I think you can extend this transposition across a lot more career paths: athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, models, film directors, etc. Any career where the financial outcome can be described by a power law follows the same dynamics, has the same gatekeepers, who have the same abusive/sycophantic relationships to market participants.
When I was raising VC I related more to struggling artist than employed technologists. Being constantly rejected, needing to be seen as more gifted than the competition and the goddamn urgency to catch on fire yesterday were the same and we got along great even if we understood and cared nothing about each other's work.
People who are considering one of these paths have an opportunity to learn from folks who might not do what they do exactly, but have been in the same sort of system. To realise the relationships they're buying into, the price they'll need to pay for a shot at stardom and to think if it's really an experience they can afford.
Keep going. This isn't unique to basically anything. Theres an analogy here for practically any case where there is scarcity and some manner of investment.
That said, I think this article is wins on providing me a window into the college athlete's world. It's a space that I feel like rarely shows up in popular media, is ripe for abuse and the stakes are definitely very high. Very interesting read for that.
There are definitely "tournament" activities that are more winners take all than others. The stakes are probably actually higher to the degree consequences are stumbling down a dead-end path for years. I'm actually not convinced playing a sport in college while realizing you're not going to make it to the pros is such a terrible thing. Presumably they got something out of it. And lots of people play sports in college or do a multitude of other things that may--or may not--provide huge professional benefit.
I think it comes from modern mass media technology. If musician A is better than B there is little reason to listen to B, unless you live in 1600 and musician A works in the next town over.
Modern mass media cannot generally differentiate between A and B because there are zillions of indistinguishable musicians invading the attention of people with very different marketing capacities.
Nah, it existed when barrier to entry was much, much higher. What causes it is the fact that with recording and copying technology, creative work scales extremely well, especially with positive feedback effects of popularity and marketing. This is what creates the very small number of very high earners. If anything, the lower barriers to entry (especially with regards to being able to distribute your work) have flattened the curve a little bit, as the long tail of obscure artists is longer and thicker than ever (and the shape is the same: each obscure genre/subculture has a few artists doing very compared to the others, though it also flattens off once you're looking at artists who primarily make money from commission work, as that doesn't scale nearly as much).
There's probably some truth to that. You either have gatekeepers or a huge number of people just fail. (Even with gatekeepers a lot of people just fail anyway but but of people just don't get the opportunity to participate--which may or may not be efficient.)
I spoke to a guy once who made gun parts, rifle bits for specific military uses. Their industry is also describable with power laws but at a much slower pace. You toil away selling a handful of units to a narrow group of highly-regulated customers, sometimes for decades, until you get that call to demonstrate your products for someone big (ie the US army). If you win, the next order is for tens of thousands of units. You license/outsource your design for a hundred per unit and walk away with a steady income that will last generations.
Like with anything, you need to do a proper job educating your kids before trusting safeguards to keep them safe. That would be my bet for a scalable solution.
Some kids will still drown, it’s unavoidable. But swimming lessons are much more effective at preventing drowning deaths than fences.
I somewhat agree with your point, but I'd quibble with the analogy, and its implication about the usefulness/importance of fences.
I'd argue that the Internet is less like water, and more like a freeway. (It is the "information super-highway", after all!)
We do put (quite tall) fences up between freeways and residential areas (or between freeways and areas with wildlife!), and for good reason: unlike deep water (that both humans and animals have a vague instinct is an "unknown quantity" best to be approached cautiously), a freeway can, at a non-rush-hour time, look like a perfectly safe and quiet and predictable place — a place just like the calm, safe meadow or bike path or residential lane beside it — until, midway through crossing one, a truck sudenly whizzes over the horizon going 120mph and smashes right into you before the driver has time to react.
And that's the Internet: a seemingly safe, predictable place — with unexpected trucks whizzing through it, ready to smack into you.
Freeway is a great example in more ways: large swaths of society were destroyed in the process of making them (less purposefully in the case of the Internet/social media I think) and paradoxically reduced social connections despite seemingly making it easier to travel/connect. Now everywhere is unsafe because of car dependence/social media everywhere (i.e. Pauly Likens meeting adults on grindr https://www.newsweek.com/missing-teen-dead-pauly-likens-dash...)
Fair and I'll run with it. Where I live (Lisbon) it's very very easy to get to unprotected highways with no fences. No trouble at all, maybe a 15-minute walk from my home. No epidemic of kids being run over. We still fence them, where we want to pretend highways don't exist. Also a good analogy.
If you wanted to live to a 1930s standard of education, healthcare, food, entertainment, interior decorarion, transportation, savings etc etc you could most definitely do it on very few hours of work. Lots of people associated with homesteading, tiny houses etc do so.
That said I agree we should be further ahead in paving a way to paradise.
It's not necessarily about the standard of living, but about production going into the zero or negative sum status consumption. Or as Keynes puts it:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes -- those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs -- a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else?
How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or proles being able to afford intercontinental flights more than once in a lifetime?
He postulated eightfold increse in economy, though not clear at what working hours. If he assumed 40 hours then and eightfold productivity increse, with 15 hours that would still be threefold increase in living standards. The productivity has increased even more than eightfold.
Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.
> Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.
Of course there is! Vernacular architecture has been doing this for millenia, all the way to caves.
Take a plain partition wall. If you build it architecturally, it’ll be optimized. Likely out of metal/timber and sheetrock, or bricks. It mainly is what it is and needs full replacement by craftspeople for modifications.
Now take the same wall made vernacularly. Possibly made out of clay and straw, or stones, or timber. Might be two feet wide in certain places. It can be carved, reused, expanded by the user at will.
Efficiency and robustness are a necessary tradeoff. If you live in a cave you can carve out new rooms given a spoon and free time. But most of us would prefer the comforts of modern buildings.
I'm sorry you've been dealt a bad hand but please don't make it worse by risking other people's lives. You're not fit to drive, period. Your circumstances don't excuse this behaviour outside of an emergency.
Around here (Portugal) plenty of people have outside cats in the city and suburbs, it’s great. However there’s a chance they’ll decide not to come back to you.
Some dogs like to roam just like cats, we had one of those. Dog gone again, call the next farm, dog there? Nope, not this time. Explore the forest to find him a few kilometers off eating from a moose carcass, joy. Once home he vomits up half a moose which he wants to eat again. Yes that's dogs for you.
See, I am the only house owner in the street without a cat. Guess whose garden is very frequently visited by literally all the cats? Isn't there some plants to repel them? And no I'm not getting a dog
Go to your local gardener and ask for plants that repels cats/has scents cats don't like and plant them where you notice they use as a bathroom. Some people plant plants with thorns/prickles too, which seems to help a bit after the cats learn it hurts.
Most obvious solution otherwise is to have a fence if you don't have one already.
That’s easy to answer: there have been no great new games since Beat Saber and that was 6 years ago. People go through a lot of trouble and expense to have fun, but there’s no fun to be had in VR for most.
Puzzling Places and Walkabout Minigolf would like to have a word with you.
They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.
Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.
That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
I don't mean to say that there are no fun games, but they're just not good enough to drive $400 expenses. They're not Pong and they're not Mario. They're not even Fruit Ninja or Mafia Wars. And yeah, your counterpoints being 4 years old isn't helping the case either.
New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
I’m 40. I didn’t throw down for my friends when I was 19, but I support those same friends through divorces, cancer, deaths now. They’ll do the same for me.
Some friends are closer than family. That’s luck, but also intention.
When I was raising VC I related more to struggling artist than employed technologists. Being constantly rejected, needing to be seen as more gifted than the competition and the goddamn urgency to catch on fire yesterday were the same and we got along great even if we understood and cared nothing about each other's work.
People who are considering one of these paths have an opportunity to learn from folks who might not do what they do exactly, but have been in the same sort of system. To realise the relationships they're buying into, the price they'll need to pay for a shot at stardom and to think if it's really an experience they can afford.
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