Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.
You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.
In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.
> Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.
People are trying to figure out their lives or how they want to live. There is nothing wrong in coming back to what they had quit. Making fun of other people's life choices is very immature in my opinion.
The last line shows their intention is good faith and on the side of the common people. There’s no proper way to interpret their comment as a bad faith making fun of people.
The comment happens to be against the status quo and for the every day person and that has a higher chance as being seen as something that is unusual and more negative than it actually is.
There’s no such thing as “giving power to the people.” This is grossly naive in both basic economics and society. There is only giving power to different people and under different terms.
But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about?
Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?
As like many others here, I started writing code in my late teens. And experienced my first bout of burn out sometime in my mid 20s. I was sick of making all these 2D, non-real things and wanted to make real world products that I could hold in my hand. So I did. Then I learnt that the pay was often shit, the work was really difficult and the physical toil it took on my body was not something I could take for long. So I went back to writing code in a comfy, climate controlled office with all the snacks I can eat. And spend my weekends instead doing amateur carpentry. That's so much more fulfilling on all levels.
It's almost certainly true that the closer you got to the ancestral environment, the more fulfilling people's lives would be. That's hunter-gatherer society, not serf farming. In the grand scheme of things, brick laying and lumber are still pretty modern. The hypothesis is that, in the ancestral environment, your instincts would actually be working in your favor, so good things would actually feel good, and bad things would feel bad.
Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.
I'd argue that, while it may not be selfish to have kids, most people who are having kids do it for selfish reasons. They don't want to "die alone". They want to show that they can afford it. They want to vicariously get into Harvard and work in publishing (if traditional publishing still exists in the 2040s at all) and live some imagined high life... even though the probabilities are minuscule and most children are going to inherit a world even shittier than the one we were stuck with.
I don't think I'll have kids. It's the one vote I've got. Why would I stake anything I care about on a society that will almost certainly fail them?
Whoa, that's a lot of super weird assumptions you're making. Fwiw, neither myself nor any other parent i ever met even gets in the remote vicinity of the picture you're painting. It sounds to me like you just have shitty parent-friends in your bubble? But rest assured that there a legion of other parents out there who neither got kids because they're afraid to die alone nor want to force their own wishes and life goals onto them.
In my experience, kids can be exhausting at times, and take a lot of dedication and time that you could otherwise spend on selfish persuits, so having kids for selfish reasons sounds insanely misguided to me. It's rather that despite all those sacrifices, kids enrich your life, and they allow tremendous opportunity for self-growth and a host of experiences that are hard to replicate otherwise.
> It's rather that despite all those sacrifices, kids enrich your life, and they allow tremendous opportunity for self-growth and a host of experiences that are hard to replicate otherwise.
This is the reason why most people have kids. This doesn't entirely contradicts the parent post though: People are having kids for their self benefits.
That post said the main reasons that people have kids are "They don't want to "die alone". They want to show that they can afford it."
Which are entirely different reasons than the parent poster gave.
This whole meta discussion of whether it's done for "selfish" reasons is largely not valuable, as every decision one makes in their life can be framed as being entirely selfish.
There's also an argument that it's unethical to intentionally bring someone into the world when there are so many problems and a fair chance that their life may involve a lot of suffering
That's not really the same kind of argument. Of course some people are too lazy and self-involved to care for other people. Lots of those people have kids and abandon them too.
Anyway, if someone does have the capacity to care for others, and wants the experience of raising children, adoption is an option as well, and doesn't require one to create more humans
I suggest avoiding the temptation to judge the motives and choices of other people when they don't affect you. I did the same for a good chunk of time. I was an excellent Internet commenter, and had it all figured out. Then I got older, and sometimes found myself understanding why those choices were made, and occasionally even making those same choices I'd despised.
Doing so was a deeply bitter pill to swallow, both in terms of the choices available and the sunk cost of previous opinions.
Working on yourself is a lifetime of effort. I suggest you focus more on that and less on casting aspersions on large groups of people for whom you know little about.
There is nothing less selfish than havint kids. The amount of sacrifice you have to put in is huge. If you are not on board with that, don't have kids.
You're doing it for a return though: the joy of having kids, planning for the future and so on... I'm sure it's hard work, but it's certainly not an altruistic act.
Even if sacrifice and selflessness were always the same, if one would treat having your own kids differently to adopting a newborn, all other things equal, then at least part of your desire to have kids is some kind of "selfish" motivation, rather than a purely altruistic endeavour to bring up a child or contribute to the workforce of tomorrow (or whatever the ostensible motivation is).
If one actually only cared about performing a service for the child and/or future society why do the exact genes matter?
Unless one actually thinks ones own genes are so superior that they're a service in their own right, in which case, one should be having as many children as possible.
Conversely, if one thinks that by having a child is some kind of cost, either to the child or society (or anything other than oneself), it can be a selfless choice to not have the child, even if you personally wanted one.
Plus, you make strong claims like "nothing less selfish" and yet you have never made sacrifices for anything other than kids... maybe there's something to think about.
If you do end up having kids, I hope you come back here and re-read what you wrote, just for lolz. Privileged young people without kids have this whole philosophy that just all adds up on paper. Reminds me of listening to libertarians and communists.
I love people like that. They have a whole philosophy constructed around this and that. I laugh at the amount of thought that went into the reasoning why they would rather not have kids. When they start dishing out these little nuggets of wisdom I just think to myself "it's better you stay childless". Imagine the little wise-ass this guy would raise. Poor child.
The best route is either to roll your own or go with a service like Ghost. Sure, you'll have to pay hosting, but you're not going to have shitty ads run on your blog.
Substack seems to be a decent technology; the problem is that it's owned by Y Combinator, which means it can't be trusted--if you piss off whoever's running YC at the time, you can be suddenly banned and have your data stolen.
Our healthcare system is an absolute travesty for the poor, but it's pretty lousy even for people who can afford care. I know plenty of people with 7- and 8-figure net worth, people who have connections to the medical system, who've still received substandard care. It's at the point where no one's winning.
Yes there was. Questioning of corporations, their motives, or their claims, was verboten. Maybe it still is, someone just accused me of being "far-right" for the thought-crime of questioning Pfizer's profiteering, lmao.
It seems like the bullies and censors and corporatist bootlickers are still far louder. It's great if you're hearing them being called out by those speaking their truth to power though.
Bullying can be very silencing and disempowering actually. I see them as closely related actually -- censorship is bullying and bullying can be silencing, although the simple kind of bullying is usually driven by their more basic fear and embarrassment of their own inadequacies.
Ah yes, the world paid Pfizer about $70 billion for vaccines in the last couple years, and in return those vaccines saved about 1 million lives. $70k/life sounds like we got a pretty good deal to me. Much cheaper per life saved than nearly any other new medical intervention nowadays.
> I see that phrase thrown around a lot. It's a variant of "you're never going to be a billionaire (so you shouldn't be against X)." Why do people assume that you have to think you'll be a billionaire to be against something that would affect billionaires negatively? Is something only wrong if you think you'll find yourself in that position one day?
Obviously cappies (meaning people who support capitalism, who are not necessarily actual capitalists--most aren't) don't walk around believing they personally have a greater than 50% chance of being billionaires. It's hyperbole. That said, they do overestimate their future earning potential while severely underestimating the number of ways in which preexisting social class will block them. This is evidently true; behavior and preferences reveal beliefs, and no one supports capitalism and its extreme inequities unless they harbor a belief--perhaps an underexamined and irrational one--that they'll one day be invited to join the capitalist class, since there's literally nothing to justify the system but "It's good if you're one of them."
This is absolutely going to be used against unionizers, which is what's really meant by "colluding". In the US this is going to get a lot of people fired. In other parts of the world, it's going to get them killed. This kind of software is Zyklon B for the 21st century.
> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?
There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.
> If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.
Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.
If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.
That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.
I think this is a great idea, but for a different reason. "Elite college" is a relative and somewhat zero-sum term, since it refers not to the quality of education but the quality of job and networking opportunities that are available once a person graduates. The embarrassing truth of these elite colleges is that there's not a whole lot of value-add. The classes are good--well, some of them--but you can find classes that are just as good at a decent state university. Elite colleges don't give anyone the ability to beat the job market; they select those who are likely already to beat it.
They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.
So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.
The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.
In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.