oramit

So much ink has been spilled on the "disconnect" between the public mood (very bad based on polling) while on paper Americans are wealthier than ever. The author's focus is the upper middle class because he's a wealth manager but the theory I've been mulling over in my head is something that is hitting everyone.

Customer surplus has been optimized away. Or put more simply: deals have disappeared.

Honest question for you - when is the last time you were just out and about, not really looking, and said to yourself "wow that's a good deal" from a find?

It happened to me once last year and it hit me like a lightning bolt that I used to feel that regularly and now it was a novel experience. Not even a decade ago companies priced things more aggressively and there was a sense of pride in making things broadly available. The customer was king and all that.

Post-covid though, instead of leaving some surplus on the table, including a bunch of extras, and trying to please as many people as possible, the relationship has completely flipped. Companies now proudly price things and engage in business practices that are design to extract as much as possible and turn people away. Customer service everywhere has gone down the tubes. Take it or leave it is now the default behavior of most companies.

It's a phenomenon related to inflation and enshittification but more anti-social which is why I think it hurts more. Instead of approaching most business interactions with a baseline feeling of positivity I now have to actively defend myself from being taken advantage of everywhere. Even paying more to get a "premium" experience isn't a defense. No wonder everyone is miserable.

If you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?

I had to check the year on this post because I couldn't believe someone could post something this naive in 2025.

With the current data we have there's simply no good policy reason to cut interest rates.

Inflation is either staying elevated or slightly increasing. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/pce-inflation-report-july-20...

The jobs reports are bad, yes, but cutting interest rates is not gonna have any effect there. Companies are actively trimming their workforce or not hiring for macroeconomic/policy reasons like tariffs that have nothing to do with the FED. There simply isn't any meaningful connection between unemployment and rate cuts. No executive is sitting around waiting for a .25 rate cut to hire a bunch of employees when all the other economic data is flashing red. Hell, even the FED themselves say this and point out correctly that lowering interest rates to "help" employment doesn't work especially in an elevated inflation environment.

"When discussing this trade-off, it is important to emphasize that, since the stagflation of 1970s, the consensus position among macroeconomists is that loose monetary policy can easily lead to high inflation without persistent gains in lowering unemployment rates. Therefore, a guiding principle of post-1980s monetary policy has been that it should not be used to try to achieve permanently higher employment." https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...

But of course, we have already passed through the authoritarian looking glass and the Trump regime doesn't even bother to lie badly about their justifications at this point. Trump wants lower interest rates therefore they should happen. Anything else is noise.

People keep making the mistake of thinking that there is any sort of logical consistency to Trump policies.

Yes. The founding mythos of Silicon Valley is of plucky upstarts destroying all the middle men and dis-empowering the establishment.

But now tech is the establishment and has all the power so that story isn't useful anymore. Instead they are justified in their control because they were so successful and are so wealthy. To fight against them is to fight against "progress" and "the market has decided".

Put another way: "The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny"

I think you're being too kind in assuming there is some sort of real philosophy or faith here. I laid out what I have observed the tech elite doing precisely to show that they are rootless and will join with whatever bandwagon is popular in their techbro circle.

It's the great irony of our tech elite. They all believe they are independent thinkers who are changing the world but like any clique they follow what the group says and found another Sass App or become another VC investor.

It's been interesting to watch and experience Techbros jump on different philosophical/religious trends over the years. Post 9/11 through the Great Financial Crisis New Atheism was all the rage. Once the tech boom was in full swing Stoicism became the dominant ideology.

Now, post Covid I see a hard pivot towards Christianity, but importantly, "traditional" forms of it. Protestant sects are being ignored and Catholicism, or if you are really intense, Orthodoxy seems to be in vogue.

As a fan of Georgism and Land Value Taxation I was hoping for a good rebuttal but I am mostly just left confused by this article. It spends a ton of time talking about the political environment (not entirely uninteresting) and almost nothing on the "failure" part. The two points raised were that it was too difficult to implement and less was raised than expected. LVT being too difficult to implement doesn't make any sense to me. We already have a property tax system in the United States that is really complicated. When property is sold that fact is recorded at your local county registrar. Property taxes are then calculated based on the most recent sales price, the rate, your tax districts, there's usually limits on how much it can increase, all sorts of deductions, etc. This is calculated down to the owner level for every plot already - how can LVT be more complicated than that?

This line in particular stuck out to me: "What’s more, in line with Georgist theory, the tax was supposed to credit owners for improvements they made to the land"

I think we're talking about different LVT systems here. The current property tax system takes land improvements into account (and charges you more for them). My understanding is that LVT should be a flat tax on acreage (different tax rates for different areas of course) that doesn't care about what is on it.

This article is attacking a very different LVT than the one I know.

Why this amorphous "the government" wording? The people elected Congress and Presidents, who did this over decades with popular support. Executive agencies are not unaccountable. They have specific charters and there is a huge volume of rules they have to follow. eg:(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act). Congress writes their budgets every year and the heads of those agencies are reviewed at congressional and presidential levels.

"Hitting a few singles and doubles beats trying to hit a home run and striking out."

As game developers and publishers have consolidated into mega corps this line just isn't true anymore. You need a billion dollar game to move the corporate needle these days. It's a very similar dynamic to what has happened in Hollywood. All the mid-budget projects are being squeezed out and you either go very low budget/indie or you go huge budget and swing for the fences. There is no career reward in the current corporate marketplace for modest wins.

I don't think this is heresy at all. I read this and just think you have a giant blind spot because you seem to be assuming that the way you learn is universally applicable.

I went to an unremarkable state school where I had classes with a hundred other students. Even my senior level courses were about a dozen to one teacher ratio. I still remember my professors and specific moments during their lectures when I was able to ask a follow up question which triggered that Eureka moment we're all looking for.

I wish I was able to just sit down with a textbook and learn a meaty subject but that doesn't work for me. I, and many others, need (or at least it helps a lot) the academic structure to learn effectively. The academic calendar, lectures, textbooks, homework, and other students you can study with all work in concert. The way you're dismissing all of that strikes me as really myopic.

There are many examination authorities but employers basically ignore all of them and have gone all in on college degrees as the signal for employment. In that way colleges are gatekeepers to higher level jobs, but they're hardly the only actor here.

Every 5 years or so a new food bogeyman appears and all the fitness/diet influencers hop on the bandwagon and blame every ill on it. Seeds Oils are just the most recent of these memes pushed by the power of group think as opposed to the power of the evidence. I think only the carnivore diet people are more out of touch right now...

I really wish there was a magic bullet to the obesity epidemic. An ingredient we can just stop using, or a diet that will fix all our problems - but that's just not realistic. The evidence points to this being a messy multivariate problem that extends beyond just diet to things like lifestyle, poverty, and cultural norms.

It's so much easier to believe that "with this one trick" we can fix everything but when has that ever worked? Thanks to the author for writing this up.

I definitely listed the most egregious rules first. Those silly and overbearing laws exist though and have the same force as entirely valid ones like keeping trees along the coast to avoid erosion.

In isolation each rule is defensible (to varying degrees), but when we step back and look at the whole, we've created a regulatory environment that is hostile to development at every step. It's death by a thousand cuts. Big government through a massive collection of tiny rules.

Therein lies the real problem and why this keeps getting worse. There's no political will (probably because there's no political reward) in doing that sort of systemic analysis of the rules. What is actually essential? What is nice to have? What would be great but increases costs so much that it's not worth it?

The incredible thicket of state, county, and municipal rules all layer and combine to make housing incredibly difficult to build. It's the technical debt of the material world.

Seriously, look up your local zoning rules. It's not "you can't build a chemical plant next to a preschool" like it's so often portrayed. It's minimum size for the lot, max square footage of the house based on lot size, max/min frontage, height allowances, max garage sizes, minimum number of trees, number of windows.... etc.

It really just goes on like that, and then to top it off, you can be totally compliant with code and still not be approved. Either because of local incompetence (building permits stuck "in review" for years) or because of local opposition.

Yeah I used to listen to them quite a bit back in the day but in the lead up to the 2016 election they became insufferable. There was one Clinton story in particular they kept bringing up so I went through their show notes to the source and sure enough they were mischaracterizing everything about it. I emailed John pointing this out and he emailed back with one of the most dismissive replies I've ever gotten.

"this is an excellent deep analysis that I credit the show for."

Wow, thanks John, I'm glad I have the show to credit for doing some basic analysis.

This is one of my big annoyances as well. Whatever happened to the idea of electricity that was too cheap to measure?

It sounds like something is wrong with your installation. That behavior certainly isn't normal for heat pumps and I would get a new vendor. I had a heatpump in my Condo and those things were rock solid, from 20 degrees to 110 I never had issues. In my new house we have a gas furnace and are experiencing the same behavior this winter you describe where the programmed temp and the actual temp in the room wildly diverge.

Just this morning I woke up to it feeling chilly. The thermostat said it was 65 and the programmed temp was 68 but it wasn't running. When the furnace runs it works great but something is off with the controller system. I need to call the heating people....

Yeah this list seems to be pretty low quality stuff. There's a couple economic/political links that I think are interesting but I can totally see why they would be removed as off-topic or likely to produce a flamewar.

It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.

The 2020 elections were such a shitshow on PredictIt. So many trades were skewed by partisan bias that it was shockingly easy to make money. My favorite trade that year was for some reason the "market" was pricing in a lower turnout in 2020 vs 2016. I grabbed a strip of the over bets at big discounts. I still to this day don't understand what people were thinking with their bets there. A hugely contested election during a pandemic when there was nothing else to do, of course there was going to be huge turnout!

In the last year of my last job I took on recruiting and mentoring tasks as one of my goals for the year. Management encouraged it, I got great feedback all year, and in my annual retrospective I highlighted it as a big win. When the annual review came around though it got no mention and I was basically punished for taking on those tasks because my billable time went down a small amount, even though we all knew (and agreed) that would happen. That, and other reasons, are why I found a new job the next month.

My experience is the same as yours OP. Hiring just isn't treated with any respect and your career will probably suffer if you take it on.

Now that i've finished complaining... I think there's a good reason for this behavior. In the US, where most of our posters are from, you can fire people for any or no reason. It's true that you can put in more effort at the beginning of the hiring process to find better candidates but you won't really know if they are a good fit until they work there for a while. You can have great candidates on paper who don't work out in person, and terrible candidates on paper who are great on the job. This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous?

"They provide high quality care at a reasonable price."

What's the cost to the patient for this boutique care?

Also makes me think of the quote often attributed to Churchill though there is no evidence he said it. "Americans will always do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all the alternatives"

Caffeine pretty much every day, I can only have it in the mornings though or it interferes with sleep. Alcohol a few times a week, usually just one or two drinks. Now that i'm mid thirties the booze hits me much harder than before and hangovers are easy to get. Pot gummies on the weekend when I want to relax. I know quite a few heavy users who will smoke a couple joints then go do yardwork - crazy. If I have any i'm eating a heavy meal and playing video games. I sleep great with it. I started smoking cigars over the pandemic, only a couple times a month, you certainly get a nicotine buzz that is kind of nice. It is smelly though so I don't do it often and it's more for the ritual and relaxation than the buzz. Amyl nitrates for other recreation.

Wow writing that all out makes me look like a degenerate :)

"Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law."

Wow, I knew that labor laws in the US were toothless but to have it spelled out like this is so depressing. A max penalty of ~15k per violation, just bravo team, bravo.

Thanks for linking this. I needed a good chuckle this morning.

On a more serious note. I'm gay and if you want to know why Pride parades, Pride month, and being out is so important, it's this sort of rhetoric. Calls for "biblical morality" and "homosexual crimes" to be punished are coded calls for our destruction. This sort of thinking is always absolutist and apocalyptic. There is nothing I can do to "tone it down" that will make them happy. They simply want us dead. Being out is the only real defense we have because we then go from a demonized other to just your friend, coworker, or family member.

We're here, we're queer - fuck off.

Health benefits and it pays pretty well. This is the sort of side hustle that used to be popular on this site :)

Anxiety is certainly part of it but I think it's simpler than that. We can't be "on" all the time. We need hobbies, distractions, and escape just as much as we need productive work. As the author notes though, this escape can become all consuming and ultimately hurt the person.

While the author compares his problem to Alcohol addiction I was struck by the sentence: "It's gotten to the point where I don't really enjoy the video as much as the numb hypnotic state from consuming that much content."

This to me matches up most with gambling addiction. There is a great book on the subject that I recommend to the Author called "Addiction by Design" by Natasha Schull. The main thrust of her argument is that machine gambling addicts don't care about winning at all but have found gambling machines (slots, video poker mostly) as a reliable way to activate that "flow" state where the rest of the world falls away. It's mostly a study of the problem, very sobering, and there are some good resources at the end for getting help.

I think we're all addicted to this "flow" state. When it happens during programming it's the best feeling ever. Hours go by, no technical hurdle is too big, I can make more progress in 4 hours than 4 days of regular work, and everything just makes sense. I come out of it always wishing I could activate that feeling on command, but it never works reliably for productive things. Only vices, unfortunately.

While framing the watching of a movie as "serious" is probably a bit much I do agree that going to the cinema is a great exercise in focus. The whole place is setup for watching movies and when I'm there I feel engrossed in a way that doesn't happen at home for me. At home everything I watch sort of blurs together into a smear of "content". I can think back on the things I've watched and I do have favorites but I don't have the same visceral memories I have for movies I've seen in the theater. I remember where I was, who I was with, and all the feelings the movie conjured up.

It is certainly less convenient than streaming at home and does cost more but I get the same amount (at least) of entertainment in the moment and the memories are certainly more vivid. That has to be worth something?