I'm always somewhat puzzled by debates around "are we in a recession?" b/c we have so many REAL TIME metrics around what people are actually doing.
e.g. credit card companies have excellent data on the amount that people are spending on. Is that not enough to determine if people are spending more or less than in the past?
I understand there are seasonal trend etc etc but even "how is spending on travel this year compared to last year around this time?" would probably have some large amount of statistical significance.
Anything released regarding unemployment and the economy are lies. If anyone in the US government tries to tell the truth they are fired.
It’s damn near impossible these days to know what’s actually going on.
All the layoffs and difficulty to find a new job should be causing a lot of suffering out there, especially in the US. Yet, everything seems to be great!
Real data is delayed to give the investor class time to "reallocate assets". Also anyone publishing a story saying there's a rececession knows they will receive the Emperor Palpatine lightning treatment from the Orange Jesus.
OPTION 1: What ever you are into, see if there is a club in your town for that.
e.g. the suburban town I live in has a:
- rock climbing club
- board game club
- maker lab at the library
- Italian speaker's club
- and more
OPTION 2: Start a club
If you don't find a club you like: start one!
I did this with the town rock climbing club. I went on the town dad's Facebook and asked "anyone want to go rock climbing?", multiple people responded and now we have a club.
Fun fact: me starting the climbing club directly inspired the founder of the board game club to start that club too
OPTION 3: Host a cocktail party
If that sounds daunting, I can assure you it's not that hard and there is even a n EXCELLENT book by Nick Gray called The Two Hour Cocktail Part [0]
It lays out, step by step, all of the steps from invite to scheduling to name tags etc etc. It's like cookbook for how to have a great party.
And the idea is to make it less than 2 hours on a Mon/Tue/Fri so setup is easy and pressure to impress etc is low.
OPTION 4: Invite other people you know out for a drink/plate of wings etc
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is starving for time out away from their life. Whether it be single people, married people, old people, young people etc, everyone wants something to do outside the house.
Don't believe me? Search "dad loneliness" on Reddit. It's post after post of dad's, probably about your age, saying "Man, I wish someone would just call me and say 'hey, what's a good time to grab a beer next week?' "
The English language has the ability to be ambiguous, but I bet AI use will change the way we use the English language colloquially, to say more specifically what we mean. I worked as a home inspector for a while. Writing for an LLM is very similar to writing a home inspection report or legal brief (or talking to a group of teenagers). Navigate the minefield with very specific intention.
The creator of OpenClaw had a great line about this:
"If your identity is tied to you being an iOS developer, you are going to have a rough time. But if your identity is 'I'm a builder!' it is a very exciting time to be alive."
Plus, there is no rule that says you can't keep coding if it's faster for you and/or it's quicker in general. e.g I can write a Perl one liner much faster than Claude can. Heck, even if it's not faster and you enjoy coding, just keep coding.
I built a house. Ok, I said an architect what I want and he showed me the plans and I gave him feedback for adjustments and then the plans were given to the construction crew and they built the actual house.
Curious about that reasoning : where do you draw the line ?
Are you a builder if there is an middleman ? If not, what if the middleman is a tool ? If you use autocad to build the plans, are you still a builder ? What if autocad has a prompt feature, are you still a builder ?
If you actually do something that is considered building.
Same with vibe coding, if you don’t write code you just ordered and didn’t code, otherwise all my customers and bosses where coders long before AI because there orders don’t reach much different from today’s prompts. The recipient changed but that doesn’t change the sender.
It’s some kind of Chinese Room but this time for those outside the room.
This might be social stigma, we will be stigmatized by society if we dont have appropriate clothes for right situations as such, we buy so many clothes that are visible depending on the number of occasions and everything because we have to look appropriate for that and this is where number of brands can stem up from too and this brand has brand value, because oh, you got that X company shirt nice.
Nobody cares what brand your underwear is because its hidden.
Such products are usually fewer brands because what matters is a huge chain supply. You most likely buy it if its available retail or not, you don't go look at an ad and say, wow I want that brand but the idea is to make familiar with it.
But even if you aren't. There are just so few brands with supply chain directly to retails that such things usually end up getting centralized and convenience of buying is the largest factor. You want to drive less to get this stuff whereas you might go far away just to get a nice pair of shirt and jeans for example something which, again has to do with the visibility of the product/social stigma
Technically, the supply chain thing also directs itself to products like cole drinks for example. You are probably drinking coke/pepsi because its available everywhere and usually the choice that you see in different drinks is just some permutation of a drink/brand which is owned by the parent company (coke/pepsi). The amounts of brands owned by pepsi/coca cola are quite a lot to be honest.
Isn't this partly what explained the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt?
e.g. the government made university education free, lots of people went to university, there was now excess supply of college educated professionals, this led to unhappy young professionals, in turn led to unrest etc etc.
May be it was one of factors but unlikely the main one. University education was free in the USSR but it was a stable authoritarian state for decades (until eventually collapsed for reasons having little to do with education).
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The problem with educated youth who understand the game is that if there’s no room for them to join the ruling class they become very angry.
My experience/observation is that only few (university-)educated people really do understand the game. Only a subset of them actually make serious attempts to understand the rules of the game, and of those, most get to believe in often very dangerous falsehoods about what the rules are.
> The rules are simple and ancient: noble blood breeds nobles; common blood breeds commoners.
This is a great narrative for folks who want to be fatalistic.
From my view:
- Much of what you call “nobles” and “commoners” are more about values than blood. Yes, “noble” values are difficult to develop if you’re not born in that class. That said, these values are easier to learn and develop today for a wider group of people than has ever been true in the past.
- Some people think the “noble” side is all rainbows and unicorns. The noble class is shedding its weak non-stop. It may take a generation or two before a branch of a noble family becomes common, but it happens often, and it’s a source of great consternation to that branch when it does.
> What’s sophisticated are the layers of ideology and falsehood that made people believe that aristocracy was dead.
Did anyone actually think the aristocracy was dead?
The relative power of the aristocracy dipped a bit mid-20th century, but what they may have temporarily lost in economic power was gained in social and political power.
> The rules are simple and ancient: noble blood breeds nobles; common blood breeds commoners.
This does not describe the current situation: even if we just consider net worth, there are at least 2-3 rather separated kinds of elites:
- the "aristocracy": what you name "noble blood"
- "old money": there is some partial overlap to "aristocracy", but not the same; for example think of family with a long pedigree, but not necessarily of aristocratic origin, think of family empires that have a standing in some industries over multiple generations.
- "new money": people who got rich in particular by building some internet company. Their values and attitudes are quite different from "old money".
These are three quite different groups of people. So, it's much more complicated than "noble blood breeds nobles; common blood breeds commoners".
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And this is just the "already net worth rich".
For example there exist groups of intelligent people who are highly ambitious, but aren't given a chance, so they look for allies, and sometimes they succeed.
In some sense the classical hacker scene can be considered as an example. Some of them actually got rich by founding some internet startup.
I've been reading Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy and it's full of fascinating insights about marketing/branding etc
Case in point:
- company was testing out their mail based fundraising drive
- they randomly tested cheap vs expensive envelopes, regular envelopers vs side opening envelopes etc for how people could send back a check
- they found that expensive envelopes beat cheap and side envelopes beat top loading
The part that was fascinating is that many folks would think "what difference does it make what kind of envelope you use?". Sutherland points out that putting a check for a large amount in a cheap envelope somehow feels "wrong" even if people can't verbalize this.
Another example is how in the 1950s many food engineers were obsessed with the idea of "food nutrient pills" and how they would replace cooking and eating out in restaurants. While it's true that things like Soylent and Huel made inroads with the tech crowd, most people still love going out to restaurants. The point being b/c eating out isn't only about eating: it's also about taking your wife out for your anniversary or meeting your siblings who are visiting from abroad.
I mention this b/c the HN crowd tends to be very logical/rational (including myself) and this book was a real eye opener around how people actually make decisions.
Similarly, when I was a teenager I knew a guy who built guitars by hand. He is a master craftsman who makes beautiful instruments, but he told me one time that he had customers sometimes lose interest because his guitars were cheaper than similar competitors (5k vs 10k as I recall). He wound up raising his prices, and got more sales as a result, even though the guitars hadn't changed at all. It was a really interesting (and to me, bizarre) demonstration of how people can make decisions very irrationally at times.
Apparently cereal makers were losing money b/c they priced their product at a much lower price point than, at the time, the regular breakfast of bacon and eggs.
They hired a consultant who pointed out they could raise their prices as long as it was lower than bacon and eggs, make more money and still be cheaper.
2. Raising prices
There is a story in one of the pricing/economics books about a store keeper who told her assistant to halve the price of jewelry that wasn't selling. The assistant misheard and doubled the price. The jewelry immediately sold.
3. The shelf that always sells
In the book about Shopsin's in NYC, the author and owner mentions that certain shelves in a store will sell out of whatever is on that shelf. Regardless of price, product, time of year etc.
Apparently, putting things right by the front door in supermarkets is the opposite: very few people buy anything that is there. I noticed that one of the Real Housewives of NJ had her food product there and thought to myself: someone is giving you bad advice and/or humoring you by putting your product there.
There was a recent anecdote from the head of radiology, Mayo Clinic I believe, that went something like this:
- AI has allowed radiologists to review a much higher rate of x-rays
- The above has led to a dramatic increase in need for faster processing, more storage of scans etc
- which in turn led to needing a bigger IT department to manage all of the additional workload
There was a similar anecdote about the IRS where the claim is they went from having N accountants to having much fewer accountants but now they need N IT people to manage the new systems.
e.g. credit card companies have excellent data on the amount that people are spending on. Is that not enough to determine if people are spending more or less than in the past?
I understand there are seasonal trend etc etc but even "how is spending on travel this year compared to last year around this time?" would probably have some large amount of statistical significance.
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