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The sad fact is that the people best suited to thrive in a context where relationships are transactional and mostly dependent on continued usefulness to both parties - are sociopaths/machiavellian types.

And these are precisely the people who are most okay with shouting from the rooftop that their company is the best in the world - then doing so from a different company 2-3 years later.

It's good for mental health to understand that. These people do not have better jobs or work for better companies on average - they just say they do because it's better for their career and have no shame or accountability in doing so publicly.


The financial environment now is very different than even 2-3 years ago. Mortgages went from 3%->7%. Bonds/Treasuries actually pay a decent return. The most speculative investments are no longer running hot because they have to compete with returns elsewhere.

So 1. people around here tend to be in the speculative investment bubble and it is worse there than most other places right now and 2. any time there is change like this (esp. when it happens fast) - there are winners and losers and 3. Since 2007/2008 everyone has been trying to be the next Burry or Taleb and call the bubble.


I ran sales for a start up and as much as I hated these types of questionnaires - it was a huge competitive advantage to have someone who knows their stuff (a founder who wrote most of our code) complete them fast and get them back.

It's competitive out there. Using an advantage to your company's benefit as a founder is your job - not work that is beneath you. Fill it out and bring some money in.


Yeah I agree with this. Dedicate 1 to 2 hours of focused work, fill it out, and move on.

This assumes that you're far enough along in the sales process that there's a high likelihood of close (you've already negotiated price and timeline), and the deal value should generally be five figures or above. This means it's worth your time.

Slightly risky hack: you can buy yourself some additional time by answering some questions with "Documentation will provided separately", and often times clients don't follow up to ask for it.


I write down a bunch of very small 5-15 minute subtasks that I want to do - being very specific and including the estimated time to accomplish into a 1hr block.

Then I put on Brain.fm for 1hr.

That's it. Works really well for me. Rinse and repeat (I typically only have to do 2-3 one hour blocks per week for super annoying administrative tasks that I've been putting off)


I think it has nothing to do with the decline (which is mostly a result of an all-time insane bubble in P/E ratios and VC investment with lowest interest rates ever) but it will have everything to do with the lack of rebound from this decline.


Nassim Taleb has advice to follow something called "the barbell approach" where 90% of your money is super safe (all stock market index funds/t-bonds/etc.) and 10% of your money is in some super speculative asset.

I don't think it's bad advice if you're willing to commit to the speculative asset over a long time horizon and you don't have unrealistic expectations.


It's cheaper to let OpenAI figure all the stuff out first - then pour your war chest of money to n+1 their model instead of doing all the work of experimenting/failing/correcting course yourself.

Give it a year and they'll all have competing and better models.


Locally: Contract test (mock provider/consumer)

As part of CI/CD: Depending on complexity - basic functional tests against the specific endpoint or end-to-end test of API functions (using mocks when APIs aren't available).

Once deployed to pre-prod: Monitor just like prod - end-to-end functional tests w/routing rules to mocks when a certain microservices is unavailable.

Prod: Monitor using end-to-end functional tests.


1. Gold goes up between 50%-150% as many countries offload USD-debt/reserves and need another globally accepted reserve.

2. Biden resigns stating mental health/old age while dodging more probs into family. Salts earth for a Sanders run again so has DNC support.

3. "Influencer" is rebranded "Coach" so they're better supported via subscription/services than ads.


A few takes on this:

* College degree is just a proxy for people in dead end jobs. This could easily say "Men without yachts..." "Men without country club memberships..." "Men without genius IQs..." etc. "People with dead end jobs dropping out of work" would be a better title.

* This makes sense because these jobs are indeed more dead end than ever. You've been competing with offshoring/globalization for the last 30 years. Now you're also competing with AI/Automation.

* The status threat is also amplified as of late because earnings/wealth is increasingly the only status. It wasn't long ago that being physically strong held status in society. Or having a strong social network. We're pretty close to wealth-is-all-that-matters for social status now. The highest status people in society are dominated by social awkward, physically weak people with high earnings. Lots of this has to do with a decrease in violence (bar fights used to be common - now they're rare and end in court).

* Finally, status has adopted a capitalist winner-take-all dynamics thanks to dating apps and social media. It's now feast or famine in the dating world. Top 1% of men are getting like 50% of the attention from women on apps and even in the real world - women are less available because the guy at the bar is competing with the guy on bumble.


You write, "The highest status people in society are dominated by social awkward, physically weak people with high earnings." The socially awkward may earn increasingly higher salaries, but this does not necessarily confer status upon them.

You downplay athleticism (ie, health) and "strong social networks". But it's precisely those groups who still tend to dominate the socially awkward in status games. An autistic FAANG engineer does not have higher status than an executive or successful salesman.

Going through your comment history, I see you're in sales. I'm sure you'd recognize that status is much more complex than a single variable such as net worth or IQ.


I think that you are too narrowly re-defining the point that BlueTie was trying to get accross.

If you look at society as a whole, the tech field dominates in large numbers when it comes to higher paying jobs.

Nobody is saying that professional athletes don't get paid a boatload, or that entertainers can be paid astronomical amounts. But the reality is that there a maximum of 450 NBA players in the NBA, for example, and only the tippy top of them get the massive dollars.

But also, the entire NBA earned $6.41 billion in 2020/2021 season. By comparison, one single company, Apple, earned $394 billion in 2022.

It's the same with executives. While some execs have high social status, you pretty much have to be at a C-suite level. Nobody cares about some mid-level exec. And C-suite is fairly much anomolous. In 2022, Apple has 164,000 employees, but only one CEO. When looking at entire job classes, technical workers predominate over all other jobs in terms of dollars earned. An autistic FAANG doesn't have higher status than an executive, but then again, he doesn't have higher status than the receptionist at the front desk. However, an average tech has high status, comparatively speaking.

Status is clearly complex for sure, but despite what people say, generalizing is just fine, as long as it's within parameters (which I'm not going to define). And tech people have way more cachet than they did 40 years ago, for example.


Why would people participate in a rigged/losing game like that? Dropping out is rational.


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