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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."
I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:
I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.
Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.
One of these things is not like the others. Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.
Yes they are real jobs, but they're also extremely menial and service focused. I suppose you can take a certain pride in your work, but there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders. So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know. Pretty dark if you ask me.
The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.
Sure, but you already work in the service sector, along with 80% of Americans.
This is indeed bad, but one must hope the present levels of spending will prove unsustainable with a bigger dependency ratio.
Anybody on the receiving end of the $7T of government spending (including, for example, highly paid Amazon engineers) is also in this situation. I'd rather the government did and spent less, but it's hardly an apocalyptic scenario.
When healthcare is the largest employer in most states, it isn't because of all the orthopedic surgeons that are employed.
Did I imply that healthcare employment is solely due to orthopedic surgeons?
Here you implied that simply because not everything is menial, that the vast majority of jobs in the sector aren't menial. That's wrong, they are menial, and that's why there's so much employment. The top of the pyramid doesn't change that.
The question is not whether X% are menial or not. The question is whether marginal new healthcare jobs are more menial than the marginal new non healthcare job. My contention is that it isn't.
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