(probably I should break up long comments? I don't know, constantly wish Substack had better formatting options for legibility and organization...)
The Bad:
*Declining value of old masters is maybe partially due to increasing risks of eco-terrorism, either directly or by lowering the relative status of such goods?
*TikTok - I continue to notice deep confusion that there's seemingly Nothing To Be Done about this Obvious Nonsense. Can't help but think that Trump jumped the gun by trying to go after this during his tenure; TikTok criticism has become right-coded, and also inconveniently deflected by pivoting back to comfortable racial territory. (Echoes of "worrying about covid is Racist, actually".) Hopefully it won't take some really dramatic Khashoggi-level consequences before Something Is Done. Sometimes wish Elon had bought ByteDance instead of Twitter...
The Good:
*This was the first year of my current career where we got through the holiday season with Zero Christmas Music whatsoever. (I'm pretty sure because management didn't know how to order the holiday CD. Yes, it's a literal physical CD that must be inserted in a disk drive to "install" the terrible-timely-tunes "station". Digital radio? Never heard of it...) I notice that employee morale was at record highs, customers largely didn't complain about the dearth - this is always the excuse given for Why It Must Be Done - and it's one of the very few winter seasons I've had that didn't leave me feeling bitter and resentful about majoritarian aesthetic preference tyranny. Talk about Holiday Magic.
*Magic inflation - one of the recent commanders was a cheap 2-drop that copies your artifact spells for {3}. I think one consequence of putting out so many new cards so quickly is...even worse power creep compared to the baseline necessary to maintain franchise interest. Like I only got interested about half a year ago, and just in that short time the new releases have been like..."wow, really, how is that okay?" I still think it's good to attract new players - like with the recent revival of TTRPG - but over the long term it's not sustainable. Only so many ways to design cards like Ruxa that make old shitty cards halfway viable.
The Condoned:
*I wonder if the grades thing works in reverse? That is, tell students all classes are letter graded, but secretly record (and actually value) only pass-fail. Would this get people to work unnecessarily harder? Also seems like one more confirmation of Goodharting - deadweight loss from optimizing for proxy of The Thing instead of The Thing. (And this is exacerbated by college admissions caring so heavily about GPAs. It's Goodharting all the way down. At least standardized tests had somewhat better correlation to the intended Thing.)
*Car loans - score one for public transit. It's been a shitty few years in many regards, but I'm quite happy to still regularly get entire train cars to myself. All for the minor cost of pre-tax-dollars-subsidized $2.50 fare, which is also not-uncommonly actually $0 due to fare readers being broken. Gas prices went up, you say? Huh, hadn't noticed...More relevantly, I wonder when the other shoe is going to drop on all the long-delayed pandemic evictions. Or maybe it already did and there wasn't actually much fuss, so it didn't show up in the news? Longer time horizon still, of course, is the looming troubles from Grand Theft Education. Which, as you made clear, depend actually very little on whether the direct debt jubilee happens or not. Lots of market shocks still to come, maybe, news at 11.
*Inflation - dunno about other labour markets, but in SF it really does seem like businesses aren't willing to raise wages much above sector "norms"...everyone everywhere is hiring, and yet no one's showing up to apply. Totally definitely coincidentally, the current crop of university students is said to be historically large, including lots of "non-traditional" students that aren't fresh off HS. Just like during the GR, lotsa folks that would normally participate in the labour force are deciding to put things on hold and pursue degrees...I sorta understand the reluctance to incentivize hiring though. Where I work, the total range of compensation for bottom-tier employees is less than $10 difference between new hire and salary-capped. Which takes around 4-6 years to achieve, assuming one gets every single possible raise. Bennies also largely don't improve with seniority. So raising the floor without raising the ceiling would ruffle __a lot__ of feathers. (We already had lots of acrimony over sudden pay rises from local minimum wage jumps, back in the #FightFor15 days. It just feels bad and wrong when someone who's got years more experience ends up earning __less__ than a newercomer, purely due to fortuitous timing...for both people involved.)
*Gifting - am reminded of Robin Hanson's claims on healthcare, that the primary function is to signal caring rather than actually cure ill health. The pervasiveness of gifting gift cards remains a head-scratcher to me...especially in comparison to just gifting actual cash. Money is fungible, and all that. But even though less gifting is probably an economic win...I think it also bodes ill for the social fabric, in that one of the few remaining easy ways to bond with people has become a confusing black box of misinterpreted signals. What does it say about how well we know our friends, family, partners, that we can't even model an acceptable gift anymore, nevermind a True Winner? There really does seem to be some magic lost by buying something off someone's Amazon Wish List. Some tension between world models, where "the point of gift giving is the gift" and "the point of gift giving is the giving". There's value and truth in both, I'd assert.
Monthly Roundup #2
(probably I should break up long comments? I don't know, constantly wish Substack had better formatting options for legibility and organization...)
The Bad:
*Declining value of old masters is maybe partially due to increasing risks of eco-terrorism, either directly or by lowering the relative status of such goods?
*TikTok - I continue to notice deep confusion that there's seemingly Nothing To Be Done about this Obvious Nonsense. Can't help but think that Trump jumped the gun by trying to go after this during his tenure; TikTok criticism has become right-coded, and also inconveniently deflected by pivoting back to comfortable racial territory. (Echoes of "worrying about covid is Racist, actually".) Hopefully it won't take some really dramatic Khashoggi-level consequences before Something Is Done. Sometimes wish Elon had bought ByteDance instead of Twitter...
The Good:
*This was the first year of my current career where we got through the holiday season with Zero Christmas Music whatsoever. (I'm pretty sure because management didn't know how to order the holiday CD. Yes, it's a literal physical CD that must be inserted in a disk drive to "install" the terrible-timely-tunes "station". Digital radio? Never heard of it...) I notice that employee morale was at record highs, customers largely didn't complain about the dearth - this is always the excuse given for Why It Must Be Done - and it's one of the very few winter seasons I've had that didn't leave me feeling bitter and resentful about majoritarian aesthetic preference tyranny. Talk about Holiday Magic.
*Magic inflation - one of the recent commanders was a cheap 2-drop that copies your artifact spells for {3}. I think one consequence of putting out so many new cards so quickly is...even worse power creep compared to the baseline necessary to maintain franchise interest. Like I only got interested about half a year ago, and just in that short time the new releases have been like..."wow, really, how is that okay?" I still think it's good to attract new players - like with the recent revival of TTRPG - but over the long term it's not sustainable. Only so many ways to design cards like Ruxa that make old shitty cards halfway viable.
The Condoned:
*I wonder if the grades thing works in reverse? That is, tell students all classes are letter graded, but secretly record (and actually value) only pass-fail. Would this get people to work unnecessarily harder? Also seems like one more confirmation of Goodharting - deadweight loss from optimizing for proxy of The Thing instead of The Thing. (And this is exacerbated by college admissions caring so heavily about GPAs. It's Goodharting all the way down. At least standardized tests had somewhat better correlation to the intended Thing.)
*Car loans - score one for public transit. It's been a shitty few years in many regards, but I'm quite happy to still regularly get entire train cars to myself. All for the minor cost of pre-tax-dollars-subsidized $2.50 fare, which is also not-uncommonly actually $0 due to fare readers being broken. Gas prices went up, you say? Huh, hadn't noticed...More relevantly, I wonder when the other shoe is going to drop on all the long-delayed pandemic evictions. Or maybe it already did and there wasn't actually much fuss, so it didn't show up in the news? Longer time horizon still, of course, is the looming troubles from Grand Theft Education. Which, as you made clear, depend actually very little on whether the direct debt jubilee happens or not. Lots of market shocks still to come, maybe, news at 11.
*Inflation - dunno about other labour markets, but in SF it really does seem like businesses aren't willing to raise wages much above sector "norms"...everyone everywhere is hiring, and yet no one's showing up to apply. Totally definitely coincidentally, the current crop of university students is said to be historically large, including lots of "non-traditional" students that aren't fresh off HS. Just like during the GR, lotsa folks that would normally participate in the labour force are deciding to put things on hold and pursue degrees...I sorta understand the reluctance to incentivize hiring though. Where I work, the total range of compensation for bottom-tier employees is less than $10 difference between new hire and salary-capped. Which takes around 4-6 years to achieve, assuming one gets every single possible raise. Bennies also largely don't improve with seniority. So raising the floor without raising the ceiling would ruffle __a lot__ of feathers. (We already had lots of acrimony over sudden pay rises from local minimum wage jumps, back in the #FightFor15 days. It just feels bad and wrong when someone who's got years more experience ends up earning __less__ than a newercomer, purely due to fortuitous timing...for both people involved.)
*Gifting - am reminded of Robin Hanson's claims on healthcare, that the primary function is to signal caring rather than actually cure ill health. The pervasiveness of gifting gift cards remains a head-scratcher to me...especially in comparison to just gifting actual cash. Money is fungible, and all that. But even though less gifting is probably an economic win...I think it also bodes ill for the social fabric, in that one of the few remaining easy ways to bond with people has become a confusing black box of misinterpreted signals. What does it say about how well we know our friends, family, partners, that we can't even model an acceptable gift anymore, nevermind a True Winner? There really does seem to be some magic lost by buying something off someone's Amazon Wish List. Some tension between world models, where "the point of gift giving is the gift" and "the point of gift giving is the giving". There's value and truth in both, I'd assert.