whatihear
3d ago
High income != high wealth. High income people are for the most part the upper middle class. They are the loyal retainers of the true ownership class. The truely rich don’t pay much in taxes.
whatihear
3d ago
That’s why they were proposing a legal framework where it becomes profitable for the restaurant to go after rude customers. If the restaurant gets most of the fine and there is an additional even more punitive fine for reviewing a restaurant after you’ve been found against (and running an anon review service is banned), you could reset the incentives. I would be mostly fine with all of this except for the banning of anon review sites because I don’t like the idea of ID gating the internet, even a small part of it.
whatihear
8d ago
Do you seriously think the quality of life for a lower class American is the same in Mexico as it would be for a lower class Mexican who grew up there, speaks the language, has a large extended family there, and associates it with all the nostalgic qualities which make one’s homeland appealing?
whatihear
18d ago
One of your main bits of evidence that Americans are disrespectful is that we dress like slobs, but that's not what respect means. You can tell a little story about how dressing up conveys respect for the people around you by showing that you put in effort, and respect for yourself by presenting yourself nicely, but you can also tell a story about how dressing down conveys respect for the people around you by releasing them from the obligation to perform a silly social ritual that per everyone's revealed preferences they don't want to perform, and respect for yourself by living authentically. Another one would be that dressing nicely shows off either wealth or a particular kind of cultural competency that encodes class in a way that is inaccessible to some people, therefore putting them down and displaying contempt for anyone who can't manage it. Since you have some background in fashion, this might be an alien perspective to you, but it's definitely not the case that nicer-clothes = more respect. Respect is about how you treat people. How you dress is part of it, and showing up to a wedding in sweats is obviously disrespectful, but it's not at all obvious that going about your daily life in casual clothing is disrespectful.
I'll allow that we may have had a hiatus in class expression between the 40s and 70s (though I'm pretty dubious even of this), but the idea that class was invented in the 80s is absurd. The robber barons, Southern planters, and the Easter financiers around the turn of the 20th century were all way more overt in their class expression than the elite of the 80s. We had a rash of anarchist terrorism motivated on a class basis that resulted in a president getting assassinated. Just walk through the historic part of Detroit and tell me with a straight face that class was invented in America in the 80s.
Finally, the idea that Europeans should be held up as exemplars of respect is crazy to anyone who has worked in a multinational company. Southern Europeans are generally perfectly lovely, but nearly without fail upon having some distant co-worker be rude and unprofessional to me I'll look up where they are based and it's somewhere in Northern Europe (and no they aren't anglophone). I don't actually mind this too much because it means they don't dissemble and you know where you stand with them. I'd much rather work with a Dutchman or German than someone from a high power distance culture who will either not call out a bad idea if they are lower rank or bully people if they are higher rank. Fortunately, there is a culture that manages to both be low power distance and professional: mine. Yes, I understand that this is culturally dependent and everyone has their own perspective. My perspective is that Americans do by far the best job of both remembering that their co-workers are people with egos and getting shit done. (I will say that the French that I've worked with in a professional context seem much closer to the American norms of professionalism than a lot of other Europeans).
whatihear
19d ago
For what it’s worth I think one of your two options is the most likely explanation, but this is a false dilemma. There is a third option: non-cis people might be more likely to lie (both to themselves and others) to make themselves seem more interesting.
whatihear
23d ago
As nice as it would be, the United States is not actually capable of trashing an economy by withholding trade. There are other countries out there that Cuba can trade with. If they had a system that worked, they could have enough funds to buy gas. Cutting off trade obviously isn’t great for their economy, but if they managed their country well it would just be a drag on growth.
whatihear
26d ago
I’m a little confused about what you mean by the “actual” energy used to do a thing. Energy is either used for some purpose or it is not. To rephrase what I think you are saying, it sounds like you are refining the energy theory of value to say that things should be valued by the “minimal reasonable” amount of energy used to produce the thing. This seems like a good refinement to me because then you can’t mess with the value of a thing by just making it while sitting in the cab of your idling F350. Is that what you meant?
I still think this is off base, though it does make it harder to trivially produce counter examples. It just seems obvious to me that some lower energy things are much higher value than high energy things. Immaterial services are the most obvious example, but I’ve already talked about that with the doctor example. You say doctors are like more efficient machines, so maybe you agree with me here? Another good example would be high fashion items. Before the “minimal reasonable” refinement you could maybe argue that actually flying the models and designers to the show circuit makes them high energy products, but the “minimal reasonable” refinement rules that argument out.
I do think an energy theory of value gestures at something interesting, but it just seems unable to handle large swaths of the modern economy. Are you actually proposing it as a bedrock principle for an overarching economic theory, or are you just saying it is an interesting idea and an improvement over the labor theory of value. I would agree with the later.
whatihear
28d ago
The energy was spent training the physician before the service was rendered.
This also leads to super silly results. Leaving aside that it would still value the medical advice way below a flight if you do your amortization properly, it also means that different doctors advice would have different value and that difference would have nothing to do with how good they are but instead the fact that one took an elevator to class throughout medical school and the other had classes on lower floors.
whatihear
29d ago
Great write up! Thanks!
How does your energy theory of value deal with high value and low energy services such as medical consultation? How does it deal with more efficient machines? A machine that created 1000 widgets and hour and requires 2 kilowatts to operate is clearly less valuable than a machine which produces the same number of widgets per hour and requires 1 kilowatt. I do think energy is a useful tool for examining economies in general. We can learn useful things by comparing night time light pollution in China with their stated GDP numbers. That doesn’t mean it is a good theoretical basis for a theory of value though. It’s better than labor, but still wrong, and still seems politically motivated. Marx wanted to do a socialist revolution, so he grounded value in labor and I think you may be doing something similar.
For your next book I suggest Human Action by von Mises. He has a similar discussion of theory of value, and I think this “subjective theory of value” makes the most sense of any I’ve heard. Before I read him I just called it the “market theory of value.” Basically he points out that there is no inherent value to a good, value is determined through a process of negotiation with the people around you. The only way to price something is to see what the market will pay for it.
whatihear
29d ago
Isn’t the doctor shortage almost entirely because the AMA restricts medical school class sizes? I know of at least one quite smart and motivated guy who did not get into medical school when he totally should have. People are doing insane resume padding things like working in hospitals for a few years before medical school. The doctors have a midevil guild and they are restricting the supply of labor, patients be damned.
but on the ground, already, in my perfectly respectable, mainstream, upper middle class environment, the reaction was almost universally a certain giddiness and excitement
I was pretty young for 9/11, so my impression was that Europeans had a lot of sympathy and support and only soured on the reaction later. This is a big update for me, so thanks for letting me know. You just converted my contempt for Europeans at your general economic dysfunction, cultural arrogance, churlish ingratitude, and eagerness to commit civilizational suicide into genuine hatred.
Edit: I’m seeing other Europeans in this thread disagreeing with you, so I’m updating back to “leftists are evil everywhere.”
whatihear
1mo ago
Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.
whatihear
1mo ago
Would be funny if we started airdropping guano on islands to annex them in order to avoid having to go to Congress for it.
whatihear
1mo ago
I would mostly agree. This war is over nukes, terrorism, old grudges and regional power. I do think some Iran hawks are hawks for cultural reasons though. At the object level we are jockeying to make Iran less powerful and more compliant, but how we got there is importantly related to their barbaric culture. Part of why a powerful Iran seems like such a bad thing to me is that I don’t want to live in a world where a culture like theirs can project power.
whatihear
1mo ago
Course not. We finished our conquest and settled in behind our comfy double moat so we could switch gears to becoming Leviathan II.
whatihear
1mo ago
I actually find some Christian conservatives pretty off putting because of their views on women as well, however, I’m way more comfortable with them than with Muslims because Christianity is a much bigger tent and as far as I can tell the most distasteful Christian attitudes come from weird low church Christians who as far as I can tell are wrong about their religion. Meanwhile, I’ve read the Quran cover to cover and as far as I can tell ISIS is just mostly right about how to interpret their religion. Of course western Muslims lie to themselves and others about how bad it is (they translate “jihad” to “struggle” when translating the Quran which is obvious dishonesty because “jihad” is a word in English too), but the theological grounding for extremism is so strong in Islam that you can’t trust that a population of moderate Muslims won’t swing to extremism at some later date. The Middle East was way more chill about their religion 200 years ago, but the Quran says what it says, and it’s the revealed word of god.
whatihear
1mo ago
Maybe the feminist angle is not what most right wingers really hate about Islam, but for me at least it is the main thing. I’m somewhat of a western chauvinist and one of the important ways the west is culturally superior is in how we treat our women. Islam’s treatment of women is barbaric and disgusting in and of itself because women are human beings, but it’s also disgusting to me because of how alien it is to my culture. I’m a basic women-are-people equality feminist (a right wing position these days I’m afraid). Maybe I’m not the modal right winger (I’m not that right wing), but while there could be some people from whom the feminist anti Islam line is bad faith, I assure you that it is a real motivating concern for some of us.
whatihear
1mo ago
It’s perfectly possible for dumb people to disagree about policy and to outnumber smart people. Also, since we are talking about the tech right here, the thing about money is very silly. Yes the smart people are very rich in this case.
The point I’m making is that “if you were really smart, you would have power” just is not true in general. Intelligence can help in getting power but it doesn’t always.
whatihear
1mo ago
you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.
In a democracy with lots of dumb people in the electorate, that’s not all that hard to explain. The electorate needs to be good enough at gauging authenticity to pick aligned dumb people over misaligned smart people as their rulers. Actually, the electorate doesn’t even need to be dumb, they could just be angry enough that none of the smart ruler options share their values to just say fuck it.
whatihear
1mo ago
These sound like companies that will fail
All have been well established and successful to varying degrees. I’ve observed this pattern at FAANG, at unicorns, at established enterprise shops, basically everywhere. The only place that seemed to engage with my open source work was a very early stage startup, so maybe it helps there but for the vast majority of tech jobs it just doesn’t matter.
The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.
Just write a virially successful project with enormous buzz bro. It’s a totally viable career path for average devs to become the Twitter main character for a week and land a job!
Obviously this will work for some people, but that doesn’t mean it will for most.
Sounds like you should change careers.
I’ll hang onto the gig where I get overpaid to write fun little programs until it gets automated away, thanks though. I was talking about barely having the energy to do extra unpaid work for fun on open source stuff. That I do it at all means I’m in the top few percent of professional devs passion wise. Open source work is not normal, and if you think it is you must be way out of touch with most of the industry.
whatihear
1mo ago
Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.
If only this were true. I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work in a way that indicates they clicked through the links in my resume and read the well formatted READMEs on the projects I maintain. When I do interviews, the rubrics I’m supposed to work towards don’t have any way to include an assessment of open source work, and other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work. The general sentiment seems to be that evaluating open source work is unfair to people who’ve done their work in corporate environments. I’m sure there are some hiring managers in some companies who can and do use it as a signal, but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill. It’s not terrible advice because it can’t hurt, it’s just not the magic foot in the door some people hope it would be. There’s no magic key if you’re early career, especially these days. I feel bad for the youngsters.
Your networking advice sounds good, but I find it exhausting and I know a lot of great hackers do to (not claiming to be one of them). Building your personal brand is probably great for your career, but I want to write code, not win instagram to get a job. Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.
Maybe “upper middle class” isn’t the right term for them, especially at the higher end, but the fact remains that anyone whose wealth is primarily drawn from their own labor is just not in the same category as people who derive their wealth from owning. There are a few exceptions like CEOs who manage established companies rather than founding, but for the most part the people paying the very high income taxes are not the super wealthy. When the super wealthy do pay high income taxes, it’s generally pretty trivial compared with the main bulk of their wealth. If you don’t want to call top earners who can save low double digit millions “upper middle class,” that’s fine, but it is import to distinguish them from billionaires and centimillionares.
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