably does decently well for himself but most of his wealth is likely the value of his business.
On posts advocating for density on HN, I often see people wondering why Americans resist densification because the benefits of a walkable city are so immense. Stuff like this and your belief that having a home electronics fabrication shop is out of reach for all but the rich (and the fact that most Americans can already do nearly any errand with less than 15 minutes of travel) are some of the reasons why. It is not that unusual for a middle class homeowner to have a home shop, though normally the equipment in them is something like a table saw or a mid-20th century manual milling machine, not a homebuilt photolithography machine and an old refurbished SEM. People who have them either use their garages (either an extra bay if they have a two/three car garage and only one/two cars or they use the entire garage and park their cars in the driveway or on the street) or they use a shed placed in their yard. Ever wondered where the stories of people starting companies in their garages come from?
To a middle-class American not living in a super high cost of living area this kid's story is something that they could have done had they had parents who trusted them and if they had the motivation and inclination to do it. The people complaining about that this kid being "privileged" are ignorant of how much of America lives and/or are jealous that they weren't able to do what he did when they were younger.
You really don't realize just how low the median income in the USA is. It's $45k for the median full-time employed individual¹, compared to $39k (£29k) for the UK². You can put the figure in pounds into https://listentotaxman.com/ if you'd like to go further with this, and think of taxes, healthcare etc.
I think your argument still holds, but only for part of the middle class or above. (There's an income distribution table on the Wiki page.)
> …walkable city…
Very few people advocate for only dense, apartment-style housing. They are actually advocating for the choice, to be allowed to build something that isn't a large house with space all around it. This is forbidden by zoning rules in much of the USA.
In a European city, and I'll pick Copenhagen since I live here and it's often cited as one of the best in these arguments, you find apartments of various sizes in the city centre (plus a very few extremely old, extremely expensive houses). As you travel away from the centre, there's a mixture of apartment blocks, smaller apartment buildings (perhaps three apartments in a 3 floor building), denser single-family homes (e.g. shared walls with one or both neighbours), and homes with grass all around. The further you travel, the more the balance shifts to the end of that list -- though if you pass a railway station, you'll find some more apartment buildings. Shops are also distributed throughout, though they are usually nearer to the apartment buildings / stations for obvious reasons.
On [3], the part between the rough circle of water made by the rectangular lakes in the north west and the old zig-zag water fortifications in the south east is considered the city centre. You'll see the type of housing change if you zoom in, then move north, northwest or west. (South, you'll not get the same effect as you'll run into the airport or a nature reserve.) You can also search "Supermarket".
I have a colleague with a couple of children, a decent garden, a car, and a basement containing a metalworking workshop. He's still within 10 minutes walk of a supermarket, and it would be safe for a child to walk there alone.
A friend needed more space than that for her hobby, so she lives on the edge of the city. She has a huge garden (which is the hobby, part is growing food), but she also has a 20 minute walk to the station if she wants to go somewhere without driving, i.e. before and after drinking. (Or < 10 minutes on a bicycle, I assume.)
Conversely, I live in the city centre. A colleague with two children lives fairly close by, in an apartment. Our hobbies don't need lots of space, so we've never felt the need to move further out. The adults and children don't have plenty of space for big hobbies, but it's a more convenient location for other things, like cultural activities, restaurants, people living nearby.
One example of that: a friend's teenage son likes LARP. At 13/14 he obviously can't drive, but he can walk a few minutes to the station. That takes him to the shop selling foam swords and whatever in the city centre, and the locations in/around Copenhagen where LARP groups meet, mostly in the larger woods.
(And can we say man, rather than kid? He's 22.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... (First paragraph, $865*52).
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1002964/average-full-tim... (2017 figure to be comparable)
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6841742,12.5866976,4173m/dat...
The typical American does not see *any* benefit to giving up their car and house. Every single benefit like < 10 minute travel time is already a reality (because what matters is how long it takes to run an errand, not how it is run), but they'd have to live in a smaller house. They are a short drive already from all the activities they could ever want and are friends with all of their neighbors. Their kids can play in the street safely as there might be a dozen cars a day traveling down their street, most of which belong to people who live there. There is no need to though, because everyone has a yard to play in. You admitted that most of your friends could not set up a shop if they wanted to, and the ones who do have them live on the outskirts of the city and have to add 20 minutes to every trip (unless they drive). For the typical middle class American, increasing density offers *no* benefit as literally everything you describe is either something they already have or something irrelevant, but it has significant downsides.
If all you talk to are internet urbanists and tech people living in the Bay Area, you are *not* getting an accurate picture of how the average American lives. This is why urban activists (and Europeans who have pride for their hometowns) are constantly bewildered as to why anyone resists them and think it's because people just don't understand the benefits or are brainwashed by car companies, not that they've heard your arguments before or visited your ideal areas and decided that they just don't want to live in an area like that. Urban activist types tend not to be the type of person who would have a home shop in the first place or have any hobbies that require space and they have fewer (if any) children. They are a vocal minority in the US: only 19% of Americans want to live in a dense urban area [4].
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalen...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
So I used the numbers for a full-time employee, and I believe they are both correct. [1] if you prefer a government source, £611 × 52 = around $43k (increase presumably due to this being 4 years later).
Your British number is for all households, including those where one or both adults doesn't work. However, they are comparable.
On urbanism, you've completely missed my point. Americans are forbidden from living like Europeans by their state and local governments [2], and I consider this completely unreasonable.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
It is not illegal to build in a European style in most of the country; we have entire areas built in a similar style. Zoning is also not a fixed thing in the US; it is very common for zoning rules to change as the area grows. Most of the country is not the San Francisco Bay Area. Contrary to popular online belief, only 19% of Americans want to live in dense cities, so our cities actually mostly match people's preferences. Zoning and land use rules make it illegal to build American style cities in much of Europe as well, so far all you know, most Europeans would like American-style living they were allowed to have it. Here's a ridiculous example of some of your continent's NIMBYs not allowing a rural landowner to open a small restaurant [1]; the same sort of people are also opposed to building any form of suburban housing.