Bingbong
15hr ago
Aren't second-tier European countries the worst case scenario for this kind of range? You're looking at high cost of living and salary expectations. Indian Bill Gates can get things done on a comparative shoestring (and living in a similarly-cheap country you'd be amazed how often the initial seed capital will just come out of a family member's small-medium business)
Bingbong
15hr ago
India is not Somalia. It is perfectly possible to have a decent life there.
Honestly in today's world, as somebody who bailed from a top-tier Western democracy to a 'mid tier' economy, this is a large part of why I find a lot of desperate migration pushes to be silly. If you're capable of getting into the upper-middle class of like 80% of the world's countries you're probably gonna be broadly fine. Urban development has largely plateaued for a decade or two now, especially in the West where the sheer expense of construction and associated red tape means that the nicer parts of the mid-tier countries are on par/better since they can actually develop things (and keep the homeless out). I'm in Malaysia now after leaving Australia, and from what I can see a lot of white collar quality of life outcomes are essentially equal between here and Australia. You might be earning 40% the wages you would in Australia, staying in Malaysia, but large portions of your expenditures (especially housing) are about 30% the price they would be in Australia.
The Malaysian Chinese demographic have historically been prone to emigration since they're filtered hard from University placements inside the country and therefore go overseas to pursue higher education. 20 years ago they were a lot more prone to just staying in the UK/Australia/wherever else they went, but now the perceived gap in quality of life has shrunk immensely. Same for Chinese. And like I have no doubt that the Somalias of the world still exist where every day is suffering and a battle for survival, but also there's a correlation between immigrants from those places and being unlikely to actually contribute to their destination country.
It is possible though India's issues are kinda different from Japan/China in that it's not like there's been a massive war or communist effort that's rendered them a big laggard to the rest of the world. There's been no reason of that caliber why India cannot compete previously. They've been permeable to outside investment, they're not recovering from being razed to the ground and there are parts of India that are perfectly functional/developed already.
Bingbong
16hr ago
Yeah but there's also a skillset involved if you get dropped into a bottom-tier school and manage to get people to actually graduate. That skillset is likely not going to pay much dividends if you're dropped into a 95th percentile classroom.
Bingbong
1d ago
Tbh having been involved in the magnet school system I do think there's a considerable aspect of 'when you have already filtered for the top 5% academic achievers to even get in the door, how much good/bad are the teachers really doing when those kids have the homelife, educational infrastructure and genetics that put them in that box'.
Also what is 'good teaching'. The teacher who'd be able to say get a bunch of 120 IQ students who actually buy in/have significant cultural pressures towards education to maximize their possible SAT scores is likely a very different person and educator than whoever'd do the best in a test of being parachuted into a random 10th percentile school and achieving the best possible results with that population.
Bingbong
3d ago
Getting really really really megarich is generally more about risk tolerance, aggression and atleast a solid dollop of luck. I used to be in the Super highroller casino space and probably interacted with more 9-figs+ than most people.
Sort of person that has the personality that allows them to keep ramming their head against the wall like that tends to be pretty idiosyncratic and doesn't self-filter at all.
Bingbong
5d ago
They don't but it's pretty illustrative of how the system works when money is involved.
Bingbong
6d ago
Indians are better at plugging into working organisms as middle managers and managing to fight in the arts of buraucracy and self-advancement. They're less suited to actually building things or being productive at scale.
Bingbong
6d ago
Jews do pretty well entrepreneurially but they weren't the group I'd indicate.
Bingbong
7d ago
Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.
Plenty of places manage this without meaningful abilities to tap into the social security net. Dubai, Singapore etcetera are welcoming but you're going to struggle immensely to ever get a passport for a lot of immigrants. I do also broadly agree that the 'O1'/'genius' level of immigration should be encouraged (albeit one must acknowledge you're absolutely fucking the developing world by taking their best and brightest), but the current playing field has gone far far far far beyond that where now the H1B layer is taking fairly interchangeable mid-level career jobs and being used as a bludgeon on the native stock to keep wages down.
Without even going down to the Deliveroo layer that's now plowing into Europe where '30 years ago when we were ultra-selective people from these countries used to excel now let's take anybody who can get on a plane' is absolutely botched policy.
Bingbong
7d ago
Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.
Bingbong
7d ago
I feel like there's a certain element where people in Western 'salary-driven' economies don't really understand that people in more developing economies tend to have far larger reliance on entrepreneurship to get rich enough to be in the West and especially to be affluent in the West. Whilst it's likely valuable to have intelligence to succeed as an entrepreneur, the great sort of Western civilization means that if you're living in an UMC bastion the locals likely have parents who are your doctors, engineers etcetera (which correlate more strictly with raw intellectual horsepower) whilst foreigners are more likely to have made their money through business ownership.
This IMO makes trying to proxy raw intellect via income weaker than you'd expect. An entrepreneur is testing for luck, social skills, connections et al in ways that white collar professionals aren't experiencing the same way. This also factors strongly into some groups being able to swing way above their intellectual horsepower due to having cultural setups that are better at enabling them to run businesses and find their way into more-softskill driven sinecuresque parts of the established economy through their mastery of networking and the art of the job application. This can be a double-edged sword in that said groups can be good at entrepreneurial (yay, more small business) and sinecure obtainment (boo, those jobs really should either not exist or be earmarked for sons of the soil and you'd have to be monumentally stupid to give these to foreigners) whilst the difference doesn't show on a spreadsheet to politicos who simply say 'X minority has a higher gdp per capita'.
Bingbong
7d ago
Kinda played out a bunch of times. Trinidad's largest group is Indian descent afaik plus they're economically dominant. I don't think any has been able to necessarily filter for 'top 10% intellectually' but there's a bunch of countries with strong Indian diaspora presences.
Bingbong
7d ago
Same for arabs (especially since I'd expect the OP using it as a shorthand for 'Middle Eastern' more so than 'explicitly arabic descent')
Bingbong
9d ago
You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?
I've had one in Australia from a pretty nerdy/biologically-male dominated industry. Also hilariously a remote dev we all kinda assumed was MTF then finally met after a year and a half and 99% sure that they're biologically female.
Bingbong
14d ago
I'd disagree. If you understand what gives SMV you can optimize for that instead. If you refuse to acknowledge the existence of SMV altogether -- which is what a lot of women seem to do IME -- good luck optimizing for anything as a guy.
I mean this is the classic loop.
Dating Coaches/'ANDREW TATE'/whatever gives advice that's actually broadly actionable but couched in sexism whilst the Longhouse gives either nothing or actively counterproductive advice like 'be yourself' or 'wait and the right one will come'. Whilst the former isn't perfect, it's still far more likely to work than the latter but women don't like the vibe of the former thus complain. Endless loop of content hot takes.
Bingbong
14d ago
She does seem to be on the spectrum plus when she met Sunny he was a multi-decamillionaire and she was a random student.
Bingbong
14d ago
IMO it's this and the nature of online dating meaning that attempts inherently become 'all or nothing' since you can't just have an awkward convo then randomly bump into the same girl 2 weeks later when she's forgotten about it/smoothed it out. Now it's all in DMs and goes in the permanent record.
When somebody's only in your social orbit off an app it's way easier to discard the good for the perfect.
Bingbong
14d ago
Yeah my best friend got together with his girlfriend in high school from her essentially initiating the relationship and has essentially never had to try and date anybody. I love the guy, but she was a serious late bloomer and I don't think he'd be able to get into a relationship with her today if they hadn't met at 15 and were meeting for the first time in their late twenties. I'm now married, but in my single period any sort of commentary from him was useless at best since he frankly had no relevant experience.
Bingbong
14d ago
I've lived in a lot of areas with large amounts of reasonably-successful Indians and I've pretty rarely seen meaningful IMWF numbers.
Bingbong
14d ago
Elizabeth Holmes was in love with Sunny before she even achieved high status, though.
Bingbong
15d ago
True but to a certain degree a lot of this was family pressure on girls (largely of Asian extraction but not all) who'd had an all-consuming thrust towards academic/professional achievement till mid twenties. Then got hit with the 'where grandkids' from their parents who'd been incredibly antipathic towards any dating in the meantime. My personal filters/location probably meant I ran into more of this type than most people would, but it was pretty striking how many long-term single women there are who kinda fit into this mold. Also there's likely a plethora of men in the same boat, undeniably.
Bingbong
15d ago
I honestly think the bossbitch thing is more productive than some of the paralysis-by-analysis cases I saw. The bossbitches were capable of getting laid/manifesting a short-term relationship but tended to go awry in the medium term. The inexperienced ones were perfectly good women but just stuck in this weird quagmire where nothing happens for years on end.
I do agree with your last point where unless you find a woman who's running the trifecta of high earning + spending conscious + loyal as hell you're more likely to end up compelled to a new level of lifestyle creep by adding a second high earner than you are to end up actually getting ahead.
I feel like medicine is a different track to a lot of other fields since there's a far clearer suite of knowledge that you're expected to develop and then practice. Business school is always gonna veer somewhat towards bullshit.
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