functor
23d ago
A lot better than a regular call center job but not amazingly well. A lot of 27 year old business majors working 60 hours a week and making 50% more than their class mates doing telemarketing. Telemarketers do really matter. A good salesmen can bring in millions to the firm. Convincing a dentist to move his pension to their fund can generate tens of thousands in revenue over the course of decades. A small difference in conversion rate can have a major impact on the firm's performance. The top people were well paid.
functor
23d ago
Granted, my career in finance was short, and I only worked in tech, but in my experience most finance was underwhelming.
There were a lot of people who more or less had a call center job. Some were doing telemarketing, trying to sell pension-investments. Others were calling people, trying to get them to sign a form promising that they weren't using their pension money to fund ISIS. There was no point to the latter job except ticking a box for the regulators. Lots of people had jobs where their job was to open piles of PDFs, find a key number and insert it into an excel spreadsheet.
With that said, some developers and traders were truly impressive and had almost super human abilities. The issue is that the company was an inverted pyramid. A few people kept the show going, while the majority were support staff. The people who actually did the core work were remarkable people whose jobs won't be automated until we have AGI. The majority were just doing tedious office work in a toxic work environment.
The one thing that keeps demand up for junior employees is that regulation increases the demand for staff. There are fewer and fewer doers and more and more people who have to ensure that the clients aren't on some list of Russian oligarchs or that have to create graphs of carbon emissions in the investment portfolio.
functor
26d ago
If they had dropped more napalm on Iraq, it would have ended like Vietnam. The Soviets killed 10% of Afghanistan's population and did worse than the US. France put two million Algerians in prison camps in the 50s. Turning Iraq into a giant prison wouldn't be sustainable. There are 44.5 million Iraqis. Maintaining a police state for a population that large would be absurdly expensive and have no point. There wouldn't be an actual endgame as the regime would get toppled as soon as the vast police presence was pulled back.
It is a win in a multitude of ways:
Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.
It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.
Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.
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