But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.

I think I need to work up a Claude skill named marie-kondo, so that when it breathlessly presents its triumphant solution, I can go “yes, but does it spark joy?” And have it go into an aggressive refactor loop with me.

Every media mogul puts their thumb on the scale of public opinion. Broadcast media aligns and controls talking points, while new media manipulates visibility of user generated content via algorithmic weights.

I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.

On the plus side, plenty of employment opportunities in the US these days. They’re offering us all the former meatbag jobs :)

It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.

As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.

Suddenly everyone is competing for limited slots, the minimum standard for hiring goes from high GPA to perfect GPA, any misstep in your learning process, any teacher who didn’t like you, any elective that may have enriched you personally but you weren’t particularly good add it, etc… gets distilled down into a numerical value (like a credit score) that bureaucrats treat as some sort of object truth. The ATS filters you out without you ever having had a shot, orgs optimize for low-risk tolerance individuals and organizations are starved of potential creative problem solvers and other types of change agents.

Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.