I'm a former management consultant and I'm not aware of anyone being mad about SWE salaries. The job paths are broadly comparable with broad salary scales, competition, risk, limited career length, compensation broadly tracking to productivity (usually more unequivocally so for SWEs), etc.
I feel like people complain about doctors roughly in the same way people complain about longshoremen or garbage men. A guild (or the literal mafia) capturing part of the economy, limiting access and extracting extreme rent, with doctors union arguably being even worse since they not only cost a lot of money but drain top talent from the more productive parts of economy (even within their own sector of the economy!).
I think this is true for many professions with a deep moat around them, regardless of that is educational credentials or some level of career success. This doesn't have to be very highly compensated professions mind you.
In situations where you're "safe" once you're in many people check out mentally and this affects not only job performance.
Being a "midwit" is only partially an effect of intelligence but also of practiced intellectual rigour, often requiring a competitive environment, which typically means work. It's like if people who were professional athletes when they were young thought they're still competitive when they haven't really exercised in over a decade. Disconnect from competition and practice allows for personal preference rule uninhibited by reality.
Somewhat related but I've become convinced that the way the doctor profession works is a major drain on society.
A practicing doctor is a somewhat important profession that requires a reasonable amount of intelligence to do competently, but they also have horribly low productivity compared to many other highly paid professions, seeing as the doctor only ever helps as many people as they physically can see. Combine this with fantastically high base compensation and a borderline ironclad employment security until the grave and we have a societal problem where medicine effectively becomes a form of sinecure for the intelligent.
There are more productive professions within the realm of medicine like researchers and med-tech engineers (and there is some overlap with doctors here) but they generally aren't meaningfully better compensated than regular practicing doctors and often get paid less.
I'm not saying these people shouldn't be well compensated or that we shouldn't have doctors but the current incentives leads to a situation where a good portion of the most intelligent are drained away from the economy to do low productivity work at a very high cost.
This could all be solved with an increased amount of doctors. The intelligent and driven will go on to more productive work (whether in the realm of medicine or elsewhere) and society gets access to more doctors for a more reasonable cost (just how much lower depends on the country).
Ioper
1d ago
Someone here recommended history of the Germans and I've liked it well enough.
Ioper
2d ago
I wouldn't know in your case specifically but her keeping in contact with you is obviously a good sign.
Perhaps you could set yourself a time limit after which you start dating again? Obviously you can't keep pining after this girl endlessly but is focusing on things other than dating for a few months unreasonable?
Ioper
3d ago
My wife broke up with me for a few months when we were 1.5 months into our relationship. The reason for this was she though I wasn't serious about her.
I didn't realise this at all and thought I had gone to great lengths to be with her, I was just very busy, but she thought I didn't want to see her. I didn't make a big deal about the break up, continued to see her for other reasons and eventually she came back and we've been together for the past 20 years, with little to no drama.
I suppose it helped that we had some common friends helping us out but the point is that it isn't necessarily over or a sign of poor potential for the relationship that there is a "break-up" early on.
Ioper
6d ago
Patients are also tested by physicians before some medications are prescribed, both physically and mentally.
Ioper
6d ago
Plenty of people do much the same even if they're urban white collar people, like my father for instance.
My father in-law doesn't like that kind of stuff though and does things like taking them to soccer games, museums and going swimming.
There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.
To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.
Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.
People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.
My point is that there are a thousand paths there even for upstanding citiziens, many starting due to things out of your control. The reason for failure to imagine them is because remaining wilfully ignorant of them is preferable, just like it is better to ignore the ignoble consequences of aging. We can often do little to nothing and it's a fucking horror show.
I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.
I've written about this before but people like to imagine that they're safe as long as they stay within the bounds of socially prescribed behaviour and have a reasonable amount of money. This is not true, there are tons of things that can debilitate you that society or modern medicine can do little about. Maybe a divorce leaves you broken and alone, maybe an illness leaves you with long term issues, maybe you develop a chronic health or pain condition as you age or after an accident, maybe you start self medicating stress with alcohol and you lose control?
There are a thousand mundane things that can make you worse of and potentially break you. It's easy to ignore or rationalise these things as consequences of mostly moral failures and that you would "solve" if you happened to be affected.
It's easy to say that one should walk a mile in someone's shoes before judging them but actually doing that is extremely mentally unpleasant. Ignoring all the risks of permanent/semipermanent intolerable suffering around you until you're directly affected is much easier and probably mentally healthier, even if it isn't very empathetic.
Ioper
9d ago
The site ate my post but I don't agree with your last paragraph. I don't think was a canary for anything, the period 90-08 was a great time for white boys. The bottom only fell out for the white precariat in the GFC and things didn't start shifting culturally until like 2010-2012.
Was Nu-metal worse than other comparable music scenes? I have no idea but it seems to me that it's a good target to shit on (and disregard base rates) because it was so dorky, kind of like Juggalos.
Partially it has to do with urban design and crowdedness.
For you to really kill a lot of people you need people who either incredibly packed together or otherwised trapped in some kind of mixed use area where you can get with a large car (preferably a truck). Street festivals are a good target for this kind of thing.
Getting an automatic weapon into some sort of enclosed space where you can gun down trapped people is often easier and enables you to better target some specific group of people, making it a much more attractive option IMO.
Better land (and climate) per farmer. Land farmed in the old world was either owned by aristocracy or very marginal.
Going to the new world was like being handed the best farmland the richest nobles had, literally for free. Of course the farms were productive.
Imagine everyone in Italy died from the black death and you could set up shop in the Po valley for free, would you be more productive than in some cold German marsh, the Scottish highlands or the Scandinavian inland?
Ioper
15d ago
I'd say it's pretty great but some people seem to think it's like being able to fly, which it's clearly not.
It's a positive attribute in most circumstances buts it's only *one* attribute.
In similar "news" from Sweden: ~90% of the Parliament (take a guess who wasn't on board) recently came to an agreement to change budget surplus goal to a "balance" goal, meaning we won't have to run a budgetary surplus anymore and can therefore spend more money (or will be able to in 2027 anyway).
Beyond that, there is talk of handling a fair bit of investments, like new nuclear reactors, in infrastructure outside of the budget. I personally think it might be reasonable to separate investments and running costs into different buckets so that it's easy to tell what we're actually spending money on and that we're not getting in debts for unsustainable running expenses, and set different goals for the different categories of expenses.
Regardless this is more money and demand going mostly into the EU economy.
What about just general predictions?
Trump has talked a big game and promised a lot of things to a lot of people. What will he actually follow through on?
- Immigration
- China
- Ukraine/Russia/NATO
- Tariffs
- Global warming
- Trans stuff
- Tax cuts
- Election security
- TikTok ban
- Downsizing the government
- Etc
Some things are of course easier than others. Pulling out of the Paris accords again, pushing fossil fuels at home and cutting taxes seems like easy and painless wins for him; expelling millions of illegal immigrants less so, even if the base might be gung-ho.
Other things might have made sense as an election strategy, like going back on the TikTok ban, but now once elected there are incentives to just let it go through anyway.
What do you guys think actually will happen? I personally have very little idea and Trump seems tired so maybe he will go furher on the direction of allowing someone else to steer the ship?
Game writers can’t write. That’s because studios hire DnD nerds who have no interest or knowledge of actual literature, have either never read the greats or dismiss them out of hand, and basically don’t understand what makes storytelling good or powerful in any way.
But isn't this the opposite of what happened? Writing started going downhill the moment they stopped hiring nerds for writing positions and started hiring creative writing and English graduates with "geeky" popular culture interests.
To me it seems like there is an issue of people being hired who don't have interests outside of videogames/anime/etc, which makes the writing and it's influences very incestous. The influences aren't history or literary greats but previous videogames and TV shows, which makes everything extremely shallow and derivative.
Ioper
21d ago
What's your reasoning for the ‘impossible burger/soyrizo’ getting pulled? Are they not selling?
I often prefer it, the reasons being that i find iterative turn based too slow and simple.
Add in that the war has increased food prices because the “breadbasket of Europe” can’t plant crops
This has little to do with food prices because the EU doesn't import much of the kind of foods that Ukraine produces. The EU is a massive food exporter, both cereals and more processed goods.
The reason food prices are up is due to increased fuel and fertilizer costs (and to a lesser extend a lack seasonal workers), which has to do with the war but not the economic disruption of Ukraine. Disruption of Ukraine farming primarily drives up food costs in the middle east and Africa, not Europe.
I think the real humbling thing is realising that being 1/200 or 1/1000 is nothing, there tons of us and most are doing very average and normal things.
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