100ProofTollBooth
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
I agree that we're hitting the full maturation stage of, at least, legacy IT, marketing-tech, and eCommerce that drove the last ~15 years of growth (big caveat: along with the longest/lowest interest rates ever). Energy and physical technology also seems to be entering a new phase of innovation (something that's very interesting to watch is that the Department of Defense has explicitly said "we're going to buy most of our Space capabilities from the commercial space instead of building them in-house.")
I'd also add that the macro indications are great for the US and shitty for ... everyone else? Maybe not our allies in SE Asia but ...
China's demographics were already - long term - untenable. COVID accelerated that timeline and rising global rates are going to seriously ruin their state-fueled growth. Forget GDP, productivity, real estate bubbles ... in 2022, the Chinese population declined. That's 11/10 uh-oh-spaghetti time. Looking to Europe, their collective economics policies of the past 40+ years have led to an impending collapse of the Eurozone, persistently astronomical un-and-underemployment for young workers who are now in their prime working years, and utterly absent technology and innovation bases. IMHO, I think the RUS/UKR war may be a medium or long term blessing in disguise for Western Europe as it will force them to rethinking their energy dependencies and spur a little extra productive government spending (in the form of escalating defense budgets).
Emerging markets keep doing their thing. A friend once shared a good quote (not originally his) with me - "Brazil is the country of the future ... and always will be." Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, maybe some spots in MENA (though they are too small) theoretically have some demographic advantages, but all of these places do not have the governmental / law enforcement / contractual pieces in place to do business. Say you're an American oilfield services company and you want to help a Brazilian concern set up a drilling field. They're 90 days late on payment. Then 120. Then 180. What are your realistic recovery options in a Brazilian court? You get the impression.
Bringing it all back home ... there is no other market on the planet where anyone would want to park their money right now than the US - upcoming recession or no. It's not even a conversation of "oh, which markets are going to re-emerge first" etc. There is no other well developed market that has the technological, human capital, industrial, and governmental, and demographic resources in place to turn $1.00 today into more than $1.00 tomorrow.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
The length of my reply may not communicate it, but I've been thinking about this question pretty much daily since 2017.
The answer is that if either a Man or Woman is looking at what the other can "bring to the table," the relationship is going to fail at some point. First, remember the passion-to-companionship cycle. At the outset, both parties generally want (and receive) fireworks. Somewhere pretty early on this gives way to a more "fun friends who have sex" situation. If it makes it two years (look around at your social circle and mark this as a milepost for breakups) then a lot of couples will get married if both parties are 28+. 7 Year itch within a marriage, 50/50 in America make it. Kids show up a lot of marriages are effectively dead but keep on going for the kids. Divorce late in high school or early college is most common for upper-middle class suburbanites.
The point of the above paragraph is that a romantic relationship and marriage that last 10,20,30 years changes so much that it is not possible for either party to meaningfully say "Yes, I'm in this for life" at the outset if the rubric is simply the "match score" for the other partner.
What's required is a personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship before you even meet the other person. And a recognition that the relationship will drastically change multiple times and require constant work. If that is the starting point, you've got a shot and then you can sort of grocery list for all of the matching attributes. If that is not your starting point, I think you can still have a decent enough romantic life, but you shouldn't think you're going to make it long term.
I don't blame this totally on the failing character of contemporary western folks. Most of marriage in human history (and, I would submit, the majority of it today worldwide) is basic economic survival and co-dependence. The idea of learning to love whichever person you ended up shaking up with to not starve to death is far more common the world over than "omg, this is how I met your mother" fairly tale stories. For a trip, read up on the emotional development of the arranged marriages of first generation Indian Couples in the U.S. from maybe the 1970s or so.
The idea of deep emotion, long-term pair bonding as the everything of marriage is a product of the massive growth in personal wealth the western world experienced after World War 2 and is also a good outcome of the mid-century feminist movement. It's just super, super rare. The bad outcome of this has been the destruction of the nuclear family since the 1960s. When the primary motivator is personal emotional satisfaction in a highly individualist society, the family is going to have a bad time absent some very strong microsocial pressures (i.e. high religiosity communities, or hyper invested "helicopter" parents who see the performance of their children as reflective of personal worth).
To conclude, however, I wouldn't call myself a marriage / long-term relationship cynic. In fact, I still think I want to get married (I just think the odds are low). I'm slightly optimistic that there's going to be some level of Gen-Z backlash to the crazy 4th wave feminism we see now and that may prompt new personal commitment to having a nuclear family and shedding some of the "but how do I maximize my own personal emotional state?" thinking. I am not Gen-Z, however, and their customs and ways are strange to me.
TLDR; It isn't about your partner, it's all about you.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Can you cite some good sources on this? I'm not at all quarreling here - just another Catholic interested in learning about VII (and having been suspicious of it for a while)
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
(Slightly tongue-in-cheek because I kind of used up my battery on another post ... so, remember to laugh)
Bring back 8th grade bullying.
Not the sadistic / sexual embarassment kind, but the slightly barbed ribbing about "not being able to get a girlfriend" or "no boy is going to ask you to the dance." (Remember! Tongue-In-Cheek!)
The more serious version underlying this is; we have to teach adolescents and young the skills for an imperfect information, yet cooperative mating strategy - and call out the ones who fail to do so. Society wide fertility is a society wide responsibility. Part of growing up through adolescence is mimicking adult behavior, failing, learning, and improving on the next iteration so that when you are able to make serious life decisions, you've got some practice behind it. The "radical acceptance" and "zero bullying" mentality completely ruins this to the point that when young men and women date in college or afterwards, this may literally be their first relationship but nowhere near their first sexual experience. That lack of symmetry is disaster for fertility because a big part of fertility is both parties (but especially the woman) being comfortable in the long term stability of the relationship (that's hard-wired into the brain).
Quite side note: A male-only version of this is fighting. It's important to get into a few scuffles in High School when you're still underdeveloped physically and no one knows how to fight. I've seen bar fights between 25 year old dudes where neither knew what he was doing turn out fucking awful for both parties simply because they didn't know how to throw punches, or how to go down and cover up, or to stop hitting someone when their arms go stiff.
A lot of the other policy recommendations in this and other threads are good from the incentive-seeking rational actor standpoint, and I do support them (sort of generally, not each one individually without exception). But, from a learned behavior perspective, I think they would underperform simply because people's interpersonal development is getting extremely weak because of the super-importance of personal development-of-the-self without regard to society.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
+1
Elizabeth Warren sent up her offering the regulations Gods in this morning's NYT.
Which also means she had her staff write the op-ed over the weekend. What a great boss.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
There's an ocean of Federal money for exactly this.
Unfortunately, doing it under the constraints of Federal development is close to impossible.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Third Option - Most men don't want to do either.
Having a long term, monogamous relationship is hard and takes work.
Living a real-world player lifestyle is possible only with either a) crazy social status and wealth (Movie stars, athletes) or b) a normal guy putting a ton of work (getting into shape, being better than average with fashion and, mostly - running game like crazy and mostly failing).
I'd say most men don't want to do this (save for those who have religious or other personal/social strong bias for family) because the average returns to either are questionable. Divorce in the U.S. is 50/50 and not much better in Western Europe. Player lifestyle - while more attainable than many would think - operates on batters baseball levels of success; 25% (.250 batting average) is OK, 30% is a good season, and anything at or over 40% makes you a hall-of-famer.
There are far higher expected returns to putting in extra work into a career. Once you get out of minimum wage service industry level work (no offense to those who are still in it), top 20% performance is mostly an equation of hours worked and a little social / political awareness (either to move up in a large company, artfully job hop every 2 - 3 years, or to network effectively for external business in a small company). Top 10% is being able to make the jump to management. Top 1% is getting groovy with risk taking and truly understanding your market (and, yes, a spot of luck).
Which leads me to what I think is an interesting twist to the original question. Which would Men opt for; perfect wifey with no possibility of divorce / hen-pecking / dead bedroom, or 100% guaranteed discreet access to world class prostitutes. Again, caveats about personal morality / religiosity apply.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Sharing your life with someone that has their own agency (even if they use that agency in frustrating ways), the game of trying to make things work together, experiencing the emotional highs and lows.
In my opinion, this reveals a lot of very good and positive perspective on things. So, go MWei.
I would wager, however, that the overwhelming majority of currently married / long-term relationship'd people are miles away from sentiments like that.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Agree with all. IMHO - "single quality girl" is just harder to find because the median has fallen so drastically and the acceptance of personal hill-climbing (in the optimization sense) has picked up. It's hard to overstate the second order effects of online dating - even women who will readily admit to being all around satisfied in a relationship (monogamous or otherwise, serious and committed or otherwise) are aware of the literal hundreds of daily new options. That kind of pull is impossible to resist - man or woman. Imagine if your inbox had 100 new job offers (not marketing blast emails, I mean sign here for money job offers).
Again, I want to explicitly state I'm not trying to say "womenz bad." I see this as a pretty basic rational economic / incentive seeking behavior. To quote the poet Slim Charles "Game the same - just more fierce is all."
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
This is a great point. Also love the phrasing. Bravo.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
I think this is a critical point regardless of worldview and also a common trap people fall into.
It is self-satisfying, comforting, safe, and easy to write off one's opponents as immoral or somehow irredeemable. It saves the trouble of having to engage with their point of view and/or arguments. One's in-group affiliation also strengthens ("Totally clapped back today, sis!" / "Owned this lib at the gas station!"). Eventually, however, you end up as an inmate in the echo chamber.
The (admittedly incomplete) method I try to use is trying to think through a different prioritization of values by the other party, leaving moralism out of it as long as possible (exceptions apply, see below). Trying to see past someone's surface level political / ideological / social arguments to identify their personal value system keeps them human (objects / boogeymen can't really be said to have values), punches through midwit argumentation (akhtually, crime went down when xyz happened), and helps you steelman without requiring a ton of intellectual calisthenics.
"This person has a MASSIVE investment into personal emotional comfort. This leads them to advocate for a lot of "outreach" style community services instead of traditional policing. Their relative value of community stability and common welfare is lower." Far more useful as a thinking aid and mental model than the more emotionally satisfying "These m-f'er wants to give free hotel rooms to crackheads?!"
Two caveats. First, this is not koom-bay-ah common-ground finding. That's one of the most bullshit concepts in all of politics / culture war. I'm not trying to find where you and I overlap, I'm trying to figure out why you and I have intractable disagreements. I don't really think I can change your value system, but I might be able to articulate something that shows you the cost and imbalance of your value system. I use business analogies and metaphors a lot because my life is a horrible series of nested spreadsheets but w/e I like it. If you have a stock portfolio that is 100% Tesla, you're taking on concentrated risk and there's a (potential or realized) massive downside. You really believe in Tesla? Ok, that's fine on its face, but you have to realize you're overinvested in a single thing. Applied to our culture war framework, Greta Thunberg (leaving aside the likely weird parental coaching) is 100% in on environmental issues and seems to actively ignore related economic, political, technological, stability impacts. There's not a moral argument there, just an examination of her value system.
Second caveat is that this does break down when you get to the real extremes. Obviously when someone's value system explicitly allows for physical violence in any case but self-defense (let's leave just war theory etc to the side for now) ... it's hard to really deal with them in good faith. The trickier part is when the other person stops short of endorsing physical violence but advocates for such a massive change to existing political order than the immediate second order effects seem to be violence. My favorite example (from right here in Motte-land!) is this post on the lunacy of Ibram Kendi. Obviously, he "values" whatever "anti-racism" is but he also clear values state-level coercion and illiberal and anti-democratic practices in support of that goal. I don't have a good workaround for that.
Your average laptop-class do-gooder millennial progressive, however, isn't anywhere near that. Yes, they will call themselves "anti-racists" to enjoy some in-groping (intentional typo) and mood-affiliation, but, by doing that, they're showing off their value system - pop culture virtue signalling, hipness with the times (so, social perception ability), and (ironically, imho) respect for conformity to prevailing ideas.
Again, this is, I think, a good means of understanding people better and doing some high-return thinking for yourself. As a tool of persuasion, I think this has close to zero value. I'm laughing thinking about that conversation - "You know, I think I understand your entire personal value system and can say confidently that you don't value community safety as highly as individual expression, regardless of long term social cost." You'd probably be better off with some nice Forer statements. "You're a creative soul who loves people, but sometimes find it difficult to fit in."
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Jobs don't get replaced and the ones that do don't matter.
People, however can get replaced when their job skills get suddenly hard capped. Case in point - for many, many years, you could have a decent-to-good job in IT as a SysAdmin. You didn't know how to code per se and certainly couldn't call yourself a Software Engineer, but you were needed to keep the infrastructure of the system running. Low(er) on the totem pole but, in 2023 dollars in a major metro, you could hit $100k with a decade of experience.
Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge. Within about 5 years, an old school SysAdmin was pretty much out of any job that wasn't working on legacy systems in a non-tech-primary organization (think banks, other big-and-heavy old industrials etc.)
And, before someone says "well, yeah, but if you still know COBAL you can make $500k because NOBODY has that skill and it still runs the NYSE." Wrong, you have to know COBOL ... and also understand all of the legacy gotchas of the NYSE. (This is a toy example, but it applies to similar stories).
LLMs and whatever other AI we can reasonably predict will wipe out the folks who just can't keep their job skills at pace with the tools. Those who can adapt will be fine to holy-shit-I'm-rich.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Desmond documents how the poor are squeezed. There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education.
Let me not only steel man Desmond's argument, let me turn it into Level 30 Plasma Coated Super-Titanium and (hypothetically) admit all of his data, assertions, root cause analysis, and prescriptive recommendations are undeniably true. 100%, carved into the tablets true. Every voter in America skips hand-in-hand to the polls to demand action from our elected representatives.
And we redistribute all of American wealth with a 22% efficiency metric. Which means we're redistributing it to a horrible distribution.
It's difficult to overstate how bad the American government - specifically the executive branch with some gentle aid from the legislature - is at accomplishing its basic tasks. Talk to a veteran about interacting with the VA, Talk with a small business owner who wants to bid on simple government contracts for providing office supplies or hauling trash. Hell, talk to any of the Reservation folks Desmond grew up with about receiving mail on time.
Beyond any normative political values, beyond the constant back and forth with data and "studies," there is a fundamental problem that with a lot of the "reforms" of the 1970s, the U.S. Government got so incredibly bad at doing its job (this being a "job" that it legally outlaws other entities from doing).
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Just wanted to say this is a legit AF post.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
In a vain attempt to hijack this into the "Get rich on real estate TODAY!" thread on The Motte...
I ran a cross a twitter thread years ago that made the case for investing in multi-family real estate in "forever emerging" neighborhoods. This would be areas outside of an obviously attractive Metro that may be seen as "up and coming." That's easy enough to look up right now. The tricky part is finding something in that emerging neighborhood that both keeps it from becoming just the next development path out of the metro, and also prevents it from going bust. The thread mentioned a few military bases that are within 1 - 2 hours of a major metro as an example; the Military doesn't go out of business, so the area won't disappear even in a recession, but because the military skews younger, lower-middle-class-er, and male-er, a trendy Whole Foods anchored shopping center with the $3k 1-bedrooms isn't going to pop up either. These are properties with cap rates higher than you would expect but without the occasional sunk cost of an eviction, the higher rates of repair due to lack of maintenance, crime, etc.
Any hardcore Real Estate folks on here care to comment. I have no idea if the thread I'm (half) citing is valid ... not even if I'm representing it totally correctly as this is from memory at the moment.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
This is the second time in a short while I've come across something interesting about Finnish drinking culture. Do you know more about it? Apparently, you don't drink casually on weeknights but then Friday/Saturday it's literally (I think they have a term for it) "drink until you shit yourself" time?
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Thanks for the reply.
I suppose what I'm most interested in in global drinking cultures is what behaviors besides the drinking itself are permissible, and what style of drinking is most common versus most shunned. In Japan, for example, salarymen going crazy fairly regularly, falling asleep in public places etc. is completely ok. Although I've never been, I would surmise that breaking out a beer at work, however, might be a pretty big transgression.
In the part of the U.S. I'm most familiar with, there are smaller signals. My dad will never drink beer out of a bottle, he always wants to pour it in a glass. He will, however, drink a can of beer without a second thought. There's a funny scene early in the book Knockemstiff where an obvious raging alcoholic talks about how once you start drinking from the bottle, you're a real "wino," so he never drinks directly from the bottle...he then proceeds to take the glass ash trash out of his car (ashtrays in cars were glass way back when) and drink from that at a drive in movie.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Something to be aware of is that as much as we are in an AI hype cycle for new products, we're also in an AI-safety charlatanism hype cycle. In exploring organizations like the Future of Life Institute, I've come across links and associations to non-profits and other advocacy groups, at least in the U.S., that have legislative goals in regards to AI. Most of the goals sound plausibly good; "let's prevent the creation of the paperclip machine that destroys earth." Some are obvious DEI backdoors (the key term to look for here is "algorithmic bias"). Even that's fine as it's just existing culture war conflict.
What bothers me is the number of people in these organizations that have absolutely zero technical background or capability. I mean literally none - they've never even dabbled with some basic python libraries that make training and running a model a 3 line endeavor. They never took anything beyond single variable calculus. They have zero stat and probability background and so fall for BASIC statistical fallacies over and over again. Even beyond the hard math and comp sci subjects, a lot haven't taken the time to investigate what I think are the two philosophical domains most important to curret LMMs and "baby" AIs; epistemology and linguistics.
Previously, I would chuckle and think, "sure! make your policy recommendations. You have no idea what you're talking about anyway." What I'm seeing now, however, is a lot of a desire to build a bureaucracy of "experts" to endorse politically pre-approved measures. This is the CDC during COVID.
I don't want to send the message that only hardcore ML engineers can have opinions on AI. Most of my career has been spent working with engineers, so I know that they are no less victim to poor / motivated / emotional reasoning than any other demographic and they often have trouble explaining the concepts they are demonstrated experts in.
The only solid cautionary advice I think I can offer in this case is to be suspicious of any group which presents a too-pure benevolent mission (i.e. "our mission is to make the world a better place for everyone always and forever), is alarmist in their doom-saying ("we have to act NOW!"), yet recommends unspecific remedies ("we need to develop mechanisms of ensuring collaboration and the integration of multiple viewpoints ... for safety ... and, like, follow the science).
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
That is correct. And the really marquee ones have qualified folks (as far as I can tell).
I'm talking about groups that are decidedly NOT marquee. They tend to be run by mid-range career academics, politico types (former staffers, lobbyists, advocacy people), and just straight up charlatans (people who have "serial entrepreneur" in their bio but no company history).
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
I think this is a very good point. Imagine a defense lawyer who's opening statement to the jury is "You know what, my client did it! hahah...jk, ok, let's get going." I feel that would be close to an instant mistrial and maybe action by the state bar association.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
(Note: I read through this entire thread and discovered, along with everyone else, that the OP comment is at least low effort and maybe-probably ChatGPT or Norwegian copypasta. Cool. Still, @2rafa
s thoughtful response motivated my response)
Ulterior motive hobby-ing and socializing in order to date is a very bad idea. As @RenOS states in reply, if you're the guy doing the thing (hobby / career / social event) just to hit on women, you get a reputation as the dude who's just there to hit on women. Because you are and you have sort of concealed that fact. I would argue that if you do this in any way that's even slightly related to your profession, say by joining a "Young Professionals in Old Timey Dirigible Engineering," you're courting disaster. The lines between personal and professional spheres for conduct are very, very blurred (I'd argue this is probably a bad thing, but that's for a different thread and a higher effort post).
The solution to this is to be good at flirting. In fact, that's always been the solution. Flirting is a specific means of communication that lets both parties covertly communicate interest while allowing for exit points constantly without anyone getting too hurt. These days, really, really subtle flirting with slow escalation and a lot of indirection at the outset appears, to me, to be the default. I think this is a symptom of overall social regression due to the rise of emotional hypersensitivity, and, frankly, just a little bit of broad level social skill retardation due to social media. It amazes me how many "conversations" these days are just round-the-table sequences of references to memes and YouTube videos.
Therefore, I see a lot of things in my social group's dating rituals nowadays (late 20s early 30s) that reminds me of what early High School was like. People do track likes on social media as indications of romantic intent. People do have multiple group-of-friends outings where two interested parties are specifically there to be near each other before those two parties go on a one-on-one date. In fact, there are even literal practice dates where one party will ask the other if they want to do coffee / movie but in such a fashion that there's no possibility of it escalating whatsoever. I remember a ritual in High School where you would ask your True Love if they wanted to sit outside in the courtyard to eat lunch together and that this was absolutely necessary before an outside-of-school-in-real-life date.
The elevated risk with current flirting, however, is that incompetence is punished nearly as harshly as the clandestine operation of hobby-ing to date. If you're socially less than replacement level (that's a baseball term, look it up), and go off half-cocked (yes, I'm having a little bit of fun now) and ask someone on a date too early in this process, or announce romantic intent with even a pretty basic - but direct - compliment, you could risk getting the creeper label. The modulators here are 1) how attractive you are 2) existing social standing 3) communication awkwardness. This is where you see a lot of angry TRP'ers and blackpillers raging "WhY caNt womenz take ComPLiments?" Well, if you're so incapable of recognizing social context, cues, and current rituals, your "compliment" is seen as a random mad raving by a whirling free radical that's too dangerous to be engaged with. When the man in three layers of sweatshirts in two layers of urine cologne on the subway salutes me and says "Morning, General!" on my commute, I don't feel flattered.
Well, how does a fellow with underdeveloped social skills go about improving? The answer is to talk to everyone about boring shit all of the time. Master small-talk. "But small talk is bullshit! I want to get into deep conversations! And isn't that also what a mate wants?" Sure, eventually. But being able to make small-talk that isn't cliche ("crazy weather we're having"), or boring, or just you free-associating demonstrates a similar kind of subtle communication very much like flirting.
If you can get a stranger, in 60 seconds, to tell them something about themselves (basic, nothing deep), laugh at an observation, and then ask you a question, you've just made a stranger begin to trust you (in the telling of the something), enjoy being around you (laugh), and take a reciprocate interest in you (the question). And, remembering that being sneaky is bad, you're doing this in a context where you don't already want to have sex with the stranger (or, you preemptively discard that outcome. Sometimes the Barista is cute, but you're not really trying to make it happen).
But, Uncle Toll Booth does kind of think all of this is bullshit. I think traditions had it right. A big part of relationship formation in the West before World War 2 was a clear demarcation between socializing and courting. Sticking with the High School image, the entire point of specific dances throughout the year was do create an unambiguous way for one party to announce interest to another (interestingly, these went "both ways" very earlier ... my Grandfather told me fond stories about his Sadie Hawkins dances where "the girls could do the pickin'" -- you take that however you like, dear reader). These dances were also the monkey-see-monkey do practices for adult courting. An invitation to dinner and/or entertainment was unambiguous as a symbol of interest. A polite decline from the offeree was respected.
[I'm going to skip the part on why / how this changed because I'm already way off topic and want to bring this ramblin wreck home]
I think a massive cause of mutual frustration in heterosexual western dating today is hyperabundant ambiguity. Friends-to-lovers, officemates-to-lovers, hobbying-to-lovers, means that a lot of young women, upon meeting a guy who is perfectly nice to them, think "wait ... is he trying to fuck me?" Not does he want to (which even Grandma had to deal with) but "is he already trying to, but won't be clear about it." Or, if he is clear about it, it's so crass, direct, and awkward that it's not just a turnoff, but, potentially, a cause for mild alarm.
[Self-critique: This post got away from me a little. I hope the Mottizens can salvage some value from the wreck]
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
One of my casual past time is reading the biographies of famous / wealthy traders and hedge funders. The two major themes I've discovered are first, a lot of these guys (and, as of now, it's only men) are entrepreneurs, meaning that they did something fundamentally different than anyone else. Second is that, failing actual entrepreneurship, they took a massive contrarian position, went all in, and it paid off. You could call the latter group "gamblers" but I don't think that's fair. Warren Buffett - he of the "kindly old man who likes coke" public image - has explicitly said that when you are really convinced of an idea, you should go all in and even borrow money.
It's important to remember that Soros originally wanted to be a philosopher and actually studied under Karl Popper in England. He used a lot of Popper inspired thinking on falsification and applied it to the market. Now, I should point out that this is almost always a stupid idea - trying to transplant an integrated way of thinking from one wholly independent domain to another. But, unfortunately, it sometimes days work incredibly well. Soros' MegaTrade was when he "Broke the Bank of England" in what is now seen as a blindingly obvious opportunity. The Bank of England publicly announced they would buoy the currency vis-a-vis the Deutschmark. What do you do when a sovereign entity announced unlimited support for an asset? You short the shit out of it. That's what Old George did and made about one billion dollars in single day.
I'd argue that, like Buffett, the rest of Soros' success largely came from the fact that he was seen as successful. In public markets, this is especially potent. The Buffett Bounce is a real thing. Also, when you have that much (i.e. billion(s)) of float capital, you have options that other players don't. People don't understand that a "normal" hedge fund cannot simply hold capital out of the market. In a lot of cases, if they don't deploy their capital within a certain timeframe, LPs can take legal action. Soros, Buffet, and a couple others can spend a lot of time hanging out on the sidelines and then bet on the game when its 42-0 in the 4th with 10 seconds left.
On Soros' politics - this is just his billionaire's fantasy. Some rich dudes buy an NFL team because they always wanted to play ball but we're 5'8 and 160 lbs. Soros wanted to be this great philo-political mind, but wasn't, and is now investing in all of the political things! to, in my opinion, brute force his way into that role.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
I agree with your final point about the evolution of human relations. People do own their own labor and time to a degree never before possible.
However, @FiveHourMarathon has a point I don't think you can totally dismiss as "relativistic nonsense." Take an example that hasn't fundamentally changed in at least 100 - 150 ears; the Military.
A 2nd Lieutenant is typically between 22 and 25. A Platoon Sergeant (typically somewhere between E-5 to E-7 depending on factors and how fucked up the enlistment cycle has been) is within just a few years of age of that 2nd LT .... probably late 20s.
On paper, the 2nd LT is utterly superior in everyway to the Platoon Sergeant. Short of physical violence, the 2nd LT has dictatorial control. In real life, the platoon sergeant has about a decade of experience (and, for this generaiton, a lot of that in combat if its a combat arms MOS). They know then ins and outs of the organization, the duty station, the personalities up and down the command. If the 2nd LT does not strike a balance of experience deference to the Plt Sergeant while not looking weak in front of the men, he's going to have a bad time. A lot of self-conscious but very gung ho 2nd LTs will totally blow off the subtle suggestions of Plt Sergeants ... and learn some hard lessons about leadership the hard way.
The point is, even in a situation where, yes, you have close to absolute superiority in every way over a "subordiante" (fun fact the etymological root of Sergeant is Servant) if you're going to have a long term or just a non-transactional relationship with that person, you have to invest in the relationship somehow.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Quality post. I don't have any factual or analytical quarrels, just a different point of view based on experienced-influenced shifts in value prioritization.
I once had a 90 minute each way commute for about a year. That's 3 hours in the car Monday to Friday. I hated it. Traffic is a stress machine; you have to be vigilant constantly in what is a boring situation with high stakes (even a fender bender has long term impact on your insurance premiums, what if the other guy doesn't have insurance, wear and tear on your car compounds, etc.) Especially on the drive home, I would get back feeling far more drained than I anticipated and this would sap my energy and motivation to do much more than sloppily prepare a Bro Dude dinner and veg out in front of the T.V.
For most of my career after that (even pre-COVID) I had either sub 30-minute public transit commutes, or a healthy mix of WFH mixed with 1 - 2 times weekly sub-30 minute driving commutes.
Without an ounce of doubt, the public transit experience was worse than every other mode including 3 hours daily. This is because it makes you tired and weary of people.
In any major American urban city with public transit, for going on close to a decade, daily riders are confronted with antisocial behaviors ranging from the mild yet still inexplicably annoying (those folks who play music on speaker instead of using headphones) to the low level criminal (open drug use or exchange ... panhandling) to the worrisome (erratic enough behavior that you must become vigilant in anticipation of potential threat) to the just .... disheartening (fare evasion by someone who obviously could pay it but understands "hey, no one is going to stop me" is now a policy in many cities). The compounding effect is that you have a constant availability bias. I can remind myself all I want about bad mental models and cognitive biases, but if I saw another homeless dude taking a shit on the platfrom this morning, I'm probably tipping a little lighter, I'm probably scoffing a little harder at a "therapy instead of jail" article in the Atlantic.
The "public space" is only public insofar as there's an understood order and general preservation of the space by the public. Otherwise ... it's a No Man's Land with a random free-ride-machine punching through it. There has to be some sort of collective respect and even pride in the thing itself. Public transit should be more than a competitor to private cars, more than a utilitarian cost-per-mile exercise. A ride should be considered part of the experience of that locale, that city, that city's culture. But ... if the current lowest comment denominator of that city's culture is open air drug market / improvisational lavatory / au-plain-aire insane asylum / literal free rider problem Illustrated ... then that public space and that public good (the transit system) is no longer what I would call capital P Public. It's a state run shitty service through Thomas Hobbes' human ant farm.
I'll let the wonderful Mottizens debate specific policy, but I'll die on the hill of this larger point - public spaces without genuine daily public support (in the form of prosocial behavior) and an understood order of things become lawless lands. It is the job of Government to reasonably encourage the prosocial behaviors (posters and the like) ... and decisively enforce actual law breaking. I do not understand how any public servant, especially elected ones, can look at fare evasion and go "oh well. It's not like they're killing anyone!" No, I suppose they aren't stabbing Cash App cofounders to death (oh wait .... sorry, too soon?). The suicide of citizen cohesion is done in slow motion and one cut at a time.
Pedantic answer: Only a minority of American's have bachelors so, by default, a four year not-online bachelors degree is highly educated. However, I AM the asshole for saying that so ...
Anecedotally ... there's a trend of women doing an immediate masters in education / social something something right after undergrad, mostly as a way to continue to delay adulthood. They stack this again with a delay into adulthood by teaching and then, yes you are 100% right, plop into adulthood by getting married. I see it as a way to save professional / feminist face (I have a masters degree and was an educator!) while covertly pursuing a more traditional family arrangement that they may have wanted all along.
Regarding Government-As-Parent .... the antecedent for Teachers-As-Parents was welfare. It's tricky. I'm not a crypto-libertarian-social-darwinist that says let single mothers fend for themselves ... but the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.
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