This week, Chamath Palihapitiya brought Trump to meet his cool tech libtard friends and show them that he is not so bad. Joe Lonsdale of Palantir suggested on X that the world’s best basketball players might not look exactly like the world’s best physicists
"concept of the nation-state itself (a people with shared lineage and history collectively controlling a discrete geographic space) is increasingly technologically incoherent. Ordinary people’s interests and personal loyalties too routinely transcend its boundaries."
I'd argue there is a deep part of the human psyche that will always cling to space/place as a source of identity of some kind -- but the collision of 'networks' with 'communities' sure has re-factored that in chaotic ways.
I know we all know this, but when people say "jobs Americas won't do" they are always implying "at the price we are willing to pay" at the end
Although I will stake out this controversial claim even though I expect you all to disagree with me: It is actually literally true that (eg) software engineering is a job that Americans generally can't do, or more specifically, that the pool of Americans able to perform at the level needed for success is not deep enough for all the people who want to hire.
Granted, I think that ~90% of the people who currently do software engineering are not qualified for it. And I'm also eliding over what I call the "artisan vs industrialist" distinction: industrialization doesn't need you to do a quality job, it just needs you to do a standardized job. But it is quite literally true (eg) that the job I currently do, I was hired because _none of the ~40 other engineers at the company were good enough at their jobs for management to trust them with the project I'm working on, so instead they hired me (a non-american) specifically for this project_
"Meritocracy" is a joke and if tech CEOs say they're going back to it, I don't know what their angle is but I know they're lying
> All of these moves together suggest that Trump and the tech CEOs are trying on the idea of a secular, cosmopolitan, essentially Objectivist coalition.
Another comment worth leaving: When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2012, it was taken for granted that all tech upper management were Ayn Rand people.
Then the google bus protests happened in 2013, tech companies got extorted for a quarter billion dollars from feminist activists, and that's how all the DEI shit originally got established.
So I would correct you and say they're trying on that idea _again_
"concept of the nation-state itself (a people with shared lineage and history collectively controlling a discrete geographic space) is increasingly technologically incoherent. Ordinary people’s interests and personal loyalties too routinely transcend its boundaries."
I'd argue there is a deep part of the human psyche that will always cling to space/place as a source of identity of some kind -- but the collision of 'networks' with 'communities' sure has re-factored that in chaotic ways.
> These are not “jobs Americans won’t do”.
I know we all know this, but when people say "jobs Americas won't do" they are always implying "at the price we are willing to pay" at the end
Although I will stake out this controversial claim even though I expect you all to disagree with me: It is actually literally true that (eg) software engineering is a job that Americans generally can't do, or more specifically, that the pool of Americans able to perform at the level needed for success is not deep enough for all the people who want to hire.
Granted, I think that ~90% of the people who currently do software engineering are not qualified for it. And I'm also eliding over what I call the "artisan vs industrialist" distinction: industrialization doesn't need you to do a quality job, it just needs you to do a standardized job. But it is quite literally true (eg) that the job I currently do, I was hired because _none of the ~40 other engineers at the company were good enough at their jobs for management to trust them with the project I'm working on, so instead they hired me (a non-american) specifically for this project_
"Meritocracy" is a joke and if tech CEOs say they're going back to it, I don't know what their angle is but I know they're lying
keep up the good work!
> They don’t care about the Federalist Papers or Faulkner, but they are sincerely moved by the Manhattan Project and the Moon landing.
Well the Federalist Papers helped lay the ground work that made the can-do America possible.
As for Faulkner, I always thought of him as that degen nihilist who sadist English teachers inflict on hapless high-schoolers.
Love EXIT, keep doin' what you're doin' brothah
> All of these moves together suggest that Trump and the tech CEOs are trying on the idea of a secular, cosmopolitan, essentially Objectivist coalition.
Another comment worth leaving: When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2012, it was taken for granted that all tech upper management were Ayn Rand people.
Then the google bus protests happened in 2013, tech companies got extorted for a quarter billion dollars from feminist activists, and that's how all the DEI shit originally got established.
So I would correct you and say they're trying on that idea _again_