bedhead

Jonathan Haidt has done a ton of research on this and it's terrifying. His thesis seems to make a lot of sense: boys bully each other physically while girls bully each other reputationally. This is likely why mental health issues for boys and girls have diverged wildly since about 2014, because as lives moved online, this was a recipe for disaster for girls since social media is so perfect for this kind of bullying, but sort of a non-event for boys who were already online playing video games all day. Social media unlocked and turbocharged all those preexisting pathologies for girls.

You’re right that some schools have had a vaccine mandate. But neither the private nor public sector ever have. And we didn’t have the accompanying dystopian nightmare as a reality and further threat. So I would say your argument is tired and misses the point entirely, aside from being so brazenly naive to fall for the “if only these last few holdouts got vaccinated everything would be normal!” straw man.

Keep on goose stepping…

Endless studies and real-world data showing no efficacy and half the world doesn't care. A new one every week, nobody cares, they're stuck in their religion.

Last week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/

Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.

Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.

Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.

Mass loss of life. Novel way in which people died. People dying randomly (hard to avoid). General hysteria. Paranoia over a minority group. Moral outrage against anyone not falling inline politically. Overreaching government plans to keep people safe. Petty symbolism (freedom fries/masks) to sort the moral from the immoral.

Should I go on?

One of the more interesting parallels I see is how injecting morality into the matter poisoned everything and ensured terrible policy decisions. How many people and politicians got effectively bullied into going along with the idiotic Iraq war because people on the right accused them of not caring about 9/11 victims?

9/11 victims, granny-killer, same side of a different coin.

Hysteria, paranoia, morality, a plan to keep people "safe" - beware of this dangerous pattern.

Things like this are why I'm so cynical about COVID stuff. We have an unconditional commitment to stupid reactive policies that elevate symbolism far above sensibility, and boy does it have a lot of inertia. The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.

COVID: come for the newfound hatred amongst family and friends, stay for the perpetual commerce dysfunction and dystopian nightmare! Are we having fun yet?! Yay!!!

No, it's the same. He created $100 million for himself that might have otherwise be spread out amongst employees, suppliers, investors, etc, who would've used their "share" of the $100 million for consumption and savings, with higher marginal costs of saving. Whether it's cash or equity is irrelevant because money is fungible...he's just skipping the step of converting it to cash and saving/reinvesting it.

Excellent question.

I believe technology is the primary culprit. Think of something like WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for about $20 billion and would be worth who-knows-how-much today. I think WhatsApp had like 70 employees, a couple founders, only took a small amount of capital, and yet created $20 billion of value in a company in just a few years. Go back a couple decades when technology couldn't scale like it can today, what would it take to create a $20 billion company? How many years, how many employees, how many suppliers, how many customers, how much capital, etc etc. Instead, it was like three guys who each made $7 billion or whatever. This word "scale" is really just code for concentration, as in, a company can grow without having to spread the wealth around, it can instead accumulate to a relatively small group of highly intelligent and creative people. Technology enables that top echelon of people to keep more for themselves.

So, I would say technology in a general sense is really what's driving wealth concentration. The long-term persistency of declining rates and increasing wealth concentration tell us it has to be structural, and I'm not sure what else can explain it. But, people are often uncomfortable with this, because it's not fixable. High taxes don't fix it over time, because we can keep replaying that game over and over again and the smartest will just keep winning and amassing a disproportionate share of the wealth created.

The Fed is reactive. The Fed doesn't set interest rates, the market does. I believe this is one of the biggest misconceptions about our central bank. Yes, the Fed plays an obvious role, more to do with printing money for whatever the issue-of-the-day is, but the market is far more powerful than the Fed when it comes to interest rates. If the Fed raised rates 500bps tomorrow, over time, interest rates would still settle back at 0%, and all the Fed would've done is created complete dysfunction.

Central banks are reactive.

I've argued this for years. Interest rates peaked at about the same time that wealth inequality began to diverge around 1980 or so. I don't think any of this is terribly complicated. Money is a commodity, and like all commodities, the price is set at the margin. Money also has diminishing marginal utility, so as you accumulate more of it, at some point it has less use.

Think about two people, one extremely wealthy, one middle class. The middle class guy making $75k probably has to spend all his money for consumption: food, rent, car, etc. There's little left over for saving or investing. In order for that guy to justify forgoing consumption and instead saving it, he requires a high interest rate, otherwise it's not worth it. But what about the guy worth $100 million? He can't spend it all on consumption, so he has to save a lot of it. Ah, but what's his opportunity cost? Zero. He has no choice, and the money he'll earn from interest won't even get spent anyway. So, two people, two very different marginal costs.

The world is just one giant pool of capital. Over the last four decades, as capital has shifted from being more evenly spread out amongst people with high marginal costs to a smaller group of people with marginal costs of zero, interest rates keep falling...the majority of capital now resides amongst people who can't spend it all and are happy to earn any real rate of return.

I love how people who drive cars, fly on planes, use plastic, get goods delivered by truck, etc etc, act like oil companies just pump oil out of the ground for fun then light it on fire. The mental gymnastics are impressive.

First of all, you have no idea whether that's true anymore than I do.

Second, so freakin what?? So 0.01% of the population says mean and ugly things - so what? It's very, very easy to avoid and ignore it. Meanwhile, policing speech is not only going to obviously open Pandora's box in general, but it will probably cause more people to be racist.

Allow it. Let the racists be racist. Let them expose themselves so we all know who to ridicule and ignore. Not only has this wacky notion of free speech worked well for a long time, society has grown far less racist despite no official policing of speech.

The insidiousness that comes from controlling speech is far greater than the insidiousness of a small group of assholes who say mean things. The short-sightedness of many continues to astonish me.

Perhaps injecting partisan into it was dumb of me, however, in my experience it was the very liberal people who were the ones who spearheaded some of our largest long-term planning blunders. But you're right, the pervasive attitude in most smaller communities is generally "Everything was great until a shortly after I moved here" which really drives me crazy. I suppose it's just more acute in a town of 3,000.

Yeah, like I said, these people all failed Econ 101. It's really bizarre, they never accept that they can't have things both ways. So we've ended up with a town that's shockingly beautiful and unique, but it's becoming more dysfunctional by the day because of the development ethos, and instead of doing something everyone just complains. It's great if you've got tons of money, and then it just gets harder and harder for those who don't. I mean, that's the most ironic part, is that the same hyper liberal people who are so against development have directly caused such wild living disparities across income brackets.

I live in a small mountain town. You could swap many towns (usually tourist destinations) in place of Ketchum in this article, it's the same story. These towns tend to be fiercely anti-development, and many people demonize anyone who would like to see growth in housing, and make hyperbolic claims that their quaint little town will look like a Houston suburb at the first sign of a new house being built.

Anyway, places like Ketchum got what they wanted, which was generally to preserve the character of the town. Unfortunately they flunked Econ 101, as they're now discovering that the trade off they made (there's always a trade off) was a cost of living that goes vertical. In my town, the problem has surpassed affordability and it's now availability - there is nowhere to live regardless of money. A recent hiring sign in a shop window advertised they will overpay and you can slack off...but they can't fill it because there's nowhere to live.

The most frustrating part is that the anti-development crowd who architected all this - whether you agree with it or not - simply won't accept the reality that this was their choice. You can't even talk to them, they blame everything and everyone else. Over the years I've noticed that failure to understand/accept incentives has been the root cause of many problems.

"Controversial" has no meaning in this context and I dislike the framing. Insider trading is defined as both material and non-public. The notion that a senate briefing about COVID by some random person about their personal opinion on what might happen doesn't even come close to qualifying as material. Nowhere close, not even in the universe of material. People might not like it, but not only were these stock sales 100% legal, they weren't even controversial.

My dyslexia had me thinking this was a sexual thing...

This is fairly normal for certain "glamour" industries. Back in the day when it was relevant, MTV was infamous for paying people almost nothing, for no other reason than they could because MTV had a coolness factor associated with it that people sought. Same is generally true for a lot of the entertainment industry.

I mean, doesn't that alone kinda point us in one direction?

I did, carefully. It's just as pointless.

This is a bigger charade than a North Korean election.

These bullets are conspicuously free of important details.

"Podcast usage has been a factor" - okay, how much? Answer: no idea.

"The strength in Ad-Supported revenue was led by our Podcast, Direct, and Ad Studio channels, with Podcast and Ad Studio both growing over 100% on a Y/Y basis" - okay, but from what starting point and how much did it contribute? Answer: not saying.

"25% of our Total MAUs engaged with podcast content" - okay, how much? Answer: not saying.

Obviously podcasts help increase metrics, but even Spotify either doesn't know or won't say, meanwhile all this discussion ignores the flip side of the coin which is how much this is all costing the company.

Last year I moved from a top 3 city to a small mountain town in Colorado. In my experience, your hostility is extremely common in small towns that have big seasonal influxes. I continue to be amazed by the overt disdain long-time locals have for second home owners and relatively newer full-time residents. The one constant is: "Everything was great until shortly after I relocated here and you people moved in." A week doesn't go by here where a long-time resident doesn't write an op-ed for our tiny newspaper with this exact message, and delusional descriptions of how their once-great town is now a hellscape.

This is one reason why CEO pay has skyrocketed: hazard pay. Something goes wrong, even if the CEO had no idea about it, and who gets vilified and maybe even prosecuted? The CEO. Just saying...there are trade offs for everything.

There is a ton of selection bias here, these are already generally speaking very unhealthy people.

I am super centrist also, and all it's done is make me angrier and angrier at the state of things. I guess it's pushing me more libertarian watching all this insanity. The craziest thing is that R's and D's have basically flipped entirely on most major issues over the last few decades.

LOL. Just the other day, Elizabeth Warren, a US senator, pushed a conspiracy that Stacy Abrams won the Georgia gubernatorial election three years ago. This would've gotten anyone banned from Facebook or Twitter if it was a different "side." To the extent a Facebook crackdown would mostly impact the right, it's because the loony-left is now completely mainstream and doesn't need Facebook. The crazies on the right have basically Fox and that's it, yawn.

Feel free to look at Twitter's trending topics. Any topic, and I mean literally ANY topic of some political nature, if you click on it, will take you to nothing but people shitting on anything conservative while praising anything liberal. It's all it is.

There's no balance ANYWHERE. Everything has been weaponized.

My point is partly, let's check in a year from now. I'd wager not one of your coworkers switched. Zero.