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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.
Anti-old policies have a greater issue than just morals for unknown vulnerable strangers. Basically everyone has someone old in their life they love (I have both parents and an aunt) who are still independent right now but might not be in the next decade or two and it's something I really am having to plan for.
But beyond even that, while younger folk like me might want to deny it we are all aware we will get old as well. Voting in anti old policies is moronic then, it's literally voting against my future self. Euthanasia at 75 means I die at 75, and that's assuming the number doesn't ratchet down.
Sure my adult children might be able to care for me but more and more people don't like that, they don't like being independent on their kids and I don't like the idea either. Funding it through taxes on everyone essentially does the same thing, my kids pay a little for every senior and all the other kids will pay a little for me.
Really the bigger answer is automation and zoning reform. We can raise our overall quality of life despite shrinking and aging populations because robots do the labor (as automation has already been doing for a few centuries now) and zoning reform can help create accessible nice homes for the old to move to so young people with kids can have an actual house.
The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.
Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.
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