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I gave up my retirement for my child's future
I gave up my retirement for my child's future

Business Insider

time12 hours ago

  • Business
  • Business Insider

I gave up my retirement for my child's future

All I have ever wanted to do is work hard for a good future. I was born into and raised by people who struggled to set goals and provide for their kids, so I knew I wanted something better for my own when I decided to settle down. Unfortunately, to give my son the best future possible, I had to give up any concept of retiring. I was 27 when my partner and I, freshly married, decided to start our family. We'd done the entire checklist that we had been told would promise success. We both went to college, we got jobs in stable career fields, and built up savings and stability before getting married. By 2019, we felt ready to tie the knot, and by the end of the year, I was so baby hungry I already had a tote of little clothes tucked away in a bin in my office. But 2019 was a very different time. I was working in technology as a hardware specialist for a local school district, my partner was a teacher. Our rent was $1150 for a three-bedroom house in a nice part of town. We were more than stable, very ready to buy a home, and content in our careers. I became a parent in 2020 We found out we were pregnant the week of the shutdown in 2020. I remember thinking that people had raised kids during the 2008 recession. This was just some strange blip, a moment in time. It would end, and we'd move on. Weeks stretched into months. I was forced to step away from my job as the demands of getting technology out to school districts became too taxing while pregnant. I had to start taking gig work as a writer, something I had never done before, to keep our finances stable. Wipes and diapers were impossible to find; there was no baby furniture, and I felt guilty buying anything before I had a person who could use it. My son was born in November of 2020, and what followed were the hardest years of our lives. The price of everything skyrocketed. People began flocking to Boise, Idaho, where we have lived our whole lives. Our rent went from $1150 to $2200 in just three years. Formula shortages made every box cost as much as a tank of gas. Groceries ballooned in price. Any hope we had of buying a house began to bleed away alongside our savings. I picked my son's education over retirement Despite picking up an extra job, working grueling hours as an editor for entertainment publications, and cutting almost every enjoyable element of our lives away, by 2024, we were barely making it paycheck to paycheck. Please help BI improve our Business, Tech, and Innovation coverage by sharing a bit about your role — it will help us tailor content that matters most to people like you. What is your job title? (1 of 2) Entry level position Project manager Management Senior management Executive management Student Self-employed Retired Other Continue By providing this information, you agree that Business Insider may use this data to improve your site experience and for targeted advertising. By continuing you agree that you accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . We lowered costs by keeping my son home, avoiding day care bills, but that meant working around him and effectively isolating him from other children his age. By the summer, we knew he would need to attend preschool, but there aren't free options for that in Boise. We were going to have to pay tuition, and we just weren't sure where it was going to come from. Unfortunately, all the scholarship and hardship assistance for pre-school programs in Idaho still function on income data from five years ago. It doesn't take into account the effects of inflation, unmanageable housing costs, or stagnated wages. In July 2024, I filled out the paperwork to withdraw my retirement savings from my 401(k). My family and friends asked me why I would do something like that. Didn't I want to retire? I explained that there was nothing in my future if there was nothing in his. My son will always come first, even if I have to work until I'm dead. We can't have any more kids Shockingly, I don't regret dismantling my retirement at 31 for my child's preschool tuition. What I truly regret is knowing that we can't have any other children. I only had one savings fund. I can't empty another for a second baby. I'd always seen myself as the mother of a little clutter of children. I've dreamed of having a family since I was very young. But it's not possible. I won't ever have more children, because doing so while the cost of living is what it is, would force my son and any future siblings to miss out, just so I could hug more babies. It's not fair to him, and it wouldn't be fair to any others. I will never regret sacrificing for my child, but the grief of a life abruptly thrown off course has been difficult to navigate. I often wake up and ask myself, "What could I have done better?" My goal now is to do everything I can for my son, to give him everything I have, even if it isn't fair. I hope that when he comes of age and enters the world, it will be a kinder place. I dream that he won't have to sacrifice so much to be safe and secure, and that he will have all the comfort and security we have lost. He deserves to dream and, for me, that matters more than retiring. It's just such a shame that these are the choices so many parents are currently having to face.

You can get unfathomably rich building AI. Should you?
You can get unfathomably rich building AI. Should you?

Vox

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • Vox

You can get unfathomably rich building AI. Should you?

is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. It's a good time to be a highly in-demand AI engineer. To lure leading researchers away from OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has reportedly offered pay packages totalling more than $100 million. Top AI engineers are now being compensated like football superstars. Few people will ever have to grapple with the question of whether to go work for Mark Zuckerberg's 'superintelligence' venture in exchange for enough money to never have to work again (Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine recently pointed out that this is kind of Zuckerberg's fundamental challenge: If you pay someone enough to retire after a single month, they might well just quit after a single month, right? You need some kind of elaborate compensation structure to make sure they can get unfathomably rich without simply retiring.) Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Most of us can only dream of having that problem. But many of us have occasionally had to navigate the question of whether to take on an ethically dubious job (Denying insurance claims? Shilling cryptocurrency? Making mobile games more habit-forming?) to pay the bills. For those working in AI, that ethical dilemma is supercharged to the point of absurdity. AI is a ludicrously high-stakes technology — both for good and for ill — with leaders in the field warning that it might kill us all. A small number of people talented enough to bring about superintelligent AI can dramatically alter the technology's trajectory. Is it even possible for them to do so ethically? AI is going to be a really big deal On the one hand, leading AI companies offer workers the potential to earn unfathomable riches and also contribute to very meaningful social good — including productivity-increasing tools that can accelerate medical breakthroughs and technological discovery, and make it possible for more people to code, design, and do any other work that can be done on a computer. On the other hand, well, it's hard for me to argue that the 'Waifu engineer' that xAI is now hiring for — a role that will be responsible for making Grok's risqué anime girl 'companion' AI even more habit-forming — is of any social benefit whatsoever, and I in fact worry that the rise of such bots will be to the lasting detriment of society. I'm also not thrilled about the documented cases of ChatGPT encouraging delusional beliefs in vulnerable users with mental illness. Much more worryingly, the researchers racing to build powerful AI 'agents' — systems that can independently write code, make purchases online, interact with people, and hire subcontractors for tasks — are running into plenty of signs that those AIs might intentionally deceive humans and even take dramatic and hostile action against us. In tests, AIs have tried to blackmail their creators or send a copy of themselves to servers where they can operate more freely. For now, AIs only exhibit that behavior when given precisely engineered prompts designed to push them to their limits. But with increasingly huge numbers of AI agents populating the world, anything that can happen under the right circumstances, however rare, will likely happen sometimes. Over the past few years, the consensus among AI experts has moved from 'hostile AIs trying to kill us is completely implausible' to 'hostile AIs only try to kill us in carefully designed scenarios.' Bernie Sanders — not exactly a tech hype man — is now the latest politician to warn that as independent AIs become more powerful, they might take power from humans. It's a 'doomsday scenario,' as he called it, but it's hardly a far-fetched one anymore. And whether or not the AIs themselves ever decide to kill or harm us, they might fall into the hands of people who do. Experts worry that AI will make it much easier both for rogue individuals to engineer plagues or plan acts of mass violence, and for states to achieve heights of surveillance over their citizens that they have long dreamed of but never before been able to achieve. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. In principle, a lot of these risks could be mitigated if labs designed and adhered to rock-solid safety plans, responding swiftly to signs of scary behavior among AIs in the wild. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic do have safety plans, which don't seem fully adequate to me but which are a lot better than nothing. But in practice, mitigation often falls by the wayside in the face of intense competition between AI labs. Several labs have weakened their safety plans as their models came close to meeting pre-specified performance thresholds. Meanwhile, xAI, the creator of Grok, is pushing releases with no apparent safety planning whatsoever. Worse, even labs that start out deeply and sincerely committed to ensuring AI is developed responsibly have often changed course later because of the enormous financial incentives in the field. That means that even if you take a job at Meta, OpenAI, or Anthropic with the best of intentions, all of your effort toward building a good AI outcome could be redirected toward something else entirely. So should you take the job? I've been watching this industry evolve for seven years now. Although I'm generally a techno-optimist who wants to see humanity design and invent new things, my optimism has been tempered by witnessing AI companies openly admitting their products might kill us all, then racing ahead with precautions that seem wholly inadequate to those stakes. Increasingly, it feels like the AI race is steering off a cliff. Given all that, I don't think it's ethical to work at a frontier AI lab unless you have given very careful thought to the risks that your work will bring closer to fruition, and you have a specific, defensible reason why your contributions will make the situation better, not worse. Or, you have an ironclad case that humanity doesn't need to worry about AI at all, in which case, please publish it so the rest of us can check your work! When vast sums of money are at stake, it's easy to self-deceive. But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that literally everyone working in frontier AI is engaged in self-deception. Some of the work documenting what AI systems are capable of and probing how they 'think' is immensely valuable. The safety and alignment teams at DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic have done and are doing good work. But anyone pushing for a plane to take off while convinced it has a 20 percent chance of crashing would be wildly irresponsible, and I see little difference in trying to build superintelligence as fast as possible. A hundred million dollars, after all, isn't worth hastening the death of your loved ones or the end of human freedom. In the end, it's only worth it if you can not just get rich off AI, but also help make it go well. It might be hard to imagine anyone who'd turn down mind-boggling riches just because it's the right thing to do in the face of theoretical future risks, but I know quite a few people who've done exactly that. I expect there will be more of them in the coming years, as more absurdities like Grok's recent MechaHitler debacle go from sci-fi to reality. And ultimately, whether or not the future turns out well for humanity may depend on whether we can persuade some of the richest people in history to notice something their paychecks depend on their not noticing: that their jobs might be really, really bad for the world.

Volvo Cuts US Lineup to Survive Against Trump's Tariffs
Volvo Cuts US Lineup to Survive Against Trump's Tariffs

Auto Blog

time2 days ago

  • Automotive
  • Auto Blog

Volvo Cuts US Lineup to Survive Against Trump's Tariffs

By signing up I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy . You may unsubscribe from email communication at anytime. View post: Amazon is selling a 'powerful' $100 cordless impact wrench for only $50, and shoppers say it's 'a beast' Another victim of tariffs According to reports by both Reuters and Automotive News, Swedish automaker Volvo is making some drastic cuts to its lineup to turn a profit as President Donald Trump's tariffs make it harder to sell a broad range of vehicles in the U.S. Previously, Volvo offered a range of sedans and station wagons alongside a selection of crossover SUVs; however, the Geely-owned automaker said that it will fully phase out these cars from its U.S. offerings due to declining consumer demand and complications from import tariffs. According to a Volvo spokesperson who spoke to AutoNews, Volvo will cease offering the Chinese-assembled S90 and the Swedish and Belgian-assembled V60 wagons in the U.S. starting in the 2026 model year. This leaves the V60 Cross Country as the only non-SUV in Volvo's U.S. lineup. Volvo will ramp up U.S. production of popular SUVs This decision comes as the U.S. has levied tariffs of 27.5% on European-made cars and 100% on EVs imported from China, forcing automakers to review their product strategies. In light of this, Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson said in remarks on CNBC's Europe Early Edition on July 17 that the company would 'definitely not' pull out of the U.S. market, where it has been present for 70 years, adding that it will bring the XC60 into production in the U.S. 'What we are doing is, first of all, we want to fill our factory that we have in South Carolina. It should be the strategic asset it was intended to be. So, we have to utilize it more,' Samuelsson said. 'Second, of course, now with the tariffs, it is very natural to bring in a [car model with] big-selling volume. We are bringing in the XC60 SUV,' he added. Following a July 16 announcement, Samuelsson said during Volvo Cars' Q2 2025 earnings call on July 17 that U.S. production of the XC60 will ramp up in early 2027. Despite currently being tasked with EX90 and Polestar 3 production, Volvo's South Carolina assembly plant only made about 20,000 vehicles last year—just 13% of its capacity. The XC60 'will bring high volumes to the factory [and] together with the increase in the EX90, will give that factory much better utilization,' Samuelsson said. Volvo CFO Fredrik Hansson added that the cost of localizing XC60 production is in the 'very low single-digit billion [U.S. Dollars].' as it previously built the S60 sedan, which is mechanically similar to the XC60. Autoblog Newsletter Autoblog brings you car news; expert reviews and exciting pictures and video. Research and compare vehicles, too. Sign up or sign in with Google Facebook Microsoft Apple By signing up I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy . You may unsubscribe from email communication at anytime. 'The plant is already adapted for that production,' Hansson said. 'That means we can find very cost-efficient ways to [build the XC60].' Source: Volvo Volvo CEO urges EU to drop tariffs against the US Following the announcement of a 10 billion Swedish kronor ($1 billion) Q2 2025 operating loss, Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that the European Union should reduce its tariffs on U.S. car imports while politicians in Brussels work toward a trade agreement with the Trump administration. 'If Europe is for free trade, we should be the ones showing the way and going down to very low tariffs first,' Samuelsson told Reuters, adding that European automakers do not need protection from U.S. competitors. 'I think it's absolutely unnecessary, the European car industry definitely does not need to have any protection from American auto builders.' In a series of letters written to the leaders of other countries and key trading partners, President Donald Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on imported goods from the EU to 30% on Aug. 1. Previously, the U.S. had a 2.5% tariff on EU-built cars, while the EU had a 10% tariff on imported vehicles from the U.S. However, Samuelsson recognizes that he has limited say as a businessperson and can only limit his company's exposure to it. 'These are the measures we have control over, rather than when it comes to tariffs, we can only have an opinion like everybody else,' he said. The XC60 overtakes the 240 to become Volvo's best seller Final thoughts In remarks to Reuters, Bill Wallace, the owner of the Wallace Automotive Group, which owns Volvo retail locations in Florida, told the newswire that in the luxury segment that Volvo competes for buyers in, shoppers are quick to pick other brands if pricing becomes an issue. 'At the end of the day, even with a luxury model, they are going to compare their payment with a BMW, Lexus, or a similar model … and if it's a little bit higher … you're just gonna lose the business,' he said. Wallace does have a point. Although Volvo has a reputation for building and selling fairly attractive and solid mild hybrid and plug-in hybrid luxury SUVs, it is doing so in a crowded market. To make matters worse, Mercedes and BMW's answers to the XC90 are both made in the United States. As I said before, Volvo CEO Samuelsson may be determined to increase American production of its high-volume models while the U.S. engages in challenging trade discussions with nearly every nation, but any decisions about the company's future must be carefully calculated if it wants to continue selling in the U.S. from here on out. About the Author James Ochoa View Profile

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