2rafa
46m ago
Boomers were born 1945-1964, Gen X from 1965-1981, millennials 1982-1997, zoomers from 1998-2009, alpha from 2010-present ish. The main bussing crises / conflicts were in the early-mid 70s so mainly affected boomers as kids. Bussing nominally existed through the early 80s but it was largely intra district and voluntary, white flight was mostly complete by then beyond a few holdout communities.
2rafa
1hr ago
Yeah, the problem with customer service jobs is that in many cases they’re much harder to replace than a programmer because they both deal with the general public and often involve the ability to dispense (directly or indirectly) an organization’s money and extremely sensitive customer information in every interaction.
Even current generation models like Fable can be prompt engineered against the wishes of their creators relatively easily, often with almost laughable prompting of the narrative role playing “imagine im your sick grandma” variety that even an 80 IQ night shift call center worker obviously wouldn’t fall for (plus the human is scared of getting fired; the AI isn’t). A bank or insurance company or medical billing company or HR outsourcer has customer support workers who have full access to the most sensitive client data, a colossal risk for data leaks in financial terms that could dwarf replacing them with Claude. And even DoorDash doesn’t want an internet full of one simple trick techniques to trick the support LLM into giving you free food. All these things can be mitigated, of course, but less than perfectly.
Call centers are also pretty cheap, especially if as you note they’re in a third world country. You can hire a lot of Filipinos for one expensive San Francisco L5 or L6 programmer. I think it’s quite possible we see mass software engineer layoffs due to AI before the end of the customer support worker.
2rafa
2hr ago
There really were millions of Venezuelan indigenous from the shanty towns who fully believed in Chavez and Chavismo. That’s why the early right wing CIA coup in 2002 was defeated, they came down from the hills and forced him back into power.
But the oil crash in 2014 and subsequent decade of low oil prices killed the client economy he had created. Maduro was also far less charismatic and moderately less competent (although Chavez’ competence was overstated when oil was above $90 a barrel). Followers only stay around you for so long when the money dries up.
By contrast, while Tehran and a handful of other cities in Iran had a moderately developed middle class and semi-advanced economy in 1979, most of the country was essentially very poor rural peasants, smallholders and workers in large towns and cities living in places without any significant development at all, and in some cases with lives little changed for centuries. The first shoots of sustained economic development had sprouted but it was early days, like Russia before 1917.
While these people participate much in the revolution itself, they nevertheless became its core constituency; all development their communities have had since 1979, the social housing, schools, universities, economic development, for them has been a product of it. They can’t remember, and have never been able to remember, good times before it.
2rafa
2hr ago
Boomers were the kids being bussed, (and those being bussed to) not the parents. Who was, like, 8-17 years old in the early-mid 1970s? Boomers, obviously.
Whatever your views on integration and the civil rights movement, it was clearly a product of the ‘Greatest Generation’ and to a lesser extent the older members of the ‘Silent Generation’ that came after them (I think MLK himself, who was younger than a lot of the politicians, was on the border between the two).
1968 and the sexual / cultural revolution was more organically boomer - it still had much older proponents like Hefner, but a lot of student activists and Woodstock types were the very oldest boomers born 1945-1948. The anti-Vietnam movement was more boomer. Certainly the anti-nuclear movements were boomer. You really have to go through to the WTO stuff to find the first Gen X heavy protest movements (and those still had a LOT of boomers).
2rafa
4d ago
As I’ve said before, both the ‘geek feminists’ and a lot of the counter arguments are wrong here. The nerdy sexless man who starts reposting Andrew Tate (or indeed Clavicular) reels on main is not becoming more attractive to women by doing so. M
But a lot of the criticism of the ‘feminist’ viewpoint is straw or at least weak manning. The argument was not “an extremely hot, rich and charming man who is a misogynist can’t be sexually successful”. If you asked one of these feminists whether a billionaire who hated women could still get laid, they would obviously, presumably, have said ‘yes’.
The strongman of their argument (which I’m not committed to defending as their argument) was more like “sitting around hating women isn’t going to get you laid. Make more friends, build a larger social circle, speak to more women and it’s more likely to happen for you”, and for the average sexless man that is in fact excellent advice and probably far more helpful than hitting the gym and watching Clav streams.
2rafa
4d ago
It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami.
Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid? Birth rates in socially conservative countries and communities clearly prove that to be incorrect regardless of what ‘Clavicular’ is doing.
To me it seems like the idea that, say, the existence of a happy nuclear family with two dads raising well adjusted and successful children ‘disproves’ social conservatism with regards to family formation.
We can go even broader. There are people who get away with socially deleterious behavior all the time. Think of the famous shopping cart greentext. At some point the argument is implicitly ‘do [x prosocial behavior] even if some other people get away with not doing it’, whatever the behavior is and whether or not you agree with the specifics of the argument.
2rafa
5d ago
I presume the gambit there is to get equity and then get rich once it IPOs or afterward as it grows to take over the whole economy. The problem is that if AI including Claude takes a lot of white collar jobs, the first thing that happens - before the riots, the protests, the political upheaval - is that people start liquidating their 401ks and that tanks the whole market in a cascade, so the Anthropic engineer’s paper millions are toast.
2rafa
5d ago
The SWE at Anthropic to avoid permanent underclass status strategy reflects a very limited understanding of finance or markets, but I suppose that’s to be expected for software engineers.
2rafa
6d ago
True but they tend to be attractive young people. Waiters are more diverse in terms of age.
2rafa
6d ago
In actually Michelin starred restaurants, it is not uncommon for servers to make $150k+ inc tips in NYC, which is probably more than, say, the average New York Times journalist. In France it is not uncommon to make 3x the (much lower) average wage, which is why you see perfectly respectable people in their fifties do the job.
2rafa
6d ago
If AI is going to kill everyone unless some fantastical global regulatory regime that won’t happen is magicked into being, what are these people even doing?
Go to the beach, touch grass, spend time with people you love, drink good wine. No atheist (which pretty much all rationalists are) who believes the world is about to end should spend their final months playing cassandra, to mostly deaf ears.
2rafa
6d ago
Nobody including AI optimists believed that the key to the whole thing would be a relatively basic semi-novel kind of statistical model. GPT-2 could have been trained in like 2005. There are thousands of ideas in physics, math, philosophy, biology, whatever that are vastly more conceptually complex than transformer models. They had no idea how it could be built, or would be built, so why expect them to predict how it could be tested reliably?
2rafa
8d ago
I have a lot of sympathy for Bourdain. Like him, I’m a romantic at heart. Like him, I feel at home nowhere, really. He had a very nice PMC Jewish upbringing, his parents were a record label executive and an editor at the New York Times. He felt a certain emptiness his whole life.
So I don’t think I’m trashing him, or at least I don’t mean to. But I wanted to reply because I disagree with the post by @coffee_enjoyer cited above. I don’t think Bourdain killed himself because he was a hedonistic liberal boomer individualist. I know plenty of those who are very happy indeed. I think he killed himself because he became fixated on one woman and this is the most dangerous thing when one loves oneself or a certain image of oneself.
2rafa
9d ago
I don’t think there’s anything on his death that could be said that hasn’t been. It is almost the least interesting of the famous celebrity suicides of that decade.
But I do think he wanted a grand exit. He wanted to show that bitch that broke his heart. This is what narcissists are wont to do. It’s why your piece of shit ex threatens to kill themselves when you break up with them. They won’t do it, probably, but it adds a grandiose element to their wallowing, to their pitiable state.
Some were always going to follow through. He wanted to show her, he wanted to make a woman he thought was uncaring (about him) suffer. You can’t do that in life. Complaining about an ex lover leaving you for a younger man isn’t really socially acceptable, even for women it makes you look pathetic and for men it’s worse. He obviously didn’t want to move on. The ego was bruised. Death seemed a final victory over her.
2rafa
9d ago
He would challenge it as a targeted tax under bill of attainder rules since the population of trillionaires is just him and an arbitrary wealth threshold doesn’t cleanly constitute a class (the way a president does), and the courts (again, right-leaning circuit and then SCOTUS) would stay the tax as unconstitutional.
Any regulatory action will be stayed by a friendly Texas circuit judge and then blocked by SCOTUS as it would be (a) trivially obviously politically motivated and (b) a 5-4 or 6-3 vote along ideological lines. They’re also federal agencies so Trump’s inevitable pardon will be more effective. The big risk would be state level enforcement but Musk moves the corporate registration to Texas so even California and NY are pretty limited and it’s likely things would go the way the anti-Trump cases did under Biden except Musk will be able to hole up in Texas while Trump wanted to be able to campaign everywhere and had a lot more assets under (ultimately) his name in NY.
I don’t think you actually need to do any of this for Musk. Flatter him and call him a genius and say you’re in favor of UBI and other stuff he supports and he’ll be fine with you. His politics have flipped before and they can again when convenient.
2rafa
9d ago
The route to stopping Musk for a Democratic president and majority is getting harder. Unlike Tesla where it’s possible they could lean on institutional shareholders to pressure him out (although they’d be very loathe to do so given it would tank the price), Musk has a supermajority of SpaceX voting rights. They could try to use the SEC to force him out of management, defense production acts to take control of operations etc but they would be stayed by a conservative fifth circuit judge, then blocked by SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS. So they’d have to pack the court first, which requires abolishing the filibuster, which would make some on the center squeamish, etc etc. There’s also no real competition in a lot of places eg Starlink, NASA contracts are so long term they’re hard to change quickly. I assume they’d try to fund competitors, maybe offer generous tax breaks or state funding or exploratory contracts, but they couldn’t actually replace them, not quickly. They can investigate him for DOGE actions, securities law violations etc but I expect Trump will give him a blanket pardon for everything that he ever did in his entire life up until January 20th 2029 when he leaves office.
2rafa
9d ago
Medium maturity diversified first world treasuries, money market funds, and a smaller proportion in developed world ex-US low PE, value equities with very little debt and what I judge to be very limited exposure to financials or tech. Some in IG credit funds that are again have limited or no exposure to finance, tech or media (the latter because I think it’s one of the first things to fall to AI disruption). If my work didn’t restrict me I’d probably keep a few high conviction emerging markets bets, but that’s only because I know what I’m looking for.
Last Thursday I finalized an almost total de-risking of the money I received / inherited when I was 18 from my parents. I had done similarly with my own modest investments / savings a few months ago (shortly before the Iran War) but resisted moving this, by far the actual majority of my wealth, out of US equities due to having to deal with a bunch of legal and other admin stuff I resisted doing for a decade because it seemed boring, tiresome and I’m low agency when I don’t immediately fear extreme loss.
Taking stock, in 12 years, more or less in diversified primarily-US and some global equities, with reinvestment, I made 400%. This is average for the last decade but an extremely outsized return compared to most periods in the history of capital markets. Few run-ups in mature, developed markets (and I am obviously counting from five years into the 2010-present cycle) have yielded better returns, ever.
I have my doubts about the memory melt up. Semiconductors are cyclical, investment is flooding in, prices will fall, and a full KOSPI and Micron collapse, which the current extreme yo-yoing portends, can cascade quickly into rapid deflation in parts of the component market for the data center bubble as the market re-assesses the real impact of extreme capacity increases coming online to produce chips (where the majority of the hundreds of billions raised has been pledged to hardware bought at bubble prices and tied to absurdly optimistic depreciation schedules), which is in turn tied into a huge amount of private equity and debt that was itself provided extensive back-leverage by banks and insurers (including those owned by some of the same PE firms).
The thing about really big bubbles, and I’m not in any sense calling the top, is that the final run-up is the true test of the investor - the last few months or years can see another doubling or more of asset prices because earnings boom (as they are now) and so markets boom, and so earnings boom etc in a very rapid quarterly feedback loop. Extreme pricing power is sustainable in some sectors, some of the time. Not in every sector, indefinitely. The S&P 500 might hit ten thousand points before a big crash. But I’m happy with my 400%, I’m a neurotic, and it seems to me that greed for / FOMO on money I don’t really need is needless risk at this stage. Still, it felt nice to write the above out.
I will re-assess early next year, I think.
2rafa
9d ago
It’s a ticket clipping operation but in certain cases with insane leverage which in a real crisis where crazy things happen for short periods in the repo market (like they did in 2008) could blow up in an interesting way.
2rafa
10d ago
Most Jane Street traders aren’t cheating or doing anything interesting. They’re exploiting tiny quirks in foreign derivatives markets or the repo market / basis trade or creating ever more complex ways to eke out margin when ETFs rebalance all with huge leverage so that 1bp becomes a moderately large figure.
There are definitely still hedge fund types who engage in the traditional shadier kind of business, but they’re not quants, they’re big global/regional macro or sector/theme funds run by guys in their sixties whose claim to fame was correctly calling one big crash in the last 35 years.
2rafa
10d ago
In any market, consistent excess returns are the product of superior information, superior analysis, or both. So whatever you’re betting on, do you earnestly believe you have either?
2rafa
11d ago
There are plenty of nice suburbs like Beaconsfield, Gerrard’s Cross etc where you can live in a big suburban house and take the train in direct or nearly direct to the City for work.
Epstein was an intellectual dilettante who would have been a second-rate shitposter here. I don’t think he was particularly well informed. He was likely very intelligent, but that is different.
And how does that make you feel, JD? There is almost no greater piece of evidence that the Epstein thing is overplayed than this kind of comment.
People who are actually of extreme value to intelligence and centrally important to some kind of secret organization don’t get arrested after being the target of an impossible to hide FBI investigation for years, subject to hugely public legal proceedings, and then die in allegedly mysterious circumstances in a Manhattan jail, before their lover / accomplice is sensationally also arrested and subject to years of public proceedings and media/public outrage that pressures congress into releasing tens of thousands of related files. They just die, quietly, and a few lines are written about them in newspapers. “Epstein died some years after serving a brief sentence for sex crimes. There were embarrassing photos of him with Prince Andrew. He died in his sixties in Paris of heart failure.” Fin.
Vance plays along even though he knows it is ridiculous for a sitting vice president to acknowledge a government conspiracy that occurred, allegedly, under the nose of then-President His Running Mate and Most Noble boss, but he also knows that the most controversial thing for Rogan’s normie followers would be for him to deny an Epstein theory, which is now not even the midwit position but the entirely normal one.
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