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Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.

By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!

Arguably someone at the center of the US political spectrum is right wing by any other standard. This is why someone like Zohran with policies that are otherwise fairly sensible and moderate gets painted as far left. Within that framing it seems that every policy position within the “center left” to the “far right” of US politics serves the same coalition. And any claims of American exceptionalism (we exist on our own political spectrum because we are special) just provides more control over that framing to the same dominant coalition.

I agree.

Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.

Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.

“Careless People” lays it out pretty well – you either need to make the right friends in college at an Ivy League or you need to be friends with someone else who did. If you made the mistake of not being born into a family that groomed you since birth for the ivy leagues then sorry, that ship has sailed already.

It’s not exactly a free choice when the built environment and infrastructure is designed around a single mode of transport. I can’t just “choose to cycle” when there are no bike paths, or “choose to walk” when things are spread out and separated by impassible freeways as to make it impossible. Look up the various ways the oil and automotive lobby has influenced city planning over the years – it might become a little more obvious who has the “free choice” here, and it’s not consumers.

> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.

This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.

> Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading?

This just sounds like a standard tech interview. Mind reading to find and perform the secret “signal”. Nobody flips out if you don’t find it, they just move on to one of the other 1,000 candidates for the role.

You seem to live in the real reality, and presumably people care about what you think there because it’s actually real. So why not enlighten us, help explain it to us deluded people? Or you can just be rude and vague.

What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.

What an odd thing to say to someone lamenting the passing of their friend. Maybe you should try some cardio.

I find this aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-expert strain of thought pretty concerning. Bureaucratic bullshit exists, for sure, but not every single system that requires credentials and expertise to navigate effectively is self-evidently bullshit. This attitude taken to its extreme creates deeply corrupt institutions that run entirely on nepotism, bribery, favors.

I’m not exactly making an argument for Soviet-style central planning. In a way, the system we have is its own form of central planning, except those with the power to do the planning are people like Zuckerberg, Musk, etc, and there is not even an illusion that they have any duty to serve anyone but their (also wealthy, but slightly less so) shareholders, participating in an increasingly irrational stock market.

The beauty of capitalism is that collective market forces determine the allocation of resources, but is that really what we have when certain individuals reach escape velocity of wealth and are no longer threatened by the natural selection of the market?

When you look at the eye-watering amount of money that Zuckerberg has spent on false starts in the past ~10 years, it makes you wonder whether capitalism truly does produce the most efficient allocation of resources.

Granted, a lot of that money created jobs for white collar workers, which feeds into other parts of the economy. But is it really more efficient to allocate those resources toward enriching a small group of Alexandr Wangs than allocating it toward projects like infrastructure, modernizing energy production, building housing, etc?