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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.

https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

A few thoughts.

  1. Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

  2. I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

  3. He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

  4. Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.

  5. I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.

  6. Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

"I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff"

I don't understand this point even slightly. Do you genuinely think the other people calling a suicide helpline are not dealing with real issues but just 'lefty mental health'? It's the businessman who has real issues, the others are just faking it?

To rephrase the point slightly, I tend to categorize mental health issues as either mental illness or as mental injury. With mental illness you have some kind of internal, ongoing problem that needs to be fixed so you can get better. With mental injury, something clear and external happened and you just kind of need to stop poking at it and let it heal.

For example, I was in a bad car accident. I wasn't hurt, but other people were, and it gave me what I presume was PTSD. I would drop a can of tomatoes, I would have that same feeling of suddenly losing control like I did right before the impact, and I would break down in a mess.

My wife wanted me to get therapy, and I started the process of getting it organized, but in the end I didn't go. Not because I didn't have issues, but because it seemed incredibly obvious to me what the issues were. There's no broken relationship with my mother or whatever to work through, just a recent bad event. I figured I would get over it with time and couldn't see how talking about it with a stranger would help.

And, well, I did. I never had any "breakthrough" or trained my mind to think in a different way or whatever. I just got a bit of distance from the event and it stopped being so fresh in my mind. I gained the ability to think about it without feeling like I was in the middle of it.

Having a business fail, or a marriage break down, or a loved one die, are all very upsetting events. There's nothing unhealthy about being upset by them. Just as it's normal to feel pain when you break your leg - you aren't malfunctioning, you're just injured.

Wow, this is a really interesting framing, and it seems so obvious I don't know how it didn't occur to me before.

To extend the metaphor further, some physical injuries are so grave that you can't just rub some dirt on them and expect them to heal by themselves. A person severely injured in a car accident may require physical therapy to enable them to walk again. By the same token, it seems reasonable to conclude that certain psychological experiences may be so traumatic that one can't reasonably expect a person's mind to heal of its own accord without outside assistance.

I've often thought about something similar in the context of depression diagnoses. We use the same word, "depression", to describe both the emotional state of feeling depressed and the mental illness more properly disambiguated as "major depressive disorder". Feeling depressed may be an entirely expected and healthy response to certain mental injuries (hence why it was so controversial when the DSM removed the "bereavement clause" from the diagnostic criteria for major depressive order - I don't care how stoic or Buddhist you are, if you don't feel depressed after your young child dies there's something deeply wrong with you). It's only when it's a chronic sensation with little obvious relationship to any mental injury that we consider it a mental illness as opposed to simply a transient and normal human emotion.

Good post I like this model. Seems to catch a lot of what I wanted to say.

I feel like you are describing a time when you weren't suicidal and had the composure to see that time would be an adequate healer. That's great. But in a case where you are suicidal, almost by definition, you are not coping with what has happened and time may not be enough to heal you. You may die first.

In your last para you are implying that there's nothing unhealthy about being suicidal after losing your business. It's a very short step from there to saying there's nothing unhealthy about going through with it and killing yourself after losing your business. If that's what you think, then 'nuff respect, but I consider not living in that kind of shame/honour culture to be a good thing and one worth building protections against, such as we're able to do.

My point is that if you're miserable because miserable things are happening to you, you're not malfunctioning. A shrink can't fix your brain because your brain isn't broken.

That doesn't mean you should kill yourself. I don't believe anyone should kill themselves except in truly extreme circumstances. I used to work in the funeral industry and dealt with a lot of suicides, and the only one that made me think "yeah ok fair enough" was the convicted paedophile child care worker who did himself in while awaiting sentencing.

And in your last paragraph, you are implying that it's unhealthy to feel upset by a loved one dying. It's a very short step from there to saying there's something unhealthy about ever feeling upset or sad about anything. If that's what you think, then I respect that, but I consider not living in a culture that pathologises all negative feeling and affect to be a good thing and one worth building protections against.

I think it depends. I think one thing therapy and therapeutic culture get wrong is just how much place you should give to your feelings. You should have emotional responses. They just shouldn’t be the basis for deciding what to do, and they shouldn’t rule you. Most of therapeutic exercises and the culture they create is so feeling centric that people never really develop any mental toughness to deal with normal feelings. Being sad or upset for a few days at a trauma is not a problem, tbh, a lack of emotional response is probably more pathological. But it’s also not healthy to be so paralyzed by your feelings that you can’t function. At some point you need to get over it.

Thinking that someone who is suicidal due to a business failure should seek mental health assistance in hopes they don't. ---> "A culture that pathologises all negative feeling"

Wow!

I do think it's "pathological" to want to kill yourself in many circumstances, that doesn't mean I think the same about feeling sad or upset about life events.

I also don't think that having a pathology is something to be judged, rather something that it might be useful to get help with.

I'm maybe a little confused by your reply though.

On one hand; Suicide is painless.
It brings on many changes
and you can take or leave it as you please.

On the other; the Lord Lays before us blessings and curses, life and death. To live is a choice and I would encourage anyone reading this to choose life. But I am not a member of the twitterati.

Something about those Tweets viscerally disgusts me and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's performativity of it all, the "Oh man I should have done something," the weird parasociality of both the OP acting like he was a person in the dude's life and the replies comforting the OP who they don't know. Something about the verbiage just feels so fake and weird and off-putting to me.

He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

The vast majority of suicides are killing themselves to avoid circumstances that are, by some standard, not that bad. There is no circumstance which leads to a large percentage of people who experience it killing themselves, to my knowledge, perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard. I had a friend who killed herself in college, at an Ivy, because there was a plagiarism thing about to break and she might get expelled. Most people who don't go to college at all don't kill themselves, let alone who don't go to an Ivy (she could probably have easily gone to a state school afterward). I had a scoutmaster that killed himself after his divorce, most people don't kill themselves after a divorce, and to be honest I knew his wife and if she left me I'd say she was doing me a favor. A friend of a friend killed himself a few weeks back, no reason at all, he was unemployed and desperate for years before he pulled the trigger, but nothing had changed in his life that week.

What I'm getting at is the causative element is always the suicide themselves, leaving aside certain cases where a suicide is instrumentally useful (ie if Hunter Biden had any decency). They had a knack for suicide, genetic or cultural or whatever, that was triggered by a circumstance. His business failure didn't lead him to kill himself, he was prone to killing himself already and his business failure was the trigger that lead to it. So it does no good to say "Oh

Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

In word, not consistently in deed. We have verbal sympathy for widowed mothers, and we tend to be nice enough to them in person and for the first few months after the death of their husband, but after a year or so she'll be on her own and it will not be easy for her. Women "survive with nothing" in the sense that they suffer silently, the world doesn't just hand things to them.

Tbqh, I'd pick being a widower with two kids over a widow with two kids any day of the week. I'd find another wife ready to mother two little blonde kids (ones she doesn't have to birth) like I was selling a classic car; a single mother in her 40s is going to have a lot more trouble finding a new partner of her upper class who wants to join her pre-existing family.

perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard

Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches, perhaps. Controversially, gender dysphoria. Although you've got to differentiate "attempted suicide" versus "died by suicide" here.

I've read a lot about this topic, but if a literal majority of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria kill themselves, that's news to me. Do you have a source?

No, I do not. As far as I know, something like 40 percent of people with gender dysphoria attempt suicide, but that's just attempts, not deaths by suicide. For mental illnesses other than schizophrenia...borderline personality disorder has a 10 percent death-by-suicide rate, anorexia a 10 percent mortality rate. Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches probably have those beat. There are of course the degenerative diseases like ALS and Huntington's, but that's not exactly what we're talking about. There death by suicide might be a kind of self-euthanasia...certainly not a central example.

There are basically two kinds of cluster headaches: episodic and chronic. The former someone gets ever 3-6 months and they last for a weekish. Sucks but manageable. Can’t imagine the second kind where the relief is infrequent.

Maybe it's performativity of it all, the "Oh man I should have done something,"

People that actually feel that way (as I have once in my life) do not telegraph it to the commons. They're too busy dealing with the personal grief.

I can't imagine trading on someone's death for virtue points, but here we are.

I agree with this. But there is a reason I posted here instead of twitter. Public stuff you have to say the right words versus getting to talk about something.

I agree with most of your thoughts.

Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

He willingly gambled everything for the possibility of attaining what capitalism offers, and, having lost, he faced the possibility of, at worst, suffering a standard of living typical of a citizen of a communist country. So, I think his suicide is actually evidence of the brutality of communism, not capitalism.

well he hangs with other winners of capitalism.

compared to a group of Caesars, being a normal person is bad.

comparison is the thief of joy. i assume this contributed to his psyche. It definitely would to mine!

live your life, dont compare with others. ignorance truly is bliss

I agree. There’s never a perfect case to make a point for discussion. His I failed and now I have to do X doesn’t seem big enough for the point I’m trying to make.

Yes, men need to be successful to be psychologically healthy in a manner that isn't the same for women. Women also prefer to marry up. Therefore, privileging women creates a less happy society.

I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

Half disagree. The "therapists can fix you" culture is deranged for average people as you are right about the the source of his misery. Its better for people to live and be encouraged to live in a manner that is fulfilling than trying to manage failing to live up to that with therapy.

Therapy can not fix the source of his misery, only him rebuilding and providing for his family again can. But talking him out of doing something irrevocable would be helpful.

Yes, men need to be successful to be psychologically healthy in a manner that isn't the same for women.

That’s true for certain men but is that so for a huge numbers of men who seem content to work at a dead end job, and do nothing but play video games and watch porn? I’ve met and unfortunately dated men like that, and they genuinely have no drive and no ambition, no matter how hard I tried to push them.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often, many men said that if it weren’t for women, they would be content to live in a cardboard box. Achieving a minimal standard of living is pretty easy in a modern western society, so it feels to me like the ambitious, career driven man is in the minority.

For this not to apply to the men you are talking about they must be psychologically healthy. Just cause they are willing to compromise with a different way of living, doesn't mean that they are happy and fulfilled doing so. Are the men you are referring to psychologically healthy?

Both those who were successful and lost it and those who weren't to begin with, neither are psychologically healthy.

Generally, when I am saying more successful than women, I am not referring to the atypical men like the one the OP is about.

I concede that this kind of careerism is rare in general and among men in particular. But both for OP and for men on average, success is related with self worth in a way more fundamental than for women. They are also judged in that manner, as you also have done.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often

Reddit has two selection effects. First it has more unsuccessful people around due to being the people more likely to spend plenty of time in such discussions.

And obviously it probably had even originally some leftist bias but became very leftist due to the moderators purging dissent.

It is part of leftism to signal opposition to gender roles and also to conform with discrimination in favor of women and against men. Leftists are more likely to live contrary to gender roles and lets assume that is a worse way to live your life as it goes against part of your biological programming and against behaving in a manner conductive for fulfilling success for the individual and collective. That might be a reason why the left shows greater prevalence of mental illness.

You are judging these men you mentioned negatively for example.

I’ve met and unfortunately dated men like that, and they genuinely have no drive and no ambition, no matter how hard I tried to push them.

I can't judge things from your anecdotes. You could very well be self serving there. I definitely find your general perspective self serving in favor of women and against men since in responses to opposing discrimination for women, and into deflecting with the situation as huge (i.e associated with most) amount of men being content without success. And how it is because of women that men care about success.

With the implication being that we shouldn't care about pro women discrimination.

Men abandoning their gender role is something that can change. And same applies to women.

We should also be concerned about the effects on society in general, rather than caring only about men or women as individuals.

And we have societies that are failing, in fact irredeemably so as they can't even sustain their own demographics with bellow replacement rate which alone is a huge issue, are promoting an ideology of self hatred and cultural self destruction, fail to protect their borders as they are replaced by foreigners who retain foreign identities and hostility to the natives, and the rise of authoritarianism in favor of very delusional excessive tribalism for all sorts of sexual or other identities and in favor of the current course and against opposing or modifying it.

The trend of males who don't participate much in society has also increased as has general lack of dating and sex among both men and women.

The above fundamentally proves the lack of legitimacy of the "cope" mentality and the current direction of society. Things need to change, and the obvious template to change things towards is the one with the more workable mores of before. Although we can retain aspects of modernity and going back to say the norms of some previous decades would be retaining plenty of influence from feminism for example.

I don't object to consider not going to far in one or the other direction, but we are too far in the feminist direction today. The female perspective and way of thinking is also too pervasive. It isn't acceptable to let things persist as they are.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often, many men said that if it weren’t for women, they would be content to live in a cardboard box.

Yes, male self worth is related to their relationship with good women. Ideally as a team men and women make each other better. Men and women having complimentary role is how good relationships work and society benefits from.

There are other things going on of course, men care about their hobbies and this can also be steered in a more pro social and pro individual men direction, or in a direction that is less so. Maybe men by nature as more obsessive over things than people are more prone to the influence of certain superstimuli?

So do you support, or object to institutional discrimination in favor of women?

Much of liberal/left wing discourse is deflecting from real problems and real solutions by complaining about the far right or when the issue has to do with feminism and male/female issues, the deflection is just to complain about low social status men and their conclusion is to do nothing. The liberal agenda being an oppositional agenda to right wing or pro male changes or critiques. This agenda can be supported also for directly tribal reasons. We would be better off with less one sided complaining about men.

What should be done in your view?

I want to say that, in general (and with two words, the lazy men you've dated have been rhetorically vaporized), it is proximity to women that give men the urge to achieve success, but success here does not mean an ambitious high-powered career. It simply means contributing more resources to the household than the woman does.

That's my model.

That's just a Chappelle bit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s5hu7o2Q62k

I think that career oriented people aren't the majority among either men or women, and most of the non-career oriented are happy enough and maybe even happier than the career oriented types.

But the total returns to career success are greater for men than women in large part due to increased sexual opportunities, particularly at the high end as opposed to the mid-level corporate drone, which draws men more into the lifestyle. And when that career turns to failure, there's a greater gap in hopes/expectations dashed in men than in women, which takes a bigger psychological toll.

the cadaver hasn't even cooled yet, assuming he is even dead, and already with with the gofundme. People are so gullible for this charity shit. Yeah , his kid will need home renovations and a new SUV or takes an interest in gambling cryptocurrency.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/artem-tepler+share-sheet-first-launch

SBF should have done this. he could have started dozens of these and he'd probably still be free.

Looks like it's gone.

it is up. themotte butchered the link . this one works https://gofund.me/b72dd8f3

188k is a lot of money. He was twitter cool.

He did get a place on real deal third article from I can see. I did post here because it was blowing up on certain twitters (small businesses and real estate) and because I thought there were things not discussed here before. https://therealdeal.com/

And I’ve had some dark days so I do think talking about taking risks and failing have a lot of benefits.

One of my points was a widow can get charity easier than a failing business man.

One of my points was a widow of a dead dude people will support a man who failed people will tell him to suck it up and figure it out.

Can you make this make sense?

I apologize. Friday is a drink and post day. And my grammar is below average as is. I edited it.

"One of my points was a widow of a dead dude, people will support; a man who failed, people will tell him to suck it up and figure it out."

Inflation has hit the once post-scarcity market for punctuation hard.

Inflation has hit the once post-scarcity market for punctuation hard.

Very good

Yeah, what's going on? This entire subthread is making me n=1-replicate that recent finding.

Tell me about it, there's a reason I don't hang out on the Indian end of the Internet 😩

Not to mention SVO ordering.

The widow to a failure is more sympathetic than the failure themselves whilst they're still alive?

I saw some things missed that I was looking for people to comment on.

  1. We have had a lot of post lately on the economy is fine. But the averages aren’t everyone. Real Estate people I could see how they are struggling now. It’s not 2008 but I saw this tweet from experience then https://twitter.com/gas_biz/status/1720481605112725782?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

  2. I do think men have a provider mentality. If you want to have a family and it fails at 40 your dating market prospects suck. I’ve seen it where the women divorces after that. What are your options then - start building again and then maybe close to 50 you can import a wife to have a family with.

  3. Americas wealth is built on this stuff. Everything he probably killed himself for are the fears that motivate people to do stuff and create wealth in capitalism.

  4. Something something about having a ton of twitter followers but not really having your busines/life going well. I know others who have a ton of followers but aren’t making money on what they say they are doing and I’m not talking those targeting lower income.

I do think men have a provider mentality. If you want to have a family and it fails at 40 your dating market prospects suck. I’ve seen it where the women divorces after that. What are your options then - start building again and then maybe close to 50 you can import a wife to have a family with.

Surely you likely already have a family at 40? If you get divorced you find another divorced or single woman in her mid-late 30s and have a mixed family or whatever it’s called, maybe one more kid. That seems to be the standard.

The average 40 year old who is going to have kids has already had them.

You're assuming that single woman is going to want to marry you.

If I had to place bets between 40 year old men who have been married before and want to remarry and 40 year old men who wanted to get married but never managed to, I'd put pretty solid money on the former getting married first. Even if they have kids and a failed business.

For what it's worth, my two most successful relatives got married and had kids in their 40s. Everyone else was married with kids by 40. The only exceptions were the ones who took a gamble by starting a business at beginning of their careers.

A lot of it is shame and embarrassment in front of peers, friends and coworkers, even employees. Heard various stories of people who killer themselves in finance, often aftermath of 2008/2009 or in a couple of cases the late 80s crash. Many must have had plenty of money saved, were under no risk of prosecution or criminal investigation, some weren’t even personally fired, they just had to lay off 50/70/85% of their teams, look friends in the eye and fire them into a job market with no jobs, etc, and they couldn’t take it. Some knew their fund/bank/etc was collapsing and couldn’t deal with their life’s work going up in smoke even if they personally had more than enough to enjoy a long retirement.

It’s very easy to get into a spiral of personal responsibility about people suffering ‘because of’ you that ends in suicidal thoughts, especially if you have a history of depression.

Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

yeah this is why if you have a decent net-worth, just park it in tech stocks (like QQQ or maybe add some leverage to the mix) and get a nice 20-40% yoy return. Or maybe real estate. No need to take the extra risk with high rate of failure with small biz or start-ups. For every Facebook, there are many failures. Entrepreneurship so expensive, too much failure, and too much work.

Lol is this real? Don't do this.

I almost want to asks if your joking.

If you did any leverage on tech stocks especially the best performers this year then last year 2022 your bankrupt especially since you mention Facebook.

It traded $92 last November. Even unlevered your feeling poor. Any even modest leverage and your bankrupt on that move. Tech was absolutely trash in the markets a year ago.

I agree if you can get that job that something at one of the big techs offers a nice comfortable salary. But everyone else in capitalism always has a bit of failure risks which is my main point that the rich people have always faced a brutal failure at some point.

If your a high IQ guy taking risks the best advice is to find some doctor to marry with stability.

Hard to read this post re: grammar errors but the numbers don't back what you think is happening in the market.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/QQQ

The highest QQQ ever was is 392, it's currently at 362. It's impossible to go bankrupt on this stuff

Here's Meta specifically: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META

Where are you going bankrupt and not making a comfortable profit over a 15 year period like every other investor?

Your not going bankrupt on a move from 370 to 92 which happened in last 5 years if you have any leverage.

I don't mean to be antagonistic but I cannot understand the points you're trying to make.

best advice is to study cyclicality.

FB at 92 was a great buy.

oil stocks at negative oil price in 2020 was a great buy. uranium even now is a good buy. maybe even silver stocks?

i dont think you’d make as much, on a 5 year time horizon, if you out all into QQQ or google or something

Well he said levered. You blew out levered that shit last year at any leverage level.

Oil negative was fake. Chinese banks were long oil to a derivative contract on spot that day. We fucked them over. It only actually traded negative for a a few hours.

yeah leverage is risky. But even non-leveraged nasdaq lost 80% of its value from 2000s highs to 2002 lows. But still not nearly as risky as starting a biz with your own capital. only a quarter of small businesses make it to 10-15 years.

I agree if you can get that job that something at one of the big techs offers a nice comfortable salary. But everyone else in capitalism always has a bit of failure risks which is my main point that the rich people have always faced a brutal failure at some point.

VC is an alternative. The VC shoulders the financial risk, not the entrepreneur. But this is harder to get. Understandably, VCs are picky. Having the right connections helps greatly in this regard.

It traded $92 last November. Even unlevered your feeling poor. Any even modest leverage and your bankrupt on that move. Tech was absolutely trash in the markets a year ago.

much of the stuff has recovered all or most of the losses. QQQ closing in on new highs. Leverage adds new complications due to path dependency. The nice thing about 1.5x leveraged ETFs, which is what I am doing, is it mostly solves the path dependency problem of leveraged stock trading.

Many big techs trade in things that AI will destroy the moat for first. I’d be careful, but if you’ve made enough to retire then good for you. Just don’t get greedy.

A lot of people think buying a small business versus market exposure is far less risky. You control the cash flows.

if I had to guess, buying a business way more risky and work than diversified stock portfolio, even an all-tech portfolio. Also lots of asymmetric info: if a biz is on the up-and-up why would they sell to you? this means tons of due diligence , and having to hire auditor and attorney, which is more money and time. having control of cash flow assumes there is much margin to work with. lol I know that if I took the opposite point, you and others be telling me how the stock portfolio is way less risky than the biz

Simple answer is IQ arb. Look into search funds which have gotten popular with mba types.

A lot of small businesses have a moat in the sense that as you go down the IQ scale they are not managed well but provide useful services. But there are many that have a ton of cash flow but are sub scale for pe. So your not competing with your other Harvard mba for the next platform grad but some guy with a ged.

Today, whether its harvard business school or Cornell or Columbia, the biggest growth clubs are the small businese investment clubs.

everyone with MBAs, who dont wanna do big corps, seem to wanna buy a cashflowing mom and pop business. opportunities might have been arb’d away

The further down the scale the more the cost for diligence relative to acquisition goes up.

I do wonder if the next move though is for mid tier PE to go micro but do a lot of bolt ins to create a company of size that can then be flipped to a larger PE. Would require a longer hold compared to average. And to reduce costs you probably don’t finance your first few transactions and then when you go to purchase more add ons you fully finance those (since you can get the bank comfortable the existing portco can support the debt)

I do wonder if the next move though is for mid tier PE to go micro but do a lot of bolt ins to create a company of size that can then be flipped to a larger PE.

Already happening, but mid-tier PE is a disaster anyway, at least for now. Only reason megafunds are hanging on is self-dealing and selling to each other in a continuously growing scheme of propped up valuations that is liable to blow up at some point in the foreseeable future, as even they seem to be starting to admit.

PE is a cheap debt phenomenon, in an environment where money isn’t cheap it’s just building and operating a conglomerate / old school holding company with more steps, and you only have to go back to the 80s and early 90s to see that conglomerates are valued very differently to the kinds of multiples PE both works with, especially now.

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Yeah but as you go down the IQ scale the comparative advantages for businesses become a bit more complicated than sticking Kanban boards in and doing a weekly standup.

this is what private equity tries to do. but the risk is mitigated by having a large portfolio of companies. an individual who buys a company is putting his or her eggs in a single basket

PE also benefits from leverage. The simple truth is that it is easier to leverage a business than portfolio stock since you control cash flow meaning that PE can get outsized returns due to leverage.

If everyone does that, and they do, power concentrates into finance and you slowly stop doing anything productive as a society.

Actual rent seeking has negative externalities. Even if it's the correct choice.

I actually think PE provides value. It provides an exit for entrepreneurs especially when they can’t go public. Let’s say you build a 100m business but are getting close to retirement and your kids aren’t all that interested in building it or you have business you want to start? PE provides an exit to those kind of business starters likely increasing business formation.

There were always exits available (selling to competitors or larger players who could access financing publicly or privately) and in countries like Germany the traditional solution was simply to have the family hire a professional manager but to keep the business in family hands. The US, UK and other prime PE markets saw their skilled manufacturing sectors suffer while Germany is a net exporter that sells China the machines they use to make goods for American and British consumers.

I do a lot of PE work and most targets aren’t manufacturing.

Of course, but it’s an example of how higher liquidity for SMEs that a large PE sector offers isn’t necessarily healthy for the wider economy. In the UK PE culture (which I’d argue is stronger even than in the US) is responsible for a rotten business culture in which even attempting to build a large new business is anathema to most entrepreneurs. This is often described as a result of growth capital being much harder to access in the UK than in the US, but this only explains a small part of it. The primary reason is that PE offers founders a lottery win that is often so tempting that they abandon their ambitions. In the US, billionaire hustle culture is ironically a partial protection against this, but European founders will cash out and retire to Cannes as soon as the first PE check is dangled before then, which I consider genuinely damaging because my impression of people in operating roles in PE is very poor.

Yeah it may be cultural different. In the US, there is still hustle culture.

Also PE now often offers 5-10% mgmt equity so still incentivizes mgmt.

Going solo is not the only way; it's the worst way, becase all the financial burden is planed on the entrepreneur. A better way is with VC, such as ycombinator program or something like a16z. The VC shoulders the financial risk by effectively investing in human capital, which is the key ingredient for a start-up anyway.

They are also sharks who will manage to get all the money if you aren't really careful. The golden days of when VCs would voluntarily share success with founders are over.

Thanks for noticing the society we live in.

I know it's stating the obvious.

But if society is to look like anything else than it does now people need to remind themselves of the pricetag on the path of least resistance.

You might be better off setting your money on fire starting a risky business than giving it to bankers to fuck everyone over. It's easy to forget you're part of everyone.

To put it another way, you aren't "stuck in traffic" you ARE the traffic.

Somewhat related thought on the harm of a therapy mindset...

Recently, Scott posted about a model of the mind where people get into destructive thought patterns which are like grooves in a road. As people ruminate on these destructive thoughts, the synapses of the mind are strengthened, deepening the groove and making it more likely that a random thought pattern will end up back in the destructive groove.

In this model of the mind, talk therapy would seem to reinforce the negative pattern. It certainly seems that few people ever graduate from therapy or solve their underlying issues.

In other words, time heals all wounds, unless those wounds are torn open every week for 50 minutes.

There are many different kinds of talk therapy. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy is largely based on trying to get out of dysfunctional mental grooves and inaccurately pessimistic perceptions of reality and on establishing new, more effective ways of thinking through insight and practice.

I personally have never gone to a psychotherapist, but it's clear to me from reading various things that talk therapy isn't just the stereotypical "lie on a couch and complain for an hour" that some people think it is.

Do you have a link?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-canal-papers

"A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space1. Situations and stimuli plant “you” at some point on the landscape, and then you “roll down” towards some local minimum. If you’re the sort of person who repeats “I hate myself, I hate myself” in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying “I hate myself” as an attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it’s easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the “I hate myself” valley, so it’s easy to roll down and get caught there."

Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)

How many therapists actually could solve that though? It’s a practical problem and one more likely to be solved by fixing the money problems than asking him to talk about how bad being broke makes him feel.

This is a fair critique and the issue with this particular case of me trying to use it to build up the issues I’m trying to discuss. He would seem to have reasonable exit opportunities that would be something like you don’t get to have your name on the wall anymore but now you need to work for Lennar as a project manager at a fairly good salary.

Cases do exists where the exit wouldn’t be as foreseeable like if your industry isn’t doing well and you were facing structural obsolescence.

Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.

If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.

Right, an intact family with 2 or 1.5 (ie mom in part time work once all kids at school) jobs of the kind that not-particularly-skilled but also not-addicts and not-pathologically-lazy people of average intelligence can get in an averagely prosperous part of the US with a few years of progression can provide a passable life for a family. Not a hugely comfortable one, but far from something most Americans would consider ‘stereotypically poor’.

Yeah. Failure case in most Western democracies right now is not that earthshatteringly bad. It's definitely tight, but it's not like he'd be forced to go homeless 48 hours after declaring bankruptcy. Especially when he's got the contact network he ostensibly seems to have had, surely there'd be a 6-figure sinecure of some sort available somewhere as a consultant or middle manager that'd allow him to be atleast medium competitive.

The question is whether you play out the unwinnable position -- go through the rest of your life as a failure who will never do any better than you are doing now -- or just give up the game as lost.

I suppose there's an argument for that, but I just feel like 'life utility points' aren't super tied to money in the West right now beyond a certain minimum spec. You don't want to be broke-broke, I agree, but the qualitative difference between making $100k and making $300k is pretty low as somebody who's bounced around the spectrum. My net worth/earnings took a big hit a few years ago in '2021 fantasy bull market dollars' terms which probably is gonna take me another couple years to get back to, but my day-to-day existence is essentially the same. Admittedly I'm probably more frugal than a lot of guys like that, but having experienced a lot of 'rich person stuff' it's the difference between a 7.5/10 day and a 8/10 day.

If you're not a spendthrift, the difference is between making $100k and working the corporate grind until you die to avoid dropping down to the $50k-or-less lifestyle, or making $300k and being able to get out at some point. If you are a spendthrift, the difference is obvious.

Even if he would be willing to decrease his own QoL, his wifes feelings are something he has to keep in mind. If she would be be intransigent and proclaim she would find replacement husband, willing to provide her with the current lifestyle, he would be broke and on the hook for eyewatering alimony.

As people on the right otherwise often suggest, it’s very unlikely the average, say, 47 year old woman married with three kids is going to get a ‘better deal’ elsewhere unless her husband is a truly incorrigible deadbeat and/or she’s somehow either immensely attractive for her age or has low standards (in which case the problem is less likely to arise at all). If she remarries at all, it’s likely to a substantially older man.

For a woman over 35 or 40 with children, things usually have to be very bad (or one’s dating prospects uncommonly good for a middle aged single mother) for leaving a broke husband to make financial sense.

The "better deal" is to take all the joint assets and most of any of his future income in a divorce, using his failure as the reason he should take nothing.

The point still remains that he’s much more likely to be able to find another partner than she is (not, like, a hot 25 year old obviously, but someone a few years younger and also divorced). In my experience middle aged women who initiate divorce are usually pretty desperate. The reason women initiate most divorces is because men are often perfectly content checking out of the relationship, maybe fucking around or having affairs, spending money on other women, then returning home to a wife who looks after the kids, probably does most domestic chores etc. This can go on for years before she finally decides to accept the humiliation of divorce. The only time it’s usually “worth it” for a man to initiate divorce in my experience is if he finds out she’s cheating, at which point masculine hatred of the idea of being sexually humiliated typically leads to an instant divorce. But provided there’s no (known) infidelity on her part, men tend not to divorce their wives because even if they dislike her, she’s a good deal.

This fundamental disparity leads to a lot of the discourse on divorce that argues women are screwing over men. In reality, it’s just that a bad marriage is today usually a much better deal for men than women.

This all assumes that she realizes this before abandoning her husband "to get a better deal". The women I know who have done this didn't give up their high standards until after they left and learned it the hard way. Choosing to leave a partner is often more an emotional decision than a rational one and a sudden drop in QoL isn't exactly conducive to rational thinking.

This was the point I was waiting for. Yes your family often leaves you when you fail. Seen it happen enough.

Sure for a functional adult you can go manage a Taco Bell and probably get 100k or more a year but your dating market prospects are awful.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

Think I’ve seen far higher than that. Like 150 advertised. But that’s still falling a lot in status.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell?

No, but IIRC fast food managers get paid mostly in the form of bonuses for hitting the metrics that’ve been set by some jackasses with spreadsheets at headquarters(health code, budget, drive through time, etc). So there’s plenty of individual GM’s who make good salaries if not 6-figure level.

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

But nobody wants to date Taco Bell customers(and Taco Bell customers probably skew very male and very lower income, so that’s predictable).

Tbh it seems like men who make good money at low status jobs do OK on the dating market, but usually have to date a bit below them on the class ladder.

Most managers at Taco Bell would do completely fine with women of their class and background. I suppose the rare formerly PMC down in his luck upper-middle-class guy who manages a Taco Bell might not, but that person is more likely to take a (lower paid) job as a clerk or paralegal or some other bottom tier office job than work for Taco Bell.

I’d guess the average fast food restaurant manager comes from a working class background and fucked around for a few years after high school, is somewhat smarter than their peers, works hard and rises the ranks over a few years until the franchise owner puts them in charge.

At which point the suicide would seem more understandable. Still not necessarily the best option, but I would find it harder to argue against. And maybe that secretly is exactly what happened and his wife was going to leave him. But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

Or even just the fear that that's what his wife would do. Suicidal people often believe everyone else sees them as unkindly as they see themselves.

I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women

Is that true, or do women just actually like therapy?

Full disclosure- I think therapy works for trauma and phobia related issues, and is useful for management strategies on depression/anxiety issues, and maybe has some applicability to rarer issues(eg the vanishing penis syndrome Scott wrote about) or for managing mental health care when there’s 20 different providers, but is basically hokum outside of that. And functionally all hokum works on the basis of empathizing with the mark and then telling them what they want to hear. Women like empathy where men as often find it annoying. So women like therapy in a way men don’t, but it has the same effectiveness for both. And obviously that leads to women pointing to it as useful even when time and drugs/life changes did the heavy lifting, while men point to it as stupid and useless in the same circumstances.

I wonder what the overlap is between liking therapy and believing in other hokum (eg astrology, acupuncture).

I dunno. For people who don’t actually have a problem it seems like a one to one trade off with psychics, so I’d expect it’s actually negative.

Yeah, my understanding is that most of the therapy techniques were designed based on female patients, and therefore focus more on things like feelings rather than solutions to object-level problems. However competent ones exist, and will tailor their style based on the needs of their patient (or at least identify when they aren't a good fit and refer them to other therapists with a better-suited style). A suicidal man seeing Jordan Peterson isn't going to get a bunch of mamby pampy nonsense about "aw, I'm sorry to hear that, how does that make you feel?", they're going to get "that sucks, life sucks, but your life isn't over, let's come up with an actionable plan for how to make it suck less" and then having an actionable plan helps fix your mental state because you have a goal you can work towards (and once you enact the plan your life is objectively improved and that helps your mental state). Even a good therapist can't unilaterally fix your life for you, but they can help convince you to fix your own life and figure out how instead of wallowing in self-misery and inaction.

Why would therapy be less effective for men? I’ve heard moreso that men don’t want to start going to therapy for various reasons (associating therapy with leftism is a new one for me, which I don’t really understand) but it’s a very useful tool to have.

And there’s more than one way to practice it - cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be effective for anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and more, and I can’t conceive of a reason it would be less effective for men.

A couple factors. One major one is the gender of the therapist: therapists are something like 3/4 female, and trending more female. This leads to several issues. For one, treatment methodologies get skewed, in terms of renown, research, and funding, toward those that female therapists prefer. Therapists are more capable of empathy toward people like them, and oftentimes patients react better to therapists who have a similar background as them.

Another, more speculative angle is that mental health issues can be intrinsic (caused by how people interpret their experiences) or extrinsic (caused by the experiences themselves). This is a bit murky: e.g. if you're depressed and traumatized because you were in a war and saw your best buddy blown to bits, that's pretty extrinsic, but perhaps some interpretative work could genuinely help alleviate the pain. But I do think it's a meaningful distinction, and therapists would be better suited to intrinsic issues. If women's issues are more intrinsic and men's more extrinsic, therapy would be less effective at effectively addressing the average male issue than the average female one.

I’m not sure there’s a difference between how the emotions from how interpret the experience vs. the experience itself? Mental issues are by definition intrinsic. Not all soldiers develop PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event - there seems to be many variables influencing its development, such as age, pre existing conditions, support network, even genes (I’m reading that PTSD is 30-40% heritable). And there’s depressingly large amounts of women that have PTSD from sexual assaults and physical abuse - while only a small minority of men become soldiers in the west.

I’m also not sure what you mean by women’s mental issues being more intrinsic? Anxiety, depression, addiction and abusive relationships would be common reasons the average westerner would go to therapy, and I don’t see how there’s a difference in “cause” there when it comes to gender?

Why would therapy be less effective for men?

One reason might be that therapists consider masculine qualities and attributes to be pathological, and thus treat men like broken women.

Therapy culture is very blue coded. Therapy culture seemingly embraces fragility as a virtue.

That hasn’t been my experience. I did CBT and there it was quite focused on tracking my emotional state and finding actions to regulate it, and more ordinary talk therapy where I was pushed to be more assertive, recognise abusive relationships and be more emotionally resilient overall. therapy does encourage you to have more self-compassion and avoid emotional repression, but to me that’s the opposite of fragility. People who bottle up everything tend to be very brittle - seeming solid until it gets too much and they shatter.

Effective forms of therapy can exist while 90%+ of therapy sessions are useless or actively harmful.

A patient who is cured might only need 5 sessions. A patient whose condition doesn't improve may have 1 session per week forever.

In this model, even if half of patients are cured by therapy, something like 99% of sessions are a complete waste of money.

Therapy culture. Not all therapy. But also I think your assumption is people can either be emotional or bottle up emotions. Stoicism is another path.

your issues are not lefty mental health...seeing all your dreams disappear...one of the most emasculating things

I don't have a lot of love for the left's frames around mental health and therapy, but this point is just silly. Or rather would be better if you just stopped wtih the real issue of providing monetarily. Are you suggesting that 'seeing your dreams disappear' is somehow a real issue, separate from and contrasted with 'mental health' concerns. Same re: feelings of emasculation. You undermine yourself by begging the conclusion.

I suspect the 'lefty' who advocates therapy very much agrees that lost dreams and feeling emasculated are real issues, and would understand them to be the exact 'mental health' issues you are suggesting aren't invovled.

It does seem like the root issue is not a business failing, but the feeling of inadequacy. A person with a strong frame doesn't update his own self worth downward for something so minor as a business failing.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

Maybe they get half way there. A therapist might help a person to realize that it is his own feelings of unworthiness, not a business failing, which is the true source of his suffering.

But then a modal therapist would seem to encourage this same patient to wallow in that sense of unworthiness every week, rather than take the steps to overcome it and, therefore, no longer have need of therapy.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

I'm mean, I am generally skeptical, though I am unfamiliar enough with something as grave as suicide that I don't want to throw support or detraction around flippanly.

That is however, not my point. slider is free to dismiss therapy as ineffective. I was noting his framing of the percieved issue to be addressed was essentially a Russell's conjugation:

Your mental health issues

My real issues of feeling inadequate and emasculated and socially maligned.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like the whole "toxic masculinity" concept when it is used as a motte-and-bailey*, but if a man hypothetically (not saying this man necessarily did) killed himself because he could not provide for his family and felt emasculated, it would be textbook example of what some leftists mean when they say "toxic masculinity hurts men as well as women".

*The bailey: "men suck!". The motte: "we want to address toxic masculinity because doing so would help men as well as women!".

It’s an especially stupid reason to commit suicide because it’s still possible to provide for your family if your business fails - you can still get an ordinary job, or do consulting work, drive an Uber, whatever it takes. The only sure way to be unable to provide is to be dead, so what does killing yourself accomplish? Your spouse now has to shoulder the entire burden on their own.

1 - What did you meant to type instead of "look themselves"? 2 - Dealing with feeling emasculated is exactly what lefty mental health and suicide prevention are equipped to del with.

4 and 5 are what the left (or at leat I) mean by toxic masculinity. If you aren't facing prison, there is no need to consider dying because you can't fulfill the roles you've given yourself.

6 - Citation needed.

Edited to add - how do we know his business failed?

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