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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26708 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Reading a recent shagbark post about how women are attracted to men who don't have bosses over 'wagies', I found myself thinking about owning a business. As as American it's obviously glorified, but I'm wondering if it's easier to own a business now than it was in the past?

Seems to my relatively uneducated mind that over time in America owning a business has in some ways gotten harder, some ways easier. Nowadays you can do the online business, make money not doing anything physical, just using your wits and social network, basically. Forms can be filled out electronically, etc etc.

On the other hand, back in the day it seems most Americans used to be business owners, especially when more rural lifestyles were more common. Folks owned farms, or a general store, and didn't really have many forms to fill out, though of course they paid (much lower) taxes.

Anyway as a somewhat half-assed tie in to the culture war - which tribe is better for business? Red tribe nominally wants to be but... they also seem to not follow through with that a lot. Blue tribe has become more kleptocratic lately. Maybe it's a tossup?

Can't really give you advice for the US, but at least in Germany you're 100% better of being a wagie. The entire system is clearly designed around you, especially the tax system, but also benefits, insurance, absolutely everything. My wife got a free 10k "stipend" as support from the government for her "women-led startup" when our second child was small so she was still partially in maternal leave. It was extremely stressful since we had to communicate with multiple agencies to find out how this is handled and the majority of their staff literally told us they have absolutely no idea, so we got bumped up to the local boss ... who also told us they have no idea, lol. After a while we found out at least that, despite being called a "stipend" which in academia is usually not considered an income, this one is anyway since there legally is no such thing as a stipend for a business, apparently.

The best part? Since the staff from the family office was hopelessly out of her depth on how to handle it in general, we structured my wife's maternal leave in such a way that she claimed was best so that we at least know how much maternal benefit we still get (greatly reduced, but at least we get no surprises from the family office). A few months later insurance calls us, and tells us that my wife has fallen out of the public insurance: Due to the structuring she is now considered fully self-employed. To add insult to injury, the way we originally intended to do it would have not led to this complication, it was entirely a result of our negotiations with the family office. Suddenly she has to pay a few hundred € every month that we wouldn't have to otherwise. We recently calculated it out - taxes on the stipend, lost benefits, extra insurance costs - and we got basically nothing out of the stipend compared to my wife being 100% in maternal leave for the entire time. It was a lot of extra stress and work, almost entirely spent on negotiations with legal bodies, for no benefit for anyone at all whatsoever.

Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field, in some it seems to be unavoidable that you have to do a a jump from wagie to self-employed when going up the ladder, like attorney partnerships.

On the tribes, in very general terms blue is worse on pushing bureaucracy, but red fucks up international business.

Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field.

Absolutely depends on field. The vast majority of Germans (and basically all other Euros) cannot independently reach real wealth by being wagies. There are exceptions - if you have the education (enough credentials in the correct field) to really go up the corpo ladder or to become an expert at the local branch of a US company/startup, you don't need to risk anything - but the overwhelming majority of people simply do not have a route to break into a 6 figure salary while employed. The distribution of salaries is just to narrow, and there's almost no long tail in Europe (things look orders of magnitude more dire if you aim above 200k: less than 1% of adults in Germany earn more than 200k EUR, and that number includes all sources of income - so there's a lot of business owners, partners and capital income recipients in that block).

But if you own a business? There's no cultural monetary limits. No education/credential requirements. "Just" the soft skills, the drive and some luck (which you need to climb the cropo ladder as well) can get into the top few percentile points of income/wealth. And sure, you need to build momentum. You need to pick a field that allows for commerce (because selling things scales much better than selling labor) and that allows you an easy path to exploit the labor of the people you hire. But both come practically built-in with many blue collar careers: many of the people in those field do not want (or cannot) directly compete with you, they want to be hired; and most of your customers don't only need to buy labor, they also need physical products (which you can sell them with good - and often obscene - margins).

As a serial entrepreneur I can give it a mixed review. Starting a business is hell, operating a reasonably successful business is superior to being an employee. Most companies fail, so most entrepreneurs will only experience the hell.

The difference between being self employed or freelancing and running a product company is vast and underappreciated. A freelancer is effectively an employee constantly chasing new contracts. Job stability is traded for higher income and higher flexibility. This path is works for self-motivated competent people. My best advice is to find freelancing work first and then start freelancing. Don't quit your job to start looking for freelancing gigs.

Product companies are a different beast. Developing a product or a service costs far more than you expect, takes longer than you expect, and it is harder to sell than you expect. There are so many aspects of a company and if you fail one, your company fails. A few years down the line life gets better. I don't have that much to do any more. Tech team has its road map, customer support has some questions, sales and tech team are bickering as usual, and I need to settle their dispute. I have a few candidates to interview. Other than that not much happens. More time is spent eating lunch and maintaining relations with people than actually working. Building and creating processes and institutional knowledge from thin air is tough, keeping them in maintenance mode isn't nearly as hard.

As for dating being an entrepreneur is a terrible idea. Expect to work far more than average. Expect to be in a world with 90% men. Replying to tinder messages is mentally taxing when you have dozens of unanswered slack messages and emails. Being in the right headspace for a date is tough when one of the investors is acting up and making absurd demands on a call a few minutes before the date. As you become successful you will be invited into new social circles. These social circles consist of married men who are older than you and who don't now 25 year old women. Women are far less interested in hearing about your startup than you think. It takes years to make a business profitable and during these years you are broke, over worked and don't have a real job according to women. You can have a company with 100k in monthly revenue and a team. If your expenses are 100k you make no money and women think you are unemployed spending your life on a hobby.

The stereotype of the new money man with a golddigger isn't purely based on the poor taste of new money. If you are stressed, only know men, work crazy hours and don't have time to date gold diggers will be the women you meet. Who will chase a guy on tinder who is average looking and rarely replies but has a fancy watch? A guy in a bar who doesn't go out a lot and hasn't had much flow with women for years and is severely sleep-deprived will only impress certain types of Asian and Eastern European women.

If you want to meet women get a job with average pay that is a bit relaxed and where you meet a lot of women.

Interesting, thanks for the response! Yeah it's easy to romanticize business, I'm sure it's quite difficult in practice. I am already engaged so the lady part isn't relevant for me necessarily, but I always do wonder if I could have more freedom/time/dignity as an entrepeneur. I don't know, seems like it really depends!

No, you won’t.

You might have more money as a small business owner. There’s even business models with very low risk- someone else figured out how to do it. But you will be working 80 hours a week for that money.

Idk, I know a few people who have lifestyle businesses where they essentially sell an online course or some other low-effort offering, and after a couple years of work have set themselves up to make plenty of money and work maybe 10 hours a week.

Probably quite difficult, but it's doable!

Those people are the equivalent of Instagram influencers. It’s folly to think you’ll be one.

The average contracting or restaurant business has a decent shot of making it, so do tech startups. This is essentially aiming at being a celebrity.

Agreed. If you're starting your own business you will be working like a dog. "I work 10 hours a week and make $$$$$" is a scam.

I mean, the person I'm thinking of isn't trying to get me to sign up for anything. She has no reason to lie. She just built a course to prep for a data science exam and has sold it well since there wasn't much else in the niche. I don't see how it could be a scam, like MLM style.

It's not a scam in the sense of getting your money, it's a scam in the sense of many self-employed people presenting an extremely biased account of their company, for various reasons, including self-justification. My brother-in-law runs a platform providing niche courses in psychology, and he constantly talks about how this kind of platform can create almost "free" money with minimal input from him since he only does the course once and then an unlimited amount of people can take them (and others can use the platform to create their own courses and he gets a cut, even more free money!). Except I know him & his life well enough that he spends a lot of time on it, regularly even on weekends, and from his wife I know that so far including all the running costs, the set-up costs (he isn't a programmer himself, so especially in the beginning he paid a handsome sum just to get the basic framework going), the gear he bought to make professional-looking courses ... he is basically still treading water. Maybe it will change, maybe not, but if you know him casually you might think he is making decent extra income with little work, the way he talks about it.

But maybe your people are for real. It's not impossible, just unlikely.

Well, fair. I appreciate you giving me I suppose a dose of reality. I've always been frustrated with my jobs so the grass seems a lot greener on the other side, but knowing myself I'm not sure I have the temperament to run a business successfully.

restaurant business

As somebody who has been looking into the economics of restaurants in the modern economy, let me say that the numbers are not good.

Running a business is really rewarding and the only real path to true success for most people. I am grateful that I went into business.

With that said the results vary wildly and getting going is tough. If you have an opportunity take it. If you are going the freelancing route you can take your time and secure some clients first. If you want to found a product company then make sure to do your research.

Yeah, if you want to meet women, become a bartender and learn how to play guitar. Starting a business is attractive in the way having a classic sports car or becoming a bodybuilder is attractive: almost exclusively only to other dudes.

As usual, shagbark is saying things that are true in a manner of speaking, but which don’t apply, because he’s an insane hippie drifter making money through gnomic philosophy. If you want to live in a shack eating roadkill so you don’t need to have a real job, business-ing part time can get you there. But you don’t want to do that. Only shagbark does. Earning a normal living as a business owner is… intense.

And the kind of woman who wants to eat roadkill in a shack so her man doesn’t have a job is very likely to talk about how he doesn’t have a boss. Sûre. Bosses aren’t thé fun part of jobs. But that woman is definitionally not the median.

I'd honestly say the shagbark lifestyles seems quite appealing. I really hate authority, and being an insane hippie drifter doesn't sound too bad. If I didn't already have a fiance and a dog and other commitments, I would seriously consider it.

Having been homeless a few times, it does have its charms, but they pale in comparison to having a refrigerator with food in it and a place to sleep that doesn't have earwigs.

I think the real signal that is being pointed to by this kind of comment is that women find being subordinate in male dominance hierarchies to be an unattractive trait in a potential mate. At the same time, men will often say that being overweight is an unattractive trait in a potential mate - but overweight women still get laid. Men prefer virgins, but non-virginal women get married all the time and there are plenty of virgins who are virgins simply because no men would want to be with them for other reasons. Living off roadkill while living in a shack is a much bigger hit to a man's desirability than having a boss, and that's a trade most women are willing to make - but if you're a woman who believes you deserve only the absolute best of men, you're going to want a man who does not have to adopt a submissive position in a dominance hierarchy while also being a wealthy provider.

Prepare to be reamed by beurocracy. And not in a nice consensual way. What we're doing to small busnises is an atrocity.

What are we doing, can you be more specific?

There's so much beurocratic overhead that you're better off breaking a thousand little rules or going dirty with bribing the local compliance admin. I'm not going to mention specifics but basically in my case the inspectors look the other way pretending to do inspection, it's a "thing".

Like most Shagbark posts, this is post-hoc cope to justify what he was going to do anyway. Really, Shaggy, women don't like wagies? But if they did, you'd become one? It's too late, he has already depicted me as the screaming soyjak and himself as the handsome Aryan Chad.

The reality is that among my coworkers even the very physically, shall we say, ungifted don't seem to have problems finding wives and having one or two kids.

I can't speak to the ease of running a business, but 20% of small businesses close within a year. Presumably most of those are run by idiots, but the odds still don't seem great.

Well, I'm putting together my first attempt at entrepreneurship myself right now, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Without going into exhaustive detail, I'm making a tabletop wargame with a focus on proxies. The model's base is 25mm, the same base size of unaugmented humans in a certain popular grimdark game, and the historically insired factions will hopefully convince some historical wargamers to try converting minis. I plan to make the core rules free online with a small initial kickstarter, and probably only start making any real money with expansions and a 2nd edition.

Theres a culture war angle here in that I think that alot of tabltop gaming companies like WotC and GW are quite incompetent and will likely bleed fans over time. That's its own can of worms to be opened in another post though.

I'm at the point where I'll have to start advertising it via videos, reddit posts, etc which I absolutely despise. I love talking about it organically with friends, but theres something fake and wrong feeling about doing so to make future sales, even if its nessesary.

So far though for me its been alot of working in photo editors on my rulebook and making 2d pixel sprites for tabletop simulator testing. Oh and a small mountain of varoius spreadsheets and documents. I may move back to the US from the UK to start the company, as America seems more amenable to businesses in general.

Reading a recent shagbark post about how women are attracted to men who don't have bosses over 'wagies', I found myself thinking about owning a business. As as American it's obviously glorified, but I'm wondering if it's easier to own a business now than it was in the past?

I've had a business for 20 or 30 years now (and worked in the same industry before that) and I would definitely say that it's easier now than in the past. The reason being that computers, the web, scanners, email, etc. have all made it much easier to handle administrative work yourself. So for example, if I need a particular document from a particular file, I can pull it up in seconds on my computer. Instead of having to go to a file room and dig around. So it saves on the real estate I need and also means I don't need to hire an assistant.

As far as whether it makes it easier to attract women, I would say that (of course) it depends a lot on specifics. If I were sitting in a bar and an attractive woman sat down next to me and introduced herself, I would prefer to be able to say that I am a tech lead at Google than tell her I am the CEO of OMW, Inc. And status matters a lot. There are a lot of women out there who would much rather date an attorney who makes $300k a year than the owner of an exterminating business who earns double that.

I would say that on balance, I probably wouldn't start my own business with a view to attracting women. Because you really are better off attracting someone while you are young and getting married. And it can take years and years for a business to really take off.

If I were sitting in a bar and an attractive woman sat down next to me and introduced herself, I would prefer to be able to say that I am a tech lead at Google than tell her I am the CEO of OMW, Inc.

Naa, tech leads (who can be almost any level) are a dime a dozen; if the woman's actually approaching she's thinking you're Senior Staff or better, and will be moving on otherwise.

Naa, tech leads (who can be almost any level) are a dime a dozen; if the woman's actually approaching she's thinking you're Senior Staff or better, and will be moving on otherwise.

Well, I'm not familiar with the tech industry, I'm just going by my general experience with bars and women. Based on that, I'm pretty sure that being a tech lead at Google (which may not be senior staff, but it's not like you are a janitor) would be better than being the CEO of OMW, Inc. The second option might mean that you are basically unemployed.

Orbán defeated

As I wrote about it yesterday, Orbán's defeat was clear from the polls, but the scale of it wasn't so sure and it is massive. If you'd like some background on what the topics and issues of the campaign were (not the typical culture wars that many online threads try to shoehorn this into) check that post, but let's now look at the results and what could come.

It's a landslide with a bigger supermajority (around 138-140 seats of 199) than any of Orbán's victories in the last 16 years (the largest was 135 seats). The turnout was 80%, the largest of all free elections since 1990 by a good margin (Orbán's previous defeat in 2002 held the record with 73.5% turnout).

However, this was not only a defeat of Orbán but also of the old opposition. The Socialist party (the legal successor of the old communist state party from before 1990) and its spinoff previously headed by the former Socialist PM Gyurcsány (2004-2009) have been demolished too. The new parliament will be filled with many new faces, and most of them are young enough that they were not involved with or socialized under the pre-1990 system - which I see as a very positive development - and they were also not politicians of either the left or the right in more recent times.

This parliament will have three parties, the broad-tent center-right pro-EU Tisza (138-140 seats), Orbán's pro-Putin right-wing Fidesz (53-55), and the radical nationalist / antivax-right Mi Hazánk (6). The left-wing and progressive liberal parties did not run for the election and instead supported Tisza. This extra-parliamentary party landscape is quite small, but the liberal-progressive centrist Momentum stands out as one that may have a chance to return in a more proportional electoral system and had at least in the past passed the 5% threshold in an EU Parliament election. The green Dialogue for Hungary is only relevant as being the party of the liberal mayor of Budapest, but never had significant measurable support. Now I haven't mentioned the last party who contested yesterday's election: the formerly joke party Two-Tailed Dog Party received less than 1% of the vote and are on the way to irrelevance. It is therefore a moment where the whole political system is prime for refreshment.

Tisza is unlikely to remain as such a broadly popular party. Their main feature is and was in this election that they could form one unified block under a charismatic leader who could unite all opposing sentiment to Orbán's system, from various disparate directions, while not being tainted by the "old opposition". Previously the opposition block always had in its ranks the despised pre-2010 Socialists and their spinoff Democratic Coalition (DK), which simply could not gather the necessary amount of votes. Magyar managed to win by remaining a blank slate on which anyone can project their desires. He avoided divisive topics in the campaign. He promised to keep the southern border fence and not to accept a migration deal, but didn't talk much about the asylum system and immigration. He does not support a fast-tracking of Ukraine's EU membership, but he is against Putin and much less hostile to Ukraine than Orbán. Magyar did not take part in the Pride march last year, which was banned by Orbán and anyway turned out to become the largest participation ever in a Pride march. He supported it in generic terms, the liberty to love who you want etc., but didn't focus on these topics. Instead he toured the countryside in national costumes, always carrying the Hungarian flag, singing folk songs at rallies, visiting Hungarian communities in neighboring countries, wearing national symbols, referring to historical heroes, national poets etc. However, his party does contain more liberal people as well, and social issues will likely be led by Kriszta Bódis who wrote illustrated children's books about gay love and so on. As I said, it is a heterogeneous block.

The supermajority allows reshaping Hungary from the ground up. Magyar has already promised to create a new constitution, and in contrast to Orbán's single-party constitution, it shall be voted on by the people in a referendum. He already called for the resignation of president of the republic Tamás Sulyok, who is even less significant of a figure than would be implied by the symbolic nature of the presidency in Hungary - he is for all intents and purposes an Orbán puppet who signs all laws without question, just like the previous presidents have been in his system. Magyar promises to also join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and review EU and state fund mismanagement and corruption, to investigate FM Szijjarto's Russian ties and to retrieve stolen wealth by Orbán's inner circle. Such promises we have already seen many times when governments were changed, and usually nothing came of it, there were background deals and the economic sector found new ways to get close to the new system. What may be different this time is that Magyar seems to have a real personal motivation to see the old regime prosecuted. And there is massive public expectation of this and failing to deliver could destabilize this patchwork coalition, as the main topics holding it together are being outraged by Orbán's corruption and the state of public services, and the state of the propaganda media. Improving the education system and hospitals and the punctuality of trains is a much slower and harder task especially when the economy is on a downturn. So he will need some symbolic wins.

Overall, what I see is that post-1990 Hungary had an era of somewhat naive attempt at copying western democracy, switching the governing side each 4 years, until around 2006-2010 which was the first big flip and disillusionment and phase change into the Orbán era, and now there is another big reordering and phase change. I believe Hungarians, mainly the intellectuals, have become much less naive than they were in the 90s. Orbán ditched many unwritten rules and will have a hard time to criticize anything Tisza may do, including using legal trickery to remove Orbán's puppets from high positions even if they were elected for 9 or 12 years (except the chairman of the national bank, whom he said he'd leave there not to scare the markets) and to starve off Orbán's economic empire. Anything Magyar may do, there will be plenty of examples to point to in Orbán's conduct, and backed by an even larger mandate with record turnout, it will be difficult to claim that all this is really done by Brussels and Zelensky. Of course Magyar will want to present himself as not simply copying Orbán's methods. One big promise is to introduce a two-term limit for prime ministers, which is unusual in parliamentary systems, but signals that he doesn't have ambitions for serving as long as Orbán.

I love that his name is Peter Magyar. Imagine if the POTUS was called Joe America.

A Kiwi Farms user claims:

Ethnonym surnames are extremely common in Hungary due to its being a multiethnic kingdom originally, like "Németh"—German, "Török"—Turk, "Lengyel"—Polish, "Oláh"—Vlach/Romanian.

Tóth (Slovak) and Horváth (Croat) are within the top 5 most common surnames in the country.

The USAian person most often memed in an equivalent manner is Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

Also Cseh (Czech) and Rácz (Serb) are quite common, and somewhat less common Orosz (Russian), Görög (Greek), Ruszin (Ruthenian).

In general geographical names are extremely common in Hungary. Not only countries, but also regions like Alföldi, but also cities such as Kecskeméty and of course rivers such as Tisza. It is just the way it is.

The best British example is former Home Secretary and Vice-President of the European Commission Leon Brittan

De Gaulle remains the best example globally, I think.

I had a Finnish friend whose surname was Suomi ("Finland" in Finnish)

Or if the President of France were named Charles de Gaulle.

How did that not occur to me, damn.

As Cremieux was covering, Hungary has failed on growth and failed on wealth under Orban's rules. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2043499458395050471, no doubt related to the embrace of retarded socialist style thought among the "postliberal" crowd.

He says

If authoritarians actually just reformed their economies, they could have a lot more freedom to implement their desired social policies, immigration policies, foreign policies, etc.

But they always seem to know the economy is important, and then do nothing about it.

But I have to disagree. They know the economy is important and do try things, Orban put price controls on plenty of different products and services, it's just that those with authoritarian tendencies are also almost always egotistical on everything else.

The issue is that of course the people who think they are and know better than the rest of society on pretty much everything else are also prone to thinking they can control the economy too, and vice versa as to why many socialists tend to end up authoritarian. "Have the government get out of the way because the market does better without you" doesn't make sense to the likes of Orban or Trump.

They know the economy is important and do try things, Orban put price controls on plenty of different products and services

These are basically propaganda tools. He does this then put billboards everywhere, mandates signs in supermarkets, sends letters in the mail, mandates little orange highlighted boxes on utility bills about how the government saved you X HUF on this bill etc. This is a political product.

Their strategy for the economy is not very deep. Keeping the car assembly plants and now they had the big idea to go all in with the electric vehicle transition and brought Chinese battery factories in massive amounts to Hungary, but this gamble doesn't seem to play out. They brought BYD to Szeged, which does little more than launder tariffs, as they just do the last phase of assembly, but they can then claim EU origins and avoid some fees. There is no high-value contribution here. I'm not saying that it's easy, given the free movement within the EU, it's hard to retain the best experts, and the periphery is by default this kind of assembly place. But Hungary doesn't have great natural resources or oil, even the agriculture is not so competitive. Now, I'm not an economist, but it's clear that the trajectory has been disappointing compared to the regional performance of other Central European countries.

But also regarding social policies and culture war stuff, they have such a primitive and utterly incompetent "intellectual sphere" that you will simply not find thinking people who can go along with that. They try to top-down manufacture Youtube podcasts, some kind of Hungarian Joe Rogans, but their viewership is just tanking. They tried bringing in popular trash celebrities, like the primitive rapper Dopeman, to whose podcast Orbán went twice during the campaign, or the other criminal-looking rapper Jaber. Their Mathias Corvinus Collegium think-tank is just a bootlicking scaffold copy of American think tanks. There really is a dearth of thoughtful backing for any of Orbán's social policies. It's all about winning the moment and doing something for the polls, being able to put something on the billboards. But I even doubt that Orbán has any real principles at all. He turns like a sunflower to whichever direction he hopes to gain from.

The atmosphere in Budapest last night was quite something. The streets were awash with people getting piss drunk, shouting, high-fiving passersby, climbing up on buses, cars honking late into the night; one could really imagine this is what it was like when the Berlin Wall fell. I almost can't wait for the inevitable disappointment to set in so I can get more mileage out of the evergreen "first time?" image macro.

I really had the sense that the opposition supporters were deathly anxious right until the moment the preliminary results started rolling in, perhaps expecting some Trump 2016 style flood of dark-matter enemy voters or shenanigans popping their bubble. Someone with good understanding of crowd psychology had the great idea to let a veritable rave to be held in the square in front of the parliament building through the evening after polls closed (tagline: "More Techno in Parliament") which allowed people to blow off steam, but judging from people's demeanor and the sheer amount of vomit puddles around its periphery I would guess there was a lot of steam built up to blow off indeed (while opposition (after)parties through the previous days had more of an exam night vibe).

There's definitely something to be said about the youth involvement in this election. In previous elections, young people were not very politically active and were apathetic. There were always some "activist" types who cared and who Deutsche Welle or Arte could make nice videos about, the slam poetry folks etc, but this time it really was something different. There was a bit of this already in 2022, but the story was much less clear and there was a lot of intra-opposition squabbling and the candidate was just not as talented.

It's also a generational effect. There are now many young voters whose only political memories are from Orbán's system. If, say, you first understand something about politics when you're 10, then everyone under 26 have no memory of anything else than Orbán being in power. And young people really resonated with the appearance of Magyar, it started with a YouTube interview on a channel watched by many young people, and they could follow the story right from the beginning, many "grew up" in a political sense with this story, it required little prior knowledge, and it started with a morally clear cut black and white story, the pardon scandal where Orbán's allies pardoned someone convicted for covering up child sexual abuse in a children's home. This led to a huge protest (independent of Péter Magyar) led by young social media influencers to stand up for children in children's homes overall. Many young people were reached by this campaign and Magyar could channel this moment and flurry around himself and formed a new movement. People were looking for someone to rally around and the 2022 defeat of the opposition had blown up the old opposition, so there was a vacuum. Then in the last summer, 2025, essentially all festivals and concerts were loud with chants of "Mocskos Fidesz!" (literally "dirty Fidesz", meaning something like "scumbag Fidesz" in emotional tone), which is really a new development. Young people used to say they want to get away from politics and propaganda during these festivals and they want to forget about it all for at least those times. This time, though, there was such strong consensus in the youth that there was basically no controversy in this.

As shown in this poll, which turned out to be remarkably accurate to the election results, young people in the 18-29 bracket support Tisza with 73% and Fidesz with 11%, and as you go higher with the age bracket, it gradually moves towards Fidesz majority with 28% Tisza and 48% Fidesz for 65+ (the gender gap that Fidesz is relatively stronger with women than with men is most likely due to men dying earlier, and there being more 65+ women than men). For educated people, it's 63% Tisza, 19% Fidesz. Also in Budapest it's 58% Tisza and 23% Fidesz. If you're an educated young person in Budapest, these all would stack up leading to minuscule support for Fidesz in that demographic you likely saw in Budapest.

There was also a massive concert last Friday, two days before the election, with 50 different musicians and bands performing one explicitly regime-critical song of theirs and it was headlined by one of the most popular singers Azahriah (years ago, even Orbán had a Tiktok video where he claimed he likes Azahriah in an attempt to be with the fellowkids). Azahriah is massive with young people, he filled the largest stadium of Hungary (Puskás Aréna, 67k seats) 3 times on 3 consequent days. On this even, the two hero whistleblowers (one a police captain who uncovered an intelligence plot against Tisza party and one a military captain who drew attention to Orbán's son's role in Hungary's mission to Chad and mismanagement in the military) made a surprise appearance on stage, and gave emotional speeches. I would also not underestimate these moments. Everything came together to "click" right for the election day. (There's also a genuine admiration worthy for a popstar towards Magyar from some young women and high school age girls, which would be worth its own exploration, regarding Tiktok and girls painting their nails with the Tisza logo or Magyar's face etc, though this is not really my space...)

Of course they will be disillusioned. I see it on Reddit that they are very enthusiastic right now, it's their first time seeing a non-Orbán in the role of Prime Minister(-elect), and project all their imagination and wishes for endless possibilities. It's really a honeymoon phase right now. Of course, people will have to learn, but this is how youth is. I had the same hope about Orbán back in 2010 when we finally sent Gyurcsány away and Orbán promised a break with all their corruption and campaigned with very similar sentiment as Magyar today. Including about the media, the "new aristocracy" sitting atop Hungarians, about dumb ads and propaganda etc. But I do think we just need this naive energy sometimes, we can't have everyone be cranky old buggers. Based on today's press conference I think Magyar will hold his position well, he's already proving less than fully eager to please whatever they ask for from Brussels. He was measured and didn't overpromise on Ukraine, LGBT or migration, regardless of what the reporters would have wanted to hear. He still wants the opt-out from the 90 billion credit for Ukraine, he still wants no migration pacts, and gave a balanced answer about LGBT rights, saying that everyone should be able to live as they want and love who they want as long as they don't break any laws.

I remember this type of feeling after the 1997 election in the UK. I didn't even support Labour, but the Tories who had been fucking things up since before I was born were finally kicked out, and it felt good.

How did that turn out?

I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.

The real question is, what changed since 2022? The main things are the prolonged invasion of Ukraine and the return of Trump. Was this a foreign policy election?

You can check my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430673?context=8#context

In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was very fresh, the invasion was barely more than a month old at the time of the election. The opposition candidate said a few stupid things in interviews about sending weapons and possibly Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine if NATO would decide so. Or that Ukraine is fighting our war too, and "blood is more important than oil" etc, which were blasted all around the pro-Fidesz media, there were huge billboards etc. saying that Fidesz will keep Hungary out of the war and will keep a strategic calm while the opposition would let Hungary slip into the war. It scared many people.

But even the baseline was different. In 2022, the opposition was a multi-party patchwork which included the despised previous Socialist PM who was in power before Orbán, and there were constant internal squabbles between the opposition parties, leading to an ineffective campaign.

I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.

I don't think this is so black-and-white. Of course some ignorant people claimed that Orbán is like Erdogan or Lukashenka or Putin. He never was that sort of dictator with blood on his hands, people never fell out of windows of tall buildings, journalists were not imprisoned, there was no novichok, etc. The democratic backsliding is about making a joke out of institutions, placing puppets everywhere from his small inner circle including the constitutional court, the public prosecutor's office, the president of the republic, the national bank, etc, funneling about a quarter of all public contract money to his frontmen, making a joke out of the public state media (you cannot imagine it, it is parody-level extreme bias, something you couldn't imagine if your standard is the left-bias of western media), taking over a lot of private media, threatening to pass a law that would crush them under claims of being foreign agents, constantly keeping some state of emergency to make passing laws even easier, and ruling by decree, on a whim. First with the justification of the dangers of migration, then covid, then the Ukraine war, there was always some special emergency state for the legal system. They often passed totally unrelated laws and bypassed the need for public tenders and gave government contracts to their friends and themselves with the justification of the state of emergency. They constantly gerrymandered and originally tailored the electoral law to benefit them. They won a 2/3 constitutional parliamentary supermajority in 2014 with less than 45% of the votes because the voting system they designed benefited them. The system forced parties to join up, since one large party and many small ones simply results in this distorted outcome. But they made sure to give enough media space to small parties to avoid having any one of them grow too big. So in many of the elections a lot of energy was spent on the squabbles of the opposition parties and in what form they should run together, what to do with the party of former PM Gyurcsány who still had significant support, but not enough to win alone, but many voters outright rejected Gyurcsány, so it was a neither with, neither without situation.

Being a former Fidesz insider, Magyar could draw a line and he held to it throughout it all, that he will not collaborate with anyone from the former opposition parties. Every single person of their candidates is someone new, who was never an MP, and never held high political positions. Gyurcsány even resigned from chairing his party and it was taken over by his wife (whom he also divorced). The small parties also just withdrew from the election. But by then they were already led by unknown people and had very low support, each below the 5% threshold, because the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 European elections led to resignations of known figures in those opposition parties.

It's certainly a combination of incompetence (or deals with Fidesz) of the opposition parties, combined with good machinations by Orbán, tending to his little garden of opposition parties well. But he also centralized power in a way that can be labeled authoritarian and made a puppet show out of the institutional checks and balances. The country was basically ruled by Orbán's college dorm friends and his childhood friends.

On the failed peace negotiations and the US blockade of Iranian oil

This started out as a reply to last week's CW post about the Islamabad negotiations having failed, but then I got into the blockade and decided to drag this to the new CW threat instead.

When Trump chickened out of becoming one of the top four genociders of all time by ending Iranian civilization, he called the Iranian ten point plan a "workable basis on which to negotiate". I was a bit surprised by that (call me naive for being surprised by anything out of of the White House), given that this plan was basically the wish-list of Iran, but then again I am not a "stable genius" master negotiator.

Honestly, I thought this was the best outcome the world was going to get. The world gets their dirty energy fix. Iran gets on the order of a dollar a barrel in transit fees, whatever. Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care -- religious crazies will do as religious crazies do, and the best thing the civilized world can do is to stay the hell out of it.

Presumably, at some point, someone in the White House thought to actually read the ten point proposal, and noticed that it would place Iran in a strictly better strategic position than before the start of Trump's special military operation. I am kind of amazed that they took 21 hours to realize that they had no overlap. I think Vance rejected anything which was not the miracle victory Trump would need not to get slaughtered in the mid-terms, and Iran was unlikely to budge on key issues such as the control of the strait or their nuclear program, whose strategic importance Israel and the US had just made blatantly obvious.

People have been pointing out that the Trump timeline was obviously never meant for production use for a decade, but lately things have been going to shit at an accelerated pace.

Now Trump has apparently announced that the US is going to block the strait of Hormuz. I wonder who could have given them that idea, and expect Trump to announce that the US will start enriching uranium next week and the US will start funding Shia proxies in May.

More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.

Not all blockades are created equally. When Kennedy blocked the peaceful trade of medium-range ballistic missiles between the USSR and Cuba, he could point out that actually this was a rather narrow blockade aimed to interdict a specific strategic weapon.

Iran's blockade is much harder to justify. Saudi oil being sold to Europe or Asia is not of direct military importance for any conflict Iran is currently fighting, their blockade is a weapon aimed at global trade itself. This makes them a rogue state and gives any country which trades oil with the gulf states a legitimate casus belli against Iran: simply send a single tanker under your flag through the strait claiming innocent passage. Either Iran sinks it, in which case you have war, or it does not, in which case you have no blockade.

The problem is that Iran does not exactly care, which is sound strategy given their situation. Blocking the strait is their one way to squeeze the balls of the world economy to exert pressure on the US, of course they are doing it.

Some strategists might notice that the United States find themselves in a slightly different situation than Iran. So far, they have not been considered a rogue nation willing to wreck the global economy to exert pressure on their opponents.

A US blockade of oil tankers bound for Iran would be as little justified as the Iranian blockade, but like the Iranian regime, they would probably get away with it. China is sadly not in the position to champion the free, peaceful trade between nations by sinking a few US aircraft carriers blockading Iran. Everyone can see that trying to end Iran's capability to block Hormuz will be a military mistake, trying to attack the US over their blockade will end just as badly.

Of course, this strategy will also not work very well for the US.

The Iranian blockade works because the median US voter reasonably cares more about the prices of gas than the regime in Tehran. Oil is the lifeblood of the economy, even a modest disruption will wreck the economy to a far greater degree than what a US presidency can survive.

The US blockade will not work because the Iranian regime cares a lot more about who rules in Tehran than their quarterly growth numbers. The US and Israel just spent tens of billions in bombing the shit out of Iran, with the net result of hardening their will to resist (if only someone had warned us!).

The idea that economic constraints might achieve what getting bombed did not seems absurd. Put bluntly, the regime in Tehran can survive a year with Hormuz being closed (especially as there are countries in whose strategic interest it will be to support them, even if they can't buy their oil, in the same manner in which NATO countries support Ukraine). The one on DC can not.

A chess grandmaster often has different objectives he achieves with a single move. Likewise, Trump has an uncanny ability to make strategic blunders which hurt American interests in a lot of different ways.

In the grand scheme of things, Iran does not matter. However, the US is just establishing that they consider broad trade blockades of enemies a legitimate strategy. This seems foolish not just in principle but because there is a country which matters which might be vulnerable to blockades, which is Taiwan.

(So far, China has been the adult in the room, refraining from any special military operation adventures. The CCP might be evil and bend on world domination, but at least they seem competent. Xi Jinping seems to have object permanence and an inclination to stay out of social media, both qualities which I find aesthetically pleasing in world leaders, and as far as avoiding a paperclip maximizer goes, I trust the CCP more than I would trust Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk. Still, looking at this timeline, it seems sadly possible that Xi Jinping might decide to walk in the footsteps of other elderly world leaders and decide to fuck up the world a bit before he exits the stage.)

Purely on capabilities, it does not matter if there is a precedent for a blockade of Taiwan or not. But narratives matter, especially when allies are concerned. Before, China blockading trade to Taiwan would have been an outrage. Now, they can simply point out that just as the US prohibits Chinese oil tanker from approaching Iranian ports on pain of war, China is blockading western container ships approaching Taiwan.

becoming one of the top four genociders of all time by ending Iranian civilization

Where in his tweet dies he call for mass murder with intent to eliminate Iranian as an ethnic group? He is clearly using "civilization" as a synonym for the Islamic Republic regime. A clear stretch of the term, but less of a stretch than calling a total regime change, a genocide, as you are, and many in the mass media are implying.

The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.

Thanks for digging up the actual tweet, I think it speaks for itself. Also, if he meant the Ayatollah regime with civilization, he would not express regret but glee at their removal.

@Poug: I am not claiming that he threatened to murder every last ethnic Iranian. (Doing that with Iran would surpass all historical genocides in scale, I think.) However, the crime of genocide does not require that you kill everyone.

The act of genocide is the intentional destruction of an ethnic group as a distinct culture -- which is damn close in concept space to 'destruction of a civilization'. Outright murder is a typical strategy, but not the only one. Mass sterilization or the forcible transfer of children to other ethnic groups are likewise ways to destroy a group.

However, context matters, and the context does not do Trump any favors here. The 'softer' variants like cultural genocide generally do not work overnight. Nobody could mistake Trump's threat as "we will occupy Iran, outlaw Shia Islam and the speaking of Farsi, force everyone to speak English and eat at McDonald's to destroy any distinction of the Iranian people and turn them into generic Americans" -- not that that would have been acceptable.

The only way Trump could possibly destroy the Iranian civilization overnight would have been to nuke their cities, killing most of their urban population and industrial base, so that the survivors would find themselves in a mixture of Fallout and rural Afghanistan, neither of which qualify as civilization. This would still dwarf the Shoa and the Holodomor in total deaths, even if the Nazis were more meticulous about murdering every last one of their victims.

Words have meanings, and I'm not a fan of constantly excusing the use in official communications of words that mean something completely different.

I agree with this take (it's poor form from someone not winning as much as they planned), but I assumed it was (intended as) a mirror to the longstanding motte-and-bailey of what the "America" in "death to America" means. Sometimes Tehran's supporters claim it only means the current government. On the other, they say the same thing about Israel and seem to have no qualms launching cluster munitions at civilian population centers there. Or supporting proxies happy enough to target Americans.

A blockade of Iranian ports, if taken to the extreme, will likely result in famines in Iran, which causes people to starve to death in large numbers.

They import a lot of their calories and don't have the road/road logistics capacity to replace their ports.

It appears that food and other humanitarian cargoes will be inspected and then permitted to pass.

Although blocking oil exports while continuing to freeze Iran's foreign assets will mean that food and essential humanitarian imports will cease reasonably quickly because Iranians can't pay for them.

This happened to Iraq between the two Gulf Wars - food and medicine imports were excluded from sanctions, but the exports to pay for them were not. There was an oil-for-food programme at one point, but it never worked because Saddam didn't care about disfavoured ethnic groups starving and accordingly didn't actually want food imports, he wanted to embarrass the countries imposing sanctions.

but it never worked because Saddam didn't care about disfavoured ethnic groups starving

This is the biggest asymmetry you can have vs the west. As long as your local faction has all the guns and you don't give a shit about the civilians, you can ensure your boys with guns are always fed, and any civilians who die along the way are a bonus because you/people in the west can point to them and scream "genocide"

Is it underhanded and fucked up? Yes. Is it an effective tool on the strategic layer? Unfortunately, also yes.

Sadly it works because local opposition parties in the west are incentivized to leverage the accusations for local gain rather than take the necessary stance to discourage the practice.

I agree that this might be a problem - and sincerely hope and pray that it is not.

However from a humanitarian perspective it seems to me the blockade is almost infinitely preferable to a concentrated power generation destruction campaign. When a blockade is lifted, it takes days or weeks for trade to resume; when power generation capacity is wholesale destroyed, it takes months or years to rebuild, and the economic damage from a blockade would be overshadowed by the economic damage from destroying Iran's power generation capacity.

(The US does have specialized munitions to temporarily degrade power supply but given that their effects are, I believe, relatively easily reversible I am not sure we would use them for "Bridge and Power Day.")

I have my doubts they can accomplish this while also stopping Chinese drone parts or whatever getting in.

But I hope this works! At this point whatever ends the war fastest while minimizing civilian harm (remember when we were freeing them from their fucked up government?) receives my full support

I don't think stopping Chinese drone parts from getting in (via sea) will be very hard, I don't think Chinese ships are likely to try running the blockade, although I could be wrong. China can provide stuff like MANPADS via aircraft easily enough if they really want to.

I suppose they could declare a destination in e.g. Bahrain and then attempt to swerve at the last minute, but then presumably they would be stuck in Iran indefinitely (I assume the US would interdict them if they successfully pulled this stunt and then tried to leave, although I might be wrong).

Keep in mind that sea control is an ideal task for aircraft and thus it's not very hard for the US to keep an eye on ~all ships transiting the strait, and they can do it without deploying, say, destroyers in the Persian Gulf. And I don't think it would be very difficult for ships with humanitarian aid to stop in Dubai or wherever for inspection and then finish the rest of the journey.

I want thinking more "DJIs in plastic wrap at the bottom of a bulk carrier otherwise carrying grain" but I'm not an international weapons smuggler so that's a vibes example not an exact scenario

They have a northern coast along the caspian sea and several long land boarders. The sanctions will not be as solid as people expect. Russia is still flying Boeing jets four years into the war. Sanctions don't work in a globalized world along long boarders.

I was repeating/summarizing a handful of comments I read on /r/credibledefense, which is usually quite pro-USA (mixed on this conflict)

We could rightly question their epistemic status, although in the same vein I'd question yours as well. I suspect everyone is talking out of their asses.

That being said, I genuinely hope that you are right. I have no sympathy for IRGC members being turned into pink mist, but I strongly dislike rampant punishment of civilians.

The bulk of the Iranian population lives away from the Gulf in roughly the northwestern third of the country. Their second-largest city, Mashhad, is next to the border with Turkmenistan. They definitely have enough logistics capacity to move stuff around.

I was repeating/summarizing a handful of comments I read on /r/credibledefense, which is usually quite pro-USA (mixed on this conflict)

We could rightly question their epistemic status, although in the same vein I'd question yours as well. I suspect everyone is talking out of their asses.

That being said, I genuinely hope that you are right. I have no sympathy for IRGC members being turned into pink mist, but I strongly dislike rampant punishment of civilians.

@quiet_NaN @coffee_enjoyer I'm gonna do a defense of @Poug argument.

The original tweet is very poorly worded. However, i think if we exam other aspects of trumps behavior aroundthe whole conflict, there is probably are good reasons to think that trump doesn't have any real desire to wipe out Iranians.

Here is trump telling Iranians to get really excited for a positive future. & wanting to continue talking to Iran to work something out afterward the initial "genocide threat"

Here is my take: I don't think trump unironically desires to genocide Iranians, even in the original tweet, he blesses the people. He is using hyperbolic language to try and get Iran to capitulate and work with him for some new deal. This is a poor strategy, but its also important to remember that there are plenty of crazy out there stuff trump has said in the past that never came to fruition. As far as I can see now, this has failed, and he is now blocking the strait. Not good, but not what i would call genocidal either. I think Iranians are gonna stay with us.

Iran is blockading countries that participated in the attacks against them. Saudi, Bahrain, UAE can't claim that they aren't participants. They were a part of the war from day one and it is reasonable for them to pay for the damage they helped create.

As for the war I don't see it ending any time soon. The expectation is always that the next war is going to be short and end in a few weeks yet these wars generally drag on for years. Gaza is still ongoing 2.5 years later. Afghanistan dragged on for 20 years. Iraq was going 8 years after mission accomplished. Ukraine is on year 12 and 4 in terms all out war. Syrian civil war went for 14 years.

Trump has created a mess that isn't going to disappear and that will simply continue to deliver headache for years to come. George Bush at least started with popular support for his war. Trump has a war with 38% support in the first month. Trump has effectively shot himself in the foot and wrecked his second term.

As for China the pivot to Asia has become a pivot to the middle east and Ukraine. The US can't be the industrial base for Ukraine's military, fight a forever war in the middle east and compete with the world's largest industrial super power in terms of military might.

Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care...

You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.

Taiwan

Oddly, I think the Iran war probably precludes a Taiwan war in the near future because two things have become clear. Iran has demonstrated the USA's superiority in technological warfare to an absurd degree. The United States and friends were able to decapitate the Iranian leadership, they've been able to operate with impunity over Iran, they were able to land a small force and operate an airstrip inside Iran during a war. If the USA is even marginally interested in fighting China, it will be extremely costly for China, and especially for the Chinese leadership elite. But also, the Iran war has apparently hastened the decline of American influence abroad. Niall Ferguson brings up, over and over, that this could be the American Suez crisis. America's irresponsible behavior is causing rifts within the alliance system, the special relationships with the anglophone countries are gone, NATO could die. American may have sacrificed its alliances in Europe for its "alliance" with Israel. This increases the odds significantly that Taiwan peacefully unifies with China, with no American opposition, because China grows in power and prominence and Taiwan eventually sees the hand writing on the wall.

As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?

You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.

You are correct, of course, my not caring is about their polities qua polities. My frustration is that there is little one could do to ensure better outcomes. Similar how life under the Taliban is obviously terrible for a lot of people, but there is preciously little the rest of the world can do to fix it. We do not have the will to permanently occupy Afghanistan, Israel and Iran permanently (or until they wisen up and become slightly less murderous in another century or so), and I don't require an EA impact analysis to notice that past occupations have been terrible on a QALY-increase per dollar spend metric (and a lot of other metrics beside that).

I would liken dealing with such countries to dealing with a chronically suicidal ex-partner. Of course you care if they suicide (or nuke each other), but you also don't want to spend the rest of your life doing crisis intervention. Bombing Iranian enrichment facilities, or having your ex committed to a psychiatric hospital for some time is a stop-gap measure which kicks the can down the road, but makes the problem worse in the long run.

Nobody has the stomach to occupy Iran or have someone long-term committed for suicidality. If someone wants to kill themself, or a regime is willing to pay the price of tens of millions of their civilians being murdered in reprisal for them murdering tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians in turn, that is hard to prevent.

Personally, I would have preferred to take my chances with a timeline in which Iran gets a nuke earlier but also does not have a history of Israel and the US bombing the shit out of them for a few decades to delay their nuclear program, and hope that both sides would be rational enough to play cold war like responsible adults.

As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?

With Trump in charge, your guess is as good as mine.

Generally speaking, I think that China is unlikely to start a war in a theater it can not win, and I do not see them winning a naval war in the ME against the US (though I am also not very well informed on relative naval capabilities).

Oddly, I think the Iran war probably precludes a Taiwan war in the near future because two things have become clear. ... This increases the odds significantly that Taiwan peacefully unifies with China, with no American opposition, because China grows in power and prominence and Taiwan eventually sees the hand writing on the wall.

It could quite easily have the opposite takeaway. We've now seen that even a pariah state can exert a surprising amount of leverage against the superpower next door, even with only a fraction of the military power. And we've seen that said superpower can't reliably affect regime change simply by dropping a few bombs, boots on the ground are likely required.

It's been clear for a while now that reunification with mainland would be a massive boon for the Taiwanese economy, but I doubt the Taiwanese people would want it.

I thought boots on the ground was China's Plan A?

Peaceful reunification has always been plan A. The official line has always been “we pursue peaceful reunification with maximum effort but never rule out the use of force” or something along those lines. The Communist Party has always talked with the Taiwanese KMT (Kuomintang, lit. Nationalist Party, the party that was defeated by the Communists and retreated to Taiwan) since Chiang Junior’s era about peaceful reunification. Xi met with then-Taiwanese president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore in 2015 and met again with KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun just a few days ago, which should be a step in the right direction. I think it’s one of the biggest happenings for cross-strait relations lately, but few seem to have heard of it in the West, partly because the other strait took their interest. Partly because Chinese positions on Taiwan was not imo rightly represented in western media, and the fact you think boots on the ground is plan A is pretty telling.

Also, PLA military advantage over Taiwan is a relatively recent development. Before the 2010s, the PLA navy and air force were weak, and their only edge against Taiwan was the PLA Rocket Force, which as you can see right now in Iran cannot force a complete defeat without boots on the ground.

I think it would be obviously stupid and tremendously tragic to do an Ukraine on Taiwan. I don’t want rockets destroying their (in my mind, our) civil infrastructure. I don’t want to destroy our cultural artifacts, and most importantly I don’t want to kill my own people, even if they don’t recognize themselves as my own people, which I think is something that could be changed without the use of force. They are 96% Han Chinese after all. There might be good reasons to have to do all of the above (the anti-secession law in China outlined a few things, including Taiwanese acquiring nukes) but it’s by no means plan A. I hope the KMT wins the next election (although I think it’s rather unlikely), and the temperature cools down a bit.

The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.

This is not an opinion shared by what I believe to be, at this point, a majority of Americans. The younger cohort would not mind if Israel were glassed, the older cohort would not mind if Iran was glassed especially if America does not need their oil. Neither would support those actions, but they would not consider it a huge loss either.

The only drawback considered is the normalization of nuclear warfare.

It doesn't matter if it's an opinion shared by 99% of Americans, or 48% of Americans, or just me personally. It's morally correct and believing otherwise is wrong.

That's the problem. To the young, glassing Israel is the morally correct thing to do, the same way the right thinks glassing Iran would be the morally correct thing to do. It's incredibly easy to make people do horrific things as long as they feel good and right and morally correct, and I think you already know this, because you're old enough to have seen the madness of social justice.

Right or wrong doesn't matter in a democracy - it just means there are more of them. And fundamentally, when people can't be trusted with the power to decide who rules them, the entire edifice built on democracy implodes. It's happened a lot in countries other than the US; many places given the option to vote for their own leaders vote in autocratic dictators who immediately do autocratic dictator things.

Come the 2028 voting cycle, I expect to see a lot of handwringing over how much the opinions shared by enough of those who vote matter.

[You should care about foreigners dying or suffering.]

Do you know what website you're on?

So far, China has been the adult in the room, refraining from any special military operation adventures.

China has been incompetently funding a procy war and genocide in Myanmar. Nobody in the west really cares about it though.

I thought the "blunt melee weapons only" conflict with India a few years ago was at least notable. I'd call it funny, but there were more than a few deaths reported.

The Nine Dash Line isn't winning them friends in their neighborhood either.

ETA: Also their international fishing fleet often accused of stealing from other nations' waters.

In the context of your country pursuing a costly and unpopular war in the Middle East AGAIN, threatening to destroy a civilization, doing flip-flops, wrecking the world economy, and threatening your own allies, I don’t understand what all this hand-wringing about China “winning them no friends” is about. Go find a mirror or something.

My understanding is that the relationship between China and Myanmar is a bit complex. The Chinese government is somewhat supportive of the junta, invited the head to victory day military parade but refuse to call him leader of the country, etc etc. The junta in return helped catching A couple of gangsters and drug lords annd sent to China. And china sold weapons to the junta. But the northern separatists (kokang) are ethnic Chinese and was a splinter group of the indochina communist party, and had always received support from the Chinese. We’ve been funding both sides, a time honored tradition like how we sold weapons to GCC while buying sanctioned oil from Iran.

I’m not sure if nobody cared about “genocide” in Myanmar. Aung San suu kyi got her Nobel stripped. Some do care but they’re not in charge of their own country now.

This is not a criticism of this post - I appreciate the time it took to write this up and it provides a useful springboard for less lengthy digressions (such as my own) - but I still think it is too soon to tell what the ultimate US strategy is or really what the final outcome is going to be here. I remember a week ago when users here seemed to be prognosticating the end of the conflict based on ten-point plans released on notoriously reliably news aggregation website Twitter X and of course the US did not in fact bite.

Iran might still agree to a deal. I think the economic pressure on them from the blockade may be underappreciated. But if they do not, the US could return to more punitive measures. The US appears to have used the ceasefire to rearm their carriers. I think it is a mistake at this point to assume the final plan of the States is to have a yearslong blockade. It seems plausible to me that the US resumes airstrikes if Iran refuses to return to the table.

Maybe this belongs in the small questions thread, but how does Iran unilaterally restrict access to the strait without Oman's buy-in as well (at least without effectively performing an act of war against Oman)? Also is there anyone here familiar with international maritime law (and preferably not of the sovereign citizen, "how dare you stop me while I travel in my vessel, officer" types) who knows what rules exist (if any) about allowing access to the high seas from territorial waters that are otherwise "trapped" by another country's territorial waters, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia currently are?

I believe Oman has quite a few sympathies with Iran, and is likely also getting kickbacks. But yes it would involve dropping mines or threatening strikes to ships in Oman territorial waters.

Iran has hit Oman at least a few times in this conflict, despite Oman not (currently) hosting any US forces. Oman was also one of the more neutral in it's public statements (IIRC they congratulated the new Ayatollah), although I don't know if that stance has changed in the last few weeks.

Looks like Iran has claimed that the only place they've dropped mines--the "danger zone"--is Oman waters.

More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.

This doesn't follow.

The UK blockaded Germany during WW1 and WW2, and it's not like this was the UK was declaring war on the entire world by doing so. The US is just moving to option 4 in the escalation ladder list. Blockading a country from trading with neutrals is generally seen as acceptable wartime behavior, and although it can cause consternation with 3rd parties, it's not seen as overtly hostile to them.

The UK did not have to declare war on the rest of the world because the rest of the world was in no position to break their blockade.

Germany tried something similar with their unrestricted submarine warfare. Now you can argue that this was less of a proper blockade (U-boots are not suitable for searching vessels for contraband, so their only option is to sink any vessels). Still, it is kinda the same thing.

The US was very much not considering the sinking of their trade vessels as blockade runners a legitimate tactic, and rather promptly declared war on Germany. I have met few people who consider this an error in judgement. Sinking the ships of any nation is likely to piss them off and attack you.

If one Latin American country was blockading another one and courteously informing the US to keep their merchant vessels out of the blockade zone, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the US would simply shrug and say 'well blockades are a legitimate wartime tactic, they surely mean no hostility towards us'. Instead they would send a carrier group.

Also, both the U-boot warfare and the blockade of Germany would be war crimes by the standards of today, because we have decided that using hunger as a weapon of war is bad. From this, one could construct an argument that a belligerent should be allowed to sell sufficient civilian goods to earn the funds to buy humanitarian goods for their population.

Personally, I find broad economic blockades distasteful because they are simply not very targeted measures. It is basically like bombing a tenement and hoping that some of the people you hit happen to be enemy soldiers. Targeted blockades (for example, rf transceivers used in drones) seem a lot less bad -- though obviously also hard to pull off, because a single container of rf transceivers will probably supply the Iranian army for a long time.

Unrestricted submarine warfare was very much not the same thing. It was obviously departing from existing blockade law; the debates were over how much could and should be done to enforce those laws. Note that the first few incidents were handled with reparations and apologies rather than a declaration of war.

In your hypothetical, the U.S. might or might not choose to respect the blockade. We have that privilege. This does not provide a general argument for or against such tactics.

Sinking the ships of any nation is likely to piss them off and attack you.

That doesn’t seem to be the case these days, at least when Iran is the one sinking the ships.

Germany tried something similar with their unrestricted submarine warfare. Now you can argue that this was less of a proper blockade (U-boots are not suitable for searching vessels for contraband, so their only option is to sink any vessels).

I need to re-read Admiral Bauer's Das Unterseeboot, but despite his rather obvious bias, he makes two credible points: the German blockade should have been considered legitimate, and Germany should have never made the concession that its submarines follow the rules of cruiser warfare early on.

I think this whole analysis is built on false assumptions frankly.

Presumably, at some point, someone in the White House thought to actually read the ten point proposal

The alternative explanation is that the ten point program listed by the Guardian is not the ten point program Trump was referring to. That instead of almost agreeing to a total Iranian victory, that US negotiators were informed of Iran's willingness to concede on most points. Then instead of needing to invent an explanation for why America seesaws from day to day (I guess Trump just didn't have any goals when he launched this war so he's fine with giving Iran more than what they started with?) -- we can actually be totally reconciled to other facts:

  • American negotiators claiming they and Iran agreed on all points except for Iran giving up nuclear weapons
  • Iran's navy and military being substantially destroyed.
  • Saudi et al. backing America in finally dealing with the Iran problem

Heck, the Guardian article itself notes that the English version they are describing is different from the Farsi version on the question of nukes, so why are we taking it for granted that it's the Iranian negotiators who are trustworthy? Why are we repeating uncritically claims made by Iranian government officials when they contradict American officials?

People here really don't like when I phrase it this way, but this really is a form of TDS. America is presumed to be acting in all manner of irrational and stupid ways because Trump is the President. Any evidence that America is acting according to some kind of consistent logic or with the consent of its allies has to be explained away or ignored, because we all know that America is irrational because of Trump. Trump accepts Iran's victory one day but not the next day? It can't be the case that reports of Iran's victory and America's surrender were greatly exaggerated. No, it must be the case that Trump got bored.

One interpretation of the Iran War: Trump stupidly launched a bad war, and he didn't have any plans for the war, and the Israelis and Saudis didn't warn Trump because they're scared / selfish, and all reports that the Saudis wanted this war too are fake news, and although we destroyed Iran's military Trump understands that we lost, and he wants us to surrender to Iran ASAP, but JD Vance didn't get that memo because Trump is bored with the war and not paying attention, so now Trump is doubling down to save face, which won't work because everyone in the world knows he's lost!

Another interpretation: America is winning and the idea that we are about to sign a surrender deal to Iran is fake news.

Purely on capabilities, it does not matter if there is a precedent for a blockade of Taiwan or not. But narratives matter, especially when allies are concerned. Before, China blockading trade to Taiwan would have been an outrage. Now, they can simply point out that just as the US prohibits Chinese oil tanker from approaching Iranian ports on pain of war, China is blockading western container ships approaching Taiwan.

This is just fantasy by the way.

The alternative explanation is that the ten point program listed by the Guardian is not the ten point program Trump was referring to. That instead of almost agreeing to a total Iranian victory, that US negotiators were informed of Iran's willingness to concede on most points.

Exactly. The ten points the Guardian is referring to is almost certainly the one Iran sent last week before the ceasefire, it had to be significantly reworked by multiple parties (Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey) on tuesday to be considered an acceptable starting point for negociation by both parties. So it is not "the same" as Iran's demands. I don't think anyone has published the accepted one, at least not that both sides have confirmed "yes, this is what we agreed on for the ceasefire". So we don't know what it was, so whatever people assume it was is just a confirmation of their prior biases.

Yeah I generally try to refrain from basing my opinions on breaking news or the latest updates, because they're so prone to error or emotion or rumor. So much of it ends up not being true. But if we were to do a full and open blowout of such content, it would imply a much larger world than the simple failures proclaimed by most posters here. Scrolling twitter casually, I see Trump saying the blockade only covers Iranian ships and ports. I see a report that the Iranians might actually concede on nuclear weapons. I see an Iranian minister whining that Trump's blockade violates international law so he shouldn't be allowed to do it. So many potential leads. They would all imply America is winning. And if we are going to accept half news as evidence, we basically have to apply our skepticism entirely in one direction to get the one-sided American Defeat theories I see all day on the Motte.

People here really don't like when I phrase it this way, but this really is a form of TDS. America is presumed to be acting in all manner of irrational and stupid ways because Trump is the President.

Your president threatened to destroy the Iranian civilization overnight.

Most people who use language try to transport meaning rather than just fill the silence. Do you think Trump tries to transport meaning with language?

Generally, a threat is only effective if your opponent believes that you are willing to act upon it. If I threaten to cast a fireball at someone, that will weaken my negotiation position because they will assume that I do not have the ability to conjure fireballs. This will increase the probability that any other threat I subsequently make will be likewise idle.

Do you think that Trump was willing to follow through with his threat to end the Iranian civilization? If so, that would make him one of the most evil men in history, and you might as well claim that people in the 1940s had a Hitler Derangement Syndrome.

Or do you think he was bluffing? If so, do you think Iran bought his bluff? Why would they not recognize the bluff when you or I would probably concede that it was unlikely that he was going to nuke Iranian cities? How does the inability of the president to make credible threats help the US, strategically?

In general, what is the purpose of him setting deadlines and making threats on social media? Presumably he has a more direct channel to Iran. Iran certainly seems to be able to conduct their war and negotiate without making dramatic tweets and flip-flopping in public every few days. Is he intentionally trying to come across as unhinged and unreliable? Why?

Or take the Greenland debacle. Trump could have achieved the same outcome, i.e. learning that Denmark is unwilling to sell Greenland to him entirely through diplomatic channels without it ever making the news. What does he get out of it? Is the goal to seem like a buffoon who has no idea how the world works? Or was it net-positive for the purpose of signaling something to his constituents?

Most people who use language try to transport meaning rather than just fill the silence.

I think most people are just trying to manipulate other people with mouth noises rather than transport meaning.

Do you think Trump tries to transport meaning with language?

Yes, but he is also trying to manipulate other people. But the likely meaning can often be teased out with effort; for instance, I was able to predict the actual meaning of his threat to close the Strait.

Do you think that Trump was willing to follow through with his threat to end the Iranian civilization?

No. He would have done something, but not anything like that; no advantage in it for him.

Or do you think he was bluffing? If so, do you think Iran bought his bluff?

It was not bluffing like poker, but chest-beating like primitive primate displays. It appears to have partially worked, getting them to the table but not getting them to yield on key points.

Or take the Greenland debacle. Trump could have achieved the same outcome, i.e. learning that Denmark is unwilling to sell Greenland to him entirely through diplomatic channels without it ever making the news.

I can't know his inner thoughts, but I would suspect Trump thought (incorrectly) that Denmark would be more willing to sell Greenland if he made it public.

Your president threatened to destroy the Iranian civilization overnight.

Yes, because it is the opinion of many in the Trump administration and in the Gulf States that a depopulated Iran is preferable to letting the IRGC have nuclear weapons. "Proportionality" is a courtesy not a moral precept.

The purpose of deploying that threat was to get the Iranians to the negotiation table. Think of it like a police officer shouting "stop or I'll shoot". And you know what, it worked.

Watching the same people who were screaming about the coming genocide a week ago flip to calling Trump a pussy/loser for failing to follow through has been a trip.

President Trump is going to destroy Iranian civilization? Sounds serious sounds like Iran should surrender.

Most people who use language try to transport meaning rather than just fill the silence. Do you think Trump tries to transport meaning with language?

It is simultaneously the case that:

  • President Trump would have done “it” if he felt he had to
  • “It” was probably not a genocide of the entirety of Iran but a devastating attack on Iran’s infrastructure that would have taken a generation to recover from
  • The strategic ambiguity between those two options is useful for achieving President Trump’s aims
  • But, again, Trump would have done it if it felt like it

I think I’m supposed to cower at the subtext here that this would have made Trump “one of the most evil men in history”. I don’t care actually. This is war. Trump is going to destroy Iran if they don’t surrender? Sounds like they should surrender then.

This is honestly the “correct” attitude to have. Trump actually gains power from a hyperventilating body politic that believes he’s gone crazy. Since it works, it’s rational. So I can sit here calmly discussing it without having to condemn it. In order to make madmen theory work some people have to believe that you are mad. But I can also take a step up and look at a strategic view and say “this is correct”.

Every time a politician says Trump has gone mad and we need to stop him he’s really going to do it we can’t stop him he’s mad impeach impeach 25th 25th where’s Vance where’s JD Vance Chuck Schumer we need you oh my God we can’t stop him — well yeah you’re making Trump more powerful. Iran sees that btw. Trump could destroy them tomorrow and nobody is coming to save them. Well, maybe they shouldn’t negotiate I don’t know, maybe they should shake their heads about what is the world coming to, what happened to decency and common sense.

Presumably he has a more direct channel to Iran. Iran certainly seems to be able to conduct their war and negotiate without making dramatic tweets and flip-flopping in public every few days.

Have you seen Iran’s LEGO Epstein AI rap videos? They’re pretty catchy. What I mean is, this isn’t true at all the Iranians change their demands daily.

Look, in fairness, you’re right we don’t know what backchannels Trump could have used instead or whether he could have talked to Iran / Denmark privately. That’s why I’m not going to quarterback him. There’s obviously a logic at work here and it’s pretty easy to see it, although I want to avoid falling into the trap of plan-trusting when this is more like watching a lion in top shape hunt as his fancy strikes him.

Trump has achieved a lot of amazing successes and I think he’s smarter than me. So it’s correct to sit back and learn something. I think a problem on The Motte is that everyone is used to being the smartest guy in the room and assumes they don’t have much to learn from anybody. I mean this in general although it very obviously applies directly to Trump.

I don’t think ending the Iranian civilization (which I take him to mean destroy their energy infrastructure) is more evil than Iranian’s attempt to restrict the global energy infrastructure.

I also think destroying energy infrastructure is relatively commonplace in war and isn’t something particularly heinous. Yes, it would’ve caused significant harm to the Iranian people but that’s war. It is a legit military target which separates it from killing camps.

ending the Iranian civilization (which I take him to mean destroy their energy infrastructure)

I truly don't see how you arrived at that interpretation. Why not interpret "ending the Iranian civilization" as ending the Iranian civilization?

Because the president was talking about blowing up their energy stations and bridges. It was context.

America is presumed to be acting in all manner of irrational and stupid ways because

they are acting in all manner of irrational stupid ways.

Firstly they started this war thinking that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the regime, which was stupid. Then they go back and forth unsanctioning Iranian oil to lower fuel prices, proposing dual control of the straits, now blockading Iran, threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, then constantly rolling back threats.

It's a pathetic display of weakness and stupidity as some very mediocre intellects thrash around trying to escape a self-inflicted blunder. It's exceeded only by cheerleaders dressing up the flailing as 4D chess.

Firstly they started this war thinking that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the regime, which was stupid.

They started this way saying that the Iranian people would rise up, but how do you know what they think? I think you should accept that the plan is above your pay grade. You’re basically conflating contradictory press statements (a chaos Trump is known to harness) with contradictory purpose.

It's a pathetic display of weakness and stupidity

Does Iran know that? They inaugurated a cardboard cutout as supreme leader the other week btw

The fact that the current plan is to fight to return to the status quo ante suggests that the plan has gone wrong

Does Iran know that? They inaugurated a cardboard cutout as supreme leader the other week btw

So America is getting humiliated by a cardboard cutout?

Which predictions would come true if Iran is humiliating the US here? I want to take the opposite bets.

I won't do the post again because I did in last weeks culture war thread; but I chickened out and pulled out my fuck around money except for a couple few thousands; which I immediately "reinvested" (read: made stupid las vegas style put it all on 00 throws) in "What if Trump is a retard, all the people around him are pussies, and enough retail investor sucker conservatives are so bought in to the bit that they fall for it again again again again again", bet it all super aggressively (Ie, had my burmese investment manager at my bank do it) and what do you know!

It's funny to me that you can print money by thinking "What would the stupidest, most harmful to their stated interest thing that the ruling party in america could do", bet on them doing that, and 4/10 times they do it; with an additional 3/10 chance they achieve levels of stupidity beyond your pathetic imagination.

It really softens the blow from the country I live in becoming more dysfunctional, more indebted, poorer, and weaker on the global stage when I get some dollars out of it.

Again I disagree that this is going badly for the US, and actually think it might strengthen our geo-political position overall

Prior to the US announcement, the closure of the straights was effectively a selective blockade where in the Iranians and their trading partners were afforded safe passage but no one else was. The US position here is that if the straights are going to be "closed" than they are closed to everyone. As a parent of small children I have to say I sympathize, if you kids can't play nice nobody gets to play.

Trump, Vance, Rubio, Et Al. are wagering that the people who've been buying Iranian oil are more likely to put pressure on the regime to concede the nuclear question than they are to risk a shootout with the US Navy.

Granted this is a gamble, but it seems like a reasonable one all things considered.

Again I disagree that this is going badly for the US, and actually think it might strengthen our overall geo-political position

Strengthens our relationship with the Arab states, weakened it with England, France, and Italy (Germany seems to be in "Keep calm and allow overflights" mode, so maybe no change there), broke it with Spain. However, since England and France appear to be utterly useless (Starmer is announcing a "summit to advance work on a coordinated, independent, multinational plan to safeguard international shipping when the conflict ends"; how not-the-bee!), it might be a reasonable trade.

The US position here is that if the straights are going to be "closed" than they are closed to everyone.

Just the opposite; they're closed only to ships visiting Iranian ports, and Iranian mines (if there indeed were any) are being cleared.

Jumping off that thread, I read Nadhim Zahawi's article making a case for this war. Some highlights:

The reality on the ground inside Iran was stark. By mid-2025 Iran was assessed to have had nearly a thousand pounds of 60 per cent enriched uranium. This is so close to weapons grade, that American intelligence said that the Iranians could have fuel for a bomb in under a week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it could make enough for nine weapons. They were likely days, not years, from the bomb.

Now, picture what would have happened if they had actually crossed that line. A nuclear Iran doesn’t just get a weapon. It gets a shield. The IRGC and the Houthis could control the Strait of Hormuz (as well as the less often discussed Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Eritrea, connecting the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden), and forever dictate terms to ships with infinitely more certainty than their threats today are armed with. Hezbollah operates with nuclear cover. The Gulf states face a simple choice: bow or build their own bombs; Saudi Arabia has already said it would. A nuclear cascade across the most volatile region on Earth would follow.

Iran's to-do list

Worst of all, the conflict we have just seen to defang the regime suddenly becomes impossible. This is exactly why the ayatollahs wanted nuclear weapons in the first place. Then the axis of resistance, led by China and Russia, can hold the region to ransom and make any Western intervention in Ukraine, Taiwan or elsewhere even more difficult. Suddenly, short-term oil price hikes don’t seem so existential.

So how did we nearly let it happen? Tehran executed a brilliant strategy, with extraordinary patience, over two decades. The ayatollahs pursued a deliberate multi-track approach: building a regional proxy network of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, to name but a few, that made the cost of confrontation appear unbearable.

Then a stroke of unforgivable Western naïveté – Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This gave the Islamic Republic both international legitimacy and billions in sanctions relief, while tying Western hands. The JCPOA deliberately excluded both the missile programme and Tehran’s regional behaviour. Many of us warned at the time that Iran would use the breathing space to fund proxy operations and accelerate ballistic missile development. That is exactly what happened.

So when we assess the conflict, which is likely far from over despite the ceasefire, we should consider not just the way it was carried out, or the consequences of action. We must consider the counterfactual of inaction. And we should rebuild a British foreign policy landscape that is capable of considering the different outcomes and the impact that they might have on the British national interest.

What would be the effect on our energy security, our trade and investments – and above all the safety of our people – if this intervention, or indeed any other, had not happened?

This hinges on the premise that a war with Iran was a matter of when, not if.

FWIW 400+ kg of 60% enriched uranium is hard to justify for civilian use (feel free to correct me), so the only thing this write up convincingly argues is Iran was definitely building a bomb. But I see no evidence that they were mere days away from a deliverable warhead. What about pit fabrication, warhead integration, missile delivery, and testing? Re Houthis, there is no historical incidence where other nuclear powers (say, Pakistan) offered nuclear cover to their proxies. And given that Saudi Arabia lacks Iran's enrichment infrastructure, a nuclear Gulf is how many years away after a nuclear Iran?

Notwithstanding @Shakes intemperate declarations of an ever secure victory under President Trump, I want to believe that paying NZ$80 for half a tank of fuel is a small price to pay for less savory alternatives but none of it makes sense unfortunately.

I'll leave larger-scale analysis to people like Dean that are competent for it, but for specific facts:

FWIW 400+ kg of 60% enriched uranium is hard to justify for civilian use (feel free to correct me), so the only thing this write up convincingly argues is Iran was definitely building a bomb.

Iran argued it was for medical/research purposes. I'm not convinced that's a useful distinction, but it means that there's a limit to how much you can persuade people with it.

But I see no evidence that they were mere days away from a deliverable warhead. What about pit fabrication

There's probably some classified issues related to this matter, but the public information suggest that the machining is annoying and dangerous, more than it's difficult or time-consuming.

missile delivery

The Diego Garcia strike was multiple thousand miles away, and while it probably reduced the weapon payload for that missile, that reduced payload is within the plausible weight class of a serious nuclear weapon. It wasn't successful, but something something horseshoes and hand grenades.

It was also sitting under the rubble of Isfahan since last June; no indication that they were even trying to dig it out. Because it was a bargaining chip (until now).

Nuclear blackmail also doesn't work the way the author thinks it does. Why doesn't North Korea say "Give us $100b and lift all sanctions or we nuke South Korea and Japan"?

Nuclear blackmail also doesn't work the way the author thinks it does. Why doesn't North Korea say "Give us $100b and lift all sanctions or we nuke South Korea and Japan"?

Because they're afraid the US would say "Go ahead, make my day". If South Korea was making the decision they might well pay it. Israel, to Iran, is in the position of South Korea.

South Korea is perfectly capable of annihilating Pyongyang even without nukes. The threat simply isn't credible. America could not have threatened the Soviets and Chinese with nukes to get them out of Vietnam, and Nixon's madman theory made him look pathetic instead.

Annihilating Pyongyang with what? North Korea could shell Seoul intensively with their artillery, nevermind nuclear attacks. A few measly ballistic and cruise missiles are no match for conventional artillery in just wrecking whole areas.

Isn't Saudi thought to have access to pakistan's nukes on demand? And Iran, unlike other nuclear powers except, for a brief period, red China, is run by true believer fanatics. USSR decision makers were nominally communists, but in reality cynical self-interested alcoholics. Israel's strategic program is governed by realpolitik, it doesn't seem to be the politically captured part of the state.

Isn't it accepted that most USSR leaders are actual communists?

Here is a summary from /r/AskHistorians

The difference compare communist to Iran's fanatics is most on what their believe system require them to do, where Iran seems to believe destorying infidel is OK while USSR's communism still believe in saving proletariat of capitalist states

Isn't Saudi thought to have access to pakistan's nukes on demand?

This is more hedging than operational reality. The formal text is intentionally vague, because Pakistan's arsenal was always India focused with tight command controls. Actually handing over warheads would likely trigger many political, technical, and NPT headaches that make the whole operation look more like signaling than a ready-to-go umbrella. Also Pakistan is literally on Iran's doorstep. Allowing the Saudis access to their arsenal to explicitly counter Iran might prompt a military response from Iran and support for proxies in Balochistan. And Pakistan doesn't want that obviously.

The CCP might be evil and bend on world domination,

A bit of a nitpick I know but the CCP is not bent on world domination. They want the South China Sea islands and Taiwan but they don't want the network of bases and patronage world domination would require. Iran has a much more extensive list of allies, proxies and bases then China does on a paltry budget. If China wanted the type of influence the Soviets had they could have it but they don't. They are happy to sit in China* and make money. For example A see the Syrian civil war.

*That being their definition of China of course.

I've always found it an irrelevant point. At one point you could also say that the US didn't want to get involved in the world domination business and wanted to just make money and control its near abroad.

I've yet to read a convincing argument for why China or the Chinese people are incapable of building an imposing global empire. It has not happened yet, which is a good reason to believe China is not currently in possession of an empire with specific qualities. Empires aren't built in a day! I would like to know the essentialist reasons why China is limited in this way due to immutable characteristics, culture, geography, etc.

Most of the Western perspective I read on this boils down to:

  • Chinese (Han) culture is very old and this is trustworthy.
  • China is big and has many people. Most of its attention was focused inward to manage these two things between bouts of bad things, or it is big enough/vain enough to be understood as more satisfied/less ambitious.
  • China preferred tributary styled hierarchies for dominance. (My intuition is this is more based on historical constraints that no longer exist, but that's not to say I suspect China will look to deploy 1 million troops to each nation it trades with tomorrow.)
  • CPC has Marxist-Leninist anti-colonial anchors. (Does anyone think that really matters?)

America also tends to avoid direct control in most of its imperial relationships and, as @Tanista wrote, was also once disinterested in far away interests. I can buy that the CPC today is not interested in certain ideological impositions as something like liberalism in the 20th century. I'm less sure this is something to bet the future on. The CPC is young and young upstarts tend to create ambitious men that shape new understandings. Romanize, Anglicize, Liberalize-- all verbs developed during a process of expansion. The broader understanding of Sinicization as limited to an economic context similarly feels overstated to me, and maybe just wrong.

Are the constraints that helped shaped a Sinocentric understanding, material or otherwise, a thousand years ago the same as today or tomorrow? Also, is it really the case that the European psyche is, in fact, the only type on Earth prone to use something understood as unpleasant coercion in a global or imperial context? I doubt this, but maybe there's a good reason to believe it. To me, ambition, inertia, and the largest navy in the world all seem like very powerful things to bet against, to assume a kind of ceiling in ambition to shape the world based on cultural vibes, history, geopolitics, or what have you.

People are increasingly realizing they cannot sit in China and keep making money without major disruptions. See Iran, Netherlands (Nexperia), Venezuela, and Panama for example. The inertia is strong (the propaganda of China as peaceful and non-expansionist runs deep but it’s delusional, Chinese empires have historically expanded to the maximum extent permitted by technology, chiefly the military technology and information technology required to maintain hierarchical bureaucracy). I doubt the non-expansionism can stay mainstream for much longer as the country’s power keeps growing.

Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home appears to have been the target of a second attack Sunday morning, a mere two days after a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the property, The Standard has learned.

The San Francisco Police Department announced (opens in new tab) the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge.

It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.

Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. 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, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.

I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?

I'm a little older than your cutoff, but I remember trying to get a first job was absolutely brutal for almost everyone.

Now AI adds a little bit to that uncertainty. I like Noah Smith's take. The younger generation already gets a fairly raw deal with a terrible system to look for jobs, most of their tax money funneled to pensioners, a dating market equilibrium that's never been worse, ridiculous housing prices thanks to NIMBYs (another defacto tax going to the elderly), and now there's the looming threat of AI.

I personally think AI will just be a mostly normal technology like the internet, but that uncertainty doesn't help.

My view on the matter has slowly become that increasing longevity is the actual root cause of most modern malaise, among the youth and all other groups. I think the biggest inflation-chock the economy has ever known was when we started to regularly live until we were 85 or 90 rather than 65 or 70. We've added more years, but the value of our collective years has depreciated – it's hard to get a house or an apartment, it's hard to get a job, it's hard to do fuckin' anything because doing anything requires time and yet the value of the time has only shrunk. Everyone knows they have a lot of years now so everything keeps getting pushed back, everything costs more time because we keep living longer and longer and longer and thereby we fool ourselves into thinking we have more life to live since we have more time to spend.

And yet life to live is the thing we don't have, because youth and fertility and energy and capacity for enjoyment and beauty, and everything that actually makes more time worth having is fleeting and adding more time whittles it away like water erodes the cliffside. I once had a friend tell me to discount beauty when looking for a girlfriend, because all beauty eventually fades. But everything fades, everything is transient and everything is slipping away like Kansas' famous dust in the wind. A Buddhist would call this attachment to wordly things folly and point out that it inflicts दुःखम्, duhkham, and indeed, if impermanence is a valid counterargument then all is disproven. But assuming it is not, it's clear that more years doesn't neccessarily mean more living. Yet we keep throwing good years after bad ones, day after day.

One day soon, sooner than we would all like, the extension of our lifespans, coupled with the women's liberation movement having liberated women from all previously taken-for-granted aspects of womanhood, could very well mean that large parts of the world might well be populated primarily by people who cannot perform any meaningful labour and who are thus reliant on other people working for them to continue living. But as the great Kipling wrote:

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?

I still think we can sort the problem out, but I don't think the main problem for today's youth is AI.

It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, right now is when OpenAI is the least impressive relative to competitors ever since they kicked off the modern LLM chatbot era with GPT 3.5 almost half a decade ago, and that's when the most violence against its CEO is happening. Even if, somehow, like a video game boss, his murder caused the complete liquidation of OpenAI and disbursement of the proceeds to his murderer, it's doubtful it would put a meaningful dent in the consequences of LLMs in employment and other societal things.

Last week, there was also someone who filmed himself setting fire to a Kimberly Clark warehouse, having been disgruntled over his low pay. He reportedly explicitly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, and I've noticed at least some significant amount of support for him, by the same sorts of people who also lionized Mangione and support the attempts on Altman's life. I don't know where things are going, but I'm pretty sure that more escalation of this type of behavior will lead to nowhere good, triply so for the least well-off parts of society, and I just hope this is a blip instead of a sign of things to come. I'm not sure what else there is to do to stop it other than ramping up law enforcement and making sure that those convicted of such actions get the harshest punishment possible without martyring them. Which doesn't seem like it'd be enough, though.

I'm curious to know more about the shooter/would be arsonist, but this strikes me less as "I have a coherent theory of change" and more as "I am angry about my life and want to get vengeance on Sam Altman."

Sam is by far the highest profile leader of a frontier lab. He also unfortunately also has a bit of that Zuckerberg style alienating personality type; if someone starts waxing philosophical about dominating the light cone, it's going to be Altman. This draws all anti-AI activism toward him, even if it was Claude that took your job, not ChatGPT.

He also lives in a large, nice home in a relatively tony area; Amodei lives in a nondescript house in a shitty neighborhood. Someone fire bombing the latter would create more cognitive dissonance.

Agreed, this is just impotent rage finding a lightning rod. You can't change society, but you can (attempt to) murder a CEO.

I mean the arsonist is known at this point to be an adherent to the Pause/Stop AI movement, they were active in the Discord and iirc their Instagram bio or handle references Dune’s Butlerian jihad. So I would lean towards that guy having at least directed his outrage in a fairly reasonable fashion given his views. I think he severely overestimated how much his actions will materially work towards his goals.

Even "overestimated" probably overstates things, in that it suggests that he got the magnitude wrong but still got the direction of the effect correct. I suspect it's more likely that stop-AI bombings will have roughly the same effect on AI risk that anarchist groups' bombings and murders a century ago had on government overreach.

https://morenogama.substack.com/p/ai-existential-risk-is-real

This is the substack of the firebomber.

According to whom?

I just happened to scroll imgur over the weekend (no account, incognito window), and one in every five posts was a picture of a flaming warehouse and variants on the quote "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." It is likely that activists and foreign social media manipulators are trying to meme it into a movement for low-class vigilante sabotage. It is also likely that among imgur users (who lean young and left) this is actually a message that lands well, and is probably providing inspiration for other young would-be vigilantes.

On the other hand, with the motivation of the culprit explicitly captured on video, the theory of social media toxoplasma predicts that it will garner fewer headlines in the mainstream media than the UHC CEO shooting, where a lot of the story was people being able to speculate and argue over the killer's motivation for a few weeks. On the gripping hand, there is probably a larger population of would-be saboteurs and arsonists than would-be murderers: Leftist activists in general are not familiar enough with guns, and the personal taking of a life is not a line most would cross.

I will admit a degree of sympathy. Having dealt with a family member on UHC, they are absolutely using questionable strategies to cut off care early, and having a friend who recently bought a modest home, banks in that city are now telling potential borrowers that they require a salary of about twice the city's median income before they will authorize a loan for a "starter home" price. (And given that the bank has title on the property as collateral on the loan and requires borrowers to pay for insurance against default if they have insufficient downpayment, that must leave borrowers with a very high risk of default.)

Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.

It is also likely that among imgur users (who lean young and left) this is actually a message that lands well, and is probably providing inspiration for other young would-be vigilantes.

Young lefties on imgur aren't working in warehouses.

Most of the Amazon warehouse employees I know are young , extremely online, and make me look like I'm to the right of Francisco Franco.

Are you thinking union jobs?

Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that giving in to populist demands will only make the problem a thousand times worse. Improvements in the economy, particularly in the inequality, seems likely to help, but if it's not done in a way that is credibly completely divorced from the behavior of the Mangiones of the world, it seems only likely to embolden them. Especially since, in the not unlikely case that giving in to populist demands only makes everything worse for the people at the bottom, it will likely cause the Mangione-supporters to double down in the "beatings will continue until morale improves" sort of way that's pretty standard in all politics these days.

give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders

So ... which is it? Populist demands are easily converted (by both sides of the aisle!) into protectionist policies that set up parts of the economy for rent extraction. "You can only build more housing here if it's economically 'inclusionary' enough" gets predictably turned by reality into "you can't build more housing here" and drives up the price of the grandfathered (often literally!) housing stock. People want to "drive housing prices up for people who own their homes" while also making housing prices affordable for people who don't, but that just doesn't compute.

principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare

are another example. The ACA caps insurance company profit as a percent of premiums, a policy at least populist enough for Obama to brag about it ... and a policy that inadvertently sets up a huge conflict of interest when insurers are trying to figure out what they should pay out.

Ironically, this sort of "cost-plus contract" malincentive was also fixed in part by Obama, in the context of NASA procurement, when he supported and extended the Commercial Resupply Services contracts and then went beyond them with the Commercial Crew program, in both cases paying for purchases where the seller actually could make more profit by producing results more cheaply. For now we still have to burn $4B a pop for SLS when we want to send humans outside Low Earth Orbit, but we can replace it with a $180M Falcon Heavy launch for things like Europa Clipper.

Meaningful reforms are the more important part of that sentence. If reforms are rejected until you get to the point of populist demands, those will likely be hijacked by special interests, as you note in the case of housing.

The princial-agent conflict I was thinking about was "my insurance is paid for by my employer, who has no incentive to limit total costs to me or to provide good coverage," but adding market consolidation adds additional problems: health insurance companies withholding payment from independent doctors to give the providers incentive to sell out join their affiliated provider network. Ditto health insurance companies owning healthcare providers, PBMs, and pharmacies. It gets even more pernicious. In the case of my family, UHC was hiring staff out of clinics as consultants, who then acted as medical professionals to assert that continuing care wasn't necessary. There were at least two backchannels between these consultants and people working as care providers in the clinic, and there was some exaggeration of the recovery going on in the official medical charts, which the consultants then used to argue against further care. What's a little favoratism between friends?

I agree that contract reform is nice, but it is only putting a band-aid over the fact that we went from a vibrant market with ~200 major defense contractors to five. As we see in space, merely doubling the number of options the buyer has can vastly change the incentives driving market participants.

Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.

Unfortunately impossible: the populists' policy prescriptions will not achieve their policy goals, and will in fact make things much worse. Which will only exacerbate their certainty that they're being exploited somehow. Even when things do get better for them, they just don't notice and insist they're getting intolerable and something must be done about it.

(For those who don't want read the link: real wage growth for the bottom decile since the start of the pandemic is nearly triple the real wage growth for both the middle and top deciles. This ought to be obvious to anyone paying attention: construction workers and cooks saw huge raises during the pandemic, and they haven't gone away. Actually, the former is a meaningful component in skyrocketing housing costs, though not the primary one. And this analysis doesn't account for government transfers, which are enormous and only growing.)

There are only really three areas where things have gotten meaningfully worse for consumers over the past couple decades: housing, healthcare, and education (and the last is only really hurting middle-income-plus families), all three obviously rooted in bureaucratic strangulation. But populists love bureaucratic strangulation! They think the problem is we don't have enough of it! Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond. Trust busting has at least a little leftist cachet and might help a little, granted. Realistically, no, the neighborhood dentist is not a 'local monopoly;' you can just travel a little further twice a year. (Or is there some city in the US where all the dentists in a fifty mile radius work for the same company? Certainly nowhere I've lived.) But I'll acknowledge cases exist where it might actually improve things.

Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond.

"Medicare for All" is one of the main slogans among the populist left. I don't think you'd get the response you're claiming.

That's hardly the same policy.

That's, uh, not exactly removing principal-agent problems from healthcare. I mean, it could work out better than the current system, which is a terrible chimera of the worst parts of several systems, but the mechanism of that improvement certainly isn't how it doubles down on separating beneficiaries from decision-makers. At least in the current system you can get a new job if your insurance is awful; if Medicare for All turns out to be awful, too bad.

If it's not clear, that was not at all what I was proposing. My solution to the principal-agent problem is just to make other arrangements legal (as it is currently not legal for an employer not to provide health insurance to fulltime employees). I imagine some still would, and some employees might prefer it, but it opens new options for those who don't. And I promise you, this is not a popular position with the populist left; I've argued with a few friends about it.

Not to bulverise, but I struggle to phrase the argument in a way that doesn't sound obviously stupid, which, uh, I kind of think is because it is obviously stupid. But my understanding is that they:

  1. Believe employees have no leverage when negotiating with employers and that they will only ever offer the bare minimum required by law. (All of them have jobs that pay above minimum wage; never got a clear answer on how they think that works.)
  2. Believe that if the employer pays for something (health insurance, but also payroll taxes), it 'comes out of' profit, not compensation. Meanwhile, if an employee pays for it, that's a direct reduction in compensation. (The truth is the employer only cares about total cost of employment, and has no issue rearranging how that cost is divided up if it lets them give the employee a better deal for the same amount of money. If they could get away with taking away benefits without giving out raises, they'd have already reduced your salary by the cost of your benefits.)
  3. Believe that employer-offered insurance is a better deal due to pooling, but that employers will immediately stop offering the option if they're allowed to. (But if employees value employer-offered insurance more than the cash value of it, companies that don't do this will have lower total compensation costs and outcompete those who do. Also, pooling is clearly net-negative for them, childless healthy-ish late-twenties/early-thirties professionals.)
  4. Believe that it's worse for the most unfortunate, e.g. people who get cancer young. (This is probably true -- though less so than they think, in my opinion -- and does represent a genuine values difference; it's not just that they're willing to donate to help these people, they strongly believe that everyone should be forced to do so)

The circumstance that he stepped up to crank Moloch's ratchet when Anthropic made a principled stand to not play ball with the War Department probably was a factor. Not only was this a strike in favour of "you can't stop or circumscribe AI, if you try to someone else will just pull ahead" for the game theorists and doomers, it also put Altman in the Trump stooge/useful idiot box for Blue normies.

As someone in that age range I feel complete contempt for the Luigi worshippers and anti-AI/data center people and can’t relate to their worldview at all. The friends I have in this camp are exactly the people I would expect, namely those who have a dogshit understanding of, well, everything, and have lived pretty coddled lives. I want this trend to stop immediately (I work not in Silicon Valley but at a company that is deeply important to the AI boom) but have no faith that it will. If the violence against AI companies proceeds up the supply chain in a sort of real life Butlerian Jihad I’ll probably be killed sometime in late 2027.

I have close to 0 sympathy for the world view driving this stuff. I myself suffer from at least a few of the grievances that people commonly ascribe to my generation (owning a house seemingly further out of reach every year, politically homeless, dealing with Boomerism in every facet of adult life), yet I don’t see how desiring to kill CEOs and protest data centers and burn down warehouses would solve any of it. It makes sense only if you have a completely cartoonish perspective on life informed entirely by fiction. It’s the mindset of a toddler throwing a tantrum. In fact, I think such things exacerbate almost all of the problems underlying the aforementioned grievances. I think due to fertility collapse the developed world essentially needs transformative AI to remain the developed world. It is the least bad solution by far. That people don’t understand this and actually believe the opposite enrages me. Young so-called progressives are now actually the most conservative (in the sense of opposing Progress) force in society. It’s environmentalists against nuclear all over again.

The friends I have in this camp are exactly the people I would expect, namely those who have a dogshit understanding of, well, everything

Dogshit or not, how would you describe their model for all of this?

Billionaires and corporations bad, wealth inequality bad, all my problems are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.

Edit: I’ll add that this all seems to me to be downstream of a belief in labor theory of value and a lack of understanding of what markets do and why they might be good. Same people who thought that pandemic-era inflation was actually just Greedflation. You can only come to believe such a thing if you have no understanding of supply and demand and the price mechanism, and what the government clamping down on these would actually cause.

If your model of what drives the outgroup is this simple and pejorative, you should be at least a little suspicious of it. Can you try to steelman the pro-Luigi case?

Whatever steelman someone creates for an irrational position to seem more rational is going to be considerably less related to what people actually believe.

It can still be a useful exercise, but one must approach it with the awareness that the steelman is wholly unrelated to whatever drives the fangirls.

But does this matter? I think you will struggle to find any widely supported position where the majority of believers can articulate an intelligent justification. You can argue about whether it is an effective strategy to attack the "head-empty believers" directly (by way of shame or ridicule or whatever you think works), but even if it is, performing that attack here will not reach them and only shit up this discussion space.

Also, it stands to reason that those who do hold the position for more intelligent reasons hold an outsize influence on it; even the ones who just think on the level of "fat moneybag CEO bad" are vaguely reassured by some belief that some smart and high-status people can articulate a more robust line of reasoning for why it is so. Far more interesting and fruitful, then, to engage with that line.

But does this matter?

Depends on why you're doing it. If you're trying to come up with a reason an intelligent, rational individual will believe X, steelmanning can be useful. If you're trying to understand why the youths or the elderly or PMC liberals with In This House signs post like they believe X, steelmanning is useless.

it stands to reason that those who do hold the position for more intelligent reasons hold an outsize influence on it

I do not think that stands to reason at all. Popularity and influence do not strike me as particularly well correlated to intelligent reasoning.

Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun, Ibram Kendi are quite stupid people that held, for several years, an incredibly amount of influence, perhaps precisely because their reasoning is incredibly simple. Nor do I think this trend is limited to progressive racism.

Sure.

The very wealthiest people (some very small fraction of the top 1%) are now richer as a percentage of total wealth than they’ve ever been. They could not spend their wealth over the course of their lives, and they are all well past the point where an additional million or even billion makes a meaningful impact on their quality of life. At the same time, many Americans who arguably work just as hard as these people in terms of effort and working hours struggle to get needs like healthcare and shelter met.

The government’s job is to support the health and wellbeing of its people, but to make matters worse, the government is unable or unwilling to help regular working-class people. This is because this segment of wealthy people are able to buy political influence that cashes out either in government services being worse or nonexistent (because the wealthy buy themselves tax cuts), or in corporations (owned and operated by the wealthy) achieving regulatory capture, meaning laws are written to favor allowing corporations to make more money at the expense of customer experience.

Combine this with the emerging trend of companies actually abandoning lower-cost offerings targeting the poor and working class in favor of doubling down on high-cost offerings targeting the wealthy, and you start to see a society that treats anyone but the most wealthy as essentially discardable slaves that might actually be worth more turned into biodiesel. Even worse, these AI freaks are talking about completely replacing labor with capital, eliminating the need of the ruling class to at least act like they care about the working class.

The solution then appears to be to tax the wealthy more, and eliminate their ability to buy influence in politics. Taxing them would have almost no discernible impact on their lives but would have a very positive impact on the lives of normal people. But, the wealthy are now so thoroughly entrenched that there seems to be no way for the voices of millions of working-class people to effect change via normal, respectable, political advocacy. You can protest all you want, but tomorrow a billionaire will write a check to [insert politician] and that’ll be it. And so, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

Edit: I’ve amended “top 1%” to be more narrow as what I said isn’t actually even true of the 1%.

Wealthy people, say the top 1%, are now richer as a percentage of total wealth than they’ve ever been. They could not spend their wealth over the course of their lives, and they are all well past the point where an additional million or even billion makes a meaningful impact on their quality of life.

The threshold for the top 1% by net worth in the US is about $13.7 million. Easily spendable, and an additional million (and certainly billion) makes a difference.

At the same time, many Americans who arguably work just as hard as these people in terms of effort and working hours struggle to get needs like healthcare and shelter met.

The labor theory of value is just wrong.

I’m not sure if you missed the comment I was replying to but this is meant to be a steelman of a perspective I’m arguing against. These are not my views and I disagree with most of them.

OK, but if you're going to do a steelman, it's best not to include things that are false (like the top 1% being so rich that an additional million or billion wouldn't make a difference)

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Billionaires and corporations bad are corrupting the free market through anticompetitive behavior and by bribing politicians and judges, allowing them to overprice their products and services and underprice labor. Wealth inequality bad inevitable, but can be moderated by effective policy, all my problems my poor salary and high costs of housing, food, and healthcare are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.

There's a more realistic steelman for you.

We have an elite completely devoid of virtue and with an inverted sense of noblesse oblige. Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite which is completely contemptible in their behaviour? The current billionaire class manage to make the corrupt people of Versailles seem virtuous.

The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.

To my knowledge Sam Altman does not possess any of the characteristics you’ve listed here. He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed and documents of his internal communications with Elon and his co-founders (from their ongoing trial) show that this a sincere concern of his.

Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite

No one is asking for loyalty to the elite, I’m asking for “loyalty” (if you want to call it that) to the basic expectation of liberal democracy that you don’t just try to kill people because you disagree with them.

He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed

But Altman lies constantly about everything. He started off saying he was running a non-profit, then weaselled out of it. Ilya hates him and accused him of lying. Dario hates him and accused him of lying. Helen Toner accused Altman of failing to inform the board about the ChatGPT launch and hiding his financial interest in the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Even in that very trial it brings out their plans to basically run off with Elon's money and make a for profit.

He might just be saying that because it sounds a lot better than 'this is my path to universal domination, you dumb, dumb fucks'. Deceptive people shouldn't be trusted.

What exactly would the noblesse oblige be that the elite could exhibit that would satisfy the the hoi polloi? Massive public works projects? Donating ever increasing shares of their wealth to broken nonprofits that do nothing of value? Art museums? Wives who volunteer in soup kitchens?

In Chicago, Al Capone was popular among the working class because he ran soup kitchens.

An assurance that you won't starve to death in a ditch seems like a pretty good baseline.

A week ago OpenAI published an AI industrial policy document that lists many ideas for how to distribute wealth. Some things it includes are: creation of a public wealth fund that gives all citizens stake in AI-driven growth, increasing the capital-gains and corporate tax rates, and expanding workers benefits as an “efficiency dividend” (including suggestion of a 32 hour work week). They did not have to do this and yet they did. I don’t think actually following through on such an assurance is something any lone company could do, so their duty is to lobby the government to take such action. This is them doing that.

They did not have to do this and yet they did.

I think I have a fiduciary duty to my investors to recommend the State buys their bags, actually.

Is the fix, then, to replace government spending $100k/year per person on homeless services with soup kitchens personally funded by AI oligarchs serving slop costing $100/year, with a big statue of Altman up front?

There is no one in San Francisco starving to death for lack of resources.

Honestly, maybe?

When Capone was running his soup kitchens, publicly funded relief systems didn't really exist like they did today. He took the floor from "nothing" to "something".

It seems like we need more stops on the way down between "gainfully employed" and "underpass resident". Bringing back SROs, for example, might help. On the government side, we could consider reinstating the civilian conservation corps.

Amazon already has, for most intents and purposes, a guaranteed job paying meager but livable wages for anyone willing to work. They get zero gratitude for this.

I can't imagine why.

As someone who's seen what goes on in shipping/mailing, that's not a job you want to get stuck with.

The top 1% of income earned pay 40% of income tax which goes to fund Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and EBT. I doubt that Al Capone spent as much of his income on soup kitchens as top 1% income earners spend on those things. Yet this is not enough.

One difference is that the government intermediates the creation of value and the distribution of value. Humans evolved for personalist politics; tracking where the revenues come from that the government redistributes is beyond the majority of people. Instead, if something the government is doing helps you out, it's because of the Big Man (be it Obama or Trump), not the material organization of the economy.

High income != high wealth. High income people are for the most part the upper middle class. They are the loyal retainers of the true ownership class. The truely rich don’t pay much in taxes.

High income people are for the most part the upper middle class.

It's intuitively bizarre to say that people who out-earn 99% of people are part of the middle class. Data bears out our intuitions - half of the top 1% of wealth holders are in the top 1% by income, with the rest of the top 1% of income earners being made of the next 9% of wealth holders. You're welcome to define the top 10% of the country as the "upper middle class" but this is pretty nonsensical.

Maybe “upper middle class” isn’t the right term for them, especially at the higher end, but the fact remains that anyone whose wealth is primarily drawn from their own labor is just not in the same category as people who derive their wealth from owning. There are a few exceptions like CEOs who manage established companies rather than founding, but for the most part the people paying the very high income taxes are not the super wealthy. When the super wealthy do pay high income taxes, it’s generally pretty trivial compared with the main bulk of their wealth. If you don’t want to call top earners who can save low double digit millions “upper middle class,” that’s fine, but it is import to distinguish them from billionaires and centimillionares.

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The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.

TAPS SIGN EAGERLY

There should be no noblesse oblige without the patents of nobility.

The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.

And how do you propose, exactly, to replace them, should they not "shape up"?

I don't hate him for tankie/anticapitalist reasons: I hate him for spiking the cost of memory and SSDs, and his market manipulation tactics would earn him a Bitcoin Assassin™ if we lived in Shadowrun.

I was planning to write up a larger top-level effort-post on this topic, but since you've already made the top-level I'll post the notes I was drafting.

For the last few days, I've been reading about the Sam Altman attack drama and the warehouse fire attack that happened recently, and I've been finding the reactions pretty scary. General sentiment on HN is something along the lines of "Altman deserved it" and even among my general leftish acquaintance bubble the vibe is along the lines of "they shouldn't have missed" or "we need more of this fuck the rich" which doesn't really bode well for the stability of society.

Whether or not you believe the more bombastic claims of AI CEO's, I do think it's clear that at minimum AI is going to exacerbate the trend of technology centralizing power, wealth and status, even as absolute material standards have continued to improve beyond the wildest dreams of 99.9% of humanity in the past. For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.

Ruling out FOOM levels of societal disruption, I can think of a few ways that this plays out.

Left-wing communist populist marxist social democratic total victory: public outcry reaches all-time highs, perhaps with some peasant revolts sprinkled in, and the AOC/Mamdani coalition gets voted in to dismantle the AI labs, big tech and the icky billionaires. Leaving aside the fact that this would annihlate the economy and living standards by proxy, I'm not really convinced that with mass internet and social media there's any gini index or amount of redistribution that would leave the status anxious public satisfied. First they came for the billionaires and then they came for the homeowners.... Certainly comparable democratic countries with half of the gini index of America are still constantly flooded with rhetoric about eating the rich.

Right-wing AI strongman technofeudal democratic backsliding: political violence becomes normalised as a part of day to day life and as a response, perhaps after a significant assassination or riot, a strongman or group of technocrats use the violence as an excuse to seize absolute power, abetted by AI in part or in full. The lumpenproles are kept under control via mass surveillance, drones and guns or killed off entirely. The worst ending, but one that seems depressingly realistic looking at the history of inequality and failed revolutions.

Nothing ever happens: whether mass unemployment happens or not, most people end up with sinecures or welfare to keep them relatively pacified. Social media and concentrating wealth inequality continues to make people miserable even as absolute material conditions begin to reach sci-fi levels, and competition for zero-sum goods like housing in desirable areas and prestigious educations and sinecures becomes even more red in tooth and claw in the vein of the East Asian countries. Political violence gets somewhat more normalised, perhaps to Latin American or 20th century standards, but it's limited to isolated incidents.

Generally I consider myself libertarian and think that billionaires are good, actually, but I do think that inequality and society's response to inequality is likely to be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. While Sam Altman is the most visible face of AI to normies, pure game theory dictates that technological progress will continue with or without the consent of any individual person, company or nation-state, if the capability exists someone (or something...) is going to be the one that holds those reins to wealth, status and power, and as long those reins are held then the holder will inevitably be the target of the green-eyed masses. I don't think we yet have the social technology to deal with this and it's not clear that we ever will; I've seriously been thinking lately whether this might be one way that the Fermi Paradox manifests.

For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status,

Yeah, it's kinda depressing to realize that some of the most optimistic scenarios for AI will still result in a lot of human misery. It's fun to be a trust fund baby, but if all the hoi polloi are trust fund babies too, it kinda loses its shine. You are just another unemployed loser who can't get a reservation at any of the best restaurants. And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the grandchild of some schmuck who was lucky enough to put $10,000 into the right stock at the right time.

There is a story they used to teach in American history classes in high school that many of the early immigrants to the United States were people who had been locked out of European status hierarchies and decided to make a fresh start of things. Perhaps a similar sentiment will drive migration to the stars.

And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the grandchild of some schmuck who was lucky enough to put $10,000 into the right stock at the right time.

This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.

This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.

Well in your meritocracy, would people be able to bequeath resources to their descendants?

Yes, because I value latent merit.

Yes, because I value latent merit.

Ok, so let me amend my scenario a bit:

And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the wastrel great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose indolent son had a fling with a stripper.

Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that. So the scenario would only be

you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the brilliant and beautiful great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose son had a marriage with an Olympic figure skater.

Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that.

But so what? It's pretty normal for people to bequeath wealth to their wastrel descendants.

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AI will be more meritorious than any human, though.

I'm pro sentient sillicon super intelligence. I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.

I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.

"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom

I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!

However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?

If it can be a true successor, with intelligence, agency, and everything, it's probably sentient. If we can't figure out what sentience is in the mean time, maybe we don't deserve to keep existing into the future anyway. It's probably not that hard, but humans are very disappointing currently.

Yeah, it's kinda depressing to realize that some of the most optimistic scenarios for AI will still result in a lot of human misery.

At some point, a Matrix style world where everyone is just dumped in a virtual reality simulator where they can each become a hero of their own tale switched from one of the most dystopian outcomes imaginable to one of the better ones.

The realization hit me this weekend as I was hanging out with some friends at an artificial lagoon with temperature controlled water, lifeguards on duty, and basically everything optimized for keeping guests from getting hurt (and keep them spending money).

This is precisely how a 'beneficent' superintelligence is most likely to resolve the problem. Stick humans into a simulation, or maybe a completely artificial environment with all the edges that cause death and misery sanded off.

A permanent Disney World vacation. Maybe swap out the aesthetics often enough to make it feel novel.

Call me John the Savage but I always thought The Culture was a human zoo dystopia.

Life without struggle seems positively meaningless.

If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living. For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now. Surely such a superintelligence would be familiar with Brave New World and other dystopian fiction and criticisms about them and at least try to route around the pitfalls.

I don't see how that would be so dystopian, either. "God wouldn't make your burden heavier than what you can carry" is absolutely lindy. Why not make it truth for once?

For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now.

Or... the final version.

I actually had that thought as I was pondering this, along the lines of "oh shit what if the singularity happened in 2025 and the superintelligence is just A/B testing or Beta testing the environment to find the ideal amount of suffering, adventure, surprise, intrigue, and danger for human 'thriving.'

Its trying out things like the Moon mission and prediction markets/gambling and weight loss drugs and seeing how we react. Its moving oil prices around, its delaying GTA 6, its generating ridiculous amounts of AI "slop" to see which ones click with us.

(Oh wait, I just invented the plot of The Amazing Digital Circus from first principles)

If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living

Yeah, a similar thought had occurred to me. I think it's a good response to the "too boring" or "too easy" argument.

That is 5000% my own objection to the Culture as portrayed.

The ONLY entities with true volition in that universe are the minds. No human ever makes a meaningful choice, and whatever influence they have on their own fate is inherently pre-calculated in by the minds.

And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.

It honestly makes me sympathetic to Culture opponents just on the basis of "yes, maybe they're sadistic, evil, and backwards, but at least they're the masters of their own fate dammit!"

I think that's the precise objection leveled by the main character of the first book, actually.

And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.

It seems to me that the Culture deals with this by letting the dissenters interact with other cultures/societies on their behalf as part of Contact. Also humans live extended lifespans but not immortality, so far as Wikipedia tells me, so the problem will eventually solve itself; even the most fiery rebel can't maintain that meaningfully within the Culture, and if they leave to join a different world, then they are no longer a problem:

Since the Culture's biological population commonly live as long as 400 years and have no need to work, they face the difficulty of giving meaning to their lives when the Minds and other intelligent machines can do almost anything better than the biological population can. Many try—few successfully—to join Contact, the Culture's combined diplomatic / military / government service, and fewer still are invited to the even more elite Special Circumstances (SC), Contact's secret service and special operations division. Normal Culture citizens vicariously derive meaning from their existence via the works of Contact and SC. Banks described the Culture as "some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works... Contact does that on a large scale."

Yeah, and that's the existential horror of the situation to me.

You can dissent from the Culture, you can rebel, you can even try to kill yourself.

But none of that will change the outcome.

Its still there. Everywhere. Inevitable. And all alternatives are inherently worse.

I have before said that the inverse of the Culture might be a civilization of pure P-zombies whose whole, entire goal is removing sentience from the universe. Not intelligence, just sentience.

Assuming they're technologically equivalent to the culture, would the Culture win that fight?

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This is why The Culture always sounded incredibly uninteresting; maybe as one book exploring an interesting dystopia, sure, but a whole series about how awesome it is? Uh...

I haven't read it though. It sounds boring and dumb. Utopia is stupid setting.

I recently read Player of Games and while to some degree I echo the "boring Utopia" criticism, a lot of what makes the Culture utopia is a literally incredible amount of technological wizardly.

I can buy warp drives and the like, but if you have robots with little force fields and humans that can take a retrovirus to change gender and do drugs by thinking about it, you arguably have moved past the point of being able to offer social commentary simply because your society is inhuman. Banks, it seems to me, does social commentary anyway and I wouldn't say it's entirely a miss - some of it is thought-provoking. But I sort of choke when I am expected to believe that humans were doing stuff like going to dinner parties instead of wireheading or something even thought the technology in the books is more than just "really really smart AI," it is the ability to manipulate the spacetime continuum to a degree that arguably surpassed Star Trek (while having just enough limitations to serve the purposes of this specific plot, much like, well, an old-fashioned Star Trek episode).

Not sure if I explained that well. But basically Banks is, from what I can tell, asking me to believe that the entire Culture has insane gigatech and lives in the way that it does (that way happening to be, basically, what a liberal arts student would hope a socialist utopia would be like) Just Because. I've been vastly preferring the Stephenson I've read recently; Stephenson really is interested in the intersection of technology and ideology and tries to show his work whereas the Culture, to be honest, seems if anything more naive than Star Trek about the ideology of the future (while sharing perhaps certain assumptions of Roddenberry about how The Future would eliminate certain barriers between older men and young and desirable women.) Obviously you can justify anything you want in the Culture by waving your hands and saying "aligned AI" but that doesn't necessarily make it satisfying.

You can have your meaningful struggle life. I'm very down for the culture, I'll gonna enjoy lava rafting, a brain that can synthesize its own drugs, and fucking my ultra hot girlfriend with my massive gene edited dick.

If I get bored I'll move to a fun sounding meme planet and become a bat-person or whatever. I bet I could have a few hundred years of fun in the Culture.

Even if we assume there isn’t still some guy getting paid to crawl into the server farms and cooling towers and fix stuff, you don’t need to be a personal servant. Waiting tables isn’t demeaning- and these people will eat at restaurants, waiters are already a luxury good, that job’s not going away.

Waiting tables isn’t demeaning-

For a lot of people it is, especially if there is a kind of permanent aristocracy in place. Personally, I don't think I'd mind being a waiter or a bartender, but I've already had a lengthy career as a well compensated professional. For someone who just graduated law school or business school or whatever, well, that might be a different story.

Yep.

The implied lack of upward mobility is probably the part that would make it unbearable.

You're a waiter because that's the only role you are capable of serving in this world. You cannot ever expect to get recognized for more than that. Not even luck will save you.

The patrons who use your services may even treat you with basic dignity, but yeah, your status will never approach theirs, and you both know it.

You're a waiter because that's the only role you are capable of serving in this world. You cannot ever expect to get recognized for more than that. Not even luck will save you.

The patrons who use your services may even treat you with basic dignity, but yeah, your status will never approach theirs, and you both know it.

Yeah, I'm not sure it would be unbearable, but it still seems pretty lousy. I'm not an expert on European history, but I am pretty sure there were situations like that in medieval Europe. Where a person worked the fields as a serf, not because of any innate abilities or lack thereof, but rather because his father had been a serf; his father's father had been a serf; and so on. Meanwhile, he served some kind of feudal lord. Who was a feudal lord because his father was one. And so on back to some day in the distant past.

We have robot waiters now.

And they are a marginal presence because people prefer humans to clankers.

Funny enough, I've had the insight that the one thing you can do to increase your odds of success in the post-AI world is be pleasant and enjoyable to physically be around. Whatever that means for you. If other humans WANT to spend time with you and be in your presence, you can parlay that into success in whatever the situation becomes. Attractive women have a clear advantage.

As an introvert, the robot waiters work exceedingly well for me.

Waiting tables isn’t demeaning-

You go be a waiter for your whole life then.

It all depends on how people treat service workers, and increasingly it seems to be entitlement and treating them like servants/trash. "I'm paying for this so I deserve to be treated with the bowing and scraping you'd give a duke" is the attitude.

Even years back, when I worked in a shop, I still remember the guy who was buying a newspaper and who didn't even bother to look at me as he paid, he kept his head turned chatting to his friend and literally threw the money down on the counter. That was just bad manners, but clearly in his mind, I wasn't even a person to be acknowledged.

Now add in drunks and lunatics, and I'd crawl over broken glass rather than work public-facing jobs again in service/retail industries.

Daily I am reminded of how I am fortunate to live in Japan. There are of course drunks and lunatics here as well, and entitled pricks are not difficult to find, but generally service is superior and customers are gracious. Even--maybe even most noticeably because they're just workaday usual-- in regular retail jobs.

edit: Japan is fucked in many ways.

Waiting tables isn’t demeaning

You'd be amazed at the shit customers pull these days. I don't wait tables anymore, but in the time I did, I had customers:

  • Scream profanity and slurs at me
  • Hit me
  • Pour drinks on me
  • Spit on me
  • Dine and dash
  • Lie to management about my behavior in an attempt to get comps.

Bartending wasn't much better.

My partner still works in the industry and it seems like not much has changed.

I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.

For example, maybe if a customer is rude, the business can forcibly fine them. A customer can challenge the fine + court fees, and is presumed innocent, but since it's a private establishment the business can present video evidence.

Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).

It's a small thing, along with letting factory workers wear headphones.

I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.

As someone who worked in retail years and years ago, hollow laughter.

Managers won't take the side of staff because customers bring in money while staff cost money. And nowadays, with your business living and dying by online reviews, and anything less than 5 stars being seen as terrible, there's even more of a perverse incentive to appease even the loudest mouth, because that's precisely the person who will leave 1 star reviews everywhere and get up an online campaign to boycott your business. Throwing staff to the wolves is easier than telling bad customers to buzz off.

Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).

Used to be the right of refusal of service, but that got neutered after all the lawsuits about equal treatment etc. (just think of the gay wedding cakes argument for one). You can technically refuse service so long as the reasons are non-discrimination, but today everything can be turned into "that's discrimination!" (e.g. Kamala and Hillary didn't get elected because sexism and racism, in Kamala's case, not because nobody wanted them as president).

Some places will protect staff, but generally customer facing is low ranking, high turnover anyway, and you're disposable.

That’s why they were proposing a legal framework where it becomes profitable for the restaurant to go after rude customers. If the restaurant gets most of the fine and there is an additional even more punitive fine for reviewing a restaurant after you’ve been found against (and running an anon review service is banned), you could reset the incentives. I would be mostly fine with all of this except for the banning of anon review sites because I don’t like the idea of ID gating the internet, even a small part of it.

I don’t want ID to be part of the internet either.

Anon review sites are already untrustworthy. Ideally, people revert to paid trustworthy critics or form paid webs of trust, so rando nitpicking and shill glazing are both ignored.

To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.

It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.

I think providing good service is reasonable, as long as the customer is polite and not asking for something particularly demanding.

The refund wasn’t your problem, the manager is the one who’s losing from giving customers extra.

My focus is when customers are disrespectful, or the boss is disrespectful, or otherwise causing the employee unnecessarily difficulty.

I think that pettiness is particularly evil, because it’s clearly unjust, loss without gain. Whereas even a robber baron, while unjust, at least gains the money others lose, and can donate it back to society. I wonder why society doesn’t focus on tackling pettiness more than other issues.

Even without the modest proposal part, ask yourself "exactly how could a business (particularly a small business) abuse this against customers, if the business owner was petty enough to want to do that?" (And plenty of business owners are petty. That's one of the advantages a big box store like Walmart has over mom and pop stores.)

If your proposal is vulnerable to such abuses, it's a bad idea.

It's a small thing, along with letting factory workers wear headphones

I believe this one's actually OSHA banning it, not the factories.

For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.

Relative deprivation/hedonic treadmill.

Whether or not you believe the more bombastic claims of AI CEO's, I do think it's clear that at minimum AI is going to exacerbate the trend of technology centralizing power, wealth and status, even as absolute material standards have continued to improve beyond the wildest dreams of 99.9% of humanity in the past. For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.

The root of this is not entirely unjustified, although I won't contend envy is not some part of it.

Before the industrial revolution, power and population were strongly correlated: if you want to be powerful, you need people on your side, and a lot of them. Even if "on your side" means a not-particularly-reciprocated relationship of "I sit here in my castle and you plow the fields", at least the peasant is necessary to plow the fields. You can't just kill him (or at least, not all of him), or the field goes unplowed, and you starve.

With the advent of industrial and especially computer technology, this balance is upset. You really can just kill all the peasants and have the field plow itself. Now, is this done? No, or at least, not yet. But it's partly because it's not yet entirely practical. You can buy a really nice nuclear bunker for a few billion in 2026, but nonetheless, post-kaboom, it's still just a relic of a prior era and you're on a limited, non-renewable supply of luxuries with minimal ability to bootstrap yourself and your buddies back up to industrial civilisation on timescales relevant to your personal comfort. Thus, it's more comfortable for now to not kill everybody.

But that's just a technology problem, too. In the foreseeable future, it may indeed be feasible to build a full, self-sustaining, closed loop of industrial production (ie, sufficiently advanced bots that they are capable of maintaining the infrastructure of their own production, together with being able to do agriculture for you). Once you have this, yeah, you really can just exterminate billions of plebes and suffer no long-term decline in quality of life.

So, basically, industrial production still depends on the labour of large numberse of plebeians--too many to keep alive with you in a bunker, so they must be kept alive for now.

The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.

So where does this leave us? Well, the Butlerian Jihad, obviously (fun fact: the "Butler" in "Butlerian Jihad" is this guy, who wrote this cute little letter, which you should read at your leisure).

The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.

I'm not saying this kind of scenario is impossible, but consider that there are large groups of people in the United States who are already candidates for the genocide you are proposing. And kind of the opposite is happening.

So I think the scenario you propose is unlikely. It's true that people want power, material abundance, etc. But people also crave social status. And you get a lot of social status out of making a show of benevolence to these unnecessary plebes as you term them.

I think it’s actually very likely. There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them, particularly people who do nothing to benefit those paying for it. Keep in mind that this scenario would entail the majority of the population, and those with the money to pay for it also have the power to murder the population in Disneyland who are a drain with no benefit. They are essentially pets. But no one will spend billions on the pets. Elon Musk isn’t the insane cat lady who’s going to keep 500 bums in his mansion.

There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them, particularly people who do nothing to benefit those paying for it.

You are aware of the sums being spent on the homeless in West Coast cities, right?

There's a political ideology that's good at rallying moralistic middle-aged women, teachers, doctors, officials, NGOdom... They do the caring for the homeless.

But is that ideology strong with tech billionaires or high-ranking military/intelligence spooks? Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.

An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists, that seems to produce leftism we recognize today, just like a system that requires a bunch of professional heavy cavalry leans towards martial valour and manly vigour...

But take away that economic system and replace it with robots, we'd see something quite different surely?

Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.

I'm informed that they already have their hands on the buttons. Certainly the middle aged women are not the ones with their fingers on the buttons.

An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists

In what sense are they required?

In what sense are they required?

Well the system we have has this kind of 'harmony' in that it evolves to meet the needs of the economy and the economy evolves to meet the needs of the system. Managerial state, managerial culture, niceness and rule-abiding, cancellation of dissidents because some middle-aged woman decided you shouldn't have a bank account or legal representation or whatever. And the economy gets altered by the system, so we get lots of pensions and healthcare spending and no nuclear energy. There sure are a lot of tensions and conflicts going on, 'contradictions' in Marxist terms, but the basic system remains intact.

My point is that rugpulling the economic base will rugpull the ideology too.

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Is that why they all sleep in the overpasses?

I'm not sure what the contradiction is.

There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them,

I strongly disagree. There is a huge system in place to distribute jobs, money, social status, and so on to so-called "historically underrepresented groups."

For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.

I disagree. Happiness is greatly tied to absolute material prosperity but relative prosperity gates access to some goods that are essential for happiness, like housing and a mate.

Furthermore, inequality is a proxy for an uneven distribution of power. Have that imbalance become severe enough and it becomes a mortal threat, especially as it relates to automation.

The level of worry that is rational here greatly depends on automation timelines but ignoring inequality is perhaps the most retarded thing anyone can do.

Furthermore, inequality is a proxy for an uneven distribution of power.

I suppose my view is that wealth isn't power, power is power. Any coalition capable of unseating the billionaire class would by definition hold more power than the current wealthy. I'm not sure it really makes much difference whether it's a Langley spook, Hague bureaucrat, tech billionaire, or CCP party member that holds the reins to ultimate power and status.

As long as technology exists you'll get centralization of power, but as long as centralized technological power doesn't exist you get Haiti or South Sudan, the Hobbesian life in a state of nature.

relative prosperity gates access to some goods that are essential for happiness, like housing and a mate

Extension du domaine de la lutte. The progressive ideal of re-distributing wealth is at least logically possible, but it's fundamentally impossible to re-distribute everyone a big house in the best locations and a high status mate. If being better than others is essential to happiness, then perhaps that is humanity's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit.

Extension du domaine de la lutte. The progressive ideal of re-distributing wealth is at least logically possible, but it's fundamentally impossible to re-distribute everyone a big house in the best locations and a high status mate. If being better than others is essential to happiness, then perhaps that is humanity's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit.

There is a vast gulf between "viable access to family formation" and "elite mansion with access to the most desirable partner". It isn't really arguable that modern society is failing to provide the former to a far larger portion of the population than it did in the past. The fact that "absolute living standards" means that we now have far more convenient and easy to use sports betting applications and larger flatscreen TVs doesn't really address the serious material concerns that a lot of people are facing.

At the same time, a lot of the visible concentrations of wealth in modern society are nakedly and undeniably antisocial. Take a look at some of President Trump's recent pardons - several of them have gone to people who defrauded the government or the greater populace. When people get angry at Joseph Schwartz, they're not envious that he's so much richer and better than him - they're furious that he cut costs in a way that lead to the death of their relatives while simultaneously avoiding paying tax. His wealth was explicitly gained in a way that harmed the rest of society, and yet our current system ensured he largely escaped consequences while the people who sued him and won in court received no compensation. While that's just one of the more prominent examples from recent news, you don't have to look particularly hard to find all sorts of examples of people profiting by dumping negative externalities on the public.

It isn't really arguable that modern society is failing to provide the former to a far larger portion of the population than it did in the past

I agree, but this doesn't really have anything to do with inequality. Most of South America and Africa have vastly higher Gini indexes and much more blatant, corrupt wealth inequality than any developed country yet retain much higher TFR's, while the social democratic Nordic countries living under the law of Jante have amongst the lowest TFR's worldwide. Being rich, free & educated, having the optionality in life to do anything in life at the expense of having children, social atomization and access to smartphones seem like much more causal factors to plummeting rates of family formation.

At the same time, a lot of the visible concentrations of wealth in modern society are nakedly and undeniably antisocial.

I agree that a lot of the aesthetics of the modern wealthy are off-putting, but as I mentioned earlier, "powerful people act in upsetting ways" is not a solvable problem as long as the fundamental ability to concentrate power through technology exists at all. Nobody remembers the man that Luigi killed and nothing changed whatsoever. If it's not the current crop of people seizing the reins of power to enrich themselves, it'll simply be someone else stepping up in their stead.

I agree, but this doesn't really have anything to do with inequality.

My opinion is that the increased immigration flows and financial pressure on housing and cost of living have much more to do with the collapse in fertility rates than being free and educated. That said, the topic is so complicated that it could be a thread by itself - so I'll just say that I think the increase in relative costs of living is a direct result of policies solely pursued due to that inequality and that is what is decreasing fertility.

I agree that a lot of the aesthetics of the modern wealthy are off-putting, but as I mentioned earlier, "powerful people act in upsetting ways" is not a solvable problem as long as the fundamental ability to concentrate power through technology exists at all.

First of all, this is not just "the aesthetics" of the modern wealthy. What Schwartz did directly harmed society in exchange for personally enriching him, and this isn't some isolated case. Look through the list of pardons that Trump has handed out and you can see countless cases of this kind of banal and venal corruption. On top of that, look at people like Rick Scott, who defrauded the government and then used his ill-gotten wealth to get elected. There's no law of the universe which says that people need to put up with this odious nonsense, and this flagrant looting of the nation is prime tinder for a nasty political blowback. What kind of vision of the future are you offering when you say that things are going to be terrible forever and rich criminals will never face justice?

Moreover, the idea that this isn't a solvable problem is just completely false. Hell, all of those pardons could be fixed by the simple expedient of not allowing the president to pardon people in exchange for personal financial gain. It doesn't have to be like this and there are numerous governments throughout history and the world that have prevented this kind of behavior and stopped it.

Nobody remembers the man that Luigi killed and nothing changed whatsoever.

Actually, the recent wave of warehouse burnings was directly inspired by his shooting.

A scenario you didn't mention: AI takes over and rules alongside Moloch over everyone.

I think this is much more likely than technofeudalism: because people are too incompetent, and what would someone who desires to dominate everyone desire after?

It doesn't have to be ASI. Climate change alone may do it, by coercing everyone to cooperate more to maintain normal.

What about the AI bubble pops? The cost decreases and capability increases simply never materialize and we enter into a recession or a depression.

I've never put a huge amount of focus into the person of Sam Altman but from light cultural osmosis it feels like he's always been presented as a turbo grifter without any particular belief if anything (and if there is a belief in anything it's a cartoon villain AGI push). Which might make it easier for people to go for him in this function?

I think that has something to do with it. He's been in the news quite a lot lately, between the Ronan Farrow expose and the general AI hype.

In the case of the individual who firebombed him, he was a full blown hard-takeoff AI doomer, so I am unsurprised that he'd go after the largest and most established company.

To me he seems like a pathological liar but no worse. At least he says good things.

I don't think he should be murdered. If you were in his position, what would you do?

Although I don't trust him with ASI, nor anyone else.

I'm going to bring this up just because its in the back of my mind and I'm going to reserve some small amount of probability for it.

But I can imagine the scenario where Sam himself arranges for these (pretty ineffective, obviously) attacks against his home as a counter to the bad press and to make sure he keeps his grasp on power, as he's already been ousted once.

Yes, it's implausible that he'd pull a Jussie Smollet, it is VASTLY more likely to be actual random violence. But I have enough distrust for Altman that I think he'd be willing to do something like this, especially if it carried minimal risk of personal harm.

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, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.

Holy cow.

I guess the high achievers are technically the MOST likely to feel this anxiety, because they can directly perceive their competition is no longer just other high achievers... but this machine that can outperform them on every single metric that matters for success.

And as a former High School Valedictorian myself... I don't have a good answer here.

Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.

But to continue in academics would be a doomed play.

Uhhh get him in a gym and possibly doing some martial arts STAT, if only for the mental health benefits.

Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.

At this point he's considering law, because lawyers decide what's allowed or not in this country. His opinion is that it'll be one of the last safe fields left.

Okay.

As a lawyer, I am going to say no, don't do that.

His logic is not unsound, since we do in fact have control over how our profession is practiced and can use our guild authority to keep AI sidelined (for now). Here's a take I had three years ago that I still stand by. I've reiterated it. (holy crap GPT-3 was almost 6 years ago?)

Yes we can throw up barriers to AI adoption, and make the laws that protect us from AI competition. That's not as strong a moat as it seems. Even if lawyers are protected from AI competition... guess what your clients are doing.

And:

A) A bunch of other people are going to get a similar idea, so it'll be saturated, most likely. Already happening to an extent.

B) Most lawyers are miserable in their area of law. I am not, but I still had a long period of suck to get through, kept alive by my long-term goal of getting where I am now.

C) He will probably not become fabulously wealthy in this field even if AI doesn't supplant most entry-level legal jobs. MAKE HIM AWARE OF THE BIMODAL SALARY DISTRIBUTION FOR NEW GRADS. This was my big mistake early on.

There is now some evidence of downward pressure on new grad salaries.

I truly wish I had a more positive prescription to give out, but I am vehement about this negative one.

Co-signed 100%. At this point, law is only worth going into if someone else is paying for it and the person has worked in some kind of law office and finds they enjoy the work.

and the person has worked in some kind of law office and finds they enjoy the work.

It's funny. I love the idea of law. I briefly worked in the mail room of a law firm and even enjoyed that.

I took the LSAT and got a 178.

Then 2008 happened and every single liberal arts student in the country stampeded into law. I guess it wasn't meant to be.

Maybe I'll sit for the patent agent test one day.

Oh I'm not a lawyer. I bailed and stayed in software before I racked up a shitload of debt.

I'm one of those engineers.

Oh I'm not a lawyer. I bailed and stayed in software before I racked up a shitload of debt.

Yes, I should've said "not lots of [actual or potential] lawyers with 178 LSATs" or something like that.

I'm one of those engineers.

No, you're an engineer who took the LSAT and did very well. Again, not the kind of engineer dragging down the pass rate.

I had a young guy in my office last month, with his dad (the client), who was apparently been accepted to Georgetown Law and was pretty hyped to be going.

I couldn't bring myself to tell him how badly I expected that to turn out for him in the end.

Important detail: he's black, so my guess is that he's getting some financial support.

I've personally suggested he join the military. That idea did not go over well with the family.

That's a hard sell at this particular moment, for sure.

Might be worth a shot to see if he can get in the military industrial complex, maybe Palmer Luckey would hire him.

That is a belittling suggestion. Similar to the discourse on X among right wingers where one camp says bright young men should get into trades. Much has been said on why this is belittling and dis-empowering for bright young men.

It's not a belittling suggestion. My family has a long history of military service. The only reason I didn't join was because I was in a car accident that rendered me medically unfit my senior year of high school.

Being an officer isn't a bad gig, if you can get it.

Going in as an officer is great for aspiring right-wing leaders. If you commit to it and don't screw up, you build a resume and a rolodex and give yourself future credibility as a political leader. It only negatively impacts your status among a small sliver of the population and opens up future employment avenues as well.

If a son of mine was interested in the military, I would likely discourage them from going in as enlisted, but not necessarily if they were interested in going in as an officer.

Being an officer isn't too bad.

You can easily do your four years in the service, make up your mind as to what to use the free college for, and then take advantage of preferential hiring.

There's also nothing wrong with the trades; we stand to benefit strongly from AI, after all. Not everyone is going to be a CEO or have a cushy sinecure, and that's OK.

Suggest he become a JAG, best of both worlds and his chances of getting KIA are near zero. And I think they'll pay off his law school student loans if he stays with it for a decade or something like that.

I think this sort of thing is really difficult to predict. It seems pretty clear that there will be some minimum demand for attorneys in the future:

By law, corporations must be represented by licensed attorneys;

It seems likely that a human being will be needed to make arguments to a jury;

Consulting with an attorney, who then queries an LLM, gives you a stronger argument that the communication is privileged than if you just query the LLM directly.

On the other hand, it seems plausible that the number of lawyers required will drop by quite a lot. If 50% of legal work can be done by LLMs, then a lot of lawyers will still have jobs, but many (including a lot of new grads) will end up unemployed.

But will it really work like that? There has been an explosion in litigation over the last 40 years, in part because technology made it more economically feasible to pursue disputes. One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.

So it's entirely possible that with AI, there will be more demand for lawyers than ever.

I just don't see anyway to sustain the pipeline if fresh Associates CANNOT outperform the LLMs, especially on price.

If a law firm can spin up an arbitrary amount of 'agents' that have all the requisite knowledge to handle a given legal issue, maybe they hire some attorneys to wrangle the agents and sign off on their output.

But that doesn't give those attorneys good legal experience they can translate into advancing their career. That's a step above doc review.

Hell, AI should be able to replace most Law School professors. It SHOULD become possible to become a competent lawyer without setting foot in a law school campus.

So naively, what I see coming down the pike is a massive spike in the 'supply' of legal knowledge that is on tap... and no clear reason why people should prefer the person who got a 6-figure loan for law school (and has to bill accordingly) over the $20-$200/month uberexpert that lives in their pocket. So from whence comes demand for human lawyer?

Basically one thing: Accountability. They can be punished for screwups.

One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.

One possible outcome is that governments spend money beefing up their legal systems, staffing out enough judges and clerks and such to actually meet the surge.

But courts are a pure cost center, so I just doubt it happens. Instead I think more disputes go to private arbitration, or maybe AI Mediators become a popular option. I think the demand for NONJUDICIAL resolutions surges! They're cheaper and possibly even more accurate. And if mediation and arbitration becomes popular... guess what all those rules about attorneys being needed to argue for a jury or represent a corpo get sidestepped very neatly.

I just don't see anyway to sustain the pipeline if fresh Associates CANNOT outperform the LLMs, especially on price.

I agree that the BIGLAW model, as it exists today (e.g. new litigation associates spend 2 or 3 years in the library) is very unlikely to survive mature LLMs. But possibly there will be a spike in demand for warm bodies to be in the courtroom.

One possible outcome is that governments spend money beefing up their legal systems, staffing out enough judges and clerks and such to actually meet the surge.

But courts are a pure cost center, so I just doubt it happens.

Well the way it happens is that the legislature passes some new law which gives people a cause of action for some wrong. Or the courts expand the concept of due process. More lawsuits or proceedings get filed. The courts get more of a backlog. So more judges need to get hired and more courthouses built. And in fact, there are far more judges now than there were in the past.

Here's an example: It used to be that if you were denied some government benefit, such as welfare or social security or unemployment insurance, you were out of luck. But nowadays, you have a right to a speedy hearing before an administrative law judge. Making more work for attorneys. Possibly in the future this process will continue.

Right, but I don't see the incentive for governments to expand the existing systems, which are already getting seriously backlogged (at least around here).

Right, but I don't see the incentive for governments to expand the existing systems

The trend over the years has been to expand and expand and expand -- despite the fact that it costs the government money.

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You’ll still need clerical workers to supervise the LLM’s or something analogous to that. I’ll never be sold on the great transformative possibilities of them due to the mathematical impossibility of resolving the hallucination problem. How are you going to trust that it correctly read that Congressional omnibus bill?

How do you trust a human assistant did so?

You verify.

So then what problems is the LLM solving in that case? The advantage doesn’t seem to be all that great.

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Law hasn't been a great field for a while either. Source: I'm a law school dropout.

Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, tons of universities added law schools. They basically bring in the same amount of revenue as medical schools, but with waaaaay less overhead. The legal job market got flooded in the mid 10's. I'm sure supply and demand have normalized a bit since then, but law isn't nearly as surefire a way to be wealthy as it used too be.

a law school dropout.

i.e. a genius.

I'm sure supply and demand have normalized a bit since then,

Yes and no. Hiring is up, but I think there's significant turnover too. Some law firms realized that when you have a surplus of desperate new grads, you can churn your associates harder and replace them easier.

Right now the churn is more in recent grads leaving for what they perceive to be greener pastures. The problem right now isn't so much a shortage of lawyers as it is a shortage of experienced lawyers. I work at a smaller firm, and just a couple months ago a younger guy who clerked for a judge after law school and whose wife works across the street from us quit to take a different job. I don't even know if the pay is any better, but it seems like everyone under the age of 35, and several people who are older, think that whatever job they're doing is unsatisfying and wants to do something closer to what they imagined the practice of law would look like. In the meantime, we can't find anyone to replace these people. Hiring out of law school only makes the situation worse because it takes several months to get an attorney to the point where they're actually making money for the firm, and they're unwilling to do that for a guy who is going to bolt in six months.

I agree with this overall, and I don't even know where new grads are necessarily going. I know of urban DA/PD offices that have trouble hiring, and the pay/benefits are decent. Doing a few years at either to get some trial/motion/evidentiary hearing experience before moving on is apparently something new grads are not willing to do. The PD offices I'm most familiar with seem to be trading their experienced attorneys every few years but there really aren't that many new faces coming up the ranks.

How is AI upending the profession in your case? Are there interesting avenues undergrads can pursue that have an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession in some sense? Or is it all fairly mundane?

I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.

I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough.

Not saying it would or wouldn't work well for this, but even Opus 4.6 is $5 per million input tokens. You probably wouldn't want to feed in all the transcripts at once though.

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I'm an atypical case, since I work at a non-profit and I spend a lot of time researching case law (I'm told by a lot of private practice friends that they haven't typed a casr citation into westlaw or lexis in years), but Westlaw's built-in AI has largely replaced summer associates as my go to source of info for "hmm, I wonder" type questions. Simple queries where I just want a quick sniff test to see if the theory I'm spitballing is precluded by some obvious bit of black letter law, or a short summary of how a particular jurisdiction handles some procedural issue. I get an answer of questionable veracity I'll need to verify and develop before getting any value out of, but the AI gives it to me in 45 seconds rather than 3-4 days. So I have to make a conscious effort to inefficiently include interns and new attorneys in things for training purposes, because it probably takes about a year before a new lawyer outperforms the AI (at current AI capabilities). We're not hiring fewer of them yet, since the higher-ups are mindful of maintaining the talent pipeline and don't want to be scrambling to find mid-levels in five years, but they do have less to do.

I'm adamant about never using AI for drafting assistance, but I notice my colleagues increasingly using it to generate first drafts of things like emails and op-eds. Haven't seen any open use of it on actual legal documents yet.

As far as labor force impact, I think it's very practice-area-dependent. The more your practice involves spreadsheets and insurance paperwork, volume-dependent mad libs-type work, the more impact you'll feel. If you're heavily reliant on tech companies or other clients making "AI first" pushes, it's probably pretty rough. I worry for our legal secretaries. Litigators are pretty safe. As long as judges require flesh and blood people standing in court rooms (or at least on zoom) and continue to ban the unauthorized practice of law, there's only so much automation that can really take place. Doctors and lawyers have spent over a century erecting walls and moats to protect their professions from competition from the dirty proles; we're not submitting to the robots without a fight.

I think that would be a bad strategy for Altman, since I think that the majority of the population's reaction to hearing about the assassination attempts against Altman is either "who's that?" or "I wish they had managed to kill him". Even among the economic movers and shakers, I doubt that many people would actually be sad if Altman was killed.

Yeahhhh the amount of support for the attempts coming out should be a wake up call of some kind.

I'm not sure he's going to heed it in any way other than boosting his personal security presence.

"lamest cyberpunk dystopia ever" rings more and more true -- the head of the $1T worldleading AI company needs to have a team of ninjas armed with micron-edge katanas, or killer robots at least; Sam will just borrow some beefcakes from Thiel, or something.

Yeah. If Sam doesn't have a team of Blackwater mercs in exoskeletons guarding his house 24/7 then Silicon Valley is a joke.

My take has been that tech CEOs, as the blue tribers they are, will never stop taking loyalty oaths to the left, but as billionaire capitalists, they will be hated by the exact same class they pledge loyalty to. As a result, they have absolutely no friends and nobody who will run cover for them. That leaves them facing a bunch of hit pieces and getting no puff pieces, as well as no fans willing to go to war for them.

Elon musk might have alot of haters, but he has a ton of rabid superfans going to war on the internet trying to squash anything negative about him. And it kind of works, normies who aren't plugged directly into the anti-trump programming machine just think he's a awkward nerdy rocket man. Meanwhile non-tech CEOs know to shut up, and make their loyalty oaths in private, if they still feel the need to. Who even knows what the CEO of Boeing or Walmart thinks about some issue or another, or even who they are. Meanwhile Sam can't help but get on stage at every opportunity, and open his mouth and say something that will piss off another chunk of the shrinking group of people who don't hate him yet.

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, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it.

Tech execs are jacked up on hopium hoping that AI models get significantly better in the next few years. In an attempt to get ahead of the curve, they're adopting policies and methods that assume those models are already here.

The fact that the majority of all code that has ever been created in history has been created since the start of 2026 is actually an incredibly bad thing. Code itself is a burden, and is only there because of the functionality it enables. And I haven't seen any major improvement in the functionality offered by major companies recently at all. In fact it often seems that things are getting worse.

The fact that the majority of all code that has ever been created in history has been created since the start of 2026 is actually an incredibly bad thing. Code itself is a burden, and is only there because of the functionality it enables.

I don’t agree. Software is a depreciating asset, like a house, and AI is tool for building it. Your take reminds me of people lamenting GarageBand or the equivalent because now everyone can make music, and it’s nearly all bad.

Software is a product that does something, while code is simply a component that is instrumental in delivering that product. If a builder uses twice as many nails, yet only builds 5% more houses, I think that's a problem for the builder.

now everyone can make music, and it’s nearly all bad.

In the same sense that everyone could make code with their computer since... well... computers? In the same sense that anyone could go and buy a guitar and tape deck and make music? In fact, the majority of music created by professional artists and record studios is probably also bad.

AI slop is different. Now truly anyone can make a song by clicking a button. I'd hazard to guess that the majority of all "music" to ever exist on earth has also been created since the start of 2026, and its badness dwarfs the shitty tracks put together by hobbyists toying with garageband.

Elon musk might have alot of haters, but he has a ton of rabid superfans going to war on the internet trying to squash anything negative about him.

Sam Hyde's Dear Elon video goes into this quite a bit. Right-wingers don't care that he's a weirdo obsessed with electric cars and who has tons of children he doesn't actually raise with a dozen different women. So long as he is willing to side with us on the core issues we care about (like immigration) or at least not be actively hostile against it (like he seems to be with religion), the right is willing to accept and love him, warts and all. It's when he sided with Vivek Ramaswamy's overtly anti-white and anti-American views on immigration that a lot of the love the right was showing for him evaporated overnight.

Personally I've never loved (nor hated) Elon, I've always seen him as a rich, sometimes entertaining weirdo who finally fixed the space industry. But his interests aren't mine, and never have been. When our interests align I'll gladly accept the help, but I will never expect him to be a reliable ally.

Personal opinion: I don't give a damn about Elon's opinions either way, he makes cool stuff happen and I'm glad he's around. World would be less interesting without the guy.

Of course they won’t have any friends. Their first loyalty is to their class interests as business executives. Thats the dynamic that puts them into a position of being able to exercise social power in the first place. Without said wealth backing them, they have no policies or playground in society to experiment with. All they can do is pay lip service.

Their class interests are defined along their wealth. These people aren’t ideological subjects in the sense that Islam still dominates the consciousness of the Iranian elite. They are still obedient along with the rest of the population. Tech CEO’s here throw their money around treating society like it’s their personal plaything to mess with. Some are dangerous ideologues no doubt, but you saw just how frail that was when so many of them did a 180 after Trump returned for a second term.

top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang.

My first immediate thought is Americans live on easy mode. For East Asians, top of graduating class would mean minimum 1500.

But what has that gotten East Asians? It would seem they prefer to move to the United States, and Americans do not prefer to move to China. Perhaps over-studying is a form of defection against society, and it being predominant lowers creative output, leading to a worse economy than a counterfactual society.

It would seem they prefer to move to the United States, and Americans do not prefer to move to China.

Not sure if that's true these days. We need to search up let's say where the top 10k gaokao testers go over the years. I believe the increased scrutiny ("Are you a chinese spy?") and increasingly hostile culture against China lead to many Chinese deciding to go back to their country. I know in Vietnam that it was a minor controversy where all the winners of a nationally televised academic contest all became Australian nationals (the winning prize is a full ride scholarship to an Australian university)

I believe the increased scrutiny ("Are you a chinese spy?") and increasingly hostile culture against China lead to many Chinese deciding to go back to their country.

Not to mention the near-impossibility of dating as an East Asian male fob in the US, especially in the major tech hubs (Bay Area, Seattle)

They could always try dating ADoS women.

I (and they) would much rather go back to China

The vast majority have not gone back to China, and the other direction you didn't address. Americans don't move to China. Why is that, if China is so great?

I've heard a few stories about really smart people on the margins moving to China and being wildly rewarded. Mostly white male engineers who felt DEI-limited in the states. Inversely though I know basically nobody learning Chinese. It's extremely uncommon relative to the number of people predicting that China is about to take over the world.

There is (or more like was) a big expat community in China, I'm sure if they could they would have loved to take roots there. China just doesn't allow much immigration if at all. The supply just isn't there even if there is demand.

How big is it compared to the expat community of Chinese in the United States?

According to 2020 Chinese census, China has 1,430,695 immigrants, dividing between 845,697 foreign nationals and 584,998 residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.[1] As of 2023, there are around 12,000 foreigners with permanent residency in China.[2]

As of 2023, there are approximately 5.5 million Chinese Americans in the United States, making them the largest Asian origin population in the country.

Despite the US being 1/3 of the population of China, there are 4 times more Chinese immigrants living in the United States than all immigrants living in China.

How do you explain that if China is so great?

I just reviewed my comments. I should have said "Not sure if Chinese prefer migrating to America is all true these days". Look, I don't disagree with you. I am an immigrant to the US myself and certainly think it's a better place for me and that the place would be better with me in it. And about the dynamics of immigration, China has never been welcoming and has a strong cultural and social identity on what it means to be Chinese, not to mention the process sucks even harder than the US in some ways. If one looks at immigration by percentage of population, China stands out in both how powerful/rich it is compared to its immigration population. But the sentiment is changing and that's what I meant by pointing out that "Not sure if that's true these days". We've all read the many posts about Deepseek and Chinese tech companies, they are certainly full of talents and people who isn't really leaving anymore. Would they if they could? maybe. Target, desire, opportunity, the triangle of crime is a great way to explain how people make choices anyway. Opportunities for foreigners in China since the CPC came to power has remained few relatively even if they have the target and desire, but opportunities and desire for Chinese nationals to stay have increased.

But what has that gotten East Asians? It would seem they prefer to move to the United States, and Americans do not prefer to move to China. Perhaps over-studying is a form of defection against society, and it being predominant lowers creative output, leading to a worse economy than a counterfactual society

I think it can still shake out in surprising ways. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.. I certainly read a ton of chinese webnovels and to me the Chinese authors are very very creative. The weight of Chinese population requires both US + Europe combined to counterbalance. Xi is iron-fisted, but Chinese people as a whole are prosperous and growing.

I am most worried for China about the demographic collapse, the gender gap. I thought China actually handled the real estate bubble well. I am of the belief that American people are still angry that no one really got punished for the 2008 crisis (that they got chumped) and that anger animates all the elections since. I don't like China's lack of freedoms, China homogeneous view of society, etc. but I don't discount that for much of its population that the balance is fine.

You are missing the point: nobody likes China, not even the Chinese. They flee from China at a rate much higher than people flee to China. Therefore, your ethnic chauvinism is misplaced. You said:

My first immediate thought is Americans live on easy mode. For East Asians, top of graduating class would mean minimum 1500.

This is not a good thing. This is why people don't like China or Chinese immigration. Studying too much is selfish and doesn't benefit society. It's bad behavior. It should not be celebrated.

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I got a 1530 and wasn't even close to top of my class, to me it seems like you guys are all living on easy mode.

overlap, you're at the top of the American/West range while I was pointing out the bottom of the East Asian range.

1400 isn't particularly good (or bad) by any measure, Asian or otherwise, but he said he did that as a junior.

Don't most people take the SATs in their junior year? College applications start going out in October so there isn't much time to take them in senior year.

There's typically an August and a September test date that can get your scores released in time for even early applications.

It's not uncommon to take an earlier SAT, though, late junior year, to make sure you can retake it if you blow it the first time.

Oh, I mixed up sophomore and junior.

1400 probably doesn’t mean much on this site, but it’s still top 5–6% nation-wide. That’s pretty good.

Good by what metric? I certainly wouldn't want to try to go into law with a score like that, like it sounds like his new plan was. You're not competing with most of the population, what their scores would have been doesn't matter at all.

In Sweden such a score means you can barely squeeze into one of the less popular engineering programs. It isn't bad but it certainly isn't good either.

A formula that I've seen says LSAT = (0.048 * SAT) + 100, which would suggest a 1400 SAT corresponds to roughly a 167 LSAT. Probably not enough AFAIK to get you into a top 20 program, but I think you could find a law school willing to take you.

Though I'd guess you're likely to end up on the unfortunate end of the bimodal distribution.

Though I'd guess you're likely to end up on the unfortunate end of the bimodal distribution

Exactly.

Counterpoint: my 1380 SAT score translated to a 177 LSAT and admission to multiple T-14 law schools. I still ended up on the unfortunate end of the bimodal distribution, but that's because I did too well on the LSAT, if anything. Punching above my weight on the standardized test meant I may have been just as smart as my classmates, but I was a much worse student with much less developed soft skills. It wasn't the not quite smart enough students who struggled. Outside of a couple courses like fed courts, nothing you're learning is that complex compared to other academic disciplines. It was the students like me who lacked good study habits, institutional knowledge, amd networking skills who had a rough time.

I would say that a mid-160s LSAT is perfectly acceptable for admission at any number of regionally well respected law schools from which one can get a decently high paying job at a mid-size law firm or local biglaw branch (assuming you can stay in the top half/third of the class, which is definitely doable with a 1400-SAT-level IQ). You're not going to be a professor, clerk for a Supreme Court Justice, or get a cushy $200k gig right out of law school, but most of the profession is still open to you. Unless you live in a major metropolis, more than half of your local DAs probably scored under 1400 on their SATs (and that's not even counting the DEI hires)

It was the students like me who lacked good study habits, institutional knowledge, amd networking skills who had a rough time.

Ah, the gifted kid paradox. Everything in the early years is easy, so you don't develop study skills and grit, and then when you face something actually tough it crushes you.

(Also, AMD networking skills are extremely important -- how are you going to succeed if you can't connect your Ryzen gaming beast to the internet for studying? :P)

You know, "being in the top 5-6% of educational achievement isn't good, this is insufficient" is a pretty blackpilling line of thought in itself. Imagine how screwed you'd be to be in the bottom 94%. That's almost everyone, and I guess we're just sweeping them under the rug and calling them bad dummy dumbs who don't count.

(This is independent of whether it is, or should be, sufficient to practice law or any other specific field. Law seems like a pretty horrible profession even in 'good times.')

That's not what I'm saying, I'm saying that it isn't particularly impressive and just an OK result, specifically within the context of academic achievement.

It means plenty of areas are cut off for him and he won't be part of the elite due to his educational achievements, but still could be through other avenues.

Plenty of areas work like this and if anything, education is particularly forgiving. Being in the top 6-7% means you likely get a decent job, just not the top cadre of jobs and you don't get to choose freely.

It also means that you likely should avoid some professional areas due to how bimodal they are. Being the least talented person at a law firm, in investment banking or management consulting is fucking miserable and a setup for failure, with law being the biggest risk due to the low bar of entry.

Right, and what I'm saying is that being in the top 5% being regarded "not particularly impressive and just an OK result, specifically within the context of academic achievement" is blackpilling. I agree that's not impressive for the elite world, but no one's talking about the elite here. It is not a failure to not be part of the elite. The elite should not be the inherent frame through which we view the world, such that "he still could be [part of the elite] through other avenues" is the consolation prize, and not "he has many options for a non-elite but good life available." If being in the top 6-7% means you likely get a decent job, with some hedging there, that's pretty blackpilling as an idea. I guess it depends on what we mean by "decent"; and if "decent" is only somewhat achievable by this portion of the population, that's the starting point for social upheaval.

Again, it's not about whether specific professional areas are a good or bad fit -- and I agree law, investment banking or management consulting aren't -- it's about how we talk about people's achievement, and whether we have a world where people who aren't in the top 1-2% on any measure can expect to have a good life. Not an elite life, not a fantastic splendorous life, just a good life.

He was a junior, that is, not graduating yet.

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.

The boomers had tons to worry about. The cold war and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation was a far greater fear before MAD started to be understood as the default. The rise of the serial killer in the 1970s and 80s. American cities were insanely dangerous and crime ridden in a way that even the worst parts of now can't hope to emulate, with brazen corruption everywhere. Political violence was a lot more common, JFK was assassinated, RFK was assassinated, MLK was assassinated, Malcolm X was assassinated. Groups like weather underground, new world liberation front, etc were planting bombs around the country. Race riots so violent they make the worst of BLM look like a nice walk in the park. Growing cults like Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, the Manson family, etc. AIDS crisis, love canal, the Great Inflation, fears of overpopulation, Watergate, Vietnam!!

You could have just quoted the lyrics to We Didn't Start the Fire to save yourself some typing.

American cities were insanely dangerous and crime ridden in a way that even the worst parts of now can't hope to emulate

While it's true that violent crime danger in most places in the US dropped again in the 90s, the "worst parts of now" are still pretty awful. NYC's homicide rate in 1980 was 12.7/100k/year, nearly triple what it is today, but that's still barely more than half of the newly "low" rate I was just congratulating Baltimore on, and it's a quarter of the rate in a couple remaining hot spots like (the city of, not the metro of) St. Louis.

No real objections to the rest of your paragraph, though. IMHO the extinction risk of AI is worse than the near-extinction risk of nuclear WW3 was, but it's also a much more subtle and speculative risk. I learned as a (GenX) child that there were thousands of nuclear weapons ready to vaporize everyone I loved, 30 or 40 minutes after someone pressed the wrong button, and I'd say that was still sufficiently rough.

It really does seem like the Boomers ended up being History's main characters; the generation born at the absolute peak.

Something is wrong if the age of thought machines and the internet is outclassed by the mid 20th century. It's almost like Boomers won't let us enjoy our new developments. They continue to insist on in person work, 40 hour work weeks, a mid-20th century education and credentialing system, and toxic levels of laissez-faire economics that leaves hard working, intelligent fathers like you worrying your kids will suffer immensely because of the creation of machines which should only grow the pie.

In person work will save your cushy white collar jobs, boy. A computer can do the work, but it can't be physically present.

Indeed. Furthermore I would argue that at the end of the day plumbers janitors and morticians are more essential to maintaining a "first world" quality of life than anyone working in software or finance.

Plumbers in particular are absolutely essential for running water, have robust guild protections, and it's hard to automate.

In the case of finance I’d agree with you. Finance is best put to use when it’s made the servant of the industrial sector.

But don’t at all underestimate the depth and range of importance digital services has in the economy. Just because it’s more intangible and abstracted away from concrete, physical and more visible productive labor doesn’t mean it’s less important.

Furthermore I would argue that at the end of the day plumbers janitors and morticians are more essential to maintaining a "first world" quality of life than anyone working in software or finance.

Maintaining on the day to day, perhaps. But building it... that's required finance since before the US was a nation, and software is ubiquitous nowadays. To be fair, a 1950s American standard of living might still be "first world", and you could advance it quite a bit without software. But hate 'em or not, you still need the financiers.

The only in person work I'm interested in is policing, directed against the kind people who tell bright young men they are „boys” who deserve less.

So you want to be a leisured aristocrat?

Yes.jpg

Since you have kids, those thoughts are normal and endemic to every parent. I’d be less concerned about “the future,” widely thought of. There’s no real way you can personally impact that. Think about what you and them want for “their future,” and build toward it. I have the opposite problem. I have things people want to my name, but I have no children of my own to bequeath them to. So I’ve had to become very selective when I put together my trust but if anything happens to me, at least all the most important items will already come with names attached to them, along with the reasons why.

Another thing me and a number of my cousins started doing several years ago were recording all of our conversations together. On my laptop I have a massive archive or recorded phone calls, each one, hours long, between me and various family members and friends. My father, aunts, uncles, cousins, sibling, etc. Someone will eventually have to come along and do all the hard work of categorizing everything. It’s all unstructured and follows no organization but my rule is none of it is ever to be released to our families (immediate or extended) until we’ve all passed away + 25 years. There will be questions people will definitely be wanting answers to, and they will get them in due time. Hopefully it’ll be something important for our futures.

There will be questions people will definitely be wanting answers to, and they will get them in due time.

Wow, that sounds ominous.

Though, whatever it is, don't underestimate the ability of future generations to just move on.

My knowledge of my grandfather grew from "He died when my dad was a kid" to "murdered in his bed during military service in a tumultuous far-off land" to "in an unsolved crime story full of sex and coverups and intrigue", ending up with an email conversation with a historian who "thought some things about the official reports didn't add up" ... and that was 20 years ago, with no closure, but it's pretty much water under the bridge to me and all my cousins. You'd think that, after I later inherited a priceless artifact (not super valuable, I just don't have the documentation that I think would be necessary if I ever wanted to legally resell it) that was once my grandfather's, the story should have picked up from there, but nope, no visits from master cat burglars or Russian agents or anything. I didn't even think to check it for secret compartments.

Damn, I've never actually typed that all out before. Now I kind of wish I had some recorded phone calls to listen through.

Sounds ominous but really isn’t. My family is an interesting group of people who come from very disparate backgrounds and more or less melded into a common culture, along with the culture of where I grew up. Our extended family is huge and lives all across the country; including relatives who know me but that I’ve never met who live outside the country. And we were always a fairly close knit group of people. Family isn’t important to most Americans but it’s enormously important to us. That said, my parents were two ‘completely’ different people. I used to think they had absolutely no business getting together and don’t know how they stayed married all their lives.

At some point we’re all obliged to move on. I had a serious sit down with some of my younger cousins a few years ago who I’m very close with (they’re more like younger brothers and sisters), after my sibling passed away and told them there will come a time when mom and dad pass away, I will pass away and everyone else around you will become increasingly distant and have their own lives to live. You’ll be standing in a room by yourself, or driving somewhere or doing something and you’ll say to yourself, “… Is that it? Am I supposed to move on as if nothing happened and it’s just another day?… And the answer to that is ‘yes’… Remember the good times we had and don’t forget me. The sun will still rise tomorrow whether you’re prepared for it or not, and you always have to keep moving forward. So don’t anchor your life around me. Maybe we’ll see each other in Heaven and if not it won’t matter, so take comfort in the fact that we’re all going to the same place.”

Recording was something we began a decade or so ago and when one of my cousins, some of my friends I had a 5 hour or so conversation and I’d laughed hard about something we were discussing. I probably laughed harder than I have in my entire life. My face was red. I had uncontrollable tears. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t talk or breathe. And I remember the next day wishing I could relive our discussion because of how great it was. Then I remembered GrapheneOS has a record button in the Dialer app. My VoIP numbers also can auto-record calls in Groundwire or Sipnetic. I told them in advance what I thought about doing and they agreed to it. Since then we’ve discussed everything under the sun. Family politics. Hood politics. Old memories. Trying to organize and plan things which anymore is extremely difficult for us. Religion. Current events. Movies. Everything.

Try it sometime. You may like it. But there are also serious things people have been wanting to know for a long time that my cousins and I have discussed that we think is best to settle and table it for the next generation of our families. What they do with it at that point is up to them. They’ll definitely get a kick out of many of our conversations if they listen to them. There will be plenty of laughs, raised eyebrows, close calls and holy shit moments to keep them entertained. We have thousands and thousands of hours recorded at this point.

The world is so much bigger than software and it's a huge shame that the last 15-20 years of social media company success stories have narrowed smart, motivated peoples' imaginations so much.

He's loved programming ever since he was a little kid playing with scratch. In theory, he's the kind of kid who should be considering it.

One dimension on the opposite end of the spectrum- it has lowered my anxiety about GPA and school-striverism that was so deterministic for the futures of my generation. I'm sure school performance will matter to an extent, but right now I am more hopeful they childhood-happy-max rather than GPA-anxiety-max whereas my generation had extremely strong incentives to resume-anxiety-max at a young age.

The entire purpose of that social system was signaling childhood talent. I don't think that stuff makes children better it was just a decent system for assessing quality.

One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."

This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.

Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.

There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.

What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.

What do they actually want?

What do they actually want?

More of what others have. Preferably all of it.

The anti-billionare crowd would rather have an opaque network of institutional investors appoint a ceo puppet than have a founder keep his company. What what they would prefer even more of course is a government committee.

I'd actually like worker co-ops, myself.

They work well in certain sizes, around the small to mid range of things. I’m very skeptical of ideas of “workers self-management” and the like that the anarchists and syndicalists of old loved to extol. I sometimes wonder if those people have ever actually had a job and dealt with the ensuing frustration of those who simply ‘don’t work’. If we lived out said ideals on a global scale we wouldn’t have a workers paradise.

I mean shit, when I was in high school and the teachers put us all into random groups and we couldn’t select our friends, I was always the guy doing all the work while the other kids sat around doing jack shit. That’s fine with me. But if I’m doing 90% of the work, all of you guys are getting F’s due to your lack of contribution. You’d better be shining my shoes and serving me lunch everyday and hope I put your name on the project. If we had this program on a national level, you’d have half the planet die of starvation and unable to wipe their own ass.

You could imagine a world where working people are allowed to make agreements with each other to collaborate in their work. Then, if someone stops fulfilling their end, the other person is allowed to stop working with them and find a replacement. The co-ops could then develop specialized roles for handling these agreements, allowing workers in the co-op to focus on the tasks they are best at.

You'd build on top of that: some co-ops would work better than others. So, then, by the same principle the co-ops can choose which co-ops they want to do business with, to provide an incentive for co-ops to work efficiently on socially valuable goods and services.

You could even have some kind of meta co-op, which exchanges frozen labor value to nascent co-ops that want to try something new and risky, in exchange for some of the value to compensate them for the risk and reward them for the labor involved in picking out the most promising co-ops.

This is somewhat by the by, but I’m curious to know how you’d interpret the failure of the kibbutzim.

On a local level we already have what you’re suggesting in the sense that there’s nothing that prevents a small band of individuals from organizing along a cooperative pathway (obviously, since that’s what we’re talking about). The problem I see is one with scale and how it generalizes to a larger population. Local production and distribution doesn’t produce an economic surplus that the broader mass of humanity outside the cooperative can benefit from on any large scale. Now technically that’s an imperfect example because some cooperatives do produce a profit but that in turn gets distributed among the workers, there is no capitalist or investor that reaps up the overall net profit to the exclusion of the workers.

I get what it is you’re hypothesizing but it just strikes me as a way for extremely dysfunctional labor to get by without keeping up their end of the work. It doesn’t seem to me to provide a solution that ‘fixes’ the problem.

Fundamentally the only way this would ever be determined is just to get the system enacted and try it out. I could be wrong, so could do. I just have a very hard time seeing it working given my empirical views about human nature.

the failure of the kibbutzim.

"Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it." - Joshua Muravchik, "The Mystery of the Kibbutz", as quoted in this fascinating GrokInFullness blog post

It feels like "failure" is too strong a word to use for that, though. Even if it didn't work well enough economically, it was at least a counterexample to the old "you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out" joke.

The kibbutzim are/were more than just a worker-owned business; they were also income-sharing communities. You can have the business end of it without the communal living part. Mondragon corporation is often pointed-to as the prime example of a large corporation running as a worker co-op.

Yeah, I’m aware of Mondragon (1, 2). Even Mondragon admits however that once a labor collective gets to a certain size they get spun off from the rest of the cooperative because it becomes unmanageable. There’s a reason vertically arranged hierarchies, whether its labor or sociopolitical are easier to manage when they become more complex than horizontal systems.

They aren’t really a “corporation” in the sense Americans think of them; like “Microsoft” is a corporation. They’re a federation of cooperatives. I’m not against them at all. In fact there are many things I like about them. But they definitely have long-term organizational constraints on them that capitalistic firms don’t have. I'm not hitting them for any of the fallacious reasons idiots like Ben Shapiro come up with (he's a moron who doesn't understand shit and has never gone out of his way to read the texts of his ideological opponents).

So long as I’m not prohibited from transferring into the subunit that’s the most difficult to work in and is the most profitable for the firm, I’d just outwork everyone else; so long as it justifies my 4:1 ratio or whatever it is against the lowest paid workers and is represented in my internal capital account of the company, I’d have no problem working for one.

Actually the largest workers' self-management experiment was conducted in the form of Yugoslavia, where it was enshrined in the constitution or whatever and was the main ideological pillar of the state. The system changed quite radically over the course of the state's existence, so how it was set up in the 50s and 60s during times of economic boom probably didn't have much to do with how it looked in the 80s.

I mean there's nothing keeping you from making one. WinCo is the biggest one in the US that I'm aware of, and Mondragon in Spain is pretty sizeable too.

However my favorite example of commies deciding they don't like having to share the means of production is when the creators of the game Dead Cells started out as a co-op, but after they hit it big they created a wholly owned (non-co-op) subsidiary to hire all the new developers and other talent they needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Twin

Motion Twin was founded in 2001 as a private limited company in France. In 2004, it became a worker cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members. The name Motion Twin refers to an animation technique, called motion tween, and the red star in the logo was chosen due to its revolutionary connotations.

...

In 2019, Motion Twin assisted in the establishment of Evil Empire to take over development and support of Dead Cells, allowing other Motion Twin developers to start on their next project. Evil Empire is run by Steve Filby, Motion Twin's former head of marketing, and is not a cooperative, since the company wanted to scale beyond ten employees. Motion Twin continues to maintain creative control over Evil Empire's work on Dead Cells."

AFAIK these are just conventional workplaces, though- sûre thé workers get to vote on some upper managers, but they’re still just jobs not different particularly from other jobs of the sort.

You will still end up with a co-op President or maybe some circle of powerful union leaders sitting in cozy office deciding what to do with capital worth billions of dollars, while the rest of the schmucks would still need to punch their card and make steel, or whatever the anointed kings and counts of the factory decided to do.

I really do not understand why are people so enamored with politics as deciding mechanism for economic power. People are raging against the 1,000 billionaires in USA, but they think 1,000 top elected government bureaucrats are better deciding what to do with $4,9 trillion of tax revenue every year - we are talking potential net worth of $100 trillion plus? And that is the best case scenario - worst case you get some petty dictator who actually decides everything personally, effectively becoming as far from your cookie cutter billionaire as they are from homeless addicts on the street. There is not one billionaire now that could even lick a boot of people like Joseph Stalin, who could just say a word and the whole country of 100 million people and its whole capital stock would make his wish happen. But he was just an appointed leader of co-op labor councils - or soviets in Russian. What a bunch of nonsense.

And even dictators can be a step up in some ways from democratic rule. One of the valid downsides of democratic rule (and public corporations) over monarchies (and privately owned businesses) is that the monarch has his incentives aligned with making the best long term decision, whereas politicians have short time horizons.

What do they actually want?

For nobody to have anything more or better than they do. Like I've said before, it's envy — not just wanting what other people have (that's "covetousness"), but resenting them for having it. Much more toxic, because it's most easily satisfied by tearing others down.

There's a wrinkle you leave out. There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot. Instead, the idea is that the right kind of person, once certified (invariably including whatever their own certifications are), should have access to the highest luxuries and social status modern society has on offer, with all the drudgery to maintain that world being performed by the lessers.

It's not a revolt against the idea of hierarchy in general, but instead a rejection of the particular hierarchy we have, because it does not adequately reward them. I can sympathize a fair bit with the radical leveler point of view (logistics and feasibility aside), but there's no one even really pretending to argue for it.

There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot.

Good thing that's not what what I said. A few may still try to sell their preferred outcome as providing this, but like you point out, they barely even try that anymore.

Again, envy is about hating those who have more than you. That's perfectly compatible with having other people who have less than you. Like you say, it's not hating hierarchy, its about hating everyone above you in that hierarchy.

I'm again reminded of my dad's old employer — who passed a few weeks ago. Liked to give all the usual lefty bits about "helping the poor"… while paying employees, contractors, and so on as little as he could get away with (along with plenty of other slightly scummy business practices); and would regularly endorse "taxing the rich more"… as a millionaire whose approach to his own taxes bordered on outright evasion (near the end, he actually got dinged by the IRS for a rather substantial amount of unpaid back taxes).

Because, you see, he wasn't rich. No, he was your ordinary middle class millionaire landlord. And "the rich" who need taxed more? Anyone who had more money than him, those greedy bastards.

There's a sequence of tweets showing how Bernie Sanders's rhetoric changed... he started complaining about "millionaires and billionaries", then when he became a millionaire he dropped that part. Elizabeth Warren, too, sets her proposals above her own substantial (~10M) net worth.

There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot.

Indeed, if you actually want to do this you can do it right now. There a variety of communities that work that way. They’re weird, but they exist.

A top marginal tax rate of 101% and for rich dudes to shut the fuck up and go back to the business mines, instead of pretending they are gods gift to this earth.

"I stole or copied an idea from someone who had less seed capital and lied to partners and investors and broke various laws until I hit escape velocity and everyone decided we can't punish this guy just for doing all that shit, he's a rich founder promethean demigod now!" Shut the fuck up and put the tech stock in the bag.

Who am I talking about? There's just so many fucking options, so many titans of industry who's main job is to do rails of coke, fuck adolescents on little saint james, and perform slightly to vastly worse than a replacement level MBA after hitting the big time.

But they've done so much for the world! They're so fucking important we could never replace them with a random number generator, the deserve to control the production of a significant amount of the worlds total work and labor. Imagine if Von Neumann and Bohr did the smart thing and developed and ap that spies on you in exchange for making you depressed instead of revolutionizing their fields, changing the world for all time. They could have gotten rich, the fucking retards.

Assuming JK Rowling didn't have problematic views on trans stuff, is she allowed to be a billionaire? Surely nobody can argue writing books and licensing the stories for movies is an unethical way of becoming a billionaire?

As I understand it, Rowling donated so much money to charity that she actually lost her billionaire status. Before the trans stuff, she was seen as the exception that proves the rule.

However, one could probably make an argument that where the money comes from matters a lot. Rowling's hands are clean, but can the same be said for the companies that paid her? How exactly could Warner Bros manage to get so big without underpaying or overworking their employees? Is such a thing even possible in a world of cutthroat competition in which every company is trying to be cheaper and faster than the others?

By that reasoning, almost every job is problematic, not just billionaire jobs, except for the jobs that are so close to the bottom that your loss from being underpaid and overworked exceeds your gain from the fact that the company is rich enough to offer you a job in the first place.

Thus why leftists critique the capitalist system and claim that there are no ethical ways to get rich.

Your analysis applies to political power far more than it does to wealth.

It's rather silly when applied to Rowling, who basically got rich by selling 7 books to every kid in the free world, then even richer through the movies. Not much less "problematic" than that.

A lot of people are fairly hard against copyright. Not that it's my personal belief, but if I put my 'angry twitter warrior hat' on I could see argument that the story shouldn't entitle to her than more than a 'reasonable living'. Also you could argue that a large part of that billionaire status is built off merchandising her story as opposed to direct entertainment consumption, which may also be objectionable?

Your terms are acceptable. I would consider a world without gigantic monopolies with huge sway over public influence to be a better one.

The amount of power these mega corporations have is, I think, incompatible with liberal democracy. Having public discourse be decided by algorithms on a handful of global powerhouses is actually an insane state of affairs with huge potential for abuse.

So yeah, let Zuck and his ilk retire early. Have Facebook fade to obscurity. Let Google fall before internet search is optimized. The entities that buy the companies should also cash out, or break up into smaller parts. Give me a bunch of multi-millionaire medium to large entities instead of the titans we see today. Spread out the money and power, and I genuinely believe the world would be in a much better state than it is today.

You're basically asking for a magic wand to give you the upsides of what you want without the downsides. It does not exist.

That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.

While wealth taxes and antitrust legislation come with their own downsides, and taxing people because they are wealthy is in some sense unfair, it seems to me that the current situation is so undesirable that it would be worth it. Fundamentally, money and power go hand in hand, so having ultra wealthy individuals in practice means that power becomes centralized within an increasingly smaller circle. Worse, the longer this goes on, the harder breaking up the circle becomes, as power is transferred through wealth from the people to the rich.

I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.

Is China going to reciprocate?

I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.

I assume China is scary to you because its interests do not necessarily line up with those of America, and if the Chinese government deems it necessary, it might take actions that are detrimental to American citizens if it becomes too powerful.

I would argue that the same is true for the mega corporations though. They did not get rich by being nice, and will tend to look out for their own interests first and foremost. Those interests may not always align with those of the local population, so if they become too powerful, they may take actions that are detrimental to American citizens. The main advantage of the mega corps being local then, are the jobs, taxes, and the fact that you can regulate them.

Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate. So for large enough entities the advantages of taxes and regulation are bound to lessen over time.

So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.

So I suppose I don't see much of a difference between having the mega corps in America or in China. They don't seem to care about how their activities effect the world regardless.

Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate.

Chinese social media sites already tried this to stop the sale of TikTok. That's my real problem here: this doesn't prevent this happening, it just prevents you from having your own companies (which do respond to US government pressure, e.g. with the pressure over "misinformation" or the Hunter Biden story).

So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.

The countries that don't have megacorps are basically buying their services from the US. The EU doesn't have its own social media sites and the solution is to just take US ones and regulate them. Of course, this only works if the US doesn't respond badly (which it is now). All of this seems strictly inferior to just building your own.

There's also the fact that these more regulations focused states are simply not doing as well as the US and arguably leech in some fields like pharma where the US spends more. I don't think wanting to control social media companies caused this, but maybe the mindset may apply elsewhere and be damaging.

That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.

This isn't clear to me, though. At the very least, it's not clear to me that policies that would accomplish this would make society better rather than immensely worse. It's not clear to me it would make it immensely worse, either, but I certainly know which way I would bet if it were possible to adjudicate this and pay out.

Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society.

The current richest people created many of the good things in society. On the Internet, you kill Google and anything else that could become big, and at best you end up with a world with a lot of Altavistas and Yahoos. Kill Amazon and anything else big, and you have a whole lot of relatively crappy e-commerce sites (which still exist, mostly for things that aren't sold on Amazon; they're usually not great). Electric cars remain impractical curiosities; space is confined to NASA and Arianespace. You also kill a lot of other things; some you wouldn't like, and some you likely would. Useful speech recognition and high-quality synthesis. Cloud computing. AI.

Currently the richest people in America are tech people. But go back a few decades or a century and you wipe out more. Retail giants. Railroads. Oil refining and retailing. Electric generation and distribution. The banking system financing all this -- like 'em or not, they're necessary. The richest people living now are why we're living with a 21st century standard of living instead of a 20th; some the richest people at any given time were responsible for similar advancements. Cut off the potential rewards, you also cut off the advancements.

Fundamentally, money and power go hand in hand, so having ultra wealthy individuals in practice means that power becomes centralized within an increasingly smaller circle. Worse, the longer this goes on, the harder breaking up the circle becomes, as power is transferred through wealth from the people to the rich.

The people never had the power in the first place. Power in the US is obtained by those who have political ability; the wealthy can purchase some of this but the agents they purchase are by nature often treacherous. Eliminating the wealthy leaves the ambitions of the politically savvy unrestrained by anything.

I suppose the question is then: Are most of the richest uniquely capable to the extent that those good things wouldn't exist at all without their work, or are they just the ones who were marginally faster than the next best competitor and/or cutthroat enough to use often questionable means to eliminate their competitors. If primarily the latter you could argue they are in fact a net negative on society. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which the value they produce over replacement is minimal or even negative, but winner-take-all dynamics in things like e-commerce or social media networks make this impossible to measure.

Maybe taking away the carrot entirely for the wealthy would cut off their motivation to develop advancements like electric cars and Amazon, but there's obviously a sliding scale that can be applied here. Is the potential for 100 billion in wealth that much less of a motivator than 200 billion? I can't imagine that possibly being the case. If anything, the striving by the ultra wealthy is almost entirely positional rather than anything absolute.

I'd say the argument isn't that Elon Musk didn't do an impressive thing by creating SpaceX. Musk + a bunch of people that worked with Musk did all that. No, not everyone should get an equal slice of the pie, but when multiple people created it and one person ends up with a slice that's 1,000 times bigger then maybe the "meritocracy" model isn't producing the output it should.

If Gwynne Shotwell wants to be paid more I expect she's got the leverage to at least make an attempt. I don't see a lor of SpaceX engineers complaining about Musk's worth (which of course comes not just from SpaceX but his other ventures) either. Elizabeth Warren and reddit antiworkers have zero call on any of that. And in fact, when they go after the "rich", they often include people like Shotwell (herself a billionaire) and even some of the multi-millionaire engineers.

I'm aware that Musk has multiple ventures. I'm also sure people are aware that higher taxes would affect people like Shotwell.

My point is that people act like more wealth maps out to more contribution to society. Rather than:

The current richest people created many of the good things in society.

I would say usually they organized the labor and provided the material to the people who created many of the good things in society. That organizing the labor has value, but so does actually performing the labor. There's an entire chain of work to building a rocket, from organizing the labor to designing the rocket to producing the parts to sweeping the floors. Each of them deserves some of the cut of success, but who decides the amount? The answer is the people with resources.

The trick to this is that the contribution of the guy sweeping the floors is anchored by society's expectations. When setting the salary of janitor positions they look at the going rate. Meaning that even if they generate $50,000 in profit from having a janitor vs not having one, they can get away with only paying $25,000 by not competing. And the guy with nothing to his name has far less leverage to hold out for more.

That's how we got robber barons and sweatshops. The people then fought to give themselves a bit of influence on their own pay, by organizing unions and getting wage laws enacted.

More comments

Zuck cashing out in 2007 doesn’t mean the end of Facebook, it means another entity, even bigger than Facebook, gets to control Facebook.

Facebook, in not selling out, wrested control from the established media players who were looking to acquire it.

That’s an outcome in your preferred direction, no? Time Warner, Fox, et al are less powerful as a result.

What do they actually want?

Marxism, or the leveling they expect it to provide.

It's just the labour theory of value conveniently cut off at such a point that it doesn't apply to anyone they know (or could conceivably be) or their favorite allied rich people (culture-producing left-wing celebrities and athletes ), though even some of those will breach the generous cap.

I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?

Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.

That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.

Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.

The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.

In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.

For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.

What sector of IT in particular is killing it? Over in infosec they’re doing terrible at the moment. The economy has left the industry to thin out the herd at the moment and jettison what it can. Balance sheets are suffering in a lot of places. Are the entry positions you’re finding localized to a particular type of entry work?

I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.

To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.

Makes sense. IT / administrative work will always dominate corporate office settings.

In the case of infosec, a number of years ago there was an analysis that found a 0% unemployment rate; but there’s also a lot of candidates that can’t find work. It’s a strange industry on the labor side if you don’t understand what’s going on.

Right now there’s an over saturation of analyst positions. Qualified people are looking to get in on the ground level but many of them are unable to get their foot in. What’s very high in demand is the meat for the industry. Threat detection engineers, incident responders, etc. A lot of the veteran, very high pressure roles. These are greatly understaffed at the moment.

… their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.

A lot of them probably work as L1’s or as juniors. It’s a good position to get into if you can manage the burnout and pressure (especially in an MSSP setting, they’re notorious for that). IAM is also increasingly becoming the frontline for threat actors looking to exploit systems. There’s problems on both the technical side as well as the business. The latter has to constantly prove its value to the executives because they often don’t understand what value you bring to the organization. Depending on who your employer is, your position may also be at risk of being permanently unstable; so it’s a worry people have.

I'm essentially in that field. The lack of glamour is what makes it so overlooked. You have to be willing to work several "technological levels" behind the bleeding edge. Forget widespread AI integration, automation, orchestration and hyper-converged environnments, most of my clients are not yet ready to really commit to or against the cloud, and I'm not talking fancy PAAS solutions, but just bog standard IAAS or SAAS. They're making the kind of technological transitions you heard about the "bleeding edge" industry making 15 years ago, if not more. All that while supporting the actual business needs of a company for which IT is about as central as the janitorial services are.

And that's at the sysadmin level, I still think there's a lot demand for support yes. The difficulty is finding people with the right soft skills and the right amount of general troubleshooting knowhow. You need the right mix of making people feel reassured that their problem is gonna get fixed, friendly but professional, and not make people feel stupid. I got my real start in the industry doing Microsoft Office support for legal secretaries; because it turns out that combining IT troubleshooting skills and enough MS Office skills to support some of the best secretaries when it comes to that software is actually quite rare. And that would be might tip to someone looking for employment right now, you need to develop an uncommon combination of in-demand skills that makes you stand out. Forget what the bleeding edge industry says they need, everyone rushes for those positions. If you're the adaptable kind who doesn't mind if the job is not glamorous or a "dream career", obscure, unsexy, pedestrian and boring is the move.

No kid thinks "when I'm grown up I'll be a support specialist for a payroll software!", yet what does every company with employees need?

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely getting in the field it was interesting to see how not-bleeding-edge a lot of corporate IT is, but also slightly comforting -- I often describe my own personality as the direct opposite of silicon valley: "move slowly and fix things." That's definitely the sort of thing I would put on a sticker.

The messy reality of maintenance/operations and the need to actually test things cautiously is a huge element of how I view computers; I've always related to them in an operations kind of a way and even in my youth I was only moderately interested in programming. It didn't seize me the way it often does other people. I'm not sure anyone dreams of being level 1 support, but I did dream a bit as a kid about being a sysadmin, especially once I got heavily into Linux which I've used on my desktop for about 10 years now.

That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).

I love teaching, and I've been told by people that I'm good at sitting down with someone and explaining things in a way they can understand. So the opportunity to share knowledge and help people learn/get people back to work/find a workaround or a fix that helps people move on with their day is very satisfying to me. I hate computers getting in my way as much as anyone, and it's great to get them out of people's way.

The lack of significance on the balance sheet is definitely the greatest area of trepidation for me as I look forward in my career, in the sense that I do have concern about layoffs/being unable to do the job properly because of limited buy-in from management.

That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).

Yes, it's a good idea to play with the bleeding edge stuff in your homelab, because when you start having to make recommendations for clients, you need to understand what is "forward" for them and every cycle try to bring them closer to that. You're not usually going to be given the time, budget, staff, and freedom to disrupt money-generating activities necessary to turn a company that does remote work by RDPing onto machines accessible from the internet into a modern network in one step. But you can make a list of the biggest, fastest steps you can make right now to move them closer, your "quick wins". You can get them to put their RDP behind a modern, updated firewall and VPN. Once that's done, you can start segmenting their network, putting internal boundaries with firewall policies, setting VLANs... You can later leverage the work into getting to separate who should be able to access what to migrate them to ZTNA... Sometimes though, the way forward is also simply blocked by other considerations. One that I often encounter is line-of-buisness applications having specific requirements that just aren't meant to work in a bleeding edge environment. Infrastructure as Code and orchestration are great ideas, and I totally agree that the ideal is that your servers are cattle, not pets. That if you login to a server to do installs and configs directly you're not being efficient. But all line-of-business apps I interact with require manual installation and configuration. Pretty much all LOB software sold to small/medium businesses is designed for pets, and so is a large portion of the software developed internally for these companies. So you get that company better prepared, you try to mitigate the inconvenience of pets by making the pets as easily replaceable as possible, but you'll hit a point where you just have to wait on the software to catch up. In the meantime, you prepare by learning how to take the next step in your lab.

I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?

I am not under 25, but I basically hire them and certainly train them (well, 25-26 mostly, but I think it applies).

It is bleak. The problem is all these application avenues. These kids apply to 1000 jobs, that all have 10k applicants. By the time I even see them they dont even know why they got this interview as opposed to 99 others they didn't even get an email about. For the select few (aka non white/asians still) they have the opposite problem. They apply to 10 places, and are discombobulated by 10 interviews, 10 confusing offers that are the same but different in all sorts of ways. Often I am telling THOSE persons that there is no way we can offer a competitive salary because they have interviewed at places whos base pay is the equivalent of ours + bonus. Sometimes 1.5x ours + bonus.

And that is on top of the obvious indirect nepotism at top firms. Dad A has son B, and Dad 1 has Son 2. Dad A hires son 2, Dad 1 hires son B. Sons 2 and B are pretty below average for where they are going, but now are on the fast track. Hmm. And, honestly, because of the infinite hiring sites and HR being a cluster, who can even blame them? All their hires suck except that one kid a year out of 10. Why hire rando #7 instead of your golf buddie's son when they both will be essentially useless?

And they all are essentially useless by the way. Our grades 9-12 and Universities are failing. Law schools are especially failing, I get summer associates and associates regularly that cannot draft coherent 3 page motions or briefs. Multiple people have been caught by partners on major cases submitting fake (presumably AI generated) case citations. Sometimes this only get caught on appeal.

The whole education system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something new. Faster, cheaper, better.

Yeah I haven't been involved in hiring in a bit but I remember a spot about 5 years ago where I was in the position of hiring fresh graduates and was ordered to explicitly discriminate (2/4 of the slots had to be filled with females in an industry that is 95% Male interest) and there was such an overwhelming logjam of applicants that it was essentially a crapshoot for who got picked from hundreds of applications for the 2 male graduate slots whilst for the girls there were like... 4 serious applicants, 1 of whom turned us down on moral compunctions after an offer was extended.

My own journey to get my original grad job was a similar gigantic crapshoot, likely due to the same filters being applied on the backend the whole time and when there's a pressure for picking minorities the nepotism picks are going to be a larger and larger issue since they're completely clogging the pipeline for the rare actually meritocratic slot.

I've been involved with hiring interns at my employer which means reading a resumes, no interviews. Despite that we have a 100% hit rate over several years. I pound the table for either of 2 qualifications:

  1. If a candidate worked for chick-fil-a for more than 3 months, right to the top of my list. Because I see them working hard and all being well trained every single time I go there.
  2. Any one passing their classes (we hire in two very narrow degrees) while playing an NCAA sport (I don't care what sport or the GPA. Because you need at least some time management skills to do both.

We've hired from all manner of colleges (Ivy League to small state schools). I trust those far more than school quality, academic record, degree program, or just about any other qualification.

Any one passing their classes (we hire in two very narrow degrees) while playing an NCAA sport (I don't care what sport or the GPA. Because you need at least some time management skills to do both.

When I was in college, I tutored a football player. He was a decent guy, but he read on an elementary school level. Does the degree requirement filter that kind of guy out?

Yeah most likely, you gotta have some experience with a statistical programming language like R or SAS.

Law schools are especially failing, I get summer associates and associates regularly that cannot draft coherent 3 page motions or briefs. Multiple people have been caught by partners on major cases submitting fake (presumably AI generated) case citations. Sometimes this only get caught on appeal.

Law schools have always been mostly useless for generating competent attorneys, but have moved from mostly useless to almost entirely useless. Covid seems to have had a big effect here, and now AI is adding to it.

I get summer associates and associates regularly that cannot draft coherent 3 page motions or briefs.

Oh boy.

These from top 50 law schools?

Multiple people have been caught by partners on major cases submitting fake (presumably AI generated) case citations. Sometimes this only get caught on appeal.

Oh BOY.

At this point, Eugene Volokh has spotlighted many dozens of legal filings containing "AI hallucinations" (or "LLM shameless guesses"). See also this database of over a thousand such filings.

These from top 50 law schools?

Mostly. We basically hire from the Big10, Notre Dame, and some other major midwest schools. AI guy was a Wisconsin Law grad.

And silly me I thought law schools were supposed to be, to some degree, a filter for competence.

Are these people able to pass their bar exams? HOW?

As someone who has taken and passed the bar exam, I am much more perplexed as to how anyone can manage to fail. I legitimately think there is a very good chance I got 100% on the multiple choice portion of the exam. Alas, we will never know because this is from there era where you didn't get scores, just a simple pass/fail.

Well that's what I'm saying. If they used AI to shortcut through most of law school, they would still have to pass exams.

So its plausible someone who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't know enough to pass a bar exam.

But a little implausible they'd have gotten out of a T50 law school with their GPA intact.

Grade inflation has made that a thing of the past. A significant portion of the T12 and T50 discourage graduates from putting their gpa(if it exists) on resumes.

News article:

AI pilot program in Los Angeles County courts will help judges craft rulings

The program, which launched last month, gave half a dozen Los Angeles County civil court judges access to AI software called Learned Hand [named after a famous federal judge]. Although it could prove critical in a shorthanded court system that is facing a workload crisis on many fronts, the announcement has also drawn concern from some members of the county’s legal community who fear the technology could create errors and erode public trust in the legal system.

facing a workload crisis on many fronts

See this is my other point, the Gov't COULD expand the Judiciary with more judges and staff and alleviate things, but AI is such tempting solution here.

And it genuinely becomes a question "if the AI is 90% as good as a judge at ruling correctly... why bother with the judge for less important matters?"

And at the county level, the judges can be very bad indeed.

The whole education system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something new. Faster, cheaper, better.

The only way to do this is HBD (IQ tests with race adjustments), but that's unconstitutional in the West.


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