I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…
On average and in total, we pay more to teach children than we do on podcasts.
US podcasts have a total valuation of $8-9B with a revenue of $1.9B; total K-12 spending is $950B a year (about 500x higher). Education receives nearly three orders of magnitude more money per year.
Most people sitting on a couch smoking weed on camera make little to nothing, while 3.8M teachers are paid an average of $65,000 per year.
You’re comparing one-in-a-million outlier podcasts to the average case teacher in order to reverse the overwhelming amount more we put into education, both in total and on average.
Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet.
Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it.
Attention is where capital is applied because the demand is so high for it. Society can control supply and demand about as well as it can control the weather.
Can you name a few topics that you feel benefit from taking an abhorrent position as a way to understand the truth? I also deeply seek open ended conversations about incredibly thorny subjects but I almost never purposefully take a position to I consider abhorrent in order to do so. For example while I am curious about and want to understand antisemitism as a political movement, I don’t see how actually adopting antisemitic beliefs even as a thought exercise would make me understand them more. I find I much more benefit from trying to develop a framework of analysis based on a mix of books from experts (which help as a kind of a meta study crystallized into a person with deep expertise in a subject) and witnessing individual antisemetic acts to see if they fit into the metanarrative by the experts— if they don’t, why not, etc.
In my experience honestly this isn’t common. People really hate disagreeing IRL and can often sniff out when a disagreement is happening that’s just a form of trying to control the environment unnecessarily due to one’s personal issues. However it is important not to be too tolerant to straight up antisocial behavior that uses “don’t be political” as a form of self defense too. I’ve definitely had to kick out guys who did shit like treat women in the group like unwilling romantic targets even after being turned down, or guys who take being turned down personally and then tried to call the woman a fat cow over it who then also tried to use “stop being sensitive and political” as a cover for just being a poorly socialized male.
Have you considered pro-AI proponents all do these things also? It’s an ugly culture war but from a relatively neutral observer I am seeing gross behavior on both sides. (Eg. Making disgusting porn of real people, mocking the dead’s art and likeness…)
From what I saw, there was no "alcohol" as you know it. Most peasant families consumed something called toddy that came from palm trees and date palms. It's a family drink and it's nowhere close to what you call as addiction.
Palm wine addicts have existed since pre history. Or banana beer, or other forms of wine, etc. But distilleries existed virtually everywhere by the 70s.
But even putting that aside, gluttons, drunkards, and gamblers are certainly ancient and well attested, certainly in the western (abrahamic/hellenic) tradition. Perhaps there are some societies without this but it not poverty or want or lack of abundance that provides relief.
The only problem is that the stock market is tied to a bunch of retirement/pension and other accounts. Yes stock market should burn to the ground but also I think pensioners and retirees shouldn’t be put out, just the finance bros and private equity folks which money is just a plaything.
This is pretty myopic, or something. Shows, at least, a real ignorance about the available possibilities (or lack thereof)—at scale—to the common worker for “saving for a later day”.
But I’m all ears. Now that you’ve diagnosed how 401K investing fools get what they deserve, care to offer any alternative solutions as to the entire work force should have been saving towards retirement.
(kinda unrelated but) I personally hate these forced savings schemes from the government. At least in my country the rates are low so it almost feels like I'm donating the entire difference in rates between the pension scheme and the S&P500 + taxes straight to the government.
At least give those of us brave (or stupid) enough to do something different with the money the option to.
I guess. My company (and I believe most) highly incentivize it by offering matching funds. The company says, "want to save $1000 of your paycheck? We'll throw in $500". The general wisdom is, you'd be an idiot to leave money like that going unreclaimed.
Where I am there's actually a %-age of your salary/wage that's "returned" to you when you retire. You don't get a choice.
You can choose to contribute to an employer-match scheme (I do) or even fund your own pension account with monthly payments to a pension provider. But these are in addition to the above forced pension.
Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.
Americans do not fuck around with loud proclamations but actions are harder. Don’t doubt that there are actions, though. But our media landscape is extremely fragmented and successful organizations of people are not covered. There are plenty of loud, mass protests happening everywhere in the country. But also understand that successful organizations that do get media attention are cracked down on. Not so long ago Los Angeles had mass demonstrations against ICE raids and the federal government literally sent in the military against its own people. Particularly conservative media covered these protestors as anti-American for their protesting, and this narrative made it so far as brought up repeatedly in spaces like Hacker News. Somehow optics of the protestors matters more than the actions of the government.
The people are fractured, the people who are trying to fight for their fellow Americans are depicted as anti-American and enough Americans are buying it that the fractures continue.
I saw widespread violence, property damage, and theft (including from immigrant-run businesses) in media coverage of those "protests". What do you think should have been done to stop those things?
> Particularly conservative media covered these protestors as anti-American for their protesting
I'm not from US, but isn't this obvious: I pay taxes hoping for police to do their job and handle criminals. Now some people are protesting and disrupting police job - I won't be happy about that.
Context: I dabbled in evolutionary biology at the university level, not enough for even a minor in the subject.
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
I don't have a job right now. I've been applying about 100 places a month. I just graduated with a phd in a quantitative field and have all the skills of an ml data scientist + my own domain expertise. And, it sucks. I am so broke. I have no money in my bank account now, maybe $7. Family helps me with rent but until then I can't bear to ask them for more money. I've been waiting on unemployment claims to process for a month now, even then the projection is around $150 a week out of that based on my former teaching income. I generally eat 1-2 meals a day these days. Some meals are things like a pile of peanuts or toast with butter. I go to bed hungry many nights. I haven't engaged in any of my hobbies since my teaching contract ended, hiking takes too much time and makes me too hungry and I can't afford to golf right now. Trying to fix my bike so I can start doing postmates with it and bring in some money to not be so dependent on other people while I am in this limbo during the job hunt. I don't have any health insurance right now. Haven't been able to see my therapist due to out of pocket costs. Routine panic attacks and anxiety. Three credit cards maxed out. Falling behind on other bills. Yeah, I'm in bad shape. Hoping things turn around for me soon. The silver lining is the jobs I'm qualified for would pay me at least 10k a month if I manage to land one. Four months of that I'll have all my debt paid off and be out of this hole.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
"I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
In countries without sovereign currencies it's more complicated, but in the US money wouldn't even need to be collected (technically it would need to be collected/added as debt, but that's entirely due to the Constitution and not some kind of natural law). The only real considerations needed to spend are whether or not adding more debt is politically viable and whether or not percepetions of and expectations for inflation are manageable. A UBI would be way too big to be able to avoid triggering inflation expectations and opportunism. Ending hunger would be much more manageable as the costs are very low relative to the impact and so it could be more easily hidden from financial doom-speakers.
Nominal wealth is useless if supply of products and services is in decline. The population histogram of pretty much all developed societies has passed the curve where the supply of labor is decreasing so that “wealth” will be competing to buy less and less labor.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
Hunger is easy. It is housing, medicine and education that are unsolvable.
And no, even if you skin all the rich and put all their money to UBI, it will only last a year or two (you can take Excel and calculate). The bulk of income and taxes comes from the middle class.
Just try and calculate. The rich are rich, but there are too few of them. Even $1000 UBI (which is not enough for anything) is like $3.2 trillion per year. All the rich taken together do not earn this much.
>I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
Partly true. But today there is no way to live off the land either, as people used to in the past by raising cattle and pigs. Either it's illegal or you owe the govt taxes.
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
I'm not sure, but that's still happening. At least it happened to me this year. I consider myself a decent developer (in every job I have landed, I was always considered the "best" in the team after not much time in the job). I'm not faang-silicon-valley level, though. I haven't written a compiler or an OS, or contributed to the linux kernel. I have read all the popular tech books out there, I do more or less know what companies (and interviewers) want to hear, and I'm easy to work with.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
My kids are happy, thriving and optimistic about the future. For me, they bring more joy than I thought existed. Having kids is the best thing that happened to me ever and pretty they’re glad I did too. What world are you talking about?
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
This is good advice, but needs to be bookended with through research about your rights, and the consequences of discussing this with a medical professional, and all the various ways in which you can be fucked over.
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
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