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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16303 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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The kids aren't alright (continued)

This college graduation season, many commencement speakers are extolling AI, then getting boo'd by the students. Most notably Eric Shmidt, in University of Arizona, after telling students to "deal with it"; also less recognized speakers in smaller universities (like MTSU and UCF).

Glendale Community College received additional boos because it used an AI tool to read students' names, which messed up.

In contrast, Steve Wozniak told students they "all have AI — actual intelligence" to applause.

This reflects multiple overlapping problems:

  • Age gap: Partly because of TFR collapse, old people have more resources, and are catered to more by politicians (who also are usually old themselves)
    • The graduates are Gen Z, the speakers are old (Eric Shmidt is a baby boomer)
  • Wealth gap: The white-collar job market (at least certain fields, like tech and art) is struggling, while top white-collar employing businesses are doing fine
    • The graduates are white-collar employees, the speakers are CEOs
  • AI favorability gap: AI has the potential to make the wealth gap worse and college more useless, to an extent it's already doing so
    • The graduates are against AI (believing it's contributing to their problems), the speakers are in favor
  • Collapsing college
    • College tuition has increased to absurd levels
    • College has become easier, evidenced by grade inflation and more attendees
    • College has become less personal, because there are more attendees
    • AI makes cheating much easier
    • College has become less helpful towards getting a better job, because there are more attendees, and grade inflation & cheating have caused employers to less value accreditations and GPA

Tech students are particularly affected: many were told that if they went to college, they'd be practically guaranteed an easy, high-paying job, like their older peers; but today they graduate to a bad job market. Meanwhile, the companies they planned to join are posting record profits. AI has invalidated some of their learned skills, and moreover, has the potential to worsen the job market and wealth gap.

Although it's not just tech. Liberal arts students have worse job prospects (although some of theirs were never good), and seem to be more against AI. Law and accounting are apparently being impacted, because AI automates their entry-level jobs.

In summary, the speakers have a completely different perspective due to their age, AI outlook, and wealth; and students aren't happy to see their college which has failed them do it one last time, by appointing an out-of-touch speaker (or using AI to flub announcing their names).

Where to go from here?

Undergraduate education is deeply flawed. I think (not an uncommon position): students should only go to college if for graduate education (which is also flawed but for different reasons, and has purpose until ASI or a suitable alternative). Otherwise, they can learn degree skills in high school or on-the-job training: probably a free unpaid internship, which (as long as it demands real skills, not cheap labor) would be an improvement over paying for college; or pursue a trade. But first, employers must no longer prioritize (let alone require) college degrees; I believe this is happening in some fields, but slowly. In the meantime, more students should and will attend cheap online degree mills, possibly alongside an internship (to graduate with job experience and a better resume).

As for AI...I don't really know. It has some great use-cases, and the potential to strictly improve standards of living (why do something that AI can automate?); it and/or another revolutionary advancement is probably necessary to mitigate climate change and TFR collapse. But it also causes some problems, and has the potential to create global catastrophe. Regardless, I don't expect I or the graduates can influence its evolution or effects. For those reasons, I'm not really optimistic or pessimistic about it. At least I'm aware enough not to extol it to college graduates.

I think it's worth noting that the idea that selfish old people are hoarding all the goodies and thereby screwing over the young is one that's been around for a while. When I graduated college into a weak job market (30 or 40 years ago) that was a very popular idea. (Allegedly) old people weren't retiring and making room for young people; old people were preventing new housing from being built in order to enhance the value of houses they had bought for a song many years ago; old people insisting on fat social security payouts they didn't really need which would result in an insolvent system; old people pushing the government to take on lots and lots of debt which would have to be paid by future generations. etc. etc.

I kind of believed it at the time, but the fact that it's so persistent makes me a little skeptical.

That being said, assuming AI doesn't destroy us but instead generates a lot of new wealth, it's pretty obvious that the benefits of that wealth won't be distributed equally. And I could easily see a situation where people who happen to own equities, real estate, and other capital goods end up being the big winners while everyone else licks the street. (Ok, that's an exaggeration, but if a utopia emerges where everyone gets UBI and can live the life of their dreams, such people might still be pretty unhappy if there is a sort of permanent aristocracy in place.) And it would make sense that this aristocracy would be disproportionately old people.

I could also see it happening that medical advances allow this aristocracy (and everyone else) to dramatically extend their lifespans, which would arguably exacerbate this problem. From an abstract perspective I would rather be a peasant in a world where everyone gets UBI and a super-long (healthy) lifespan than a fat cat businessman in that world's past. But I can see how people might get upset at being consigned to a permanent lower class.

When I graduated college into a weak job market (30 or 40 years ago) that was a very popular idea. (Allegedly) old people weren't retiring and making room for young people; old people were preventing new housing from being built in order to enhance the value of houses they had bought for a song many years ago; old people insisting on fat social security payouts they didn't really need which would result in an insolvent system; old people pushing the government to take on lots and lots of debt which would have to be paid by future generations. etc. etc.

Except for not retiring, these all seem true both now and when you (and I) were young, but not true 100 years ago. I'd argue that the alienation of youth could easily be responding to a real change.

The alienation has persisted for over a half century, because the complaints have been true over that period.

Except for not retiring, these all seem true both now and when you (and I) were young, but not true 100 years ago.

What's your basis for believing this? In 1926, roughly a third of Americans worked in agriculture. I can easily imagine young people complaining at that time that old people owned and controlled all the best land in the United States.

Of course, I don't know one way or another. But I do know that in a free market economy, there are always capital goods and other resources in short supply. And that, logically, older people frequently have had a better chance than young people to acquire and accumulate those resources.

A lot of the paths that made money in the older generation got institutionalized. For sales and trading type roles or even Ibanking you read a lot of old stories of a guy just met someone then is at major bank. (Epstein, Michael Lewis. High profile on this path. Many others). Now it’s institutionalized and still pays well but there are 5-10 highly profitable firms and to get in you need to be “math Olympiad winner” and the competition is against a global population. Plus you have to a great degree lost the ability to get equity in form because the competitive moats have increased a lot.

It does feel like the current career paths offer less stability and your career can end quickly even with fairly strong credentials. The exception is a huge explosion in government work which I would include health care in.

Probably some new routes are emerging and in 25 years we will see a bunch of rich people who just started doing something.

College is 4 years to party, chill, smoke weed, play video games and do nothing (delete as appropriate) at the government’s immediate expense. If you’re smart and care about learning you can even go somewhere good and have great discussions with professors and TAs here and there.

There has been much made of the apparent ‘social pressure’ over the last 30 years for teenagers to go to college. But most kids want to go to college because, pay, wages, jobs aside, it looks like a hell of a lot more fun aged 17 than becoming a bricklayer or taking up an apprenticeship as a hairdresser or plumber or carpenter or electrician, or getting a job at a warehouse, or a call center. Even if you do those things eventually, at least you have 4 years before you have to do them. And it’s not like anyone else is going to lend you six figures to chill for 4 years.

And if a 17 year old was asking here or in real life, I’d tell them to go to a big 4 year college and have a great time. We might all be dead from some AI engineered plague in 4 years. We might be dead in WW3. We might be dead from microplastic induced colon cancer because we ate too many processed foodstuffs. May as well have fun for a while instead of spending your youth doing mind-numbing or back-breaking (or both) labor. Be good about 401k contributions or your local pension equivalent when you get a job and forget about it. It’s like these FIRE jokers living off rice and beans despite making 85th percentile incomes in their twenties so they can hypothetically retire at 47 instead of 64.

College is 4 years to party, chill, smoke weed, play video games and do nothing (delete as appropriate) at the government’s immediate expense.

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college? Most of what I did then is more or less useful for me on a daily basis as a foundation. I didn't go to a great school, although I was (un)fortunate enough that there was no obligation to take a minimum of humanities classes and I managed to take >95% STEM classes. I don't, for example, use what I learned in phys chem all the time but every now and then Michaelis-Menten kinetics or Gibbs free energy pops up and it was useful to have taken that class.

Don't the engineers and other STEMlords have to work, and don't they learn things that are useful for their careers? Is it just Americans that are lazy and credentialist?

Nope, I remember a lot of nights spent studying and doing my homework for my CS degree. There was also a lot of time to trying and go pro in gaming though. I suspect non-stem people had more free time.

I went to a magnet high school with a rigorous enough curriculum that even the chemical engineering program at a prestigious university was a step down in terms of difficulty, but I would still say I worked fairly hard.

Not that much I learned has been of use since then; most ChemE departments still teach as though all their students will end up working in oil and gas, when in reality less than 10% do these days.

I majored in computer science at an OK school. I worked and studied pretty damn hard, volunteered for research, was a TA, all that good stuff. I also went to every party I could, did tremendous amounts of drugs, and played through lots of classic games. Maybe I should have gone somewhere more rigorous, but they didn't offer scholarships. I don't know if it matters really, I still got into FAANG straight out of college.

The key is that you knew to leave out the "chill" and "do nothing" parts.

I worked nearly full time throughout my studies, did decently in university (my professor gave me glowing praise over a decade after graduation when asked about me for one job) and still went to a whole bunch of parties and was active in student clubs. The trick was really to learn how to optimize and not waste effort on things that didn't matter beying getting the required passing grade while saving the effort for those courses that actually mattered.

+1 on not wasting effort. I heard a bit of wisdom from an older student when I was a freshman. "If you want to get an A, that's fine. But if you end a course with a 99% you worked 9 points too hard." Another thing was not performatively grinding. So many other students would study in groups or in public where they could barely concentrate.

I went to a prestigious US school who is famous for its relative rigor and resistance to fun and double majored in two STEM degrees. My stress level went down greatly when I graduated college and started working full time in a startup. My experience was similar among other people in my major, as well as some other groups such as pre-Med students and folks grinding for specific internships and career paths.

That being said, there was a minority who honestly coasted. I'm unsure globally who is more representative.

So you didn’t like your time at University of Chicago?

Should have gone to Bar Night

This is why I'm not a spy.

That wasn’t too subtle. But they already tried to be more like Harvard. Now because they don’t have the endowments of others they ran into financial difficulty and are massively boosting enrollment and basically prestige whoring. But it won’t be the quirky place it was. It will be the easiest place to buy a spot for a relatively smart kid going further which will likely end the days of not being fun.

By the time I went in 2016-2020, it's culture had already largely converged with other 'Ivy' related universities. Individual departments and individual coursework could be hard, but they can be hard at any university if the student elects to go that route. I haven't been there since, but I don't really think they have a meaningfully different culture like they may have had in the '80s.

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?

No. The Motte just has a contingent of college haters who forget non-software related engineering degrees exist. I've yet to see a self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

I had to teach myself matrix math on the job. 0/10 - would not recommend.

Eh, matrix math I never found that difficult. Perhaps circumstance can present challenges, unless you believe you’re disadvantaged in mathematics. Curious, what was the job (if you don’t mind sharing)?

I work in software and I was doing a bunch of image processing on tiffs and jpegs.

It probably would have been easier if the project didn't also have a tight deadline, and my manager at the time wasn't also implying that my job was riding on it.

Ah, that makes sense. That’s foundational to digital imaging. Working on raster images is a gigantic pain in the ass, but multiplying coordinate vectors to digitally allow for infinite scaling makes the job so much easier (zero pixelation) once you’ve got it nailed down. If I was learning it for the first time, I wouldn’t want to be under that kind of pressure either.

The biggest issue was the fact that I was doing rotations and mirroring on images that were too big to fit into memory all at once. Not only did I have to learn the math, I also had to figure out how to do it in chunks. The tiffs were tiled. The jpegs were not. It was not a good time.

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Do note the "and" I put there. Now realize that matrix math is just the beginning and imagine having had to teach yourself all the rest, too.

I take no responsibility for any existential despair that may follow.

Oh believe me.

I didn't go into engineering for a reason.

I've yet to see a self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

I can second that, EE was a massive PITA. The math was hard, the courses were unforgiving, and the amount of time it required for lab classes was too much. For my ASIC design labs you had to spend 14 hours in the open lab prior to the actual lab so you could finish the actual lab in the 3 hours provided. I recently amused myself by seeing some mass-market "cool special math" book on a friends coffee table, opening it and realizing it was just complex numbers + euler. What a throwback.

Apart from two thirds of the math courses and less than a dozen other courses I didn't find it that bad. Certainly not trivial but really nothing ridiculously difficult or laborous. I suspect a big part of this is Finnish university (and AFAIK European universities in general) not leaning nearly as heavily into making students do mandatory coursework just for the sake of doing work and absolutely nobody giving a shit about your grades as long as they weren't completely shit tier. I spent my summers working full time and the semesters working maybe 3-4 days a week on average (in practise working full time except taking a couple of days off before major exams).

Still, there's no fucking way I would have ended self studying all that or ever working in signal processing if I hadn't studied the topics formally in university.

Yeah I wish... I might just be a midwit but I found ECE to be particularly difficult and laborious, and occasionally very abstract. I deliberately switched out of the CompE side of the major because the PCB/ASIC design courses were required and had horrible(deserved) reputations. A major component of it was that the department prided itself on "no grade inflation" and having lots of smart research professors. This translates into most courses being graded on actual curves in that 50% of the class fails regardless of absolute score, and the lectures being completely pointless to attend (but losing points for non-attendance in a way that could only hurt you). Most learning was done in TA study halls, Professor office hours, and at home. It was essentially learn this by yourself and we'll grade you, oh and learn it better than your classmates.

I remember the average on an intro linear circuits exam (the Thevenin's equivalence topic area) being something like a 28% I had been chatting with the professor and she pretty much admitted they had went a bit overzealous with that one and actually felt bad.

It was a slog, and still to this day I feel like I suck at math.

Our circuit theory 2 course (basically passive AC circuits + laplace transform + transmission line theory) had a fail rate of around 40% ever year even though the professor was voted several times as the best teacher in the department. That topic was just legit difficult.

Then on the other side there was electronics 2 with massive and completely useless emphasis on mosfet calculations. Luckily I managed to pass that one by cheating and filling my TI-85 with all the required formulae.

I only understood perhaps a quarter of the math they taught us but the trick was to learn just enough that you could reliably pass the course (requiring typically > 50% of points in the exam) except when it came to actually useful things (iow the first semester course with all the basics required for everything else in EE).

The best thing about university was that attendance was almost never mandatory (and still isn't) with the exceptions being almost entirely the occasional lab courses.

Jane Street's hardware desk would like a word.

?

You'll have to explain that a bit more.

High frequency traders that make the fastest lowest-latency hardware to enable their financial parasitism.

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?

The vast majority of attorneys I know followed the 2rafa path in undergrad and even in law school. This includes some who are now state trial court and state appellate court judges.

Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?

No you are not, but I have a lot of acquaintances (I hesitate to call them friends) who took @2rafa's approach. As I've mentioned before I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic this sort of attitude was. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by taking challenging classes and trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of the "opportunities" presented to me.

It's interesting to look back years later and compare GPA to life-trajectory. They are not positively correlated.

I learned even from my non-STEM classes: philosophy, international culture, debate, and more.

Maybe college is useful for most people, after all. But not the insane tuition (which doesn't seem justified), and students who don't show up and cheat because they only care about the degree: most people shouldn't attend college, like today, unless they enjoy learning or plan to use their education in some way. Then, professors could devote more time to those students, and those who wouldn't use their degrees wouldn't have debt.

I was always very attracted to the humanities and religious studies departments, but fortunately also had a very strong autodidactic education in various scientific fields. The increase in tuition costs should signal to parents and young students to spend more time charting out a sufficiently defined and pinned down career path, before blindly entering campus and assuming student debt chasing general education courses and hoping you’ll eventually find an interest in something.

Yeah, I learned actually important things in college that are actually useful in a career. I also double majored and worked hard at studies. I wasn't lazy and high. 2rafa is being really cynical.

Only one-fifth of bachelor's degrees and one-tenth of associate's degrees are STEM.

Another problem with today's society is lack of third spaces. And another may be employees working and stressing more than necessary, because of inefficiency and toxicity from employers. If there were more third spaces, blue-collar employees worked for less hours, and there were more blue-collar employees in their 20s, they would be able to party and relax like college students.

Even today, if a high school graduate gets a vocational job that leaves time to hang out with their friends (who may be in college dorms and buildings that allow off-campus guests), their short term experience may be better: they don't need to worry about coursework off hours, and they have more disposable income (unless the college students are taking extra loans).

Although I think it ultimately depends on the person's interests. I know I'm much better at thinking than labor or service. If someone's genuinely passionate about a college field, or despises mindless work, they should get a degree, then maybe enter graduate school. But if someone only wants a social life and stable income, getting a degree they won't use is a waste, there are better ways for them to still enjoy their 20s.

I really didn't care for any third spaces, I would consume things like BJJ but not really put in effort to maintain them, for a long time. Then in my late twenties my wife and I were about to have a kid in a new city and we didn't know anyone. Joining a church kind of fixed everything socially.

Third spaces and food desert are similar. Third spaces don't exist, and healthy food is lacking because people don't want them.

In other words they are both convenient, polite, normie Sündenböcke which take the blame for issues in place of the real, impolite-to-point-out reasons.

For third spaces I think it's primarily lack of incentives for third space creation and maintenance, and the lack of incentives stems from wealth. Food deserts are probably more what I suspect you're darkly hinting at, but I also put wealth in a big part of that, society being wealthy and providing ample welfare.

I get the impression that many in their 30s want third spaces, though like healthy food, they're too lazy to act. They would also be a better alternative for those in their 20s who go to college only for the social experience, and don't use their degree afterwards.

I doubt we can revert to past third spaces, but maybe the evolution of social media will create new in-person experiences. Like how GLP-1 helps people lose weight. Or the asocial people (who used to be pressured into socializing) may die off.

I get the impression that many in their 30s want third spaces

Do the ones with children want them? I get the impression this is some type of bonobo signal for childless bohemian millennials. They need something to fill the void.

It would be nice to have more indoor cheap kid places when the weather is bad. There are bounce and indoor playground places, but they are surprisingly expensive. These are still acceptable library programs, but not all that often.

At the quantity of kids that 30 somethings are having it seems plausible. One kid per parent is manageable, or it can be an evening to get away from the kids. I never want to predict the future lest I get bit in the ass but I take my toddler out. It's not everything it was before he started coming out with me but I just get to hang out with other parents as our kids interact. Or one parent takes a few kids and you trade off.

There's also the ultimate third space of Church where if they at all want to grow will have child management.

I'm an older millennial so I don't get the full experience of the kids these days, but the weekly trivia night I go to has a great ratio of younger adults, so does the church I attend.

As you noted I suspect the people complaining are lazy and also have a propensity to be weirdos who other's don't want to be around.

They want third spaces to exist, but they don't want to start them or put the required effort into them to make them flourish. Most people are just free riders that want the benefits. I run a local board game meetup and trying to get people to do anything more than show up (and even then) is very hard.

anything more than show up

But surely that's exactly the point of third spaces. They aren't supposed to be activities you have to put effort into - the whole point of third spaces is to enable what, for lack of a better term, I'll call socially-acceptable indoor loitering. When the bar and the bowling alley are third spaces, you don't go to the bar to drink, and you don't go to the bowling alley to hone your skill at the game. If you want your board game meetup to fulfill that role, you need to stop worrying about whether the people who show up actually play board games. Otherwise you're just running a hobbyist group. Hobbies are socially valuable too, but they're a different thing.

Sorta, if your goal is to just show up at the bowling alley or bar and not provide anything, the "socially acceptable loitering" I don't think you can complain when the space shuts down because it ran out of business by having too many free loaders. You don't need to be a try-hard at drinking or bowling but you should pay for a lane, buy a few drinks to nurse, and contribute to the community. In my specific case, it's "nominally" a board game hobbyist group but its more of a social space. We do a lot of non-board game things, social events, dinners, etc. But there are people that contribute to the community/space in the form of hosting/planning events, bringing supplies, food, and there are people that just show up, give no effort other than their presence. A community/space cannot survive with a too large majority of the latter.

I'd struggle to think of any hobbyist group that is not some form of third space. The simple law of reality is that in order for something to exist, someone needs to make it exist. And that requires effort. Legislating a third space into existence does nothing. Someone needs to actually go organize the community garden, the local pub, the dance hall. And if they get hit by a bus, and the third space falls apart? Well then someone else needs to step up and do the work.

That's totally fair. I misinterpreted "trying to get people to do anything more than show up" as suggesting you were mad at people not actually doing the signposted activity, rather than people refusing to do their fair share of the admin/etc.

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I want to second this. It's why I chose trivia, but trivia is just an excuse. I don't care if we answer a single question. It's mean to be a super low commitment reason to hang out. Granted it does help that we are one of the best teams in the area... winning is fun. But we do have regulars who almost never answer a single question.

Also if you do want to take it to the next level and create a friend group that does require some effort and sacrifice. But it's worth it, just don't expect everyone to contribute the same amount.

Boomers have too much and are too entitled. I was thinking the other day how we live in a stone age primitive communism tribe where the village elders get way too much deference. As people age, politics insulates them from economic consequences. First at 45 they are afforded half-UBI like middle management positions, which 20 year olds could easily do but can never get because they're essentially handouts for middle aged people. Then they hit retirement age and they live off the backs of young workers. I believe that old people are a burden and young people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the young, who are the ones with the thumos and the vitality and the ability to make war and innovate. What do we need old people for, their life experience? We have ChatGPT for that.

Smart young people should take old people UBI and use it to launch careers, get married, and start families as well. The money is wasted on the elderly, who will never do anything for the human race.

One day you'll be old too, so I'd be cautious of discounting old people as mostly just a burden.

Funnily enough this isn't a new idea. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement of the early 20th century asserted in his Manifesto of Futurism the idea that the old were useless and that it was the young with creativity, strength, and innovation.

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

He was 32 when the manifest was published. The guy lived to 68 and went on to fight in both world wars, enter politics, write books and poems, have a family, and continue to advocate for futurism. So doesn't seem like he upheld this portion of his manifesto... otherwise he would've stepped out of the way after he hit 40. Its easy to demand others do something until you also have to do the same.

Anyways if we want to actually tackle what utility old people can provide, I'm going to say the nuclear family structure has been detrimental to a role old people have played for most of human history. Older people in an extended family structure can provide support for the family through housework, taking care of the children, companionship, and yes, knowledge counts too. Also, it is older folk that is going to have the most knowledge of family history and pedigree. For a lot of people knowing their family and history gives meaning and a sense of legacy and purpose in context of the wider world. ChatGPT is not going to have information about your family history. It should also be the role of older people to act as a glue that keeps the wider family connected. They have the time and pre-existing relationships to maintain the network of family and having access to such a network provides value. ChatGPT is not going to provide that network. Older people can also fill less desirable jobs and roles that need volunteers.

Consider all the inventions, works of art and literature, businesses, etc that have been created and developed by people in their older ages. Is the rate lower than the rate at which younger people create these? Obviously yes, but your claim was that the elderly will never do anything for the human race. It's also likely the success of work produced by old people come from having many years worth of experience in life. Do you think JRR Tolkien was capable of writing Lord of the Rings in his 20s? If yes, why didn't he do it in his 20s? He began his most famous work at around 62. Also, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. This is after filtering out small businesses with no intention of growing large. Should the group most likely to have a successful startup not reap the benefits of their risk and effort in their old age? Why would anyone bother taking that risk if they aren't allowed to do so?

Also, does legacy mean nothing to you? Would you not like to have grandchildren, maybe greatgrandchildren and see to their growth and success? You don't think you'll be able to provide them any value other than your previously accumulated material wealth? Do you believe that you would serve them better by dying and giving them an inheritance than guiding their growth?

I'm not fully discounting your complaints either, because things like advances in medicine has caused older people to live longer than they used to which has increased the strain on social security. Couple that with less people having children and this is one of the great pressing problems of the 21st century. Personally I'd restrict voting power to adults that pay taxes and that'll probably address a good chunk of the issues you point out. Maybe even have it proportional to the amount you are taxed up to a cap. But I don't think "clearing" out old people is the solution. What exactly do you mean by "clearing" out old people anyway? Make it illegal for everyone over 40 to have a job? Let them starve to death? Mandatory assisted death over 60? It's not like basic resources are an issue - we currently grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and if people aren't having kids then eventually the population is going to start shrinking. You might think old people are getting the in the way of young people, and to an extent that may be true, but is that the main factor?

For example, lets consider the high price of housing and rent. A common sentiment I see online is that the boomers are hoarding all the property so young people cannot afford homes. But is that really the main issue? The cities with the worst housing markets are the ones that tend to have the most restrictions and regulations on housing and rent. In a city like New York, rent control leads to a lot of empty apartments because it's cheaper for the owners to leave it empty than to spend the money necessary to renovate it to a livable standard from updated codes in NYC. LA has restrictions on the size of apartments and in San Francisco you can spend years waiting for a permit because a study has to be done on the environmental impact your new building will have on the local bird population before you can begin construction. That's not really an issue with the existence of old people holding homes as much as it is an issue with government mandated regulations making it harder to increase supply of housing. The homes older folks tend to live in are also cheaper homes in LCOL areas where their money can go further, while young people are more likely to be competing for homes in more expensive cities where there is more opportunities in their career. I haven't crunched the numbers to see what has the bigger impact but my gut feeling is that the restriction on housing supply due to not being able to construct enough new homes is a bigger factor than the housing supply being constrained due to old people buying up all the homes.

The real issue with Boomers(and Spiritual Boomers) isn't that they're old and entitled, it's that they're old and refuse to acknowledged that the ground game has changed.

To use a less(hah!) contentious comparison, look at the flood of male divorcees/widowers getting back into the dating game after ten years of marriage only to find that things have become an utter shitshow.

If Boomer's general reaction to the state of, well, everything, was to basically say 'Yes, things have gotten really horrible' and just nod along in sympathy, they wouldn't get near as much vitriol thrown in thier general direction. Instead, the ones who end up being the loudest say 'You're just spoiled/entitled/lazy/we had it worse', and when people start bringing out the receipts, rather than acknowldging anything to zoomer's arguements, they double-down and go 'NUH-UH'.

My favorite example on twitter was one spiritual boomer bragging about how the home he and his brother grew up in was perfectly affordable at 250k, only for someone to do the work and discover that it was 100k just 8 years prior. ... Yeah.

So, we'll see how all that will work out in the end...

I believe that X people are a burden and Y people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the Y

Endless human conflict is based on this principle. It really never works out as intended.

Boomers have too much and are too entitled

This is maximum spicy outside of /r/antiwork. To me, it reads: I want their money and it’s their fault.

I'll be old someday and don't want to be "cleared out" in any sense. I don't want to work and save for decades just to have it seized by entitled youths who feel it is unfair that I have much and they have little.

Then don't be old and don't work and save for decades. Live now and create. Society is gray when the economy is dominated by penny pinching sloggers and idle old people. Imagine creative young people investing and building and doing their best to still contribute something positive in their 60s while living off of some savings.

Then don't be old and don't work and save for decades. Live now and create

Naa, I'm tired. Besides, if I did, you and yours would be complaining about old people hogging all the good jobs.

One quibble with this, in the US at least, the vast majority of retirement savings aren’t just sitting in banks, they’re tied up in the stock market, ie, invested and “building”. This is true for most old and/or wealthy peoples money, which is why the “they’re hoarding wealth” argument is kind of silly in some ways; this generational wealth isn’t sitting in some Scrooge McBoomer vault, it is the fuel that drives the market.

Fewer young men will take risks when they know the next generation will say "we don't owe you nothing, gramps".

No, they will take more risks because the future is more uncertain regardless of present actions when they're not getting a cushy OAP for having wrinkles.

A world where none of your choices can affect the stability of your life in the future sounds like something that will collapse after a generation in favor of the one that balances handouts to the young with UBI for the old.

No it doesn't. The smarter argument would have been „have you seen Africa?” My retort would be that the present economy is too sure in all the wrong ways so chaos would be an improvement. Then out of the rubble comes a well-ordered slow life history society, like Ancient Rome.

The old (specifically, old fathers) had ALL the power and wealth in Ancient Rome. It's a terrible example for your position.

What do we need old people for

Motivation, that's what. The benefits and respect afforded to the old aren't an insult to the young, they're a promise that they'll be rewarded for working hard in their earlier years once they've done their time. One day, when the tonguing is done, we'll take our leave and go.

That's a weird, servile way to think. In my family, we work on credit and debt. First credit is issued, and we work hard because we feel like we owe a favor. We are generally too proud to work under a whip, chasing a carrot on a stick that is reserved for people who are suffering from the disease of old age (what good is it then?). I feel like credit is not being issued to young people in Western countries, therefore I owe nothing, and therefore I am relatively anti-social in my outlook towards the society and am more interested in looting it and swindling it legally than I am in contributing to it, since I owe it no favors.

Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.

But to put it another way, the basic model of our social contract is that, out of an ~80-year lifespan, we would like people to contribute about half of that number to working full-time to the benefit of society. In exchange, they can enjoy a life of relative ease for the other half of that time-span. 40/40. It's intuitive, it's fair, it's attractive. Instead of 40 years of leisure followed by 40 years of labor or vice versa, however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.

Splitting the difference in this way fulfills multiple useful purposes. Firstly, it includes (in your terms) both "credit" and "carrot" mechanics, thus appealing to both kinds of instinctive motivation. You should work hard because you owe society for your happy childhood, and because you still have some more comfort to look forward to later. Secondly, it concentrates the designated labor period in the years when people are fittest and thus when their time is more economically valuable. A 7-year-old gets as much happiness out of leisure time as a 37-year-old, if not moreso - and a 70-year-old doesn't get much less out of it than the 35-year-old, though admittedly he does get somewhat less. In contrast, the labor of a 7 or 70-year-old is worth far, far less than the 35-year-old's.

Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future. Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic (indeed, I had nowhere mentioned a stick/whip). Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful. How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.

Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.

No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do. The parents need the credit from society, and parents-aged people can't get it. Therefore we have a low fertility crisis and people who are too old to be parents trying to have babies. It's unhealthy to have 35 and 45 year old new parents versus 25 year old new parents.

however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.

It definitely does not work like this. My parents paid for everything during the first 20 years while society only got in the way and demanding they pay more and I make less money. So, from my point of view as a married man who would like to become a father now: I am responsible for paying for my children, and society is not producing the credit for that that it should. It is paying me $150,000 less than my equivalent who is 15 years older, but that equivalent is not a suitable new father and his children should be capable of earning income by that age, or almost, because he should have had children 15+ years ago. As my children grow up, not only do I pay for them, society starts demanding that they and I do things which are disadvantageous and unnatural. Economically, they mainly serve as economic redistribution to all sorts of strange guilds, which we as a family don't owe. There is some sort of half-baked argument covering for this about this being good for my family, the economy, and the nation, which don't really hold water when examined. And the tab here is years of life and hundreds of thousands of lost dollars per family. And then when they are done with all of these things and I'm holding the tab, my children will be systematically underpaid and forced to pay for stranger old people's lifestyles, who have done nothing but steal from us as I have raised them, instead of having more money to use for my grandchildren and myself.

Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future.

Nature provides for that plenty without this monstrosity of a redistribution system.

Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic

People need to look forward to the end of economic theft from themselves and the beginning of their OAP instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding? That's misanthropic.

Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful.

No, you should actually earn it, not have it promised by the government.

How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.

I live my life now and have already accepted the terribleness of old age and death. It seems like others are still in denial about these as adults and would simply like to argue with and negotiate with Mother Nature.

No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do.

Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?

instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding

To enjoy any those things aged 70, you need to be able to afford a comfortable living without having to work anymore. But more to the point, you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.

Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?

When they die I inherit? I actually owe them while I don't owe strangers? They won't nickle-and-dime me like strangers will at the expense of their grandchildren?

you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.

I believe both. Old people can be comfortable if they earn it, but unless they're my family I'm not willing to make the comfortable at my expense. All they did is take from me and my family.

I believe both. Old people can be comfortable if they earn it, but unless they're my family I'm not willing to make the comfortable at my expense.

Except you also say old people who worked and saved ("earned it") should be "cleared out." So you don't want them to be given anything, and you don't want them to keep anything they earned, you basically just want everyone but your parents put on an ice floe once they can no longer work?

Old people can be comfortable if they earn it,

What do you mean by "earn it"? If you mean "earn it morally by contributing to society while they were able", sure. If you mean "literally personally earn the money they'll live off of in their elder years", we have a problem. There are plenty of working-class people who can work hard every day of their adult life, but for whom making enough savings to make a decent living on in their golden years is simply not a realistic outcome. Have these people "earned" a few decades of retirement? I say yes. I say society needs to offer them some guarantee of it if it wants young men to go into those lines of work, and they are necessary work. But that's going to look like a pension system.

(No, "get married and have kids" doesn't square this circle. Odds are their children will be living paycheck-to-paycheck too, the last thing Junior needs is another mouth to feed on his minimum wage.)

First at 45 they are afforded half-UBI like middle management positions, which 20 year olds could easily do but can never get because they're essentially handouts for middle aged people.

Counterpoint: I worked at a broadly 'flat' tech company. Having thirty young and roughly equally-qualified engineers competing for middle-management positions makes for an awful working environment. Get the oldest to do it, as long as he's decent, and everyone can get on with work instead of agonising over reviews and stabbing each other in the back. Who's most senior is also semi-random, so you don't end up with the greasiest of the pack put in charge.

For those wondering about the whole fertility thing, why people aren't having children... this post gives you one underdiscussed reason. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth...

I thought for a second that you meant people aren't having children because infertile boomers are hoarding the wealth from those who are young enough to marry and reproduce. For example, I married younger than most people of my generation, and we can't afford a wedding ceremony, or a child, and our marriage process still costed a lot of my net worth. I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?

But then I saw that that boomer, who is known for his feeling of entitlement to his old-age pension, The_Nybbler, posted the comment, and I looked up the serpent's tooth quote, and ... my priors have not shifted on you.

„How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child:” I am a minority. The children are too thankful. Even if they were all like me, that would be no reason to not have kids. I still want kids. Mine will inherit my ideas. Is it a horror, that they will believe I should not exist on the dole for 30 years of retirement if they are struggling to afford to give me grand children? Not quite. That being a horror seems to only make sense if one is in denial about his mortality and the true conditions of old age. It is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children. If you do not agree, you will be replaced by those who do.

I married younger than most people of my generation, and we can't afford a wedding ceremony, or a child, and our marriage process still costed a lot of my net worth. I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now.

I am [not yet 35], make [~median household income] as the sole breadwinner, and have [2 - 4] children.

Obviously everyone is in a different scenario but barring very exigent life circumstances I have a hard time imagining being unable to financially afford to have children on 95th percentile income for my age. I'm very happy to chat about my lived experience in general terms if you're trying to figure out how to make it work.

It is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children.

It's (100% unironically) best for your Darwinian fitness for you to offer to watch the grandkids on the weekends.

I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?

Without knowing more details, I don't know how much of this is based in reality. It certainly beggars belief that someone in the top 5% of income couldn't afford to have multiple kids, much less a single baby. My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s. I understand that cost-of-living varies a lot, but as someone living in a medium-high COL area who has friends and family who are decidedly NOT in the top 5% (they certainly make less than me, and I'm certainly not in the top 5% in income) who have multiple kids, I don't understand how the math could work out to make it unaffordable.

My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s.

That age entitled someone to an extra $140k a year shows everything that is wrong with this economy. There is no way they are „earning” that. That's village elder UBI and it's bad because people in their 20s need it to feed their babies.

I'm worth more than two people in their twenties at work. I'd say they're underpaying me in some relative sense.

Usually, people who are older tend to make more money because they can provide more value by nature of having more experience and understanding of how to provide value. There's also greater replacement costs when it comes to employees that have been working at a company for a long time; someone who isn't all that productive but knows a specific company's systems well could be hard to replace and thus command higher pay than a productive junior member whose responsibilities are low enough such that they could be exchanged for another junior member, and older people are more likely to have worked at a company for a long time.

It's not as if older employees automatically earn more than younger ones for the same entry-level job, except for cases of some other factor that's often correlated. E.g. some possibilities: older employees are more likely to have experience negotiating for higher base pay, or they're more likely to have kids and get a sort of parent-sympathy bump.

There's a strong argument to be made that the current allocation of compensation doesn't properly reflect the actual productivity or value that these individuals provide. There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.

AI might obviate all of these, but, well, modern AI is less than half a decade old, barely long enough to have gone to and finished college. These things take generations to turn around, not mere single-digit years.

Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby. Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.

Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby.

I don't make that much. I'm not American, and maybe younger than you're thinking. My wife doesn't work. Why should we be dual income so some Boomer can sit on a boat and our babies don't have a full time mother? Yet another demand these olds put on young couples that is ridiculous.

Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.

I pay a ton of taxes, almost all of it goes to education, healthcare, and old age pensions. The latter two fund the old, the former funds other people's children's daycare, and waste of time for teenagers, and a guild of strangers who feel entitled to employment in that domain.

Then it's rent. We have space for a baby or two, so at least there's that. If we downsize, we don't, unless we live in poverty. I'm not living in a one room shack for the Nybbler's of the world who feel like they Earned their javascript money and like I don't deserve to get in on that because I was born too late.

There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.

My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs. How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.

My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs.

This doesn't seem like the worst idea, or even a bad idea. I'd be curious to see the precise details and what economic models predict in terms of how this affects incentives. Perhaps you could solve your baby affordability woes by becoming a politician, then using that power to steal from the government direct money towards friends and family or make money through insider trading, because your ideas seem likely to be popular enough to have at least a decent shot at winning elections.

How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.

The bloodiness in these things often come down to friction in implementation. I.e. the existing democratic system often prevents changes like this, because there are a lot of old people who vote, relative to not-old people. As such, it's usually just a matter of time before someone like you gets replaced by someone more extreme than you who calls for just eating the rich murdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?

I actually agree with the basic thrust of your point - being rich in your 60s is nice but doesn't achieve much for society in most cases and younger people would be better off with more money for having children - but you are making incredibly strong and bad claims that are distracting from it.

Yes, someone in their 30s is usually worth 2x as much as someone in their 20s. They've had 6 to 10 years of seeing stuff actually happening in the real world, they've got some experience in when and why things work or fail to work, and they are able to reliably handle things without needing their hand held. They are less likely (though still distressingly likely) to decide that they've worked out how the world really is and everyone just needs to get out of the way.

Yes, someone in their 30s is usually worth 2x as much as someone in their 20s. They've had 6 to 10 years of seeing stuff actually happening in the real world,

I saw a recent paper measuring this claim in teachers. The difference between a teacher with 2 years of experience and 18 years of experience was 0.04 SDs. That's like half an IQ point. That's also like a correlation of 0.10 or less. Worker talent dominates, particular experience does not have that long of a tail (maybe 1 year matters but 10 is outrageous) or that big of an effect. Ultimately the experience narrative is the narrative which justifies the redistribution, but when it gets audited it fails just like the education system. All of it's looking like village elder UBI more and more.

Could they earn an extra 10% per year? Maybe. An extra 100% is an outrageous effect size.

In my industry there is a saying about some people having X years of experience and others having 1 year of experience, X times. Teachers, by nature of the job, nearly always fall into the second pattern -- each year is the same as the last. And they get seniority pay increases because they're public employees with unions. Most jobs are not like that -- if experience people get more pay, they're expected to do a better job.

Ultimately the experience narrative is the narrative which justifies the redistribution, but when it gets audited it fails just like the education system. All of it's looking like village elder UBI more and more.

Could they earn an extra 10% per year? Maybe. An extra 100% is an outrageous effect size.

I too would be incredibly depressed and cynical were I to think that I've basically peaked and that in a decade+, I'll only be at most 10% more competent than I am today.

That's because teaching experience doesn't do much to outcomes because, well, we've had that conversation plenty. The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.

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I think you copied-and-pasted the wrong link.

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The key word is 'feel'.

I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension. I was also never middle management, for that matter, although the idea that it is "half-UBI" for the old is pretty laughable. And I didn't expect your priors to shift because integer ones never do.

I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?

No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.

I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension.

You're over 40 and have savings and a house. Under the new rules, that's a boomer. I'm a decade-ish younger than you and a boomer as well.

Under the new rules, that's a boomer.

I think I'm going to have to come up with some jokes to associate people making these claims with the University of Oklahoma, or the state more broadly.

What about USS OKLAHOMA, which is sadly not an OHIO-class SSBN?

If you manage to get a good mortgage in your 30s, you've found the pathway to being a boomer, sooner.

I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension. I was also never middle management, for that matter, although the idea that it is "half-UBI" for the old is pretty laughable. And I didn't expect your priors to shift because integer ones never do.

You are over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.

No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.

You just think young working couples, whom the world depends on, should be poor, while you sit around on a pile of „earnings” (which really do not survive worthiness audit anyway, although that's beyond the point), and stronger younger men are barred from competing for it except for through pandering to you. The problem with this is that it is more ideal biologically to cut you completely out of the loop at this point. Is that the nicest way to do things? No. But it is evolutionarily best, and we are much too tilted toward Boomer worship and far too removed from the law of nature or nature's God.

You are over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.

You are a self-parody.

You just think young working couples, whom the world depends on, should be poor, while you sit around on a pile of „earnings” (which really do not survive worthiness audit anyway, although that's beyond the point), and stronger younger men are barred from competing for it except for through pandering to you.

I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings, and do not somehow belong to the younger generation merely because they are younger. Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment should have anything is dystopian.

Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment [in this specific instance, that's the old] should have anything is dystopian.

But we kind of have that world right now.

and do not somehow belong to the younger generation merely because they are younger

They belong to you insofar as you can defend them. Historically, the old pay the young to do that (in various ways, not necessarily financial, but is a good chunk of the time). The fact they're currently refusing to (because they feel, perhaps correctly, they do not need to) and at the same time preventing any other independent development is, again, kind of the central issue.

I believe I've mentioned this before: when a society is in equilibrium old vs. young and to the degree that all modern development is zero-sum, TFR should be 2.0. Lower than that means the old aren't reinvesting enough (it's very clear that they're addicted to low-cost labor, hence their preference for infinity foreigners rather than focusing on domestic reproduction); higher than that means the young are burning through the capital too quickly and are on track to create this problem.

They belong to you insofar as you can defend them. Historically, the old pay the young to do that (in various ways, not necessarily financial, but is a good chunk of the time). The fact they're currently refusing to (because they feel, perhaps correctly, they do not need to) and at the same time preventing any other independent development is, again, kind of the central issue.

Except none of that is happening. Taxes are paid by the "old" -- well, really, the middle aged, but our angry Zoomer doesn't make a distinction

I believe I've mentioned this before: when a society is in equilibrium old vs. young and to the degree that all modern development is zero-sum, TFR should be 2.0. Lower than that means the old aren't reinvesting enough (it's very clear that they're addicted to low-cost labor, hence their preference for infinity foreigners rather than focusing on domestic reproduction); higher than that means the young are burning through the capital too quickly and are on track to create this problem.

I do not find this claim compelling.

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You are a self-parody.

This is how gen Z and alpha actually talk. There is no gen X in the lingo. FWIW other 55 year olds I've spoken to have also expressed disdain for being called boomer so it's not unique to you.

I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings

There's a strong argument and a weak argument here. The weak argument permits sitting on bygone glory that can't be presently defended, but audits your earnings and finds that dotcom era webdev work was overpaid. The strong argument says that even if you invented the transistor and capitalized completely fairly from that, evolution dictates that once you are done producing with that money and reproducing with your gametes, it is no longer optimal to allocate those earned resources to you. They should be dispersed, and do become dispersed, in the state of nature. That's how aging and death works.

Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment should have anything is dystopian.

The old gods are harsh but not dystopian. What we have now is a dystopian for young people. In reality I don't support going all the way on Gnon's law, but I think it helps to present the pure case of it and then discuss where to actually set the points of divergence. We are currently pandering way too much to old people and it has to stop. Maybe the optimal point is to cut OAPs in half and re-organize the tax system to tax reproductive age income less and old people spending more. That doesn't mean everything is taken from you overnight and you die in your 50s but it also means men like me will not be your slave while you sit on a boat somewhere into your 90s, having been retired for decades.

This is how gen Z and alpha actually talk.

No wonder they're poor.

I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings

There's a strong argument and a weak argument here. The weak argument permits sitting on bygone glory that can't be presently defended, but audits your earnings and finds that dotcom era webdev work was overpaid.

There's no argument at all for young people to judge the worthiness of work done by old people long ago with an eye to confiscating the fruits of their labor.

The strong argument says that even if you invented the transistor and capitalized completely fairly from that, evolution dictates that once you are done producing with that money and reproducing with your gametes, it is no longer optimal to allocate those earned resources to you. They should be dispersed, and do become dispersed, in the state of nature. That's how aging and death works.

Ah, but most of us aren't dead yet. And before you suggest "that could be arranged", you might want to consider that if you were in any position to arrange it, you wouldn't be poor.

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Social security tax hasn't increased since 1990.

I'd like to see more young politicians. Even if most boomers keep electing boomers, the other generations combined could elect a young millennial or even Gen Z.

Young politicians have less worldly experience and more impulsiveness, but more familiarity with recent worldly changes. In these times, which are changing faster than previous decades, this is important. Young politicians would also be more popular among young people, who (like the graduates mentioned above) need optimism and relatable leaders. And there would still be old politicians to mitigate their deficiencies.

I suspect a big reason tech isn't being regulated well, isn't corruption (although that's also a reason), but because old people don't understand its effects.

Yeah, we def need more AoCs and David Hogs. How about Hasan Piker?

Hasan Piker

I'd like more young politicians and public figures who are better role models.

AoCs and David Hogs

I think they're not good, but better than the average establishment Democrat.

If AI is actually going to significantly reduce people's job prospects, then what is called for is better social safety nets. In this scenario, we are entering a world in which there are many more people than jobs, but the amount of available resources are unchanged. If so, it only seems fair that the people who would have otherwise attained jobs but now cannot due to factors outside their control, would still receive enough resources to build a life for themselves. Maybe this is UBI. Maybe it is jobs in the military. Maybe it is more social programs to ensure that large groups of the population do not fall into complete poverty. We might also see even stronger anti-migration stances, as the jobs currently held by immigrants become competitive even amongst college graduates.

If AI does not do this, if it actually is just a tool, then the hype will eventually die down and life continues. Current tech students are uniquely positioned to learn the ins and outs of this new tool and use it to enrich themselves by creating further technological progress. We will see some industries die out and be replaced by others. There will be less demand for artists, and tech grunts who would have formerly been doing janitorial work on websites will either have to skill up or change career paths. But new jobs will turn up to replace them and the crisis is limited to specific fields.

That said, I understand the feelings of being lied to. You grow up taught to expect an easy life if only you study well and do as you are told, only to get the carpet ripped out from under you and saddled with debt. And my own stand on AI is pretty negative. I personally think the money spent on it would have been much better used on improving the school and medical sectors, or on improving social services. While the current models are vastly superior to those of 2024, they are still not at a level where I believe they have justified their costs. All the tasks LLM's can complete, could have also been completed by using the investment money to hire professionals to do them instead. Even if we do one day achieve AGI, it seems like all the spoils will go to individuals who could not care less about humanity and would happily let the rest of us burn if it meant enriching themselves.

How bad is the new grad job market, really? There's been a few high profile layoffs in tech companies, but a lot of those companies had insanely over exuberant hiring during the pandemic (and let me tell you, they hired some absolute howlers). That seems like a much better explanation for layoffs than the AI washing coming out of the C suite as a sop to investors.

Why are they booing the boomer? Well, the left hates AI, and college students are pretty left. Do we need to go any deeper?

Yeah I read that Meta has more employees now even post-layoffs than they did pre-covid. Enormous hiring followed by moderate cuts.

I'm hearing the media (always cynical outrage) is worse than reality, but it's still bad.

Most graphs I've seen look like this (Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States): a bump rising 2020-2022 falling 2022-2024, with current levels around 2020 levels, not rising nor falling. The problem is, there are many more computer science graduates than in 2020. AI probably hasn't diluted the job market (at least yet), but the massive rise in computer science graduates has.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

Or the problem may not be lack of employment, but tech companies becoming bureaucratic nightmares which don't make anything fun or beneficial to society, while evaluating employees on stupid criteria (like how much AI tokens they use) and constantly threatening layoffs. Ludicity is a blogger with stories like "I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars"; although his experience is only from 2023-2024, and maybe unusual, because he had no problem getting hired.

The problem is, there are many more computer science graduates than in 2020.

Sure, but this should be visible in unemployment/underemployment figures and there's nothing there.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

This is a major pain in the ass (recruiters are also, as a rule, retarded). I don't know if AI makes it worse though.

"How would you approach this problem?" in a 10 min interview seems like a fine hiring screen. AI or no AI, being able to ask the right kinds of questions and work out the right initial approaches seems like the best mark of a good candidate. AI is still slow enough I doubt they can type and read answers off GPT quickly enough, and having done lots of projects using AI or not using AI should give them the experience needed to answer at the high level.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

I think this might be because their jobs as hirers are just old people UBI. There are 19 year old HBD posters who could do a better job.

You seem to be advocating for committing federal crimes. "HBD posters" hiring criteria is illegal. You can't Family Guy "okay/not okay" meme test candidates.

It could be done race-blind, although it would produce the HBD predicted race gaps when done correctly. In tech this would primarily decrease Indian employment a massive amount.

The 19 year old HBD posters would get the company in hot water with the EEOC.

I don't think most HR and managers (the ones doing hiring, not the CEO) are old. But I do suspect their jobs are mostly useless, many aren't good at them (but stay because their boss/CEO doesn't know better), and companies could get by with much less of them and possibly AI.

I don't necessarily care if they're (not) fired, and I have sympathy for them. But it would certainly be better for employees if companies simplified long interview processes and replaced them with (paid) probation, and I think it would be better for employers (since probation is a better metric, and many talented employees will simply abandon convoluted hiring process).

I don't think most HR and managers (the ones doing hiring, not the CEO) are old. But I do suspect their jobs are mostly useless, many aren't good at them (but stay because their boss/CEO doesn't know better), and companies could get by with much less of them and possibly AI.

HR, yes. But I've had several excellent managers, and they are absolutely worth their salaries.

I'm going to pushback a bit at least on tech employment and present this data analysis posted on /r/cscareerquestions yesterday. Bolded mine:

From the data, several distinct periods can be identified:

Following the early 1990s recession and during the Clinton admin. economic and internet boom, tech employment increased exponentially at a 12% annual rate, peaking at 1.358 million in March 2001. It then collapsed in the dot-com bubble, up to an 18% downturn at its worst, and only recovered to the same level 6 years later, on March 2007. However, the market returned to growth in under 3 years.

The 2008 global financial crisis actually had only a limited impact on tech employment, since tech continued to boom during this time. From June 2009 to the pandemic in February 2020, tech employment increased in a remarkably stable and rapid linear growth pattern of around 80k per year.

The disruption caused by the pandemic was incredibly brief. It caused a net change of -70k, but by June 2020, hiring restarted at the fastest pace in history, around 130k per year. Having been a high schooler in this period, I definitely remember how insane the hype was around tech.

Hiring finally began to plateau beginning in May 2022. Total employment peaked at 2.483 million in March 2023. Ever since then, it has changed at a net rate of -42k a year.

The current slump is characterized by being less severe compared to the massive displacement of the dot-com bubble, which was much worse in percentage terms.

However, the current slump is also very protracted. This is the longest contiguous period of declining tech employment in the 36 years of data. That probably explains why this slump feels worse than anything in history. Even if it is not as intense as the dot-com bubble was, it is already longer, and it also followed the most rapid period of hiring in the history of tech.

It seems obvious that 2021-2022 overhiring has contributed to a disproportionately large glut of CS majors who had been expecting that 130k/yr employment growth rate when the market has actually suddenly shifted to -42k/yr, a gap in expectations of 172k.

This can be seen by the recent shifts in CS major enrollment. We can see enrollment as a rough 3-4 year lagging indicator for the sentiment of the candidate pool (since the data I have only tracks the employee pool, not how many people are applying for those positions). It started to drop rapidly this year.

So there is definitely a downturn in tech employment. And because tech ate the world, there are reverberations outward.

FRED source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001

That's an interesting fact, but I don't see why it wouldn't show up in unemployment/underemployment figures. If fewer people are going into CS when there's a glut of workers and unemployment is stable... Seems everything is working as intended?

I think you're right, that AI is not the cause of the tech layoffs, but rather overhiring in the tech sector over the past decade.

But the tech execs themselves are clearly telling us no, it's definitely AI replacing all the workers, so... I mean, if they want to make a case to the commies for their own guillotining, who are we to stop them?

They don't want to admit they overhired. That's a failure in leadership. Blaming AI is putting a positive spin on things.

I think it's more that the tech industry feels that normal growth is unacceptable and that the massive growth of the 80s and 90s is what's to be expected. They can't come to grips with being a mature, boring industry that makes incremental advancements; there aren't any 25-year-old multimillionaires who made their fortune starting a construction machinery company out of their bedroom. So when the industry starts contracting, it can't be because their growth projections were overoptimistic, but because they're actually doing a lot better! Their products are so advanced that they don't need employees anymore, and your job is next, even if they don't know what that job is. I don't think it's a coincidence that LLM hype coincides with tech employment peaking.

I mean, tech employment peaked because they flooded the space with low-quality hires who only picked up programming because of the high salaries.

The median quality of programmers has plummeted over the last 30 years, despite the fact that the quality of the tools available has skyrocketed. The guy who designed the multiplayer networking backend for the original Age of Empires games was some 18 year old kid with no degree they grabbed off the street because he said he liked programming. You’d have to get a senior dev and pay him like $300k now to hope to get someone capable of architecting anything like that now.

But first, employers must no longer prioritize (let alone require) college degrees

And instead of using college degrees to filter out applicants, they will be using...? Remember, the most obvious answers are illegal.

Aptitude tests are explicitly legal.

I am very interested to see the outcomes of Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship. Recruit people directly out of high school; use SATs and high school experience as proxies for g and conscientiousness; hire them if they succeed.

If college is replaced by unpaid internships, those. The internships would be easy to get, and incompetent employees would be fired early and not recommended, so their resume would only grant more unpaid internships.

Unpaid internships have the potential to teach more relevant skills cheaper. Ideally, they’re mutual: the employer gets a free worker, the employee learns exactly what they’ll need for a paid career.

Although they have the alternate potential to be worse than college: an employer may require busywork that would be useless in a real career, “grade” students unfairly (threaten to fire and give negative recommendation based on arbitrary criteria), and probably won’t provide the social aspect of college (which may shift out of college into third spaces if everyone's doing internships, but may remain or disappear, especially if employees are being overworked).

For this reason, I think internships should be advertised and accredited by some agency, like colleges are. Or, students should still attend college, but coursework should be almost entirely replaced with internships. The idea of an internship comes from today’s colleges’ internship programs: every one I’m aware of is highly praised, so much that I’ve frequently heard applicants choose colleges mainly for their internship opportunities.

If you suddenly have so much work done by unpaid interns, why hire any of them on for paid work? They leave, and their place is taken by yet another desperate unpaid intern. This isn't even slavery; slaves get fed.

It's apprenticeship. You hire them because they are now more skilled than the newer interns as a result of your tutelage. Obviously, many ways for this to go wrong in practice.

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