Conversation

Scheming a move back to the Seattle area by end of year. Plan B is now Chicago area. I’d guess 15-70-15 percent chances of staying in SoCal, back to Seattle, out to Midwest Need some sort of cunning leveraged way to do the move though. This one’s hopefully long-term.
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Wife: “Why can’t you be a lifeguard, didn’t you used to be a competitive swimmer in college” Me (former embarrassment at “waterboy” on waterpolo team): “Did you see what the Rock did on Baywatch? I can’t do that” But seriously no future for me in 200k-lifeguard geographies
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Weird labor dynamics of software eaten world make value of money illegible Nurses on burnout pay Cops get paid huge amounts to play dress up Lifeguards get paid like baywatch stars Doctors do data entry in EMS systems to work off student loans and pay for malpractice insurance
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Doesn’t help that financialized ownership (aka PE firms own hospitals based on elective surgery theses and end up cutting costs in pandemic year??!) distorts things even further Plus investment income drives real estate Funhouse mirror world
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The best argument to work a standard careerist job is literally that the bizarre fantasy numbers are designed to add up properly relative to them. The crazy kinda balances out somehow. This is really what “market” solutions are.
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A “job” is like html that validates because it is syntactically well-formed. The content need not make sense. Conversely consensus high-value work in non-jobs may not “render” at all. The economy of a tight societal unit like a city need not make any kind of human sense
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People demanding that AIs should be “explainable” or even pass laws demanding it, crack me up. Have you tried “explaining” any major city? Let alone a national economy? And the demanding people are also most like,y to pass more regulations making economies unexplainable.
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The best argument for being as rich as possible is that you can pretend the world makes sense, because you can just pay to not have to look at the nonsense parts. If you never have to walk by a homeless tent or take public transit, yeah… the spherical cow makes sense.
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I tend to bracket all my conversations with rich people strongly based on when I think they last had any contact with median lifestyles. The world is so weird now that it only takes 2-3y of being very wealthy before you completely lose touch with what life is like for the rest.
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“if life was going to live in such a vast Universe, one thing it could not afford to have was a sense of perspective.” — Douglas Adams
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There’s no such thing as a “correct” perspective on the economics of lifestyles. The rich think they have one because their money and comfort is proof. The poor think they can find one because their pain and suffering points to “truth” somehow. Both are utter bs.
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The key is to find the easiest and most fun distorted perspective that solves the life equation for you. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to end in a mansion 😇.
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