cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
Where is the American Dream?
There has always been a dream of wealth and fortune in America. Drawing immigrants and inspiring the population. A sense that you can start from nothing or very little and pull yourself up through hard work, a bit of smarts, and a bit of luck. But I find myself a little unsure of how do this lately.
Learn to code
A decade ago there was a refrain among the elite "learn to code". That was how the coal miners in West Virginia would replace their dirty global warming causing jobs with something less harmful for the environment.
I know how to code. I've been coding for more than a decade. I'm out of a job and unlike in previous years I'm not being assaulted by job offers on LinkedIn every day.
The talk I'm hearing (and believing) around twitter and silicon valley is that AI is replacing coders. Or at least that is enough of a perception that hiring is down.
I'm at least a senior web developer, but for the new kids coming out of college... I don't know. I used to know guys a few years younger than me asking for help finding a job out of college and I'd do a resume tune-up and send it back to them and they'd tell me thanks but they managed to get a job already.
Nowadays I don't even think telling people to go into coding is a good idea.
Heal the sick
There does seem to be a consistent growth industry in medicine. I'm certain this is true. However I feel this is a bad omen.
Medicine has this feel to me like it is a consumption industry. The typically unhealthy are often old people that aren't really producing lots of goods and services anymore. It's savings that they are using to prolong their life.
Maybe if all the medical spending was on life extension I'd feel this was a good use of money.
But forget about how I feel about the industry. Is this any place to get rich as part of the American dream? If you enjoy terrible hours, lots of bureaucratic red tape, and years of mandatory training then it's all for you. It's certainly not available as a quick career pivot.
Become a social media star
Another avenue of wealth open to seemingly everyone is to go on social media and become an internet sensation. Sell advertising and related products.
Im honestly not sure if this is a realistic avenue these days or not. I do enjoy quite a few niche media things. They seemingly make a living even if they aren't wealthy.
The downsides seem numerous.
- Your business is beholden to the social media sites you live on.
- You may end up with fame, but without the traditional trappings of fame that would protect you.
- You are very connected with customers and consumers who are very accustomed to getting exactly what they want. It's a brutal set of obligations.
Where do I go make money?
Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
My mom was able to give me good advice a decade and a half ago to go into coding. It worked out well for a while.
Now I'm in a bind of figuring out what to do next, and what paths to lead my kids down for good career paths.
The AI-lephant in the room
LLMs certainly change things. I'm sorta operating on an assumption that language based things will be solved and done for. If it involves typing up or reading and comprehending a thing that seems like something current AIs can generally do better than 95% of people.
I'm assuming other distinct areas will not be solved for. Not because I think they are unsolvable, but just planning becomes meaningless at a certain point. But they also don't seem currently solved.
cjet79
28d ago
I've been listening to a Tim Dillon (a standup comedian) for a lot of my political news. He called it a while back that Musk and Vivek were going to be fall guys.
The strategy that makes sense to me, and I think the one they've talked about before is to break down the government for the first part of the administration and then build it back up in the form they want for the second part. The building up will be easier if done by someone with a clean record. Someone seen as a voice of reason and stability.
cjet79
29d ago
The story is a bit of an odd duckling. It feels closer to cozy western fantasy than most cultivation. The main character is an old man, and generally concerned with his extended family/ descendants. The sect he joins is good. It's different from many cultivation stories that have selfish jerk MCs playing in a world of only terrible people. Generally if you are looking to avoid dysfunctional families I'd agree that avoiding all cultivation novels is smart. But just consider this something that might fit your preferences that otherwise would get totally filtered out from your searches.
cjet79
1mo ago
Sublight Drive is a Star wars fan fiction of the clone wars. Main character is competent and generally so is everyone else in the story. The only times there is anything approaching incompetence is when someone is outside their area of expertise.
cjet79
1mo ago
And I naively though children's health and an international pandemic would supersede politics due to the importance of getting them correct. But now I don't know what politics has touched and what it hasn't.
cjet79
1mo ago
From your conversation below. There is a difference between common sense medicine, and common sense applied to medicine. I am more talking about using common sense medicine. Things a practicing family doctor might take for granted after 30 years.
One of those common sense things is that a major medical intervention requires a set of good justifications:
- Life of the patient is in danger, or severe quality of life impairment.
- The efficacy of the treatment is proven to a set of standards.
- The side effects are known, disclosed, and understood by the adult patient or the patients' medical guardian.
There is a lot of elaboration and nuance for those points. But it feels like they were repeatedly violated for political reasons during the last decade. And it has drastically lowered my trust of medical authorities.
cjet79
1mo ago
Yeah all the steroids abuse by teen athletes seems like a natural experiment to look at. I'm not even sure steroids are as impactful as hormone therapy, but no one thinks steroids for kid athletes was good idea. The "medical" justification for both is kinda the same too, self hostage taking. "I'll be sad and kill myself if you don't let me take these drugs."
cjet79
1mo ago
It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.
Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.
Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.
Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".
I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.
cjet79
1mo ago
This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.
There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.
The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.
cjet79
1mo ago
You'll definitely love sublight drive. A bunch of parts in the first book go into explaining some of these ship differences that appear.
The separatists preference for missiles is because they don't have access to some of the high quality gas needed for better blaster weapons.
Some of the ships are specifically adapted from private usages which gives them unique advantages and disadvantages, like e-warfare capabilities, or badly armored locations.
Mostly neither side is on a war footing for production when the clone wars start, so there is a sense early on of throwing ships meant for fighting pirates against full on navies, and then later in the series those same ships are far less effective because manufacturing and fleet doctrine has caught up. But ultimately the core worlds have far more production capabilities so it feels a bit like the American Civil war where the north had advantages in manufacturing and manpower, and the south had advantages in experience.
cjet79
1mo ago
Just slow role the 2000 pages and you'll hit the finish line by the time the last chapter comes out in a week. Or if your reading speed is not an excessive 300 pages a day then don't worry.
cjet79
1mo ago
There are different degrees with different levels of capital formation vs signalling.
Even with technical degrees that seem very useful my experience and the experience of those I know is that half of it is useful to someone but 80-95% is still mostly useless to any individual because those careers require specialization.
The student loan program is mostly indiscriminate, and graduate and doctorate degrees are often funded in other ways.
cjet79
1mo ago
That is a really cool post, thanks for sharing.
Can't say that this fanfiction totally follows along. There is something weird going on with the droids in the FF, buts it's never full elaborated on, and we are starting to get epilogues, so I assume it won't be clarified.
cjet79
1mo ago
Sublight drive is a Star wars fan fiction. I started reading this based on a recommendation from either here or /r/rational. If it was here, thank you to whomever recommended it. Very enjoyable.
A person from earth is reincarnated in the star wars universe, and they are a ship captain with the separatists during the clone wars. The mc has some basic knowledge of star wars.
There is no boring lead up. It jumps right into the space opera action.
The characters are smart and facing very tough problems. But they are also not all perfectly intelligent. For example Jedi generals are often skilled in the force and have advantages that they use well, but they can often be outsmarted by other characters in fleet battles.
cjet79
1mo ago
Sheepskin effects.
It's the finding that someone with 3.9 years of college education and no degree earns significantly less than someone with 4 years and a degree.
You don't have to ask anything of business. Just stop subsidizing a signalling game.
It's a bit like handing out stools at a concert so people can see over the crowd better. It's self defeating.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think I like what @SSCReader said better.
And no I can't make any promises on moderation because someone will be obnoxious with it. There is a gradient from bad to good. Fed posting, and specific calls for violence are very much on the bad side. Trying to engage with people you disagree with, or at least targeting ideas rather than individuals is on the good side.
There are ways to make the bad side acceptable, I'm sure there is even a quality contribution that did it at some point. And vice versa there are ways to make the good side a bannable offense.
cjet79
1mo ago
What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
cjet79
1mo ago
Spelling out specific plans for violence puts us in a shit spot. It's very unlikely any of you carry out such plans, but if you were to and had posted about them what happens to the mods or other forum goers afterwards? Will victims sue us for not reporting it to the police?
Our solution is to not be put in the spot. Any expressions of preferences for violence puts us in this bind.
Expressing disgust towards people falls afoul of other rules like boo out group.
The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".
"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."
cjet79
1mo ago
Pick out any decent books they haven't already destroyed, herd the board inside, bar the door, and torch the place.
I believe this is known as fed-posting.
leftist brain parasites
This isn't good for being boo out group.
You have been on thin ice. Normally I'd just make this a warning, but this needs to stop. One week ban.
cjet79
1mo ago
Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.
cjet79
1mo ago
If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.
A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.
With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.
cjet79
1mo ago
There are often problems that are made worse with more money.
There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.
- Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
- Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
- Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.
I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.
I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.
cjet79
1mo ago
Trump voter and generally disappointed, especially with tariffs. It's not that any of his bad economic policies are a surprise. Its a bit of a toss up of whether he is worse than the alternative. The Democrats tend to have lots of dumb but relatively small impact bad economic policies. Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.
This was one of the paragraphs I almost added in the initial thing. Tradesman is sort of an option. It's not as bad as coffee barista, but breaking six figure incomes seems pretty difficult.
I'm not quite willing to go bug my neighbor across the street about how much he makes in his plumbing business. But he is living in the same neighborhood as us, having bought his house thirty years ago. His land use lawyer brother is definitely richer.
It feels like tradesman is a sort of compromise where we say "no! You don't have to be poor in America if you try hard. It's just we are gonna gate off the middle class." It's a bit of a fuck you. Even Mike Rowe who laudes this kind of work made his money in entertainment.
The US is still great and still the richest. But it also leads the way. Are all nations headed towards this kind of stagnation? We can't quite figure out what to do with everyone. Even skilled workers are likely to get left in the cracks.
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