It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. I could make a zillion dollars as a dev for a big tech company, but there's nowhere that pays 80% of that for 80% of the hours. Hell, I don't think I have the option to make 50% of that for 80% of the hours. Salaried careers seem to only have full time positions, and it sucks.

"It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. "

I agree with this, and I've personally led a life that has had many different kinds of occupations (I've been a musician, a teacher, and a programmer- usually all three at once).

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the reason for "full-time" employment has to do with making workers unavailable for other projects.

Or, if you prefer, full time jobs aren't there because 40-hours-a-week is how much can be gotten out of a worker, but because that's how much time is necessary to keep someone from getting another job that might interfere with the "real" job.

Many folks, especially folks who do weird stuff that requires, if not great intellect or training, familiarity with a specific system (as is the case with software, for instance) aren't actually working a full time load. That's a really common observation, I think. But the way to understand why that continues to happen is that their employment ensures their availability.

That may see strange, and on some levels it's simply not correct and certainly not how most folks are thinking about full time employment.

But if you push an employer to give you fewer hours, that understanding might make a lot of sense out of why they generally won't allow part-time work- if you've got a side gig, they can't have that take priority over their tasks.

Your value to your company is also not a linear function of your time there. There are high fixed costs to training, liability, insurance, etc. They are paying you to always be available, etc.

With that said, I think it's very possible to find a much more easier development job with a lower salary. You should be able to meet performance expectations in very little time.

The company Galois notably supports this sort of arrangement (you pick your hours and your pay is scaled accordingly). I think their corporate structure could be applied more widely.

Specialization is at the core of economic profit. Damn you, economics!

if you have the soft skills (I sure dont lol) I -think- contracting/consulting can be a solution to this? It's not exactly part time, but you work your contract and then take a break before you pick up the next one, which does give you more flexibility with your time. You could eg work six months on, six months off, that way.

Maybe. I knew a PE who did this years ago, but I wonder if there's any software engineers on this board who have successfully done this

I usually negotiate my contracts to be 20-30 hours per week of work. This gives me ample time to work on side projects (aka playing ck3) and run my Etsy shop.

The soft skills aren't much, you have to remember your boss is also just as social awkward as you, because, they are usually cut from the same software developer cloth. But remaining on good terms with past managers helps a lot. I still have annual dinners with almost everyone I've ever worked with, even if we are all scattered across the US.

Iceland is an affluent western nation with its own language, but a population of less than 375,000 people - fewer people than many cities in other countries. And yet these people want books just as much as any other people - perhaps given the nation's culture even more so.

For supply (and selection) to keep up with demand, it requires a far higher percentage of the population to write.

As someone who has a full time job and has self-published a novel I wrote in my spare time, I do not think that supply of books is the issue. In fact, as I went through the process of learning how to self publish, I met many people who write in their free time, including people I know and friends of friends I don’t know. I was actually surprised by how many people there are who have either already self published or who have an unpublished book they work on in their spare time.

From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.

While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.

It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).

EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense

While there may be less demand for books, I am less sure of the corollary that there is less reading. I remember when Harry Potter was having its hey day, and the Amazon Kindle was first announced, there were stats showing that worldwide reading blipped up.

I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.

After graduating college at the age of 22, I've read between 20-50 books every year.

I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.

Reading in America is a lonely hobby sometimes.

When I was younger I would read ten to twenty books a year, of all genres. As I've gotten older it's dropped to one to two, entirely history books. Part of the problem is discoverability. There's too much stuff, and places like Goodreads aren't good at sorting through them. Since most things get limited physical releases these days you don't find them at book stores or libraries like you used to. I also refuse to support Amazon in any way because I'd rather give the money to the authors directly. Problem with that is the only way to do that most of the time is with pre-orders or drops, and by the time I found out about these authors or that particular work those are long since over.

Goodreads discoverability seems pretty good to me. I'm constantly finding new books through their recommended algo, front page, curated lists and search. What else could they do to improve that?

For example, if I wanted find more beatnik related books (after reading On The Road) I search lists and find this fantastic community scored collection with more books than I'll ever want to read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/89976.Beatniks

A big problem for me is I can't just open to a random page and start reading to see if it's worthwhile. I have to jump over to Google Books, and that can be iffy as to whether or not they have samples I can read. Google Books also isn't good about searching by title, and I often have to use the author's name in combination or search by ISBN, and I don't always have those. Google Books does have the useful facet of searching by release, so if a book's been re-released under a new publisher or with a new foreword or something it'll tell me that.

I maybe used to read 30+ books a year. (And subscribed to a lot of magazines.) I’m not sure I read many fewer words these days but I read far fewer books—maybe 5-10.

As much as I dislike publishers gatekeeping what gets read, It's a big ask to commit several hours to a self-published book. This is one thing I like about Japanese light novels, I can look up the release calendar and pick out a few that look interesting. They are a relatively quick read and only around $7 (about half that if you live in Japan).

I feel this. I write non-fiction in the tech industry. I start every project estimating the potential number of readers. My second book is the only one written for a particular profession. I calculated there were at least 20,000 people in the profession. Over 13 years it has sold about 2,000 copies. I have also written the only history of the IT security industry. I update it every year. It too only sells 2,000 copies per edition. Definitely not a way to make a living.

Less reading imho, is a symptom of increasing hours worked (which is also linked to lagging livable pay). The US has been increasing the hours worked. Less leisure time and less disposable income drives a host of negative effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

I'm pretty sure it's just more options, mainly social media. Everyone I know has plenty of leisure time to browser stuff on their phone, but book reading is a distant thought for most.

Yeah, I really doubt people would read much more if they worked less. You need a combination of literacy and a longer attention span, and these qualities are strengthened by reading more often. If you go forever without reading a book, it's harder to read through long books with advanced language that you used to be able to read effortlessly—and this is not because you don't understand the language, but because you lack the willpower to continue, since it's a bit mentally tiring to if you've fallen out of practice. At least, that's my experience, having gone through long stretches of time without reading.

So, based on my own experience, I think most people who don't read actually wouldn't be able to read more given more time. They would need to practice reading books that are easy on their level (both literacy level and attention-span level), and gradually advance to longer and more difficult books to read.

Post a link to your book here as well. I'm intrigued to see what it was about.

The demand side is also that for people who do read their spending may be down. I used to buy roughly $400 in books a year. I now buy maybe 1 book a year and subscribe to kindle unlimited for everything else. I don't think I'm reading much less but authors are certainly making less per read, especially since 30% of my spend on KU goes to Amazon and any book that has a publisher still needs to give the publisher their cut out of the remaining 70%.

I think your $400 a year might be a bit of an outlier. Personally I would say the $140 I'm spending per year via KU is probably more than I was spending before. If you multiply this out by the number of people with KU subscriptions it wouldn't surprise me if that's actually more money flowing directly to authors than before.

I guess it depends how much you like paperbacks but they were fairly good at getting me to buy hardcovers because I wanted something right when it came out and didn't want to wait for a paperback. At $40/hardcover $400 is less than a book a month. A KU subscription is less money flowing into the system than someone buying 1 hardcover per quarter.

Self publishing causes a huge increase in noise since there are no barriers to getting published. So there's a big risk you'll pick up some garbage, but also vast supply which drives down prices. It also means new books on popular subjects can be quickly written, so unless you have some credentials the odds are stacked against you. So i think it comes down to marketing one way or another.

I plan to write a book one day, but mainly as an aid to establishing my credibility for courses I'll run, so marketing from the other direction.

> the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read,

I got back into reading, but its been an effort. Books are big and expensive, my library actually doesn't have stuff available often so I'm always on a wait list. Its hard tough to find time let alone quiet time to focus on a book. So many distractions around, roommates, city noise, neighbors making noise.

The thing is when I read more books, I’d pull out a book if I had a dead 15-30 minutes more or less anywhere. Nowadays it’s easier to default to Facebook, random links, etc. in those sorts of slots.

Most men, at any rate, wore a jacket almost everywhere (as in: suit jacket, sport coat, blazer) in the heyday of pulp fiction, when quite a few could make working-class wages pounding out words on a typewriter.

What do those jackets have? Big hip pockets. What fits perfectly in those, hardly even affecting the drape, with enough room to spare that they can slip in and out effortlessly? Slim little pulp fiction books. Hell, many are even big enough for a volume of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to fit OK. Can't cram a glossy in there, but pulps? Yep.

Plus, yes, there were no cell phones, but if you want to carry a book today, where do you put it, if you don't have a bag (and even if you do, that's not convenient, is it?)? Well, on your phone, as an ebook, since that fits in a jeans or trouser pocket, and practically no dead-tree books or e-readers do... oh but look, you have some notifications! And there goes the 15 minutes.

Women often carry purses. And who still reads? It's largely women. I'm sure there are other reasons, but—hmmmm.

I read a lot of books when I wasn’t wearing a jacket so I don’t know.

Yeah, same, it’s about ergonomics and tendencies over a population, though. Hard to make a book as small as a cell phone that is really readable (it’d probably have to be spiral-bound, for one thing, or have ultra-tiny print crammed on the outer 2/3 of the pages), and lots of cell phones already barely fit in a trouser pocket.

> in the US ... people here hardly read

This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.

This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.

What does the data say?

* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."

* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]

* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]

* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]

* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]

[1] https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/12358/which-countries-produce...

[3] https://internationalpublishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/... , page 17.

[4] https://masterenedicion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BookM...

Your data does not answer: how many of these books are actually read (in the US)?

I've been reading about 5-10 books a year for the last 10 years or so, after having not read anything of substance (outside of school) for some years prior to that.

Since my reading time is limited, I want to read books that are really good. I have to say, quite frankly, that many books just aren't that amazing (and I'm including both traditional and self-published in this). That makes me reluctant to pick up a book unless it's from an author I already know, comes with a really strong recommendation, or just has a superb opening. If a book doesn't have at least one of those three (or ideally two), I'm just not going to pick it up.

This is all anecdata, but my point is the demand side is more complicated. Even given the competition, the vast availability of both traditionally and self-published books doesn't guarantee that quality goes up, at least in aggregate.

At 5-10 books a year, there's also the "problem" that you've got more than a lifetime supply, just sticking to time-tested, very-likely-to-be-excellent classics. That's even true for relatively-modern genre fic and such, these days—it's not the 1960s anymore, you can fill shelves and shelves with good-reputation sci fi and fantasy. This is all true even if zero new books are published... ever.

>People here hardly read,

I feel it's not so much that people don't read, it's that people don't read books anymore in lieu of other mediums (most prominently social media) or methods (eg: watching television, playing games with a story component).

We all do plenty of reading in our lives, after all.

It’s more than that. In Iceland you’re allowed to just stop working and the government will give you a basic income (along with a recreation stipend!) indefinitely. This gives people so much time for pursuits they’re passionate about.

As usual, I will allow Han Solo to critique your argument.

> There’s not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser.

That’s why it works I get it and most people wouldn’t want to live in an icy hellscape but if you like spending all your time indoors it’s not so bad.

Contrary to the name, Iceland isn’t an icy hellscape at all. Haven’t you heard the quip about Iceland being green and Greenland being ice? Icelanders like spending time outside, and Reykjavik and most cities and towns are on the coast so they’re not all that cold. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/iceland/reykjavik/climat...

I think by most people's standards that's pretty cold. Summer high in the mid 50s. 8 Months of the year with near freezing nightly temps.

What inhabited place would you be comparing it to to get "not all that cold"?

It’s not very icy, with an average high above freezing year round. That’s warmer winter conditions than a lot of the US. Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Finland, Mongolia, Svalbard, Norway… there’s a pretty long list of inhabited places that are colder than Iceland.

an average low of 0 celsius in the winter is a LOT warmer than Canada, except maybe on the west coast. It's probably warmer than the Nordics too, and maybe Russia.

You’re just naming other icy hellscapes.

You mean actual icy hellscapes? Correct! ;)

Ones that are all colder than Iceland

Ah, well, I think I have to stick with my original assessment, maybe less cold than Russia still sounds very cold.

I would love a way to easily run the numbers but ball park I think 98-99% of World population lives in a warmer climate.

Even Ottawa and Moscow get summertime average highs around 80 vs 57 in Reykjavík... Burr...

I think what you're saying is that you find those temperatures very cold. You asked what "inhabited places" are colder than that; I gave you a list of countries totalling around 200 million people who would not find Icelandic winters cold. I'm not sure they'd be too happy with a high of 11 in the summer though.

Hehe did the context somehow get completely lost somewhere? We were talking about whether Iceland is an “icy hellscape”. The summer temps and the number of people in warmer places is irrelevant. Nobody argued Iceland isn’t cool or cold relatively speaking. The only question is whether it’s below freezing, otherwise it can’t be icy, right? Reykjavik is not icy most of the time, even in winter. Reykjavik is also warmer in the winter than much of the inland US, and many many other inhabited places that freeze regularly. I was just trying to correct a common misunderstanding about Iceland. Sometimes people make incorrect assumptions based on the name.

I live in the states and forecasted low temps this week are lower than Reykjavik’s average low by more than 10 degrees, and lower than Reykjavik’s actual forecasted temps by 25 degrees (F)...

It would indeed be interesting to run the numbers. I’m guessing the number of people who live in below freezing temps in the middle of winter, places colder than Reykjavik for the coldest month or two of each respective locale, would probably exceed a billion.

Do you have a source for Iceland having a universal basic income like that? How much is it? I’m not finding anything about it with Google searches, and it seems kind of hard to believe.

It’s not universal. It’s basically indefinite unemployment payments.

Australia has that too. $1500/mo for a single person.

This still seemed implausible to me, so I looked it up. The Icelandic government has all the details on the web in English!

It looks like it’s for up to 30 months, and you need to be employed for 24. months to ‘reset’ it: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/entitlement-to-unem...

You’re required to confirm every month that you’re seeking employment: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/rights-and-obligati...

The amount seems to be ISK 349,852 per month: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/amounts-and-payment...

So that’s about USD 2500 - though there are lower amounts depending on your ‘entitlement’ band - I’m not sure how that’s calculated. Even at the 100% band, that’s $30,000/year - which is (for example) half of California minimum wage.

> But if the US were more like Iceland and typical "real" jobs paid a livable wage with reasonable hours

That's the key issue in general, not just for US. When the system is designed to extract maximum efficiency, there is little room for other stuff

Maximum efficiency in regards to what metric? (Before you say 'money/the economy', inequality seems to be bad in that respect [1], and that's about the only thing in regards to which US system seems to be highly efficiency ;)

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf

The US is fairly good at creating high GDP per capita. They are 8th behind: Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Norway, Qatar, UAE and Switzerland.

Of those nations: Norway, Qatar and UAE are highly dependent on oil profits and Luxembourg is an outlier as an unusually small affluent nation. Ireland is also known to have an inflated GDP due to it's tax hub status resulting in corporations reporting high revenue numbers there even though that revenue is often disconnected from the country.

I think most nations would be thrilled to have a GDP per capita of $76,399 USD. When the proceeds are that much higher it takes an awful lot of inequality to make the outcomes worse. One of the biggest issues in the US is that health care is not covered by the government so it costs nearly double compared to most comparable countries and access is subject to all the inequality constraints that universal government programs mostly erase.

For example in Canada which has a GDP per capita of $51,987, the split between wages and capital is approximately 90-10 meaning that the average wage (including non-working population) was $46,788. For the US to have the same type of average wage of only $46,788 the share going to capital would have to be 38.8%.

I believe that is what they are referring to, 'the system' being highly efficient at allocating process improvements/efficiency improvements to the owners of capital leading to the income inequality you note