This strikes a chord with me. Another maybe similar concept that I use internally is "fried". Don't know if others have it too, or if it has a different name. The idea is that when I'm drawing, or making music, or writing text, there comes a point where my mind is "fried". It's a subtle feeling but I've learned to catch it. After that point, continuing working on the same thing is counterproductive, it leads to circles and making the thing worse. So it's best to stop quickly and switch to something else. Then, if my mind didn't spend too long in the "fried" state, recovery can be quite quick and I can go back to the thing later in the day.
'Cause it’s gonna be the future soon,
And I won’t always be this way,
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
I wonder, this seems like a superficial enough job (at least in some cases) that AI could be a good fit for it. But then again, OnlyFans seems about as superficial and hasn't been completely captured by AI yet, so maybe there's still some time this remains viable.
I think the Bay of Pigs, Grenada, Panama were proactive. Vietnam too: the Gulf of Tonkin story kinda fell apart later, so did domino theory (the future problem they were trying to prevent), and anyway US military involvement in Vietnam started decades earlier, to prop up French colonial control.
Maybe to summarize my view, I think for a powerful country there's a spectrum from "acting as police" to "acting as a bully", and there have been many actions of the latter kind. Not that the US is unique in this, my home country (Russia) does its share too, as do others, when power permits.
Yeah. It's also my explanation for why the internet became crap: the early internet was very under-monetized. Creators were putting stuff online in a way that most of the surplus value went to viewers. That's why to early viewers the internet felt amazing, magical: all this value lying around. Then platforms sprang up that redistributed some of the surplus to creators (like YouTube with its ad revenue sharing, I remember how jarring it felt when I first saw creators beg viewers to watch ads), but of course that didn't make creators better off, because content creation is a business with free entry and exit; instead we got a lot more creators, with the median one still losing money and only being in it for the passion and hope, and the viewers getting not much surplus either.
The frustrating thing is, it's still very possible to make a platform that will be under-monetized in the same way as the old internet was. But most creators won't go there, because they understand that content creation is hit-driven and they want the chance of a windfall that the monetized platform offers. Meanwhile the platforms reduce money sharing with creators to just the right amount that they don't leave en masse, and use network effects to make sure a new less hostile platform doesn't get traction. A sticky situation, this is what the logical late stage of a market looks like.
Are you sure it makes sense to go into these details? After all, the US has waged many wars since WWII, and the Iraq war doesn't seem unusual among them. So maybe we shouldn't explain it by unusual events; the right explanation would have to work for the whole reference class.
I'm against IQ tests for employment. My idea was more about job-relevant tests. They do require study, but the point of banning discrimination by diploma and allowing only tests is that people will be able to study for the test in any way they like, because employers won't be able to demand Ivy League etc.
Thank you for writing this!
I think my ideal system would differ from Singapore's in a couple important ways:
Classes would be grouped by subject+level. A student would progress in different subjects at different pace and level, and there wouldn't be an overall "level of student" or "level of school".
Employers would be banned from discriminating on education. They could only discriminate based on exam results relevant to the job, and the exams would be accessible to everyone regardless of hours of study.
It seems to me that this setup is equivalent to "skim air from the top of Earth's atmosphere, drop it back to Earth, extract gravitational energy", with some more details that don't change much. This fails for density reasons, unless I'm missing something.
I think the scheme "prove you're serious by spending one of your 10 limited applications", similar to other schemes like "come to our office to apply in person", is a kind of all-pay auction. People often self-organize into all-pay auctions: "all of you must spend something to compete, then one of you will get the prize". Sports is a big example. The general problem with such auctions is that those who don't win still lose something tangible for trying: time, money, effort, opportunity cost.
One nice thing about market prices is that they allow society to avoid the wastefulness of all-pay auctions. Only the buyer pays, not anyone else. If there are too many buyers, raise the price until there aren't so many. If there are too many sellers, lower the price until there aren't so many. But for that to work, the price must be allowed to truly float.
How does this look in the case of jobs? Offer a lower wage. Or if it's a job where employee value grows with time at the company, like engineering, then offer lower wage at the start and then a gradual ramp: high enough that the employee isn't tempted to leave, and low enough that the company isn't tempted to fire. That's what the market is for, negotiating these kinds of things.
As for what the government should do - how about a safety net? Healthcare not tied to jobs? Allow building more housing? Lots of things. It might end up reducing the resume pressure on companies, too.