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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.
There is way too much money floating around in these communities. It breeds certain pathologies, obscenely paid escorts being one of them. See also how there's the whole "unless you follow exactly our ideologies and beliefs and do what we say is the right way to do things then you'll be
damned foreverpart of the eternal underclass".The solution here is for these communities to be put in their place, which is only really going to happen via some form of external shock. When and if that happens nobody can say.
I agree completed. Income is way too laissez-faire today. The issue is that people who would spend their money on Aella are even allowed to get enough to spend 5 figures on her in the first place, not Aella herself. The injustice is that such people even have the money at all, not that they give it out to prostitutes. That money should be reserved for the highest types of people, which unfortunately is something Western capitalism cannot achieve. Because such people will hardly subject themselves to the free market as much as Aella fans.
Such as, for example, yourself?
Nah, I'd happily keep my current SES in exchange for getting to enact my ideal policy. If the group includes me I'd be fine to be excluded, because the idea is more important than my wallet. Same with eugenics, it's not about my reproduction, it's about the future of humanity.
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