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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.
I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.
Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?
Have more controls on provision of medical care to the elderly when it's not passing any cost/benefit calculation especially on public purse. Bump the retirement age substantially upwards for public assistance since an increasingly vanishing minority are working jobs with any real physical toll.
If you want to self-fund your tilting with death sure but incentives are currently massively misaligned
It's really great you're going to be thirty years old forever and maximally economically productive and will never get old or sick and will never be replaced in your job, so you are never going to need home helps, healthcare services, or a pension. Unlike those old useless seventy years onwards people selfishly requiring doctors to treat their arthritis and pneumonia, the leeches!
Publicly funded retirement is a privilege. The line needs to be kept at a point that enables society's books to be balanced. 65 made sense when a comparatively small fraction made it there and massively costly medical interventions weren't a thing.
If you want to stop working either have enough kids or get enough money that you're not on the public purse.
In the US at least, social security and medicare is an entitlement. You essentially earn "points" (not literally but figuratively works similar) in the program the more taxes you pay into it while working, and then come time of retirement or disability you get benefits paid out based off how many "points" you have.
There is an implicit, and in many ways explicit, agreement that this is earned. Some people try to argue against that by pointing that the cash you get out isn't the same cash you put in, but that doesn't actually change anything in the agreement. Money is fungible, it doesn't matter where it comes from whether it got stored in a big bank over the 40+ years of work or it went to seniors of the time and the money comes from workers today, the seniors of today earned their "points" in the benefits system and want to see the obligations promised to them by the government fulfilled.
The correct answer to this was for the government to never make such a promise to being with, not to rip people off.
It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in. It was not earned, in the most literal way.
https://401kspecialistmag.com/social-security-taxes-vs-benefits-americans-take-far-more-out-than-they-pay-in/
The imbalance is mostly driven by medicare; social security is much closer to breaking-even or even losing you money if you are a high earner, although married couples get more under certain conditions.
Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.
I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.
Absolutely. I agree with you that it was a terrible idea and should never have been done this way. It also was done this way, and government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.
Even the most principled small government activists came asking for their share like Ayn Rand. Some leftists tend to say that she was a hypocrite for this, but I disagree. You can believe that taxing your money is a bad idea and also accept that ultimately they did tax your money and want them to fulfill the promises they made.
You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.
It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.
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Of course, they’d make more if they could invest the cash in the market.
Only if you automate an index fund & ignore it. Most active investors lose money over time.
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Yeah but the government sets forth with many entitlement and implicit vibes then takes them away arbitrarily. End of the day the system has to balance financially somewhat. The seniors of today didn't accumulate sufficient points to get the age target they wanted and it's better to make common sense shifts now rather than be forced through austerity or the day of the pillow in future
I think the best option is to simply raise the retirement age. There wasn't some big reason for it to be at 65, that was just the age of the federal railroad pensions. And they already raised it before, the full retirement age now is 67.
If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed. That way it is truly an insurance for old age, as the name implies. That more and more people are continuing to work while collecting benefits is proof that the age is not set properly for insurance purposes.
People who are crippled early can collect disability benefits as a form of early retirement, something we already did unintentionally back during the great recession.
Things are going to get really interesting when AI reverses the direction of this and brings it down from 67 to roughly 20 (ironically the highest current age at which someone finds jokes about 6-7 to be funny), as the only form of employment available to anyone becomes the original form of employment. Then again, improving cosmetic surgery and sun protection might mean that the age goes back up and/or just remains stable before going up to the 100s.
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This is called "altering the deal". Anyway, aren't you one of those who swears that old people's saved money is no good and they should actually have to personally provide for themselves in their dotage, or have their kids do so?
"We made a deal, but you never signed it or voted for it because it was before you were born, but don't worry about how much it's costing you because you'll get paid back by other people who still haven't been born, except of course that the demographic pyramid is now much taller and upside down and our accountants say there's no way you can't get mostly stiffed. Are you really saying you want to alter that deal?"
I believe the appropriate counter-meme here is the "Yes Chad".
I'm probably near enough to the peak "going to get screwed when the younger people wise up" age that I certainly can't be happy about the situation, but it is what it is.
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but if we're going to insist that someone to do all our work and pay for our leisure without deciding to just let us all die instead, I think creating AGI to ask might still give us better odds than asking the ever-shrinking younger generations of First World countries. And just in case that Fully Automated Luxury Geriatric Space Welfare-Capitalism plan remains mere fantasy for too long, in the meantime it might be a wise idea to back off on the massive debt-funded entitlements gradually, before we add too much more risk that our creditors will decide to back off suddenly. In the worst case, there might be so much of a backlash that the "saved money is no good" contingent actually gets into power. It's dismaying how many young Americans hold favorable views of socialism, but if they perceive the status quo as "socialism, just not for you" then I can see how they might imagine they'd be upgrading.
The real risk to old people is bringing in a bunch of third worlders who then have to support the old people who the immigrants have no connection to which in a democracy means the olds gibs will get voted away.
Seems to be mostly anti-immigration types trying to cut off social security. Immigrants seem to be generally for all gibs.
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The people who want to cut off Social Security for "boomers" (really Xers) and who want to take the houses of old people because they aren't using them appropriately are pretty much the same. The group which thinks old people's money is no good and if you aren't working now, you shouldn't be able to pay for things is a subset of them. You can't appease them (or anyone, really); victory anywhere would only embolden them. Otherwise I'd be more open to cutting off SS.
The Xers are already showing serious creaks in the structure. Anybody looking at an age distribution chart has to be very alarmed.
If an old person is totally self-funding their retirement and has an expensive house I have no malice to them. I do suspect they might be happier moving into a purpose-built assisted living community someplace with cheaper land values, but that's their choice. The issue becomes when massive subsidies, far exceeding the individual's lifetime contribution are piled on somebody who is also holding a very valuable asset which is increasingly happening.
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I think that we should try to still give old people a decent retirement within our means, but it has to be kept in mind that this was boomers making a deal among themselves that now doesn't work out due to their own foreseeable failings. It's really hard for me to feel sympathy for a generation that went through a boom period with a 10-to-1 dependency ratio now not getting what they promised themselves because the dependency ratio is now 2.5-to-1.
The "deal" is older than the Boomers. And any cutting-off won't fall on most of the boomers; the reality of numbers and the speed of politics means it'll be Generation X which is cut off, plus maybe a few of the youngest boomers.
Yes that's true. Which is why most young people are quite militant since they know it's an inevitability that their personal access to the luxury communism will likely be killed off before they get to harvest a cent
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The deal is going to be altered regardless. The Boomer block is still 5-10 years off peak demographic overhang and the system is already cracking. Public funded retirement can continue to exist but either age or provision of care needs to be shifted till the books somewhat balance.
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