This whole thing is a nothingburger.
hope so!
To me, it seems wild to look at this and not want to shut all eonomic immigration down hard, (H1-Bs, etc).
Economics is often not intuitive, and this is not likely to actually help the situation.
It's pat to say this. But that isn't going to change the fact the CS grad working as a waiter can literally count the CS H1-Bs being brought in, and the CS foreign exchange students getting those jobs he isn't.
"No, no, no, this is all good for the economy" doesn't seem like it can hold if native americans can't get jobs.
Sure, what I'm saying is that this isn't itself a 'political constituency'- we aren't seeing protests, or advocacy groups that are explicitly around jobs for the young. There's no "Occupy Wallstreet", Tea party, or anything else. Rather, it's fractured and absorbed into the two other party's existing platforms - socialism on the left, and economic and immigration protectionism on the right.
On the left, this concern is subordinate to general immigration welfare, on the right it was kind of forefront, but has been backseated to the current... whatever.
Snap (Chat) stock rises on AI motivated layoff
Now, I am surprised that Snap even still exists, and would assume that financial pressures would have forced down layoffs anyway. The article says about 1000 people are affected, which implies they have over 6000 employees. Wild.
But regardless, whether AI is an accelerant (I can't see how it's not) or a convenient excuse, we are going to continue seeing tech downsizing and stock jumping, encouraging more of it.
Meanwhile 43% of US grads are underemployed.
I am not going to bank on any hard predictions, I am not a great forecaster. But it does seem like things have already unravelled much more than the PMC and neoliberal middle class want to admit.
We will continue to have more Mandamis and more Trumps gaining popularity as alternatives to the stuck middle that seems to be held hostage. As long as keeping housing market, medicare, and 401ks proppped up for the older middle class are the primary concern, we're building pressure to the system.
To me, it seems wild to look at this and not want to shut all eonomic immigration down hard, (H1-Bs, etc). Yet somehow, the economic disenfranchisement hasn't quite reached that fever pitch. I am surprised (again I'm not a good predictor) that such an economically disenfranchised college graduate population (if that 43% is accurate) haven't solidified into any kind of a political movement yet. I can still understand (while disagreeing with) wanting to keep cheap laborers here to work manual labor. But the writing appears to be on the wall about the white collar squeeze that's already here.
Left unaddressed, I'm sure we'll get more Mandami's and socialism, with a leftish solution that is more about socialist subsidizing while promising immigrants can have it too; but we are also seeing massive fraud being uncovered in California, and Mandami claiming NYC is worse than broke; if both those fall apart, it will certainly undermine 'welfare' + immigration based solutions; and it seems like we will also have to get realistic economic opportunity protectionism as a major political block as well. But what do I know
My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related,
This is very sad because this was me. Eagle Scout, 1460, varsity athlete, interested in software development, graduated in the aughts.
I had the opposite problem: The future was so open wide, that I took gambles on more creative pursuits than b-lining a traditional software job, where I could have made much more money more quickly. Now in my late 30s, with a young family, I feel the combined constant breath of the treadmill trying to keep up and catch up, while simultaneously worrying about what the heck my children will do.
The best I can do, is to pretend it's not here. Living vicariously as a parent is, in many, ways sweeter than childhood itself,; you get to be a gardener as well as enjoying the fruits of their joys. My parents got to show us a wide open world, and tell us that we could be anything we wanted, be excited to see us reach further than them, on their own shoulders...
I, instead, have to build a careful facade and guard the edges. Not tell my kids that I have no idea if they'll get to be anything at all, that I have no clue what their future will look like, while panicking that it won't all fall down before I've given them a rich childhood.
I am, of course, very very lucky in that I get to still be where I am with a family and still living in the modal 'good life'. Much better being here worried about it ending, than being on the other side worried you'll never get a chance.
It really does seem like the Boomers ended up being History's main characters; the generation born at the absolute peak.
Anyone else get annoyed (or at least roll your eyes), when someone says they "built" X with AI? It comes off to me as stolen credit, and ironically highlights (for me) the diminishing human input in the value chain.
For context, I am referring specifically to work-related scenarios, where X is not some output of design and engineering, but actually the result of a few prompts. In the past few weeks, the overwhelming majority of the people I work with seem to have completely and openly outsourced their jobs to Claude.
While I've been using ChatGPT since it first came out to help out with work (from research, to QA, to drafting documents and communications, etc), I've always been very careful to keep it's input in any final product discrete. Those who have left their AI outsourcing lazy and obvious (including tech leaders and C levels who should know better) like leaving em dashes and AI fluff in emails have previously been quietly mocked for their 'boomerish' obliviousness, or resented for the obvious lack of engagement.
We had a C-level a few months back write a corporate communication that was meant to be both encouraging and strategically informative about some top level changes, that was clear AI slop. It ended up being the exact opposite - engendering resentment of what was obviously being too lazy to tell us yourself.
But anyway, in the last 3 weeks it's flipped. Everyone gets onto every call proudly announcing the latest thing they 'built' in Claude, while pre-apologizing for errors in the work in progress as if they couldn't possibly have been reviewed.
These are dashboards, briefs, presentations, documents, all things that would have previously been expected to be completely error free, and important enough to make strategic decisions off of. Now it's all yeah, I had claude do my work and I haven't even checked it yet. but as a flex. because currently 'Use AI' is a key KPI. But it all seems so short sighted, it makes me sad.
- Prev
- Next

The banana thing is a combination of being picked too early and stored too cold.
Once bananas get too cold the ripening process stops and they will rot not ripen.
More options
Context Copy link