> [...] a lot of young founders here seem to have since embraced a punishing work culture — the 996 ethos. What are your thoughts about what’s happening?
> I kind of love it, honestly. I think Silicon Valley got really lazy during COVID
Honest question: is this the type of culture that anyone outside of VC actually wants?
Do a majority (or a significant plurality) of people support this infinite-grind mentality, and if so, to what end? It's framed in the context of a "race" with China, but all I see is a race to the bottom. What prize do we win if we beat China in this "race"? What is the goal here, who benefits from achieving the goal, and what purpose does it serve? (Aside from enriching a handful of VCs and executives, that is.)
For everyone's sake, I hope you're correct. A quick scan of the article's comment section is enough to seriously curb one's optimism, though. I don't know what the demographic makeup of participants in WSJ's comment threads is, but the views expressed are surprisingly homogenous in both substance and tone.
I like to challenge myself with a little "game" in which I attempt to guess the most commonly expressed opinions in WSJ comments based solely on the parent article title; it isn't a particularly difficult game.
They just scream antisemitism when you point that the bloodthirsty fascist leadership in Israel is trying to get US to die and fight for them in Iran even though Iran is only an issue for Israel. Save the goyim from this one and just go at it alone please.
And btw, I don't think normal Israeli people have anything to do with this stuff, it's mostly the bloodthirsty elites, the plebs in Israel like the rest of the world will take the hit while the Epstein class throws up a party.
> still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math.
Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!
In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.
With all the tech-fueled multipliers on productivity that economists and market analysts have been touting over the past decades (not even counting LLMs), one might imagine that there's plenty of money going around to sustain a healthy margin with reduced working hours (or at the very least, the same amount).
Seems like a lot of that "surplus value" just disappears or flips negative for many of us, though. It's almost as if a huge chunk of it is being diverted elsewhere beyond our reach. Wonder where that could be?
Where has the bulk of all that "value" our work has created in this industry gotten off to? I certainly see less and less of it these days.
You can't be serious. We're discussing a class of people making sub-minimum wages, barely scraping by to afford rent and groceries (much less any childcare or medical expenses), and your suggestion is "lobby to change that" or "just get a different job"?
As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.
Nobody cares that a large number of billionaires and world leaders, individuals with the power to steer the course of society as a whole, are implicated in one of the largest (and darkest) scandals in history?
"If AI does to white-collar work what globalization did to blue-collar, we need to confront that directly," Fink told the crowd in Davos
Seemed oddly progressive coming from Fink, until reading a bit further.
Fink's prescription, offered in a conversation at Davos with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was for pensions to invest more in AI infrastructure—the kind of assets BlackRock manages.
There it is, predictable as clockwork. If anyone needed any further evidence of how detached the worldviews of elites have become lately, there's this jewel of a closing quote from Fink:
"We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth," he said. "If they're just watching it from the sidelines, they're going to feel left out."
It would seem that in Mr. Fink's view, the greatest threat facing those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (who have seen their share of wealth contract by nearly 50% since '81, per article stats), is feeling a bit of FOMO. Not food insecurity, not teetering on the edge of bankruptcy due to a medical mishap, not the specter of homelessness forever looming, just... "feeling left out."
Give him a break. Most of his speech was akin to reading directly from Das Kapital. Finally one person among the US elite had the courage to openly call out the elephant in the room that is staring at everyone's faces.
> I kind of love it, honestly. I think Silicon Valley got really lazy during COVID
Honest question: is this the type of culture that anyone outside of VC actually wants?
Do a majority (or a significant plurality) of people support this infinite-grind mentality, and if so, to what end? It's framed in the context of a "race" with China, but all I see is a race to the bottom. What prize do we win if we beat China in this "race"? What is the goal here, who benefits from achieving the goal, and what purpose does it serve? (Aside from enriching a handful of VCs and executives, that is.)