> The Anglophone strategy led to greater internal inequality but seems to be better from an aggregate standpoint.
Let's see. I feel like whatever is brewing economically and socially may hurt the "service industry backed societies" harder, when the time has come.
> Germany still has an enviable roster of small, agile manufacturers, and the Bundesbank and others reject the notion that full-blown deindustrialization is anywhere close.
It's not all cars. It's a lot of things you haven't heard about, because they are highly specialized, niche industrial parts. I think, the German economy rests on the shoulders of Maschinenbau and, presumably, there is a whole lot less naked growth enabled "bullshit" products in that space.
Don't lie, don't you feel something is freaky with the economy? I don't just mean numbers and stock value... something more fundamental. Don't you feel overwhelmed by commerce, at times? Like, there is a lot of non-products produced. Almost violently pushed onto people, sickening amounts of "stuff" saturating all channels. How many mouths does marketing feed? There is so, so much marketing. Can this really be sustainable???
I don't know. I feel something is getting horribly out of balance and the service industry is a symptom. Rabid inequality is a symptom. Like core rot, it looks fine, until a little gust lays the tree onto your house.
> I feel something is getting horribly out of balance
In my country, they dropped interest rates to near 0 in the wake of 9/11 in order to prevent the economy from crashing, and held them there until the Covid pandemic. It seems like that free money was used to buy _anything_ that could be invested in, driving up prices for assets like stocks, houses, and cryptocurrencies. I remember reading articles around 2018 that said that economists didn't know how the economy worked anymore.
The crazy low, long term interest rates are what _I_ feel has been freaky about the economy since at least 2005 when I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income.
It's felt like a huge house of cards has been built for over 20 years now, the whole economy outside of the service sector has been hollowed out, and I'm still waiting for it to all come crashing down.
> I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income.
I suspect, people, even with comparatively high income, stopped being able to buy hard securities like houses. Why save up then? So, folk had a lot more "disposable income" to consume soothing, but overall transient consumable products and services like clothing, tech gadgets, food, subscriptions... – lifestyle stuff. You know: 1000$ sneakers and a 12$/month meditation app. A bit of luxury and the illusion of wealth. This in turn enabled an industry of bullshit pushers, who started manufacturing the demand for all these consumables, trying to reap a new massive YOLO market. All, of course, paying their 20% to the 1%.
Rents and living costs kept rising, so now we got to the point where "luxury" has become cheap, cheap lookalike instead, and most everybody is hustling to keep their "standard of living". Multiple jobs and a side gig, to pay for the fix and all your subscriptions... no pension, no pause. Ever.
> "You'll own nothing and be happy"
Look at the housing crisis and get all academic about the economy... What terrifies me, is this new, omnipresent private sell-out and monetization of social interactions. Everybody always has something to sell, is self-branding. Everybody wants to get in my head constantly, stomp their shit between my dopamine receptors. Too often, I feel exhausted and physically sick from this dynamic, I feel the sick. Decency and respect had their IPO.
And I am carrying a new generalized anger with me everywhere, which I see in fellow strangers, too. People are increasingly short-fused. The pandemic accelerated this. Traffic is mad.
I fear the fabric of the collective is on sale at this moment. Maybe the mandated growth dogma has hit the capacity of healthy attention or something. This is not just an economic bubble, but the exhaustion of a part human along with it. Someone is getting high on their own supply...
Thank you. That blog post is a bit of a mindfuck, to be honest.
I see immediately why you thought of it. It's exactly the same theme, identifying the same developments, the same critique, same everything. But - It is not the same. Ha! I've been there!
Whatever the author is talking about can't be the same. Retrospectively, 2017 was infinitely more hopeful. He must be getting all raged up over merely a bow wave in the fog, a neighbor's new baby hippopotamus pet, the rape of Kathleen Maddox, that persistent cough, a first hottest summer.
All the developments were present already, but nobody could have foreseen the sick then. A quick fix: You take every observation in the article and add bath salts.
So, let's make a collage!
> Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes. <
> The essence of premium mediocrity is being optimistically prepared for success by at least being in the
right place at the right time <
> But the demographic at the very heart of the phenomenon is the young, gentrifier class of Blue Bicoastal Millennials. The rent-over-own, everything-as-a-service class of precarious young professionals auditioning for a shot at the neourban American dream, sans condo ownership somewhere at a reasonable distance from both the nearest meth lab and minority ghetto. <
Venkatesh, gentrification is over. The minority ghetto became unaffordable all by itself. Oh, and the meth lab got acquired by Big Fentanyl. Must be popular, draws more people to the sidewalk than a Supreme store.
Oh dear! We're not faking enjoyment for our friends on Instagram anymore. We either made it early in the business of exploiting teenage insecurities, or we aspire for the Girl-Boss Dream on OnlyFans. On C-SPAN, Mark Zuckerberg is telling the judge, a child's suicide wasn't his fault. You can pretend you care, read about it behind the New York Times paywall, or retweet the trending blue check antisemitism spin on X, for free. X is what you called Twitter in 2017. But, you know, on bath salts. Anyway. Or... you come watch me unbox this gift from my sponsor Bad Dragon! You do this for me and I get under the knife for you. Backyard fillers minimum. Instagrams better than it feels, to be honest.
(BTW, I think you can buy optimism on BetterHelp, now. Link in the description.)
Everthing-as-a-service used to mean Office365 and outsourcing corporate infrastructure to The Cloud.. in 2024 we mean a paid subscription for a calculator app.
If you're ugly then there is only the option of a full stack bootcamp, the one in eight billion chance of creating your own means of extraction.
> It is a class for which I have profound affection, and one whose eventual success I am sincerely rooting
for. <
Yeah. Because you haven't mentioned climate change even once, Venkatesh...
> Premium mediocrity is in part a theater put on by Maya Millennial in part to spare the feelings of parents. Inter-generational love, not inter-generational war. <
> the consumers of premium mediocre things are generally strongly and acutely self-aware about what they are doing.
... well, now best we can offer is this peace deal: We get the house and all the pre-war money left - and until you're dead, you will carry the sorrow, Daddy! Or, you know, next pandemic we won't stay home.
> That leaves the cryptocurrency lottery as the only documented way up open to all, regardless of skills. <
Crypto is over, so that's it, huh?
> Unlike a covered call, which is about promising to sell what you actually own, a naked call is about promising to sell what you don’t actually own. <
Rhetrotorical question. Funniest thing, you don't have to explain naked options in 2024! Lol.
If your parents death isn't that promising, you better haven't held the $GME and $TSLA bag, but got lucky with $NVDA or $RHM instead. Why Nvidia? Oh, boy!
> You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do. <
Why Rheinmetall?
Yeah...
Okay, lastly, our collage gets a center piece: A 2017 truth remaining faithful and a 2017 wish becoming true ...
> The public markets are no longer reliable wealth builders, while the private markets exclude almost
everybody who isn’t already wealthy. <
> Because you see, while it is somewhat important that everybody drink some kool-aid, it is absolutely
crucial that the leaders drink a lot of their own kool-aid. <
Underneath we put picture of Peter Thiel's survival bunker in New Zealand.
Nauseating nostalgia. I would really, really, really love a follow-up by the author!
> The Anglophone strategy led to greater internal inequality but seems to be better from an aggregate standpoint.
Let's see. I feel like whatever is brewing economically and socially may hurt the "service industry backed societies" harder, when the time has come.
> Germany still has an enviable roster of small, agile manufacturers, and the Bundesbank and others reject the notion that full-blown deindustrialization is anywhere close.
It's not all cars. It's a lot of things you haven't heard about, because they are highly specialized, niche industrial parts. I think, the German economy rests on the shoulders of Maschinenbau and, presumably, there is a whole lot less naked growth enabled "bullshit" products in that space.
Don't lie, don't you feel something is freaky with the economy? I don't just mean numbers and stock value... something more fundamental. Don't you feel overwhelmed by commerce, at times? Like, there is a lot of non-products produced. Almost violently pushed onto people, sickening amounts of "stuff" saturating all channels. How many mouths does marketing feed? There is so, so much marketing. Can this really be sustainable???
I don't know. I feel something is getting horribly out of balance and the service industry is a symptom. Rabid inequality is a symptom. Like core rot, it looks fine, until a little gust lays the tree onto your house.