Being cowardly and being scheming are not the same thing. Being scheming is about having a plan and executing it. Being cowardly is about being afraid and acting based on the fear.
My main point is that the kind of jobs that Graeber talks about isn't primarily "trade" or "leadership".
There are some people on the left who think that any job that's doing trade or leadership is a problem, but that's not true for Graeber or tech/progress study people who want less middleman.
If you take universities, they had had leadership fifty years ago as well. The growth of university administration in comparison to professors in the Great Stagnation timeframe is about other middleman.
There are cases where middleman produce coordination but generally the more middlemen you have the harder it is to coordinate everyone.
David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad.
Someone who sits at SpaceX and first has to calculate the chance than Starship will land on a whale and kill the wale and then calculate the chance that it will land on various other endangered species and kill it, to then conclude that the chance isn't that high on the open ocean, is the kind of person who would say his job is "useless". That's what Graeber talks about with bullshit jobs.
I have a friend who's employed at an state-owned investment bank for local building who's job it was to calculate ESG metrics for the bank and who thought he was doing what Graeber was describing. The metrics he calculated were not going to affect any decisions and likely the rules for the ESG metrics were going to change in a few years anyway.
Ten people want to build a bridge. But they face problems: Who works on the foundation vs. the supports? How do we prevent the left side team from building something incompatible with the right side team? When is the foundation strong enough to start building on top? How do we know if we’re on track or behind schedule?
Today, ten people can't build a bridge because they need to involve a lot of middleman to deal with bureaucracy. Building a bridge was a lot cheaper 70 years when Robert Moses build his bridges. In the timeframe of the Great Stagnation, the necessity to involve a lot more middle men in creating a bridge was created and now we build a lot less bridges.
If you have a mathematician who needs to calculate the ESG metrics for the bridge building project before the bridge building project can be funded building bridges becomes harder.
How can you align your efforts to improve future coordination?
Getting rid of middlemen is often a good way to do so. That's why NEPA reform is important. In health care it's why getting rid of pharmacy benefit managers is a good idea.
Understanding Northcote Parkinson's work about how bureaucracies grow middlemen and then the middlemen make up work for the middlemen to do is key.
The link also didn't work for me. The post is from the 31th of October 2015.
To the extend that it's true that people get eliminated by their digital footprint, having no digital footprint means that you are a risky hire because the company doesn't know anything about you.
It's very hard to know whether companies will decide that they want to on average hire more or less people who have an online presence. It likely going to depend on how the job performance of people without online presence compares to people with online presence.
Human health is very complex. There's a lot we don't understand about it. Part of what makes a good rational analysis is to accept that reality is complex.
I'm not sure what you mean with the term "mindbody people" there are many different approaches that consider how the mind affects the body to be important and not all of them would fall under "we must treat the reaction to the fact there is something wrong with us". While the sentence might apply to Sarno, if you take for example Thomas Hanna who speaks about sensor motor amnesia as the key issue, that's not about treating the reaction to the fact that there's something wrong.
On the other side, mainstream medical people who follow the official guidelines on a topic like CFS and those who speak of Chronic Lyme Disease and want to treat it with strong antibiotics + malaria medication aren't the same community or methodology.
ChatGPT suggests China → US: about $6.5 per kg : US → China (backhaul): about $1.2 per kg. That means a roundtrip of 1kg is a bit less than $4. Of that around a fourth is fuel prices, so you have around $1 fuel prices per kg.
Starship on the other hand needs around $1000k in fuel to transport 150kg mean $6.6 per kg. Even if you double the efficiency you still won't reach the same numbers.
When it comes to non-fuel costs, I would not expect them to be much cheaper. Especially when we talk about prices billed to customers.
The airplane market is very competitive with low profit margins that regularly make airlines go bankrupt so that they need to be bailed out. SpaceX will likely target higher profit margins and I don't see a market with airplane like competition in 2035.
It may actually be more affordable to build some kinds of high cost-per-kg structures (e.g. datacenters, high-tech factories) in space than on land.
This seems to be partly the reason for Google Suncatcher project. However, it's not clear that the have a solution to the cooling problem that allows anything of the scale of datacenter to exist in space.
Nobody builds datacenters that can run without water on earth because the cooling without water is too expensive. It will get more expensive in space.
The application you didn't list are surveillance satellites. The cost of providing 24/7 video surveillance of the whole world is dropping.
Ilya has 5-20 year timelines to a potentially superintelligent learning model.
That seems to be the timelines that are necessary for investors to invest in him. If the timelines are shorter, than his startup doesn't have time to compete with the incumbents. If they are longer, then the company has a problem as well.
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I think you underrate how much of the job of a journalist is about simplifying complex events into a narrative that's easy to read and consume for the audience of the newspaper.