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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24624 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.

It’s true that lifespans have risen due to medical technology, but it seems that maximal lifespans have not, you just don’t need as much good luck to reach them.

I'd add that lifespans have indeed risen due to medical technology but healthspans, so to speak - that is, one's longevity as a healthy person capable of working -, have not.

In the strong sense of maximal, I agree with you - the maximum human lifespan has been 100-105 since time immemorial. But decreasing mortality at older ages means that any given high percentile (95th, 99th, even 99.9th) has been visibly increasing in my lifetime.

The apparent maximum lifespan has dropped because there are fewer places where you can credibly claim to be 110+ based on dodgy records.

It's pretty hard to avoid the elderly stickiness effect when the vast majority of jobs are stuff you can just sit at from 60 onwards as a soft sinecure if your industry isn't particularly proactive in running the purge.

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.

I'd argue that the alienation of youth could easily be responding to a real change.

Exactly. Most Elderly welfare programs were designed under fundamentally different conditions. 65 as a retirement age made more sense when a considerably-smaller chunk of the population made it there with way less years in the tank after working a lot more physically arduous jobs and their end of life care options were a lot less numerous and expensive. By the time that today's youth get to that age the programs will likely be drastically reshaped and cut to accommodate for this new reality and/or luxury robot communism for all since human labor is no longer useful. Since the elderly have enormous voting clout in democracies there's also no particularly good way around this, and any changes will likely involve large degrees of grandfathering.

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.

Indeed, the historical norm for settled, agricultural societies is that the elderly have everything and the young work for them. We do not see youth complaints much from before 1900, but there is evidence in the sources indicating that the Greeks and Romans were very concerned about managing it.

Wasn't this part of why the Romans were always on campaign? War redirects the energies of restless young man with little stake in the existing order.

These campaigns also involved a whole lot of stealing the foreigners' land and giving it to said young men. Nobody with a 40 acre land grant, slaves and loot taken as spoils, and a new wife is particularly interested in causing civil unrest. And now your newly conquered territory has a nice, healthy population of loyal veterans with a very personal stake in maintaining the new order.

In 1926 the median American was around 26 years old. Thanks to the baby boom, the median wasn't much older in 1970, 28, and was 30 in 1980. Today, it's 39, and will likely be over 40 by 2030. The old have never been so proportionately numerous.

This is aggravated by the fact that economic growth has been declining since the 1980s, and especially since the end of the 90s. Barring 2021, all but the oldest Millennials never experienced 4% GDP growth as a member of the labor force. All but the youngest of Gen Z have never experienced 3% GDP growth in the workforce, again barring 2021.

In 1926 the median American was around 26 years old. Thanks to the baby boom, the median wasn't much older in 1970, 28, and was 30 in 1980. Today, it's 39, and will likely be over 40 by 2030. The old have never been so proportionately numerous.

I agree, but why does this matter? I mean, there were certainly a lot of rich and powerful old people in 1926 in the United States. Enough for young people to form a belief that old people were hoarding the goodies.

This is aggravated by the fact that economic growth has been declining since the 1980s, and especially since the end of the 90s. Barring 2021, all but the oldest Millennials ever experienced 4% GDP growth as a member of the labor force. All but the youngest of Gen Z have never experienced 3% GDP growth in the workforce, again barring 2021.

I did a random search, and the graph I found indicated that in the 1970s and 1980s, there were a lot of years with GDP growth well under 4% and sometimes under 0%.

There really weren't a lot of old people around in 1926 period, let alone a government subsidized upper-middle class of retirees. In 1920 less than 1/20 Americans were over the age of 65. Now it's 1/6.

That there were bad years in the 70s and early 80s doesn't change the fact that no one under the age of 40 has experienced anything like the sustained economic growth we had from 1985-2005. The 1970s sucked compared to the 50s and 60s but still had faster growth than the 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s so far.

In 1920 less than 1/20 Americans were over the age of 65

In my view, 1/20 is more than enough to form the basis for class resentment. And note that the line doesn't necessarily need to be drawn at 65. For example, I myself am in my 50s and I could envision a lot of young people resenting the fact that I bought a house many years ago which, if I were to sell it today, would provide me with a huge windfall on the back of some young couple who desperately needs a residence near a major city.

That there were bad years in the 70s and early 80s doesn't change the fact that no one under the age of 40 has experienced anything like the sustained economic growth we had from 1985-2005.

FWIW, when I graduated college (after 1985) there was a recession on; I couldn't find a job; I ended up pursuing post-graduate studies instead; and I very much resented old people for much the same reasons young people do today. It felt like the ladder had been pulled up.

In my view, 1/20 is more than enough to form the basis for class resentment.

To trigger class resentment, the elderly would need to be a privileged class. There are two institutions that allow this in the modern west: pensions, and mass homeownership. America doesn't really have pensions until the New Deal, and the only non-rich Americans who own their own homes in that period are farmers. The (middle-class and below - class resentment of the rich elderly is obviously real, but is about class and not age) urban elderly were seen as pitiable before these institutions came into their own.

I can't speak for 160-acre family farms in the early 20th century US, but in the (very long) era of subsistence family farms in the west, gramps is generally perceived as a net positive (but is still allowed to starve before the prime-age family members when food gets short). So I don't think there would be widescale resentment of the elderly among the smallholding class either.

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Elderly didn't have the benefit of the modern medical infrastructure where you have a great chance of toddling around in pretty solid health at 70 compared to where you were. Look at the recent presidential stock.

Inheritances are coming later and increasingly past the ages that facilitate real meaningful innovation from the recipients. The laptop jobification of the economy means there's way more scope to just hold on to roles into dotage years.

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.

Lot of this is hindsighting the previous generation's wealth accumulation methods. Stuff like Medicine is pretty evergreen but each decade or two the dominant forms of finance earning will shift violently. I used to work with a bunch of old Floor traders and that is a totally different skillset than modern trading.

There's also generally a hindsight effect where people assume the big trades of the past were bleedingly obvious since the people who hit them now have the biggest pulpit

You can still see in that industry the skillset change.
1970’s - some even no college made it. Still some truly smart people 2000’s - Big Ten Schools and above 2020’s - what was your placement on the IMO

Another way to look at it - 1970’s the best local talent in Chicago or NYC who just wandered into trading. 2000’s The best in recruited from the top schools in the region. 2020’s the best recruited Internationally. So yes it’s much harder today. Finance in general has gotten much more selective. PE is likely very similar.

Ownership seats are also basically non-existent now in PE or trading. If you started in PE in the 1980’s you have your name on the door. If you started post 2010 you work for a listed PE firm and only get a split of the fees. Which is a lot of money.

Ownership seats are also basically non-existent now in PE or trading.

Tell me about it. Biggest BS ever: even very very good people often don't make it beyond being desk head where the partners siphon off their share. Even the places that say "share of the profits if you come to us!" usually don't offer you more than 2-3% of the returns (before tax, mind you) which you generate for them and you still have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy of the stuff above the pod structure (and pay for it of course). Starting up your own place is also now becoming effectively impossible unless you have mid double digit millions lying around because of all the rules and regulations and partnerships you need.

The money is very very good regardless but there's a difference between having real autonomy vs being a cog in the machine, which is what a lot of modern trading is becoming (remember, the models etc. you develop don't belong to you, they're company property so you can't just up and take them to a competitor firm without getting sued, and nobody (other than the aforementioned pod shops above with their own issues) is hiring you unless you agree that ownership of models isn't yours.

Above desk head it was always internal politics. It’s the same in every part of finance, in tech, etc. Some people don’t realize there were plenty of ultra-smart people in the 80s and 90s who also capped out far below the top because they couldn’t play the game. The ones whose names you know today are the survivors. A lot of the real autists with zero social skills who made it to mega billionaire status (Hohn, Rokos, the Two Sigma guys or one of them at least) were helped along because people who had those skills adopted them and essentially exploited them to get rich themselves.

Even in the quant space that means that smart people who seem to have the ability to handle clients, participate in sales (even if only as ‘the smart guy’) and play that role are most likely to make it to the top. It’s the same in every field. If you’re a really smart procedural lawyer who is kind of autistic you will often never make partner because the existing partnership knows you’re (a) unlikely to leave [autists hate change] and (b) probably can’t bullshit your way through the marketing exercise that is every non-technical part of an interview. Outside of the largest partnerships and public corporations where dilution is negligible an equity stake is often far more about being pushy than anything else.

I also think that like @Opt-out says the field is just too saturated with mathematically / spatially super smart IMO winners, who themselves can do a lot more with AI now than they could a few years ago in terms of speeding up implementation / backtesting / whatever. 40 years ago a lot of the white / Jewish top math grads aspired to a career in academia, the younger generation is more diverse and more financially motivated. The rest go to SpaceX. Meanwhile the dumb as bricks bond salespeople I know who would struggle to precisely define carry and roll or how the post libor forward rates curve is computed in a non wishy washy way, or the commodities guys whose market color consists of calling up their clients whenever some OSINT Twitter with a million followers posts a new satellite picture of a missile attack, somehow seem to continue to make tons of money.

Moving up internally is the same as always. It’s the specific ownership seats that are non-existent. You can still be Lloyd Blankenfien CEO of Goldman Sachs but you can’t be a K, K, or R in KKR. Because things have become institutionalized, scaled, and moated. Pure trading the last time you had a path like that was probably early 2000’s and then when banking got banned from prop trading it opened up a big path to scale as big competitors left the market. That window is likely dead now.

There are tons of ex top pod shop guys who have set up on their own over the last 5 years, often backed by the last place they worked. They usually don’t name the company after themselves, but that’s because this has been in decline since at least the 90s. Functionally they are in charge, they could rename ArcNextGammaWhatever to Miller Patel Sarkisian And Company, what’s the difference?

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Yeah but like I'm sure there's a relatively niche employment spot right now that will turn out to be the big hindsight winner circa 20 years from now. AI researcher was a skilled profession 15 years ago but you weren't paid Lebron James money for the bleeding edge and there's now way more of a glitch of people entering the field.

But yeah there's a reason there's a meme with talking to 50 year olds in elite jobs now and getting 'I started my career at 27 after spending 3 years backpacking and getting turned onto this field by a newspaper ad after junior college' versus the new graduates being the absolute bleeding edge of filtering.

Hell my dad managed to get to a very senior offshore oil platform design electrical engineering position with 2 years before dropping out of a third-tier undergrad and a trade electrician cert. These things happen when you're born in 1949 and get in early on a field that ends up exploding in relevance

AI researcher was a skilled profession 15 years ago

Lmao, AI research was an extremely niche profession 15 years ago. AlexNet came out in 2012 and pioneered deep learning which lead to transformers/LLMs. The only people who were AI researchers were college professors and the occasional industry researcher. You had a number of folks doing data science/ML engineering but it was pretty much just a sub-domain of statistics as thats what boosting/SVMs/Random Forests are.

That's the point though. Occasionally the economic fairy will come through and bless something to go from academic curiosity to instant megabucks then inevitably every university in the land will dilute the original credential to nothing

The only person I can think of who just lucked into their position without heavy filtering today feels like JD Vance. Sure he got into Yale Law, but he sort of just wrote a book that was ok professionally. Then met a billionaire who turned him into the VP. US politics might be the only place I can think of where some of it just feels lucky.

There are still tons of people who get lucky. There are random people in PR or marketing at nvidia worth millions. I know a lot of midwit at best people who coasted around non-technical startup jobs (copywriting, project management, marketing, social) who ended up at companies like Coinbase and Revolut who are either rich or going to be. There are always new businesses blowing up.

Similarly in American politics, the most common route is still elite upper middle class childhood - HYPS undergrad - HYS law - clerkship - DC. There are exceptions in every field. Even in quant finance there are a handful of people every year who get recruited out of nowhere because despite no real credentials they contribute enough useful research. I’ve met one, a Balkan immigrant with little formal education.

I think people just see this through the lens of hindsight. There were tons of people in the 70s who did the ‘smart thing’, went to a top college, got a grad job (‘management trainee position’) at IBM or PanAm, and never made fortunes.

I feel like the 70s equivalent still do fine on the aggregate though even if they don't teleport into billionaires. Just being a solid MBA type and pulling in 85th percentile income for a 30 year career is a perfectly good and stable life

US Politics you're gonna be way more aware of people who end up in the top jobs. There's still plenty of right time, right place hugely-successful people but the traditional UMC path has become exponentially more arduous as a result of striver optimization.

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.

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.

There are still some positions even in corporate world where you can land without university. At 18 you can land some lower-end sales job as SDR maybe with tech-sales or similar. If you are technically savvy, you can aim for presales engineer career which is pretty neat. You can land IT support position and farm certifications. These together with work history will be more valuable than some default easy college. All of these work very well especially with some referrals and recommendations.

I’d agree if it weren’t for the debt. The idea of a government supported rumspringa available to all adults is probably better than college for almost everyone. It would be cheaper to have kids live in cheap rooms, socialize, hopefully meet their spouse and form friendships.

But with debt in the picture, I think college only makes sense for kids smart enough and hard working enough to do the work of getting the grades and internships and building a portfolio of good work to show an employer.

I’m rather certain that youths in apprenticeship/vocational training also have sufficient opportunity to party, smoke weed, play video games, chill and hook up. The main difference is that none of that is financed by government money; on the other hand, we’re talking about people that are already earners. I guess I also have to concede that they lack access to the social circles that are normally made up by college students, which does hinder hookup/mating options.

Am I missing something here?

Actual apprenticeship programs tend to have strict drug testing policies because it’s a cheap way of filtering out many of the worst employees.

I think there are some roles where this is the case, but a lot of these jobs don’t have huge intakes of young people working together because of the structure of the businesses. It’s more like you, someone ten years older, a few people 10-30 years older. Maybe every so often you take a class and meet some other people doing vocational training of a similar kind but it’s not college, you’re all commuting etc. One’s friendship circle also seems to consist primarily of high school classmates, which means they’re not making many new friends.

I see. I suppose your argument is that this is one aspect that young people notice and it does erode whatever level of willingness they have to enter vocational training instead of college.

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?

It varies a lot by degree but generally only those in "engineering" and medicine really need to study. I've seen studies showing that the median university student spends less than 13 hours a week study related activities, engineers spend about 40h and those in medicine about 44h.

These two fields are of course a tiny part of the overall student population.

Yes, American issue mostly: https://www.themotte.org/post/3654/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/426896?context=8#context

My undergrad was extremely rigorous and I had to work like a dog's dog.

Standard Cambridge Natsci workload per week according to the faculty, and roughly correct in my experience (admittedly only during the 8-week term) Lectures: 12 hours (Sitting in lecture listening and taking notes - the quality of lecturing was high enough that people went to the lectures) Supervisions: 4 hours (2-1 interaction with a tutor) Practicals: Up to 12 hours in lab depending on what options you were doing (biologists have more labs than physical scientists). Possibly 2-4 hours a week writing up lab reports outside the lab, depending on what labs you were doing that week. Self-study and review of lecture notes: 6 hours Preparatory work to discuss at supervisions: 16 hours. Seeking additional academic support: 2-4 hours a week if you needed it.

So 50+ hours academic work a week, and the gunners had at least one and often two demanding extra-curriculars on top. Preclinical medics had it slightly worse.

This is not usual for either UK or US undergraduates.

Did a Commerce degree and most of it's a blur when it comes to actual functional workplace skills acquired. I feel like anything outside of STEM/Finance/Accounting it's largely bullshit due to the august mandarin laptop bureaucracy generally being more vibe based than tying into particular skills.

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 beyond 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.

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

Should have gone to Bar Night

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.

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 (edit: typo) 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.

And you’re saying the people who design their hardware are self taught and didn’t go to university at all?

No, there's no way that's true. I don't know those people or specific details of their work, but that can't be the case.

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Yeah I know a Jump Trading hardware guy and dude has degrees coming out his ass.

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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.

Law school is a lot like law practice. It's a lot of very difficult work, but you're also getting hammered 5 days a week, at least once or twice at pseudo-mandatory school/recruitment events with open bars. It was near the hardest I've ever worked, but it was also definitely the drunkest I've ever been and when I did most of my experimenting with drugs.

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 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.

My biggest regret in college isn't my GPA or degree, it's that I gave up on the Sailing Club because I thought they were a bit too stuck up at the first event. I feel like I missed out on a lot of networking, and a lot of fun.

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.

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

To be fair, a lot of associates degrees are vocational studies which actually teach something specific, it just doesn’t happen to be math.

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.

How many hobby third spaces are going to help with kids, though. I like my BJJ gym but there's only a small selection with kids and it's mostly young professionals

I wouldn't argue that BJJ gyms count as third places, as they obviously only exist to serve BJJ practicioners. Third places by definition need to also be accessible to average people who don't necessarily share a niche hobby.

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

Isn’t the usual heretical HBD realist argument regarding food deserts that the rampant crime that is the staple of ghetto areas is discouraging enterpreneurs from running small shops of any kind? Also, doesn't a food desert by definition include any shop within a walking distance that offers any food, not just healthy food?

@The_Nybbler beating me by five minutes.

Motte and Bailey... "Nobody means literally abolish the police!"

It's a lack of "healthy and affordable foods"

USDA: Mapping Food Deserts in the United States

ERS's Food Desert Locator is based on a definition developed by USDA, Treasury, and HHS. Low-income census tracts with a substantial number or share of residents with low levels of access to retail outlets selling healthy and affordable foods are defined as food deserts. A census tract is a small, relatively permanent subdivision of a county that usually contains between 1,000 and 8,000 people but generally averages around 4,000 people. Census tracts qualify as food deserts if they meet low-income and low-access thresholds:

  • Low-income: a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, or a median family income at or below 80 percent of the statewide or metropolitan area median family income;
  • Low-access: at least 500 persons and/or at least 33 percent of the population lives more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles, in the case of rural census tracts).

There's more than one argument. Rampant crime discourages shops big and small. But lack of demand discourages certain kind of shops.

Anyway, the food desert definition is

Census tracts qualify as food deserts if they meet low-income and low-access thresholds:

Low-income: a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, or a median family income at or below 80 percent of the statewide or metropolitan area median family income;
Low-access: at least 500 persons and/or at least 33 percent of the population lives more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles, in the case of rural census tracts).

So small stores/bodegas don't count.

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.

Can you please spell out the impolite-to-point-out reasons?

We live under a dictatorship of the dysgenic and the kinds of people who yap about 3rd places on youtube only need a mirror to see what the true problem is. Of course as narcissists, that is unacceptable to them. If they were not narcissists, we would all be 140 IQ super models right now from eugenics.

We would have been bred out as autistic. I'm not even sure that they would have been making a mistake doing it.

I'm not more autistic than Francis Galton. It doesn't matter either way because the gene pool would be totally different. If your objection to eugenics is I wouldn't have been born, that's narcissism as well as some kind of fallacy.

Of course as narcissists, that is unacceptable to them. If they were not narcissists, we would all be 140 IQ super models right now from eugenics.

Someone would. Neither you nor I would exist.

As a non-narcissist, that doesn't bother me at all. According to your reasoning, our present existence is a fluke and has essentially 0 universal existence measure anyway. I would rather that whatever does exist be as good as possible than cling to shitty existence.

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.

Parents of young children very much welcome family friendly third spaces.

Really? They welcome chuck E cheese's?

Playgrounds count as third places as well. In that sense, young parents in fact also very much need them.

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.

"Socially acceptable loitering" is simply another word for "socializing", I think, which is the whole purpose of third places.

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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.

In my conception of effort, the effort required is not the people showing up to trivia, its the organizer. The one who gets the questions every week, contacts restaurants and bars for hosting, markets the event, etc. Regulars are great and you can't have a reliable third space without them, but if that organizer did not organize it, there would be no event. And if enough organizers in the local area don't organize it, there is no local trivia community.

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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 obvious way to square the circle is to make social security and medicare linked to "volunteering" for, say, ten hours of work per week at nonprofit childcare and education centers. (Making the rules intentionally lax so any ideological group can qualify so long as it actually takes some of the childrearing burden off parents.) Sunday schools, daycares, boy scouts, hell-- a chess club where the parents can drop their kids off for 3 hours to be supervized by a cadre of partially demented old grandmasters.

Notably this also solves the fertility issue. If you're going to be taking care of brats when you're old anyway, you might as well make sure they're your brats.

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...

Median mortgage payment as a percentage of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1RDJB

FRED doesn't have data further back, but it's worse 1981-83

That's one of many reasons boomers aren't impressed by the whining. Yeah, things are in fact bad now (though there was a lot of the same whining pre-COVID when they were not). But they were worse in the 1980s, when many boomers were trying to get their life started.

My dad likes to tell his story about getting a mortgage with something like a 13% APR and that was a "low" rate relative to recent rates at the time. Home prices were low but monthly payments weren't compared to his salary.

A high rate on a lower balance means that you needed a much lower deposit (and had the benefit of those high interest rates while saving for it). In addition, inflation was higher (with, as always, wages and prices roughly keeping pace) so the monthly payment didn't stay excruciating for as long.

A high rate on a lower balance means that you needed a much lower deposit (and had the benefit of those high interest rates while saving for it).

Alas, no, you didn't. Savings deposits were stuck at 5.25% due to something called "Regulation Q" while inflation and loan rates soared. And people didn't do money markets and buy T-bills individually back then. This was repealed in phases starting in 1980, a bit late to help.

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.

I feel like I have a vague memory of essays by boomers saying something like this, but I've so rarely run into it that I can't remember, and I've certainly never seen it among boomers IRL. Not that I hang out with a lot of those, so that doesn't mean too much.

But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal. Notably, I've never seen boomers implying that this would solve all zoomers' woes, merely that those are the types of things they should do first before declaring that making it in this economy is impossible.

I'm personally a privileged millennial, who was lucky enough not to suffer the pains of the 2008 crash that happened around the time I started working. So I don't have enough personal experience with such stuff to weigh in on. But I certainly have the experience of sacrificing location and comfort for price in rental, sometimes spending nearly 2 hours in commute each way for work, doing meal prep and budgeting my restaurant meals, not ordering food for months, not paying for any entertainment subscriptions, finding used or free furniture from Craigslist, things like that, in my 20s and even 30s. They're just not that much sacrifice, and certainly I think my qol with all the benefits of modern technology and policework is better than that of boomers when they were young adults.

I sense that zoomers were too grown up being fed fearmongering that these were the end times, and COVID plus AI gave them a one-two punch right as they were becoming adults. Like generations before them, they were sold a false bill of goods about college being the solution to all their career problems, and there's certainly blame that deserves to land on their parents' generations to some extent for all of that except maybe AI. And so they're somewhat understandably weary of being told advice. But jumping at shadows is still jumping at shadows, and devoting significant energy towards criticizing others instead of criticizing oneself tends not to be all that useful for getting oneself out of a hole, regardless of who dug that hole or put one in there.

I’ve yet to see a boomer that doesn’t think like a boomer - but I’m dumb and work retail and so meet people that are, what I would politely call more normal than some people may meet on this forum.

I’m not saying you’re rich and meet smarter and more elite thinking boomers, but I would say that if I were thinking of a fictional person on the motte.

I also agree with your take about how the youngins think about lunch, breakfast, etc.

But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal.

That's because Zoomers could afford it if they just cancel their pensions. They want zoomers to be poor while they live the lifestyle they deny to young people.

But jumping at shadows is still jumping at shadows, and devoting significant energy towards criticizing others instead of criticizing oneself tends not to be all that useful for getting oneself out of a hole, regardless of who dug that hole or put one in there.

Sounds like something the hole digger would say to avoid consequences for their actions.

Sounds like something the hole digger would say to avoid consequences for their actions.

I mean, if you want to go down that road, I'd just say that those in glass houses ought not throw stones. But that's really irrelevant. It doesn't matter what something "sounds like" in terms of who or what they would say. What matters is if it's true. I'm not sure how it's not obviously true that improving oneself to become better at climbing out of a hole is a far better use of one's energy when one is in a hole than bitching at the hole-digger. Obviously, one could do both, but also, the response to recommendations to do basic financial planning indicates a whole lot of not doing the former.

That's because Zoomers could afford it if they just cancel their pensions. They want zoomers to be poor while they live the lifestyle they deny to young people.

Tremendously few people at 25 have the lifestyle they grew up with. Which makes sense! Their parents have had 25-35 more years of work, saving, and building up a home than they have.

People ought to be raised by 25 year olds, so this doesn't make a lot of sense. I think years of experience is overpaid due to cognitive bias towards elders and against innate intelligence, so I also don't accept that 25 year olds ought to make much less than their parents did in their late 30s. Boomers talk past zoomers with the suffer and save mentality. No, they do not accept your Luke Skywalker working man's „hero's journey” pablum as an excuse for immiserating young people in the summer of their lives. There is nothing noble in being poor, and squirreling away money just to get some relief when society decides you are finally old enough to make a dignified wage.

I also don't accept that 25 year olds ought to make much less than their parents did in their late 30s.

Flipped around, that means people shouldn't be making more in their late 30s than they did at 25... aka whatever you make at 25, you're locked into an amount close to that forever, no hope of significant advancement or growth?

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If they're 25, and having babies, they're probably living on a single income, which might well be half of what they'll eventually make, even without raises.

But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal.

I would be wary of taking these arguments on popular social media too seriously. All sides involved in them are incentivized by the attention economy and by their own emotions to present the maximalist, ridiculous versions of their positions and to treat the argument as a general rage-venting session instead of as an attempt to ascertain facts and jointly find solutions to problems. I think that offline, probably relatively rare is the zoomer who genuinely thinks that the idea making your own sandwich is some kind of horrific unreasonable oppression.

This is correct, but also, the context of this is specifically about how boomers are conspicuously ignorant of the way things have become harder for young adults now compared to when they were young adults, which appears to me entirely a social media attention economy rage-venting phenomenon.

My father had to scramble to find a defense job so they wouldn't send him to die in Southeast Asia. My experience wasn't as bad but I did graduate into a recession. Some millennials got screwed pretty hard entering the workforce during the GFC. There's certainly plenty of things that suck now, but the zoomers on X utterly reject the idea that anyone else ever had problems.

I'm personally a privileged millennial, who was lucky enough not to suffer the pains of the 2008 crash that happened around the time I started working.

Yeah, that crash basically set my career back... oh, 3 or 4 years. Even with a very good trajectory since (by any reasonable metric, that is, not by the start-up/FAANG/finance metrics), I'm still a little bitter over it, and look at where my career/life might have been (aka three more years of potential seniority/raises/promotions, and a few life opportunities). I can only imagine how I'd feel if I wasn't doing comfortably well right now.

And, of course, it could have been worse! Better to be jobless early in one's career, when parents and grandparents have a spare room, than mid career when you're the one paying for a mortgage and food.

The Twitter generational war, be it over sandwiches or houses and cars, has been dumber than usual this week, and that's saying something.

My thoughts as a mid-millennial who mostly missed the crash (not being able to score even any variety of job as a freshman in college was irritating, but otherwise it wasn't that bad) but fucked around and failed to launch throughout his 20s (I delivered food with a side of dispatching for 14 years LMAO, but since that gravy train ended have managed to use those experiences to switch to an office job in trucking that appears to have potential to make a real career out of.) are otherwise as follows:

Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s, but it's not Cash for Clunkers that caused it, but the loss of production during the Great Recession and Covid years (along with inflation) making either 15 year old beaters or lightly used cars more expensive. That said, even if it feels a touch overpriced compared to the $2K shitboxes of the 2010s (Back then, my pick for best pizza delivery bang for the buck was a Bush era Ford Focus.), one can get a 15-20 year old Corolla on Marketplace for $3500-$5000 depending on one's tolerance for ugly and it'll probably work fine. If not, it's a Corolla. Get on Youtube, buy some tools from Walmart/Harbor Freight, and fix it, or find a friend who can and will (Car guys tend to identify themselves by talking about them all the time.). Don't want to pay the Toyota tax/want something nicer? Get a Mazda 3. In my experience they're very reliable and have depreciated more heavily (Mine has 100K miles on it and the only non-maintenance thing I've had to do to it was replace the belt tensioner, a pain in the ass but the part was $30 on Rock Auto.).

Pack a lunch to work or spend $28 on Doordash? Who the hell eats lunch at work anyway? Unless my boss is paying for it I don't eat lunch at work; I'd rather work through it and leave early or play on my phone. If I had to eat out and pay for it, there's an Italian place downtown that does a two slice or two Chicago dog and drink special for $7.

All that said, my broad take is that things really are worse than they were in the mid/late 2010s. I spent that decade as a drunk slinging burritos and sushi in a college town and never had money problems in spite of an outrageous bar budget and my only real quality of life sacrifice was living in various shitty apartments with cheap/freecycled furniture and having to do laundry at a laundromat. I have a real salaried job now and make more money than I did back then (and without beating the shit out of my car) but I still feel broke (and objectively am; that career change was brutal) in a way that I didn’t/wasn’t in the 2010s. Job hunting in ‘24/’25 was a miserable, hopelessness inducing experience and I doubt I’d have gotten the job I have now without knowing my current boss from my time bartending.

As for the Boomers/Xers and quality of life, I think their real privilege/crime isn’t so much a money or standard of living thing, but fertility related. Boomers and Gen X were the last to spend their younger years in an America with a relatively normal age distribution instead of the rapidly aging gerontocracy we’re in now. From 1930 to 1980 the median age in the US increased from 26.5 to 30 years old. From 1980 to the present that number increased from 30 to 40 years old, mostly from 1990-present.

Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s

I remember even the late 2010s (so around 2016-2018) that the "gently used" car market was... worthless. If I wanted any kind of substantial discount over just buying new, I was looking at close to 100k miles or more.

I was car shopping back then and while I can't comment on the lightly used market the mid and low range were reasonable (I was at a food delivery company at the time, so that was the sort of shopping I did.) if you weren't looking for a truck or SUV. My goal was under 10 years old, 100k miles or less, and under $10K and there was a decent selection even accounting for my weird tastes (I wanted something not silver, white, or black, and it had to have a stick shift.). I was closing in on a Mazda 2, and early 2010s models were running for about $7500 at the time.

I actually blundered into a private party deal that I couldn't pass up, a loaded one year old Mazda 3 with 15K miles for $17K. It was retired lady's recently passed husband's car, a stick shift that she couldn't drive, had one minor scrape on the bumper, and the interior reeked of cigarettes but otherwise it was mint and I knew how to fix the cigarette smell so I offered her NADA "rough trade-in" and she took it. The bank had it valued at $21.5K, and on that note interest rates were lower then. I was able to put 20% down and finance the rest of it for 2% interest.

Funny enough, I never liked that car all that much (It's a perfectly nice car but doesn't feel particularly "fun" to drive. It's too SUV-like and the tall gearing makes it feel slow.) and sold it once but wound up getting it back (The guy I sold it to died and left it to me because he owed me a ton of money.). I will say that it's been perfectly reliable and if I was looking to recommend a compact car to someone who doesn't want to pay the Honda/Toyota tax I would go with a 2nd or 3rd Gen Mazda 3 without hesitation.

By contrast, the lightly used market for stuff I want now is mostly ridiculous. An 8-10 year old Civic Si with under 100K miles runs over $20K and even the cheapest Type-Rs are pushing $30K, with a lightly used example pushing $40K. Another issue for normies is that the mid-2010s had several "dud" cars that appear nice but have major problems that should be avoided and infest the "affordable" end of the used car market. I'm talking about Nissans with their CVTs, Ford Focuses with the Powershift automatic, Hyundai/Kia products with the Theta engines that blow up, GM SUVs with the Ecotec 4 cylinders, Fords with the 3.5 V6 that has the nightmare water pump, etc.

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.

Combining a 10 year increase in healthy living expectancy brought about by costly medical procedures that didn't previously exist with the greatest pace of technological advancement at the same time is gonna produce weird knock on effects.

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.

I've gone from living in an Anglo every man for themselves culture to a more collectivist one and that changes the calculus at hand when the affluent elderly are actually trying to share the wealth constructively somewhat

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.

Naa, I'm tired.

That sucks. I'm young people should not have to wait to live their life until they're tired all the time.

Then live your life. But your implied idea that people who have already worked and saved should be dispossessed and sent back to work (which, as I said, you'd complain about too) so young people don't have to... well, even if you could pull it off, it works for one generation only.

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".

Yes and a lot of the youth today are toiling under the expectation the vast panopoly of elderly welfare that currently exists will have a machete taken to it long before they get there.

The current clique got on the right side of medical advancements and shifts in lifestyles that enabled an extra 10 years of lifespan without the retirement setup adjusting far enough to keep the books balanced.

Yes and a lot of the youth today are toiling under the expectation the vast panopoly of elderly welfare that currently exists will have a machete taken to it long before they get there.

And this has been true since Gen X started working. I'm sure there have always been younger people who think the way to get ahead is to just to steal old people's stuff, but they're as wrong as evil now as they always have been.

There's two separate issues/lanes here. Some people are beneficiaries of public retirement spending at massive scale despite not actually self-funding their retirements and some are being accused of hoarding.

As a generational cohort it'd make sense for the elderly to do more to support each other via applying better means testing to program availability

There's two separate issues/lanes here. Some people are beneficiaries of public retirement spending at massive scale despite not actually self-funding their retirements and some are being accused of hoarding.

And between the two this covers pretty much every old person who worked.

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.

40/40 is retarded when the back half of that 40 is begun in way better condition than the historical norm after work that is far less physically arduous and then a suite of super expensive medical therapies are stuck onto the last 5-10 years of it.

The book can't be balanced for most people who aren't self funding

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?

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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.)

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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.

Having thirty young and roughly equally-qualified engineers competing for middle-management positions makes for an awful working environment

Of course, what makes a good engineer and what makes a good manager are very different things. A lot of companies are seemingly trying to create a "technical expert" path for engineers so they don't have to deal with that pesky people side but can still get the prestige/pay... I'd say in my experience, it's been maybe passably successful.

Management simply can't resist the idea that they can take their best technical people and multiply their effectiveness by having them do people stuff. They create the non-management roles but they still expect "leadership" from the technical people; the difference is they don't get hiring or spending authority.

Why select for the one who has toiled at the current level for the longest without securing advancement

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.

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.

Yet human history shows no sign that groups where the old kill themselves for the sake of their descendants actually outcompete groups where the old don't.

"Going out on the ice floe" is the exception. In a world where food is scarce and malnutrition is a major cause of death (which is almost everywhere until the 20th century) the old "kill themselves for the sake of their descendants" by letting the prime working/child-bearing age family members eat first. And they do, in almost all times and places we look at.

Families where the core workers eat first get through the hard times a few members shorter.

Families where the elderly eat first don't get through the hard times at all.

Yes it does. Most historically successful groups had high rates of death in early late age and had demographic pyramids with a healthy amount of young adults. Today's gerontocracy is unprecedented.

That doesn't mean that in those groups, the old killed themselves for the sake of their descendants.

I didn't mean it's best to do that in general. I meant it would be optimal in a crisis that demands it. Parents kill themselves for their children in history in many cases in crisis.

Well, I agree with you that it can be optimal in true crises. I guess the question is, what constitutes a crisis that is true enough.

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.

How did it cost so much if you didn't have a wedding ceremony? Did you have to pay import duty on a mail-order bride?

Mainly moving in together and her still being in university, so I go from single man no kids to supporting a wife. Plus the rings, jewelry, and so on. All this stuff can easily hit $10k in costs after a year.

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.

What quotient of Boomer grandparents have made decisions to opt out of family obligations via fucking off to resort colonies or whatever, though? That was nowhere near as viable in previous generations

I don't know the answer to your question statistically speaking, but I don't need a statistical survey to tell you that killing yourself at age 65 is even worse a dereliction of family obligations than absconding to a resort colony or whatever.

At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house. Press coverage tells me that the situation in the US is similar but less extreme.

At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house.

Worth more to whom?

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.

Goddamit this is GenX erasure!

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. 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.

We express disdain for being called boomers because to the degree that "generations" exist, GenX is a generation with different life experiences and upbringings and career paths than our boomer parents.

If you just want to call everyone older than you who owns a house "Boomer," we can't stop you.

But we probably can stop your campaign to take our stuff because you want it.

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.

That's lovely but we've decided to quadruple the population with immigrants to feed various political machines just before the UBI period hits. And we didn't even have the good sense of the Saudis or the Emiratis to make those admissions temporary and at our leisure

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.

Laws introduced by the elderly out of some misguided social justice angles that take an enormous shit on the financial competitiveness of the youth, yes

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.

Who brought those laws and regulations in, exactly? Especially when scaled by modern travel infrastructure from nice to have concession to fairness to massive problem for young native workers

Who brought those laws and regulations in, exactly?

The people running things in 1964.

The staffers who wrote the rules and the bureaucrats who implemented them would have been Silents. I think the Greatest Generation leaders who decided in principle to do it genuinely had no idea how much trouble it could cause.

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?

As mentioned, college pipelines are 3-4 years delayed. Job numbers are currently down to -42k/year. Just as the greater economy might not have a big effect on one industry (2008 where tech only had "limited impact"), this time, the greater economy might not/has not yet noticed the relatively constant downturn of one industry. Just because the squeeze is slow does not mean the squeeze isn't there.

Who's saying anything about the greater economy? CS new grad underemployment is low compared to other majors.

Ooops, sorry, I was in a rush. I read the whole thread again and looks like I misunderstood your position. I think we have the same initial position that there has been a correction from the exuberance and so the vibes are bad even though stats wise it's not worse than average, and in fact underemployment is actually better than average for new grads in CS. The slight difference in between us is that I do believe there is a kind of protracted downturn (3+ years) in total CS employment count that has not been fully attributed yet AND that this slow erosion of total CS jobs also mean lowered wages, which changes the calculus of CS jobs attractiveness.

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.

I understand what you're saying, but that feeds into my point: If an industry is going gangbusters companies can't be too picky about who they hire. I saw it myself when I was doing oil and gas titles; some attorneys would be the kind who would go into excruciating detail about every possible title defect and track down every piece of supporting documentation. Others would slap something together that vaguely resembled a title report and required substantial modification to turn into anything we could submit to a client. Everyone starts off in the second category, but when the industry is hot, we were willing to tolerate a lot more people like that because it was cheaper to correct their work and hope they got better than it was to turn down business due to lack of staff. When the industry's in a slump, even the first type of employee will have a hard time finding work. The difference is that the energy industry has no problem admitting when it's in a slump, and will openly state that as a reason they had to lay a bunch of people off. They don't try to bullshit investors to make them think it's about efficiency, because anyone can look at the price of oil. Tech companies can't seem to admit that demand for their products may be declining. Or that advertising and data harvesting for free products aren't as valuable as they thought.

Tech companies can't seem to admit that demand for their products may be declining. Or that advertising and data harvesting for free products aren't as valuable as they thought.

Well. We don't have to speculate, these are mostly public companies. Meta's Q1 profit (not revenue) is up 30% YoY. Doesn't sound like demand is declining to me.

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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