You might find this arrogant, but alas it’s actually true. It’d take 15-20 average Indian outsourced employees to replace me. And then the work would still be substandard compared to what I do.
And I think that’s true of most really good workers.
Political Economy
Done
I love big-ass windmills, solar power installations glinting in the noon bright, Starlink satellites streaming across the sky.
It all means we are Getting. Shit. Done.
Just a Bit
Germany is ngmi pic.twitter.com/kYWfx4ykdZ
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) November 29, 2024
Germany is so incredibly fucked. I truly wish it were not because that means we’ll be the ones tossing Russia out of there in 2030. But it’d be good if they could at least stop doing ridiculously stupid stuff for just a bit.
Officiousness
This trend of employers inventing reasons to disqualify your experience is really obnoxious.
Try getting out of the army and then seeing how employers treat you. I had more than one tell me I had “no office experience” despite working in an office for five years straight, eight hours a day. And working in an army office is a hell of a lot harder than working in any corporate office I’ve ever seen.
Employers make every effort to discount your experience because then they can pay you less (in general and in specific).
NIMBY MBA
The problem is being ruled by Excel spreadsheets and the MBAs who wield them. Who, strangely, seem to be in some sort of oddball alliance with the build-nothing do-nothing degrowth left. Excel knows nothing about will and changing the shape of the possible. Much of what we do now was said to be impossible not long ago; our goal now should be to make our current selves look just as clownish in the future.
Anything else is a failure.
Backyards
It’s worrying how many problems are the result of and downstream of NIMBYism. Being convinced you’re the last good one who “deserves” to be there is a horrid goddamn disease.
Boomer NIMBYism is killing large parts of the nation.
Kid Me Not
Hell, we earn around 4x that much and it’d be a stretch including cost for college to have a kid. Don’t get me wrong, we could do it! We earn a lot. This isn’t some sob story. But it would mean we’d have to retire later or not at all, and have far less money for emergencies and the like. Child care in this area is something like $2,000 a month.
I truly do not know how people do it. Makes me glad neither of us have ever wanted kids.
Pathway
People like to say we can’t tech our way out of climate change. However, we both can do so and must do so. There is no other plausible path.
Herd That
That people did not fight harder to preserve WFH shows how cowed and in fact bovine American workers are. I’ll never work in an office again. But a lot of y’all didn’t have to but got herded into the chute anyway.
Idiots.
Compulsion
Housing is a terrible investment, by the way. Real returns of around ~2% a year. And no, the recent run-up does not change that much at all. People only perceive it as a good investment as it’s forced savings.
But I don’t need that. I save without being compelled to do so.
We only bought a house when its expected investment “returns” could be in the sharp negative and we’d still financially be ok. That’s not the only time you should buy a house. That is up to you and depends on your risk tolerance and financial status. But you won’t even beat a money market fund with housing unless you get really, really lucky.
Housing as an investment is BS in all sorts of ways.
Skimming
Crazy to think that the majority of the money I used to buy the house I’m currently living in I made doing low-risk and perfectly-legal stock market shenanigans with play money1.
What I did shouldn’t be legal. Some companies do it at massive scale. And not (just) to praise myself, but it takes a big brain to do what I did. That is a good example of a de facto power imbalance that the left refuses to talk about ever. It is a real blind spot for them. Not to belabor the point, but the age gap crap they incessantly bang on about absolutely fucking pales in comparison to cognitive inequality.
Econgerie
Just ran out of unemployment. 12 months, 1200 applications, zero jobs.
And y’all wondering why Trump did so well.
Wrath of Khan
One of the very worst parts of Trump being president will Lina Khan being ousted from the FTC. She’s been the best head of that org since the 1950s and has saved Americans billions while preventing some of the worst abuses that corporations want to commit. And now they will be able to.
This will be a such a huge loss. May she return one day with great wrath.
Driving Housing
Charles Hugh Smith: Unaffordable Housing and Homeless Encampments: How Did It Get This Bad?
Charles is one of the few (maybe a few dozen?) in the country who actually understand how housing prices currently work in the United States. Basically no one in the press does. None of the real estate “analysts” except maybe one or two do. Zero real estate agents do, of course, because they know nearly nothing.
It’s insane that something so important and that is the repository of vast wealth is so poorly understood by so many. I think that is deliberate, though — if people actually comprehended how it works and why it works that way, far more of them would rebel against it and demand change.
Hence, all the propaganda is designed to lead one down the wrong epistemic path.
Lacking Smacking
A good sign that most people are in fact clown-ass dipshits (whether on the right or the left) is that their opinion on the health of economy undergoes a 180 degree shift the minute someone of the opposite political party become president. And that is with no changes in the economy itself, of course.
Critical thinking altogether lacking. How do people live like that?