csa
The stakes Sam is playing for isn’t yachts. It’s power.
I think he lives in enough of a bubble that he’s starting to believe his own hubris.
I don’t think this will end the way he thinks it will.
Sure.
I think the poster you are replying to is trying to say that the “k-shaped” economy is incentivizing the market to cater only to the high end and simply ignoring the low end.
A few businesses I own are dealing with this issue now. It’s just much more profitable and logistically easier for them to charge what seems like an absurd price, justify it with some inexpensive “white-glove” service, and just ignore the rest of the market.
On the one hand, this is a tribute to modern marketing that high value-add products and services can match with customers more efficiently. On the other hand, it has the potential to create a bizarre “race to the top” such that only suckers will cater to anything other than the top 1% of their target market (in terms of wealth / willingness and capacity to pay).
Where I currently live, this is happening with frightening efficiency with health care. Almost all of the “good” PCP doctors are going concierge, and the concierge prices are increasing at a rapid clip.
Large swathes of education research are extremely questionable due to things like limited or no ability to be reproduced, circular references, or just straight up fraud.
The more that something that falls under the moniker of “education research” is built on the foundation of a more traditional (and typically more rigorous) academic discipline, the less likely that it is bogus research (e.g., Howard Gardner’s core research on multiple intelligences, which was science based on aphasic patients), versus the derived works on MI, many/most of which are bunk that he does not endorse).
> Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
This is just a cloze exercise. These can have a legitimate role in a learning environment when used appropriately.
I’m going to take your comments at face value. I encourage you to find a good salesperson and shadow them for a day or two.
> why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it?
Do you assume most people actually read product info? If they do, so you assume they understand it? The answer to both of those is a resounding “no” (especially in areas that change rapidly like tech and medicine), even if it doesn’t apply to you. For some potential customers this is due to lack of time, and for others it’s simply lack of ability.
A good sales person is finding and connecting their product or service with customers who will find value with their product or service. “Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door” has largely been shown to be untrue.
> why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn?
There is a lot to unpack here.
Commission-based pay can be debated, but I assure you that any system that yielded better results consistently would become the new standard fairly quickly. It is what it is.
The amount sales people earn is generally based on two things — their relative value to the company and the market for sales people. Losing one key salesperson to a competitor can mean the end of a lot of small businesses.
The “schmoozer” comment can simply be addressed by saying that some people are more likely to pay for a product or service from someone they know or like. This might be a rational criterion in some cases, irrational in others, but it’s very real.
> The workers create value, and are paid the least.
Workers do create some value for sure. Matchmaking the customer to the product or service also has value. You may not personally believe that, but the market seems to.
The relative amounts of pay are largely market driven, imho.
The subtle but profound ways those generations have experienced being essentially abandoned by the government and “Japan Inc” will have a lasting impact on Japan for many decades to come.
There are some leaders who actually grasp the problem and actually have decent ideas for solutions, but the will and capacity to execute those ideas just isn’t there.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
1. You may want to work on your reading comprehension skills.
2. You would probably benefit from being more curious and less certain.
You won’t get any argument from me that most teachers are poorly trained. Money can largely buy someone out of that trap.
That said, just forbidding a tool that is critical in modern life just because some/many people are bad at using it does not strike me as a particularly constructive solution to the problem.
> I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
My “solution” to this is not a popular one. Lower expectations for public mass education.
Over the last 120 years, we have taken a curriculum that was targeted at elites and forced it onto almost everyone.
High quality education should be available and cheap or free to everyone, but I really don’t think it should be mandatory.
If we stopped compulsory education at 8th grade and replaced most high schools with some sort of other skill development program or work/study program, the expectations and outcomes would probably be better aligned.
Large parts of the tertiary education system would be gutted, but maybe that’s a good thing.
Yes, many sales people or even whole sales teams are effectively dead weight, but a highly-skilled sales team is a godsend both to the company and the economy.
We should all be wishing for more effective sales teams — the world would be a better place.
Most people have never experienced a good sales team, so I’m guessing this sounds like total fiction.
That’s a very engineer type of take.
Both middle management and HR serve roles that are believed to be useful to someone (maybe not you).
Often it is some form of protection by serving as a fall guy or complying with regulations, but it can be other things (e.g., increasing headcount/budget to gain power, etc.).
That’s a very uncharitable reading.
I have made my mark in the world by exploiting the Achilles’ heels of “authority figures” (which is usually just some form of a lack of empathy). I have caused a few to fall, I’ve made others reform, and I’m just an annoyance to many others. I have trained others to do the same.
That said, I could get whacked out of existence figuratively or literally if I crossed the wrong person or group.
There are others like me, but (as I mentioned before) we aren’t always easy to find.
I know the above may seem grandiose, but I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about these “authority figures” since I was a kid. I’ve done something about it, but I also didn’t choose to bang my head against a wall and call it progress.
Three claims of propagandists with agendas.
While I do think AI will be disruptive like other tech advances, I think the manner and extent to which it could cause trouble is rarely discussed in a way that will be looked back on as resembling what actually ends up happening.
Having been to a school like that, I agree with you. I had to learn those lessons quickly.
I largely opted out of being in the middle of that world, but I am still adjacent to it due to its ubiquitousness.
> The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
I was a product of an environment like that (magnet school with a lot of unstructured time and good access to resources), and it didn’t take me very long to run into the Binary Authoritarian Figures’ version of “you and what army?”, and they were largely correct.
There are ways to undermine parts of the establishment, sometimes even at scale, but the process is not always obvious or easy to access.
Can you give us an example to what his looks like in your context (not necessarily you and your kids)?
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results
Laptops, tablets, and AI are just tools. If the folks wielding these tools (or ostensibly teaching others to wield these tools) are not using a tool effectively, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the outcomes are unimpressive.
Simple example — put a hammer in the hands of a skilled builder, and you can get a deck or a house frame. Put the same hammer in my hands, and you will get nothing more than bent nails and sore thumbs.
All that said, just like I feel confident that I could learn how to use a hammer well if I took the time to learn and practice, I think students and teachers can learn to use their tools (laptops, tablets, AI, etc.) well if they take the time to learn and practice (ideally with some good scaffolding).
Simple example pitch that many general practitioners might consider using (based on local laws, of course):
“Insurance covers C, Y, and Z. I can offer these additional services for A, B, and C that are not covered by insurance.”
Where I live, you get a lot of this via “concierge doctors”, but that system can go far beyond basic concierge service, and people are willing to pay for top quality care.
Streamlining everything. Sometimes this is done in a bad faith way, but it’s often not difficult to do it in a good faith way.
Some simple examples:
- right-sizing staff (can be reducing, increasing, or changing roles)
- improving marketing (e.g., simple things like customer reactivation, packaging the product/service better, or just plain, ol’ getting the word out better via stuff like before/after pics or success stories)
- improving operations (e.g., better organization, better processes, better communication, better training, better logistics, etc.)
> Delivering better profit margins?
Improved profit margins are a byproduct of the things listed above.
Yes, I have. In the US. Some were active military personnel at the time.
Some folks are just warped, but some folks change a lot after they have experienced war.
Maybe for top tier play, but apm wasn’t really needed for regular play.
Just to debunk this myth, it used to be possible to get to diamond with 80-100 apm (which is very easy to achieve), efficient builds, fundamental rush defense, and a-move.
Not sure about now, but it was doable for many years.
It’s not a credible take.
> You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society
Agree. I think only dysfunctional weirdos actually think that’s what AI will do.
> to look anything like our current society
Who says our current society is at its apex? I don’t think it is. I think we have a ton of upside left to explore.
If our society looks like it is now 10-20 years from now, I will feel like we will have failed miserably. I am willing to bet that it will be much better.
This will not happen in my lifetime.
It may do some. It may even do a lot. It will certainly augment close to 100% the remote jobs.
AI will never be able to “do every job that is remote”.
That has been enough for a couple of centuries, and it still may be the path. Sadly, skewed voter participation rates mean that even voting isn’t necessarily sufficient to have a government that more accurately represents the electorate.
> read the New York Times
Most people don’t do this, even liberals. The NYT has lost its magic.
> and show up to glorified block parties.
Fair, but maybe that’s the right amount of protest by American standards.
> Where is the rioting over NSPM-7?
Almost no one knows what it is. If they did, many of them would support it.
> Where are the assassinations?
Well, tried and missed. There are also probably credible failed attempts that have not been publicly announced.
> Where's the fucking self respect?
No shortage of that.
> Of course capital is going to treat americans like the doormat they are.
Sure. That’s capital.
> But yes, continue to shove your head up your ass because that's more comforting than realizing that despite all the propaganda, liberals & social democrats learned absolutely nothing from the Weimar Republic
Hmmm… that’s not really constructive or accurate.
IMHO, liberals have really dropped the ball in terms of presidential candidates since Obama. They also dropped the ball by leaning hard into DEI and extremely lax immigration enforcement — two policies that are not widely supported as implemented.
A consequence of those decisions is that voters in swing states had to choose between the lesser of two evils, and it wasn’t necessarily clear to those voters at the time which one would be worse.
There are some folks, Buttigieg being one, who are talking the right talk. It really just boils down to whether the democrats can be unified in promoting universal policies that help everyone (rather than niche groups) and vote accordingly.
“Liberals” in the US can be somewhat snowflaky, so I’m not sure how likely that is to happen. That said, the ham-fisted policies of the current administration may unite them. Time will tell.
Please don’t spread propaganda.
I’ve seen admissions evolve over decades. Your take strikes me as very uninformed and shaped by certain agenda-driven media narratives.
A generous interpretation supporting your thesis is that AA spots took away spots from very marginal asian and white students. Marginal asian and white admits even at Harvard are usually not terribly impressive, such that I’m not sure that this trade is a loss for the school or the student body.
An interpretation that doesn’t support your thesis is that the admissions process at elite schools put a tremendous amount of value on community involvement for AA candidates.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the latter is discrimination. I’m not a lawyer, so maybe it is, but I don’t think I’ve ever met an AA candidate that wasn’t bringing something else quite compelling to the table. That said, I’ve met plenty of asian and white marginal admits that did not bring much to the table (student: “woohoo, I study a lot” me: “yes, you do, and you’re bad at it”).
People act like so many deserving asians and/or whites were denied spots due to AA, when the reality is that the folks who theoretically “lost” a spot were already so marginal that admission was a bit of a crapshoot anyway. They would have just been warm bodies used to fill out the class with very low expectations of contributing to the school or the community. Snarky take, but that’s the reality.
Yeah. We are talking about different types of schools.
For one, Cal and UCLA both admit a lot of students. It’s just not as competitive. Additionally, it’s fairly easy for a decent grinder student to go to a feeder JuCo and transfer to either of these schools (which would be a fine outcome for the “ESL immigrant parents” you gave as an example).
Second, while Cal and UCLA are top-tier public schools (along with schools like UMich, UVa, and UTexas), I don’t consider them elite in terms of undergrad programs [1]. Any resident of California who gets into Stanford or an Ivy would be able to get into either of those (excepting anomalies like unusually high departmental requirements at some UC schools like Cal).
So sure, if the goal (esp. for California residents) is to get into a UC school, going the grinder route is fine — overkill in most cases, but fine. This will be less than ideal if they are also considering elite schools like Stanford or Ivies.
[1] What makes an undergrad program elite? The short answer is drive and the ability to get things done.
If you take the top 1000 admits from Stanford and compare them to the top 1000 admits at Cal, you may not see much difference in terms of raw intellect — plenty of super smart people in both groups. But the Stanford students will be more ambitious, they will push each other much harder (and in most cases learn more), and they will achieve more than the Cal students. Note that this isn’t a knock on Cal students — it’s just a different way of approaching school and life that is quite apparent when you interact with enough folks from each group.
Stanford, an elite school, can and does select for these traits. Cal just can’t be as picky due to the large number of admits and certain state policies.
That’s true for sports, music, and academics, but I think “grinding” exceptional leadership can be a thing. It’s very learnable, and effort often times makes the difference.
Some simple examples I’ve seen in various forms:
- starting a meaningful business or non-profit
- starting a meaningful arts or sports experience (literary magazine, regional film festival, regional sports event/tournament, etc.)
- many/most substantial Eagle Scout projects (not all are substantial enough)
The heuristic I tell people to use is this — the reader of the application will go “no kidding… I’d really like to talk to this person and learn more about this” (aka “have a beer with them” type of sentiment)
> Grinding 15 hours a day is a more realistic option for most children and parents.
See above… grind at the right thing. Full-time grinding academics is a fools errand unless the applicant can demonstrate their competence at a regional level, if not national or international level.
The person whose view you endorse supports what many parents believe. I’ve seen how the sausage is made, and he has it (mostly) wrong.
Many people seem to think that being more above average is the key to elite school admissions. It helps, and it’s directionally correct (one needs to show academic competence), but the key is to be truly exceptional in something.
Five extracurriculars is almost the same as one or even none if there was no demonstration of exceptional performance or leadership.
Taking the max load of AP classes versus just a few is not as helpful as people seem to think. Using one’s time to do something unique and/or exceptional would be time much better spent.
I beat this drum as often as I can here and elsewhere, but the upper middle class folks in that particular rat race don’t seem interested in hearing what I’m saying.
For most schools, it’s the opposite.
For folks qualified to get in, they will be selected. For folks at the marginal threshold, it’s luck of the draw.
> Clearly the entire thing is broken.
I agree with your sentiment, but for opposite reason. We need to scale down the number of people at R1 schools and develop a more robust system of technical and trade schools (imho).
The spreadsheet types have taken over the universities from the professors (it started decades ago), so I don’t think that this change will happen unless and until the current system implodes.
Thank you for this gift. This combo has entered my lexicon.
You forgot a decimal there.
If you want to fund your kids’ elite education and you can’t front the cash, you can take out the loan or agree to pay a loan they take.
Plus, your $300k bonus (maybe $150k after taxes) will go a long way towards financing this obligation.