Mottizen
7mo ago
Fairly high up in some interaction of gambling/crypto. It's not socially gainful but it is fairly lucrative.
Mottizen
7mo ago
The higher fertility rate subpopulation thing does provide a chance of running out of productive workers, though. One of the killer hacks of avoiding the fertility decline associated with being a productive member of industrial civilization is to just call the bluff of the other members when it comes to willingness to let you starve.
Mottizen
7mo ago
I'm very newly a father. My daughter is 3 days old. I'm turning 30 this year, and the general reaction I got from talking to my friends & strangers was very 'wow that's young to be doing it' or 'how can you afford this'. I was the youngest person in my highschool scholarship class in a good upper middle class suburb by about a year, 30 people of whom most have gone on to be Doctors, Dentists, Developers and other Desirable roles. I'm the only to have reproduced, and at this rate I'm the only one who even looks particularly close to it. My university cohort's fairly similar, with similar professional attainment.
The big themes I noticed when talking to people about why they haven't taken the leap are generally some combination of not owning housing, being stuck in the dating app treadmill, protecting their free lifestyles to do 'cool, spontaneous things' and versions of 'my potential children will inherit the apocalypse'
Mottizen
8mo ago
In my experience sometimes it's literally just Frank.
I used to work for one of these small businesses were the owner-operator was prettymuch Mr Krabs for Spongebob. Cartoonishly money grubbing towards customers, most of whom he'd known for decades at this point as their 'Computer Guy'. Towards the end the business was only really viable since he'd put about 2-3x the margin on getting tech for fellow boomers as they'd get from going to an Apple Store direct or the local Walmart equivalent. It wasn't quality, price or friendliness it was literally just 'Frank is my computer guy and he is who I buy computers from' inertia.
Mottizen
8mo ago
Untangling 'Frank's Automotive has good will' from 'Frank Frankerton who runs Frank's Automotive and has for the last 30 years has good will' is the hard part, though.
Mottizen
8mo ago
I'm sure that a certain chunk of these businesses are free money, some are okay returns on capital and some are toxic cesspools that the original owner is exiting for a good reason.
Mottizen
8mo ago
I think you're wildly oversimplifying the 'simply take over a business from a retiring boomer' thing. I used to work for one of those, and whilst it was sold with a fairly reliable source of income (Pre-Apple Store Apple importer who still had a license to do repairs on Apple hardware that the Apple Store refused to due to being a generation or two out of date). The seller refused to actually retire and kept servicing his best clients directly (who were largely also superboomers who'd had him as their 'computer guy' since 1980 and didn't want to get computers from anybody else), plus the actual business model itself was really coasting on inertia after being a good idea 30 years ago. You can't really steal the customers here since they're not price-sensitive, they just want to do their very intermittent tech purchasing from the guy who they got their first handshake from 30 years ago.
A lot of these incredibly profitable small businesses are coasting on servicing fellow boomers and based on the operator's relationship network.
Mottizen
8mo ago
Housing Prices in most affluent Western countries have combined with the deterioration of the sexual marketplace and decline of employer-employee relations to cause this, though. I'd love it if my lifepath was getting an okay sinecure somewhere here, making 75th percentile wage for my country and buying a free-standing house and get some kids going.
Instead in order to achieve the unfathomable wealth required to buy a free-standing 3bedroom house somewhere within an hour's drive of my CBD I've had to do pretty well in the startup lottery and pick a fairly disreputable industry on top of that. The system no longer facilitates the normal path.
Mottizen
8mo ago
The more integrated BTC is into the global economy the bigger a deal the Satoshi coins moving would be, though. It does feel unlikely that a hypothetically alive and healthy Satoshi's participation in Crypto is exclusively limited to those coins, though, so he's likely not struggling for money.
Mottizen
8mo ago
Yeah, but the act of spending those coins would cause severe reverberations throughout the Crypto economy which is what makes it tricky.
Then again a sufficiently large Crypto entity could lend him money so he doesn't move the Bitcoins.
Mottizen
8mo ago
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do. Also Satoshi actually moving his Bitcoins would cause massive reverberations throughout the Crypto economy so it isn't really just a matter of 'I am Satoshi, here is proof, I have 2 million Bitcoins give me a loan'.
It's like if you were in a gold-based economy and half of the Gold had been used to create the tomb of King Satoshi II, and there would be a Jihad upon anybody who actually touched said gold. Yes, King Satoshi II's heir would be wealthy in the sense of owning that gold, but actually moving it would be impractical.
Mottizen
9mo ago
I agree with this, but the Aspergers diagnosis got banded about willy-nilly so it kind of had to be hauled back (plus the culture war tones, I guess)
Mottizen
9mo ago
Exactly. That's essentially the environment my mom worked at (albeit essentially purely aimed at the bottom 10% of your cohort), and a positive outcome of a 12 year education at that school was 'capable of holding a shelf stacking job or consistently contributing on government subsidized work for the lesser-abled and moderate sociability'.
Autism's a weird subject since the diagnosis gets thrown around super liberally for any sort of 'does not play nice with others' psychological diagnosis, and it's such a wide spectrum.
My mom used to work at a private school dedicated to let's say 5th-10th percentile intelligences. Not the absolute lowest rung, but the one above it. The vast majority of her students had diagnoses for Autism (along with whatever myriad difficulties they had) and were essentially incapable of functioning above a 4th-grade level. When that bloc is contributing to the statistics, it's very hard to be successful on the aggregate. Without going into the amount of criminals or ne'er-do-wells hit the psychological diagnosis arena and get 7 different things assigned, one of which is invariably ASD. These people are already on an atrocious course and further drag down averages. It is my belief that if diagnosis was a firmer line and was universal, that the gap would be a lot smaller.
The most 'successful'/able-to-cope Autistics are also unlikely to ever pick up a formal diagnosis, especially if they're presently older than mid thirties. I'm diagnosed with what was Aspergers. My dad is a very successful engineer who is 99% to also get diagnosed (and indeed self-diagnosed after I received the diagnosis) if he ever had occasion to pursue it, but as he's now in his mid 70s, retired and in no need of psychological assistance he's unlikely to ever get his autism certificate.
I feel like you are picturing the 'average autistic person' as a FANG developer who struggles with dating/social contact but is otherwise able to get some benefits out of the quirk in their brain chemistry. This is a person who's like 85th percentile.
Mottizen
9mo ago
Yeah. This bloc feels a lot bigger than 'fervent Democrat/Obama supporter who'd be lulled to the polls by a WOC with a big surname', especially since Clinton had relevant experience and Obama decidedly does not.
Mottizen
9mo ago
Betting markets are keen on Michelle to jump in there, but that seems especially insane to me.
Mottizen
10mo ago
The problem I have in the modern era is that the 65~ retirement age is being preserved for the boomers as a legacy of an age where you worked with your hands and died 5-10 years after retiring. Without generating anywhere near the amount of expense and medical drama that somebody in the last few years can and will these days.
Mottizen
10mo ago
USA is hardly a pure ethnostate of the most productive demographics. Cut 2 or 3 geographic regions or 2 or 3 ethnicities and it'd be similarly buoyed.
Mottizen
10mo ago
Honestly from having a close friend/old housemate who's very high caste Indian back in the motherland (Father a very high ranking Air Force figure, grandfather owned a ton of stuff), it was always hilarious listening to complaints about bias or stratified society in context of what their family had gotten up to.
Mottizen
10mo ago
The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.
I thought it was due to the scheduled caste/affirmative action in India being so very strong that the majority of Indians who end up in the West have a bone to pick with the concept of it.
Mottizen
10mo ago
I remember reading a while back that China saw the divorce rate go down after requiring a mere thirty days cooling-off period before you could proceed.
This goes for prettymuch every major life decision, though. People are prone to inertia and frequently the straw that breaks the Camel's back only does so for a short while.
Mottizen
10mo ago
They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.
I think you're overhyping this a bit. Many is the couple where the guy suggests an open relationship, not realizing that even their middle-aged wife/partner commands about 50,000x the desirability in the hookup market even if things have evened out a lot in the longterm partner market.
I've been looking at moving to Malaysia (albeit my partner is from there and has a big, pretty well-off Malaysian Chinese family which makes the decision considerably easier) with my newborn, sooner or later.
Honestly in my opinion technology's reached a point where there's just not a huge dropoff in QOL/development between a city in a country with a first tier Western GDP per capita and one that's above $15k per capita or so.
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