roosterdawn
You got it. As always, it's the gross margins. Cocaine has higher gross margins than most prescription drugs, which in and of themselves are almost pure margin -- nevermind that, the market demand for it is broad and deep globally. Cartel operators aren't dumb. On the contrary, they show much of the unsavory, warlord like aspects of doing many kinds of business where there are zero-sum dynamics like this -- they just don't even try and hide it.
> There's a whole real-life social network out there, and they definitely aren't inviting the programmers.
Is that really the case? Or is it just the case that they're not inviting the kind of "programmers" that GP knows/is (and for what it's worth, I consider myself an engineer, not a programmer)? For what it's worth, as a 30 year old "just an IC" in tech, I know a lot more HNI individuals and "high status" people (supermodels, executives, musicians, scions) /and/ find it way easier to get meetings with folks in /their/ network if I want to than my peers from university who were just as ambitious as I was and who went into law, management consulting, banking, or academia.
While I wouldn't say my experience is necessarily indicative of the average IC in my field or world, it is certainly not unique; indeed, my managers at previous firms took very similar trajectories. But then again, this is based on my experience in NYC. As the world is changing, I do think there is an increasingly accelerating understanding that the wheels of power are increasingly being seized by technology, and that those who utilize it to do so have the world as their oyster.
That's I think where I disagree. I would say that wealth is almost always a consequence of status and influence than the reverse, with maybe the express exception of CS/tech because of US entrepreneur/startup culture -- even that is debatable, but we can at least come up with examples, in large part because tech is so young as a field. If tech is, say, 50 years old compared to common law which is 2000+ years old, to what extent should we really be drawing comparisons and to what extent should we be saying "well, the /field/ is up in the air even if human socioeconomic relations are not"?
Here in the US, you rarely study computer science to become a computer scientist but rather to be a highly paid engineer or eventually obscenely wealthy founder. The same is true for philosophers, authors, politicians and composers; increasingly, the same is true for biology, physics and even law. You study these (or any of these fields) to show some ability for abstract thought to get you into the career of your choosing.
In the US, notably, the field you actually study increasingly seems to have little to do with what you do later on in life; that all seems to do with your socioeconomic class, who you make buddies with in early schooling, who your parents know. It doesn't matter if you study law at Harvard if you don't come from wealth; and likewise, it doesn't matter if you study CS if you come from wealth. And inside the middle class to upper middle class, studying either field isn't very likely to break you into the upper class; only starting/scaling a business will.
Looking at members of the senate is also not very useful. Sure, "computer scientists" may not be represented in the Senate. But wealthy "applied computer scientists" who started companies (Bezos, Gates, etc) hire lobbying firms that essentially purchase the behavior of these senators wholesale. They have more clout than entire nation states.
Still, with that said, there's a difference between clout and high social status. But I observe that high social status is something that pertains to caste and heredity, not necessarily field of study.
I respectfully disagree, and would gladly take the counterpoint to that argument. You will find the intersection of the three inside of many real world engineering problems. On the contrary, I am skeptical of the idea that applications in any one particular area don't have corresponding mirror images in the other two. Based on achievements in all three (research, engineering and trade), it is my opinionated belief that a focus on the intersection is where you create compounding value. I would love to hear a compelling counter-argument.
I cannot agree with this. Embedded in this argument is the idea that syntactic specialization towards pedagogy is a worthwhile goal rather than ramping up a pupil towards where they'd be able to function independently as a software engineer by giving them a solid theoretical and applied foundation.
Part of being an engineer is learning how the quirks of the language evolved, the history of how it got to be that way, and what it means in terms of the long term evolution of the language and ecosystem as collectively reasoned through by the eyes of skilled practitioners. You get to see the decision making process of language design, and how the plan became a prototype became a battle hardened tool that can adequately work in a variety of real situations, well enough to gain a significant plurality (or mindshare) for a specific real world use case.
Just because studying Latin is useful for understanding English at a deeper level doesn't mean it's a good idea to learn Latin before learning english. It doesn't change the fact that a) immersion is the best way to build fluency, and b) fluency is the goal, does it? What makes programming languages any different?
Perhaps that could be because Veblenian entrepreneurship, like most entrepreneurship, is made possible through higher margins. I always parade out this 2S Ventures post about the importance of margins [1] because it really drives the point home. On the contrary, "innovation" based businesses require a large variety of environmental factors to succeed, ranging from cultural ones to regulatory and logistic ones. And there is indeed no guarantee that an innovative business is necessarily one with higher gross margins than an incumbent whose products/services it would seek to unseat even if there is societal benefit, so the business may not intrinsically be attractive to investors.
So it is with this piece here. Its explanations of new business formation targeted at conspicuous consumption are targeted towards academics concerned with earlier explorations of these areas, rather than practitioners. I think the possibility of it being thought provoking for the first group while common sense for the second group is where the irony comes in -- presumably, it was intended to be the other way around!
[1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...
You can apply this approach to more complex commodities to theorize about the upper limits, but I think this is a good way to get started.
I suppose where I want to see evidence (and it's not because I don't intuitively believe it -- it does seem to make sense to me) is considering the idea that "many Americans once took their local communities much more seriously than they do now." I don't doubt that such a thing is the case, but it's important to remember that historically, America was the country you went to in order to homestead, to be a pioneer, to discover the frontier. It's true that some degree of community was a part of this, but so too was the idea of exploring the unknown. The mechanisms of immigration, frontier settling, and of course genocide were part and parcel of American existence up until settling was complete, "coast to coast".
What I'm getting at is that maybe the individualism that the environment self selected for during much of America's early growth set in place some momentum that continues going beyond when it generally creates only positive exponentiation. Now, as America has continued to grow up over the past century, it begins to grapple with how to conduct a society inside a universe which is not expanding for everyone the same way it used to. Is the lack of community potentially a second order effect which is downstream from this? And does that combine with the almost sousveillance state level visibility everyone has into everyone else's life, vis a vis the only very recent ascent of the "reality show" as a dominant force of cultural production?
> the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?
I'm not sure that's historically accurate. The connection between pederasty and upper caste aristocracy goes back to Greek civilization, if not earlier, and is its own kind of a cultural reproduction mechanism that seemed to have elements of both mentorship and romance. Without a doubt, it's something that I still see today in elite circles.
> The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem
I think I'd beg to disagree -- not with the product of the ecosystem part, but with the idea that it's cultural rather than socioeconomic and caste based. And maybe this comes back to my point earlier, which is a friction point that maybe both the IQ shredder concept and this article fail to account for, which is a certain degree of lifestyle dynamism.
That is to say, is that finance guy stuck as a finance guy forever? Or does he eventually accumulate enough wealth before moving on to a separate phase of his life, one where he can have a family of whatever size he wants with the best partner he can find that will take him? Because if that's the case, then maybe both the IQ shredder and Idiocracy argument perhaps only serve a useful function when referring to the lower and middle class, and fail to account for the upper class. And this, too seems to make intuitive sense to me: even as we see the middle class hollowed out, the upper class in America (and maybe across the world) continue to see increased prosperity at levels never before seen in history.
> If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.
I think the warning against dualistic frames is fair to keep in mind. But if you have a non-dualistic frame, that "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" then I think that it's equally fair to warn that a frame which conflates an observed scenario to as a dystopic frame rather than evidence of an apoptotic mechanism could itself be the flawed frame.
Further from where? For better or worse, America has always been a deeply individualist country. Is it maybe the case that now the less savory consequences of that are more visible than ever before?
I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does. Even, or especially by a fertility cult. I remember this being one of the central, disturbingly dystopic outcomes that Mike Judge's Idiocracy tried to address.
A lot of progressive technocrats look at model citizens with technologically harnessed upward mobility. They observe and want to enable global movement towards this. But if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default? Wouldn't that be a local maximum? Without some kind of mechanism in place to address that, the progression has no guarantee of continuing. And this could lead to the dystopic scenario outlined in the film.
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Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an increase in talent.”
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.
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I think that the concern you touched upon is essentially the lose-lose quagmire that we as a country arrived at during the onset of the cold war, a war that I believe never truly ended. To answer your question: the problem with mutually assured destruction doctrine is that it necessarily results in an arms race that no superpower can pull out of. Sadly, I question whether a country can be a superpower without also trending more in the authoritarian direction.
Learning how to copy things is an art in and of itself. A lot of engineers (myself included) got into the craft by taking things apart and putting them back together again. It's true that you cannot become a good engineer /only/ by doing this, as at some point, you must learn how to create things from scratch that you've never taken apart and never put together before. It's true that teaches you a lot, but I think it's a little bit of a stretch to imply that it's the only thing that can teach you.
At a certain point, I stopped looking to new gear (as it pertains to music) and started focusing on trying to push the boundaries of what I had. As it turns out, I wasn't anywhere near close to pushing what I had to its limits, which proved I should just focus on technique and craftsmanship. Since then, I've grown a lot more.
Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.