> Get roommates. Again, relationships.

I'm with you so far as the physical presence, having done both and now gone back to hybrid (few hours remote, then on-site for about half the day) the rapport I have with my colleagues is almost entirely based around in-person interaction. I don't think anyone calls or IMs people to chitchat the way you do when you bump into someone in-person. That matters.

That said, living with a roommate is probably going to be irrelevant to OP's career. Unless you're rooming with strangers, which is ten flavors of gross.

That doesn't affect individual rates anymore. The insurance can charge your company a higher or lower rate than mine, but within our respective company "pools" everyone gets offered the same plans/rates.

It's one of the biggest drivers for corporate outsourcing. High wage workers demand a high quality health plan. On a $100k base the expense for a $25k plan makes sense. On a $35k salary, not so much , so now those people work for 'Facilities Mgmt LLC' which does the same non-core work but only has crappy benefits.

For a full family plan? Easily. I'm on an individual HSA plan and my employer's contribution alone is $9,250, plus my personal contributions of about $1200/year.

If OP is eating the entire unsubsidized cost of a family plan $20-25k is possible. It's also likely the subsidy repayments are only part of the bill, e.g. if they didn't pre-pay enough taxes in advance since OP was self employed.

I work in the industry, it mostly depends on the class of the drug. Drugs derived from traditional "small molecule" chemistry tend to be a lot faster than "large molecule" biologics. A "large" small molecule like Lipitor might be made from around a hundred individual atoms and have a mass of about 1,000 Daltons. A Biologics derived drug like Humira might be around 150,000 Daltons, or more depending on what it is.

From a manufacturing perspective the complexity of a small molecule is on the relative scale of creating identical bicycles vs building an identical aircraft carrier. The first is a challenge, but you can usually prove atom by atom that the new product is in fact identical meaning it can go for sale quickly. The latter is actually impossible, no two ships are identical in final construction and that's assuming they're from the same shipyard. A rival country trying to recreate an aircraft carrier from scratch? No chance it's the same. So what the rivals actually do is try to produce a "biosimilar" and bring that to market. That involves a hell of a lot more work and a lot of long expensive clinical studies proving that thir biosimilar is no-par with the original product.

A secondary factor is market size. There's a fixed cost to setting up a production line, if the drug is for a rare disease then you're splitting the cost fewer ways.

> exporting food from India to build stockpiles while people in India starved to death.

In fairness, 70 years after the end of the British Raj this hasn't really changed. About 40% or children under 5 in India still experience stunted growth from malnutrition, about 20% experience wasting from starvation, and about 800k children die from starvation, double that if you include malnutrition related disease.

Roll back to 2000 and the figures were much higher.

I don't see how it really changes most of the inconveniences aside from moving twice rather than once. The same set of delays/problems surrounding a sale are just as likely to happen regardless, only now you're begging a landlord to extend your lease month to month when you can't find a property in time.

I think it only really makes sense if you're moving somewhere that isn't local so you can take your time shopping your new area.

Should work out in time, but this is an excellent example of why to use a credit rather than debit card for miscellaneous expenses.

Whether it's fraud or a billing error like this, it's less disruptive to have a hold against a credit limit than cash absent from your primary checking.

Seriously, I can't believe that's the top comment.

Accepting the counter offer can sometimes make sense though. A friend of mine got a call from his previous employer offering him enough of a jump that it would be hard to turn down, but likes his new job better so he took the offer to them and they matched it. That was most of a year ago and they've been very good to him so far.

The degree to which different Employers/Roles actually care about retention varies, but those who do will go out of their way to placate people they think might be flight risks. The cost of awarding a small "market adjust" is smaller than letting the position go vacant.

The difference is small enough I'd focus more on which has better career growth opportunities. Quality of Life and work/life balance matter too but it's kind of hard to gauge sometimes until you actually take the risk.