Mottizen
1mo ago
I think you're wildly oversimplifying the 'simply take over a business from a retiring boomer' thing. I used to work for one of those, and whilst it was sold with a fairly reliable source of income (Pre-Apple Store Apple importer who still had a license to do repairs on Apple hardware that the Apple Store refused to due to being a generation or two out of date). The seller refused to actually retire and kept servicing his best clients directly (who were largely also superboomers who'd had him as their 'computer guy' since 1980 and didn't want to get computers from anybody else), plus the actual business model itself was really coasting on inertia after being a good idea 30 years ago. You can't really steal the customers here since they're not price-sensitive, they just want to do their very intermittent tech purchasing from the guy who they got their first handshake from 30 years ago.
A lot of these incredibly profitable small businesses are coasting on servicing fellow boomers and based on the operator's relationship network.
Autism's a weird subject since the diagnosis gets thrown around super liberally for any sort of 'does not play nice with others' psychological diagnosis, and it's such a wide spectrum.
My mom used to work at a private school dedicated to let's say 5th-10th percentile intelligences. Not the absolute lowest rung, but the one above it. The vast majority of her students had diagnoses for Autism (along with whatever myriad difficulties they had) and were essentially incapable of functioning above a 4th-grade level. When that bloc is contributing to the statistics, it's very hard to be successful on the aggregate. Without going into the amount of criminals or ne'er-do-wells hit the psychological diagnosis arena and get 7 different things assigned, one of which is invariably ASD. These people are already on an atrocious course and further drag down averages. It is my belief that if diagnosis was a firmer line and was universal, that the gap would be a lot smaller.
The most 'successful'/able-to-cope Autistics are also unlikely to ever pick up a formal diagnosis, especially if they're presently older than mid thirties. I'm diagnosed with what was Aspergers. My dad is a very successful engineer who is 99% to also get diagnosed (and indeed self-diagnosed after I received the diagnosis) if he ever had occasion to pursue it, but as he's now in his mid 70s, retired and in no need of psychological assistance he's unlikely to ever get his autism certificate.
I feel like you are picturing the 'average autistic person' as a FANG developer who struggles with dating/social contact but is otherwise able to get some benefits out of the quirk in their brain chemistry. This is a person who's like 85th percentile.
Mottizen
23d ago
NCAA is no longer the default pathway to the NBA with overseas professional leagues, G-League and 1-and-done college stints all becoming more prevalent in the last 5 years. Plus the internationalization of Basketball means there's way more overseas talents.
It's hard to cultivate star power in College Basketball as a consequence, and in the meantime a lot of the Blue Blood programs are struggling which increases volatility and decreases interest.
Mottizen
27d ago
Fairly high up in some interaction of gambling/crypto. It's not socially gainful but it is fairly lucrative.
Mottizen
1mo ago
Housing Prices in most affluent Western countries have combined with the deterioration of the sexual marketplace and decline of employer-employee relations to cause this, though. I'd love it if my lifepath was getting an okay sinecure somewhere here, making 75th percentile wage for my country and buying a free-standing house and get some kids going.
Instead in order to achieve the unfathomable wealth required to buy a free-standing 3bedroom house somewhere within an hour's drive of my CBD I've had to do pretty well in the startup lottery and pick a fairly disreputable industry on top of that. The system no longer facilitates the normal path.
Mottizen
23d ago
It's funny the WNBA can't capitalize on WNCAA interest when the latter is a feeder to the former (admittedly a lot of charismatic WNCAA players will go from being superstars in that arena to middling in the pro leagues, but still)
I've been looking at moving to Malaysia (albeit my partner is from there and has a big, pretty well-off Malaysian Chinese family which makes the decision considerably easier) with my newborn, sooner or later.
- Cheap (About a third COL of Australia). Can buy a reasonable longterm family home in the gated community in a upper middle class suburb my partner's family lives in for $300-350k AUD (About $200k USD)
- 90% Developed. There's stuff you'll miss from the West but if you pick one of the outlying spots around Kuala Lumpur or Georgetown you're getting the vast majority of creature comforts and cheap as hell.
- English reasonably strong
- Education system strong if in Malaysian Chinese area
- Childcare very cheap due to proximity to the rest of SEA. Foreign maid is about $10-15k per annum AUD.
- Going from 0 cousins for my child in Australia due to my only child status to about 40 within 20 minutes in Malaysia.
- Nice and central for Asian tourism (also only 8 hours back to Australia for occasional trips in my case)
Honestly in my opinion technology's reached a point where there's just not a huge dropoff in QOL/development between a city in a country with a first tier Western GDP per capita and one that's above $15k per capita or so.
Mottizen
21d ago
Yes but when you are a feudal peasant being ground into dirt in feudalism in 1915 and you have an untested idea, I can see why you'd take the leap.
Mottizen
21d ago
Which language to learn in some countries is a bit of a question. In my personal situation I'd be a lot better served improving my Mandarin than my Malay, since despite Malaysia's diversity it's in kind of an odd 'everybody lives in their little bubbles and deeply distrusts the other ethnics' kinda way.
Mottizen
27d ago
The higher fertility rate subpopulation thing does provide a chance of running out of productive workers, though. One of the killer hacks of avoiding the fertility decline associated with being a productive member of industrial civilization is to just call the bluff of the other members when it comes to willingness to let you starve.
Mottizen
20d ago
Yeah. I'd be looking about an hour out of KL where my partner's family is from, but I agree with this. Personally being located in Australia normally the distance to USA is something I just take as a given about life, and Malaysia actually improves most of my woes in terms of getting to Europe/USA becomes 15 hours instead of 24 hours.
Their own colorful ethnic issues seem to suppress issues with white foreigners, plus not really being a tourism defined as other similar countries.
Mottizen
21d ago
Women's Tennis benefits from being a bit more volatile and a bit less serve-driven than the Men's game.
Mottizen
3mo ago
USA is hardly a pure ethnostate of the most productive demographics. Cut 2 or 3 geographic regions or 2 or 3 ethnicities and it'd be similarly buoyed.
Mottizen
3mo ago
The problem I have in the modern era is that the 65~ retirement age is being preserved for the boomers as a legacy of an age where you worked with your hands and died 5-10 years after retiring. Without generating anywhere near the amount of expense and medical drama that somebody in the last few years can and will these days.
Mottizen
1mo ago
In my experience sometimes it's literally just Frank.
I used to work for one of these small businesses were the owner-operator was prettymuch Mr Krabs for Spongebob. Cartoonishly money grubbing towards customers, most of whom he'd known for decades at this point as their 'Computer Guy'. Towards the end the business was only really viable since he'd put about 2-3x the margin on getting tech for fellow boomers as they'd get from going to an Apple Store direct or the local Walmart equivalent. It wasn't quality, price or friendliness it was literally just 'Frank is my computer guy and he is who I buy computers from' inertia.
Mottizen
1mo ago
Untangling 'Frank's Automotive has good will' from 'Frank Frankerton who runs Frank's Automotive and has for the last 30 years has good will' is the hard part, though.
Mottizen
2mo ago
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do. Also Satoshi actually moving his Bitcoins would cause massive reverberations throughout the Crypto economy so it isn't really just a matter of 'I am Satoshi, here is proof, I have 2 million Bitcoins give me a loan'.
It's like if you were in a gold-based economy and half of the Gold had been used to create the tomb of King Satoshi II, and there would be a Jihad upon anybody who actually touched said gold. Yes, King Satoshi II's heir would be wealthy in the sense of owning that gold, but actually moving it would be impractical.
Mottizen
2mo ago
Betting markets are keen on Michelle to jump in there, but that seems especially insane to me.
Mottizen
1mo ago
I'm sure that a certain chunk of these businesses are free money, some are okay returns on capital and some are toxic cesspools that the original owner is exiting for a good reason.
Mottizen
2mo ago
Exactly. That's essentially the environment my mom worked at (albeit essentially purely aimed at the bottom 10% of your cohort), and a positive outcome of a 12 year education at that school was 'capable of holding a shelf stacking job or consistently contributing on government subsidized work for the lesser-abled and moderate sociability'.
Mottizen
3mo ago
I can sort of see the argument in the sense of 'it is more likely that the Asian diaspora will take over in the next few decades than it is that African descendants will cause an issue'. However, most people are concerned more about the stability of their day-to-day existence. BAME immigration might not imperil the 'macro' as much, but has more everyday living consequences in terms of violent crime and people subsisting on handouts.
I'm very newly a father. My daughter is 3 days old. I'm turning 30 this year, and the general reaction I got from talking to my friends & strangers was very 'wow that's young to be doing it' or 'how can you afford this'. I was the youngest person in my highschool scholarship class in a good upper middle class suburb by about a year, 30 people of whom most have gone on to be Doctors, Dentists, Developers and other Desirable roles. I'm the only to have reproduced, and at this rate I'm the only one who even looks particularly close to it. My university cohort's fairly similar, with similar professional attainment.
The big themes I noticed when talking to people about why they haven't taken the leap are generally some combination of not owning housing, being stuck in the dating app treadmill, protecting their free lifestyles to do 'cool, spontaneous things' and versions of 'my potential children will inherit the apocalypse'
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