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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
Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.
I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.
It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.
But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.
I'm not convinced this really is a solvable problem.
Lifespan has increased without meaningfully increasing the amount of healthy years. Age of retirement can be raised a bit but we're starting to hit hard limits of what is possible (at least for the general population, some jobs can be done by some groups of elderly more reliably).
It isn't really a problem insurance or redistribution can solve because this is something that happens to everyone and welfare states are already stretched to the limit and running massive deficits. This is a demographic and biological problem, not a redistribute one.
A stop gap measure is probably increasing the retirement age where possible and cutting back on non-essential elderly entitlements but at some point we have to ask ourselves what we're doing here.
Let's say we treated this as savings instead and people got a an account of money at retirement that they can spend on healthcare, assisted living and pension; what do we do when that money runs out? That's the situation we're getting into societally, regardless of whether we have insurance based or socialised systems.
We have no treatment for aging so no-one is getting out of this alive, and that is something we as a modern society have to come to terms with. Our current attitude is more than a little childish, imo.
Hopefully AGI really comes and solves aging for us or this is going to get ugly.
Another aspect not many people talk about when discussing this issue is that the elderly are currently sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of underused real estate. Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care. The boomers need to sell their fucking houses and get some of that wealth working again. Social security and medicare payments should be halved for every spare bedroom in your home.
No, it really can't. You'd think so, but transaction costs are high, condo fees are high, and healthcare is hellaciously expensive.
Also ridiculous carveouts in the current pension system. Australia doesn't count the house you live in towards mean testing for public assistance, pension and healthcare so there's a lot of instances where elderly are deliberately sitting on premium real estate (that they don't maintain at all) solely to potentially give it as future inheritance.
I'm reminded of an elderly couple near me growing up where their kids lived an hour away since the suburb had massively appreciated who made their own retirements significantly worse (due to transit and rarely seeing grandkids) by refusing to leave their literally rotting home
Old age social security benefits in the US are not means tested. This is a weight-bearing component of the system -- it's funded by a special tax on all workers, and provided to all those who paid into it. That's what keeps it from just being considered plain old welfare, and what makes it the "third rail" of politics.
As for occupied houses literally rotting in Australia... isn't the country generally rather dry for that? Even in my wet area of the US, if you avoid being flooded from below and keep the roof from leaking, and don't set it on fire, the house will be OK structurally for a very long time.
Also, a couple holding onto a house to keep the health care system from getting it rather than their children goes against the narrative of greedy elders who don't care about their children.
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If they all start selling then prices will drop because people don't have the money to buy the real estate absent inherited real estate wealth.
Which solves another problem! Win/win!
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Ohno. Premium real estate drops a bit in pricing and transit issues get mitigated.
The point is that it isn't a good source of funding. Much of the value is illusory.
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Or to a 500-ft2 ADU in the backyard.
Seriously. Unleash the granny flats! Make multi-generational households great again!
Exactly. I've moved from a nuclear family society to a clannish one and the elderly tend to have better QOL through granny flats and staying inside the home
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