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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:
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
Nature provides for that plenty without this monstrosity of a redistribution system.
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.
No, you should actually earn it, not have it promised by the government.
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.
Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?
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.
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?
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.
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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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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