You're not giving a counterfactual, you're restating debunked arguments. That's my point. You have no valid or cogent argument here because you aren't reliant on facts, you're all about the vibes.

We're here in a pissing match because you said - and keep saying - that "The actual problem isn’t college or student loans." Except time and time again, I've given evidence that the actual problem IS college and IS student loans. Here's what I said two fuckin' months ago:

ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone.

FFEL was in effect from 1965 to 2010, FDLP in effect from 2010 'til now. Simply put, college students from 1965-2010 had a different financial landscape than college students from 1945 to 1965... and college students from 1945-1965 had the GI Bill. They had the GI Bill, of course, because more than half of young men were enlisted between 1941 and 1945 and letting them into the job force with nothing better to do isn't a great idea, and then we had Korea, and then we had Vietnam but for everyone else there's FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS so you could either pay Uncle Sam up front or on the back end.

Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves.

You wanna die on the hill that employers just up'n'decided that they felt like requiring a college degree so all of a sudden, everyone went "well shit guess I'm going to Columbia now" rather than recognizing that when a college degree is advantageous and free, everyone goes to college.

There's no grand conspiracy. The Chamber of Commerce didn't have a meeting at the Skull'n'Bones club and say "fuck yeah bachelor's degrees or no typing pool." What happened is the government extended education to everyone at favorable terms and everyone got educated. What happened next is Republicans lost their shit over the idea that college liberals might get a free ride and made it really tough to disburse college debt in bankruptcy, and then a generation later Republicans lost their shit again and made it impossible.

I'm saying all this for a third time in some instances. It's not "especially once student loans were available" it's BECAUSE student loans were not only available it's that they are lucrative as fuck for anyone servicing them. It's nothing like cancer drugs, it's like student loans.

I don’t see how “actually, since you need college to get a good job, people go to college” deals with what I said, which is that if kids didn’t need college for the hope of a good job, then those kids uninterested in academic work would likely make different choices, and this would change everything in the equation.

You're arguing that the problem is on the jobs side, and if everyone just got paid more there would be no problems. You have no arguments whatsoever as to why the price of college exploded in the past 20 years. On the other hand, I've now given you two heavily-documented responses explaining EXACTLY why the price of college has exploded over the past 20 years and you're resolutely at if we paid people more college would be cheaper.

If you could do what most people could do on graduation in 1955 — go get a job pretty much anywhere that paid a livable wage, the demand for college would reduce drastically because people are not choosing college because they have a burning passion to read books on philosophy or English Literature. They want the jobs that the diploma opens to them. If you had viable options for working indoors pushing paper that didn’t require college, I expect enrollment to drop like a rock.

Okay, so what changed since 1955 other than college loans becoming available to all and dissolving of college debt becoming available to none? Elastic inelastic blah blah blah you wanna give causality a try?

Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing.

Fucking hell, buddy, they absolutely do. Here's an undergrad in spreadsheets tearing apart the biggest conservative political theory of 2010:

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's easy. The problem isn't the education, the problem is the cost of education and the cost of education is related to policy.

And don’t get cocky and try to push it too hard. A coding agent is like a big-ass tunnel borer machine when you've been using power shovels. It is strong, sure, hella strong. But it is expensive, it can still get stuck badly, and you need to guide it carefully at all times. And it's not that fast – it's not going to bore through the English Channel in a day. So don't set unrealistic expectations going in. Just focus on how different this stuff is from 2 years ago when ChatGPT came out, and then marvel at how different it is from 2 months ago when the best we had was chat.

Let's talk about Photoshop, shall we?

I suck at Photoshop. Always have, despite taking an in-person course (in Photoshop 2.0!) and at least three online courses. I started hacking at Photoshop when people were still using it to retouch photos, fer chrissake, then adopted Lightroom when Photoshop became too bloated to use on photos, then adopted Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 while still trying to make headway against Photoshop, then abandoned Lightroom when they abandoned cataloguing.

Photoshop, meanwhile, got folded into "Creative Suite" which meant you were heavily penalized for buying Photoshop when for less than double the price you could get five other programs you'd never use. So yeah, you'd pay $1100 or some tedious shit to get the whole thing, then $100 or $200 to update it, but mostly you torrented it because fuck you, Adobe. Then it got folded into Creative Cloud and yeah, you could rent Photoshop for $30 a month but you could rent all of Creative Cloud for $50 a month! But then nobody rented Creative Cloud because fucking hell you can do 90% of what you need in Canva. Effectively for free.

Adobe tried to staunch the bleeding by paying $20b for Figma, but it didn't work. instead they had to pay Figma $1b for letting Canva eat their lunch while they fucked around trying to buy themselves out of a problem. Adobe is dealing with AI by forcing everyone to use it and hiking their prices, which Barclay's thinks is bullish. My kid's art class is learning photo editing in - wait for it - Canva. Her friends do their video editing in CapCut, because of course they do. Meanwhile she is the undisputed heavyweight champion in the world because I spent 10 minutes showing her how to punk around in iMovie.

For you CIO-types, fleets will enable your developers to spend thousands of dollars a day. Even if inference costs plummet, the Jevons Paradox will result in higher usage offsetting those costs. If you don’t believe that, go ask to see your bug backlog; it’s basically infinite.

Thousands a day!? But it's money incredibly well spent! Your engineering org will start to be able to go as fast as you want them to go, for once. Can you believe it? It'll be like being a startup again. You’ll be able to “surprise and delight your customers”, as Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, at an elite level you never dreamed possible.

Who's got two thumbs and knows what Jira is? This guy! Because I beta-test. And in the past ten years, the three platforms I beta test have moved from Jira to Centercode because Jira is bloated and expensive. Two of those companies? Publicly traded. The third? One of the biggest privately-held firms in Hollywood.

I don't know about one of them, but I know the other two have a coder or two in the US working on any given feature and an army of offshore developers. You are now aware that Pro Tools is largely written in Ukraine; Putin really fucked up my beta schedule, albeit only for about four months. So. Are these firms going to trade off AI for offshore development farms? Maybe if it saves them money and time but we've got bugs that we know what they are and we know where they are and we know they aren't getting squished because for the past fifteen years those bugs are a consequence of legacy code that supports this one studio that can't change out this other piece of code and bloody hell if you lose that one studio you're sunk so the entire rest of the world deals with this one rare error that pops up all of a sudden.

Are... you going to explain to the AI fleet why that bug has to stay?

I know four CRMs. How wretched is that? Two of them I know because there have been hints of APIs that allow me to talk to the two CRMs we run, and the two CRMs we run are that most wretched of CRM, known as the EHR. Yeah. We run two EHRs. I know. Because one is good for naturopathic medicine and the other is unparalleled for midwifery. One of the EHRs? It's got two coders. Neither of them like me. They were willing to give me access to their API for long enough to get Zoho running for $10k. I opted out, since they said "we support Zoho" when in fact they meant "our db will theoretically interface with Zoho's db." The other has one coder. His name is Mohammed. I had a great conversation with them once where I explained what an API was. They thought it sounded like a cool idea. They've been working on mobile (yes, I know) for six years now; interfacing with my phone system sounded like science fiction to them.

Now - I know what you're thinking. Mohammed needs an AI! Goddamn right. Just think of what Mohammed could do with a $50k "fleet" of AI agents, other than burn through six months of budget that needs to be passed along to a legion of independent shoestring-budget alpha females. Why, he could create a mobile app! He could integrate with phone systems! He could integrate teleprescription!" I can tell you what he did do with AI. He changed the text box in one of the description fields into an RTF box in one of the description fields and broke everyone's records going back to the dawn of the system; everyone's records are now full of "&nbsp"s everywhere. Took two days to roll things back.

Now - I know a guy. Has worked for Salesforce for like 20 years. His job? Assess your needs, assess Salesforce's stack and custom-build a Salesforce CRM for your organization. His department has been shrinking gradually because Salesforce wanted $150 per user per month to glue my phone system to my EHRs. Now they want $80. "Hey OpenAI, configure this pre-existing Salesforce stack to work with this pre-existing accounting software" is something an AI should be able to do, particularly if you can blame the customer if it doesn't work. Of course, you might end up injecting "&nbsp" everywhere and having to revert.

And we've got a computer science masters' student on our network right now. Her thesis is going to be about tricking the API of one of our EHRs into coughing up useful data we can use to show insurance companies. These are metrics the software is required by law to collect - that whole "HIPAA" thing? It's the Health Insurance PORTABILITY and ACCESSIBILITY Act, there's no "privacy" in there anywhere - and yet, what she gets is blanks and garbage. Masters' student. Thesis project. She's salty that we aren't running EPIC because why wouldn't you run EPIC?

Because at my size, EPIC is $30k a seat to buy and $3k a month to operate. And every hospital pays it. Because they have human coders, who solve your problems, who make it all work, and make it so your data can be sent anywhere. EPIC? Epic isn't gonna fill your text fields with "&nbsp."

_________________________________________

Look. You think I might be able to fumblefuck my way through "vibe-coding?" I'll bet I could. I know how to trick Google into giving me what I want, and what limited entertainment I've derived from OpenAI has turned out exactly how I wanted it to. I could certainly do worse. And my phone system has an API, and one of my EHRs has an API, and I'll bet I could "vibe-code" some glue-ware that would open up my EHR when the phone rings, scan for a known phone number, feed a hit into the phone system so the name pops up automatically and open the EHR so that my receptionist can get some deetz about who she's talking to. This is literally the ORIGINAL SIN of CRMs. It's what they were CREATED to do. It is the only reason they fucking exist - CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT.

But what I know? Is if my finger into Google Workspace drops below a threshold of $5 it will stop returning API calls requiring regeneration of the key or else not only does voice transcription fail, the callback to another service I use fails which fails something else and the whole voicemail system goes down. Ask me how I know. Better yet, ask me how long it took to get an answer about this out of Google because the answer is "never" because there's no documentation on any of this shit and you think I'm going to hand over this much mission-critical shit to Microsoft CoPilot or some shit when Mohammed brought down an entire EHR by asking for RTF? Mohammed? Who codes for a living, rather than to just eke out a little extra time to hang out with my wife?

You know what I don't need? A tunnel borer. Because there's buried electrical and natural gas in there and I don't need a fucking tunnel. I need two guys who know how to put in drip irrigation, and I will pay them, and I will manage them, because if you just YOLO into this shit you get surprise landscaping.

Coders? And people who write about code? Suck bawlz at considering where the code lives. What the code does. And I don't know that we'll ever know what knocked out Telefonica?

But my money is on "vibe-coding."

You know... this is still bugging me two days later. Like it personally insulted my daughter or something.

- I worked a closed-door "futurist" session for Warner Brothers some years ago, where the c-suite drones of every duchy of the far-flung Time Warner empire showed up to learn what the hell they were all supposed to do about this "internet" thing. The VP for programming of HBO was there, as well as the content directors for DC Comics and Youtube (he had just been hired away). And we had this one "futurist" who took to the stage to discuss torrenting. He turned to the audience and said "do you guys really believe that some kid with 80,000 MP3s on his hard drive was going to buy those tracks? Do you honestly think he'll even listen to them all? Of course not! HE'S CURATING!" and everyone nodded thoughtfully.

- Trent Reznor once called Oink.me.UK the best site on the internet. Sony was caught seeding their unreleased shit on there, while also demanding it be shut down. The guys into music enough to be on a private tracker, to pay for a seedbox? They're your influencers. The ones who decide "yes, I will listen to this once and seed it forever because this is how my tribe reaches each other" are the ones keeping the system running. When I need new music to play on the radio I pull down every torrent within a laundry list of micro-genres published since the last time I was dry. Anything good enough that someone else goes through the trouble to create a torrent of? It may not be to your taste but you know it reached someone.

- Jeron Lanier basically predicted NFTs in You Are Not A Gadget by pointing out that physical music sales will never come back, and if bands want to make money they need to focus on collectibles and the fan experience.

- I don't often purchase music off Bandcamp. I purchase shirts. Nearly everything is on Tidal and Tidal integrates with Rekordbox so it's easier just to stream it. But that doesn't make anyone any money except Tidal and AlphaTheta.

That's just fandom. The act of curation is the act of appreciation. Seeking out things you like and sharing them is the whole fucking point. The manifesto I wrote that saved my radio show relied on a "push/pull relationship" with music, stating that there were people who sought out new music and propagated it to their friends ("push") and there were people who were more comfortable listening to things that had already been vetted for social acceptance via MTV, Rolling Stone or television licensing ("pull"). I went further and pointed out that goth-industrial was entirely push because the path to mainstream acceptance had exactly one bridge on it - my show.

But I think the reason this bitch really bugs the shit out of me is because of a conversation I had 25 years ago. I dated this girl who was awful, who had a father who was awful, who had two kids with one of his students (she was not awful). 20 years his junior, she was within 10 years of me and the girlfriend, which means her siblings had young children. They tried to relate to us as peers rather than as youth, which was nice, but they were also young parents, which was interesting. I was talking to one of them about mixing in clubs and she said something that hit hard - "oh, sure, you listen to a lot of music now but trust me, once you have kids, you won't anymore. You'll just want the silence. I haven't listened to a band in five years."

Fuckin' haunting, yo. Also absolutely untrue, no basis in fact, etc etc etc but at the ripe old age of 22, here was a lady going "I have turned old and you shall as well, it is inevitable."

I think of the "pullers." The ones for whom Columbia House existed. The "album of the month" club for people who don't want to decide for themselves what they like, who want someone in authority to tell them that they won't be mocked at a cocktail party for liking the wrong things. The ones who had a subscription to Spin Magazine because their friends had subscriptions to Spin Magazine so they could all stick to what they read in Spin Magazine and rest assured that their lives were Spin Magazine approved. And those of us who considered it the anathema of music appreciation? Well, we just never crossed paths.

THAT is what this column is bitching about:

- There's no authority to assure people like this of what's cool

- If they wander out into the wild wooly world they might encounter people who didn't care for Spin Magazine

- They aren't sure what they should enjoy if there isn't someone to give them permission

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO CONNECT WITH THE MUSIC YOU LOVE... BUT YOU HAVE TO LOVE MUSIC.

Spin Magazine, ironically enough, ran a feature entitled "Top Ten Albums Owned By People Who Hate Music." Their argument was that there were some albums that were so universal that people with absolutely no connection to music whatsoever ended up with a copy. I thought of that article when I saw Icona Pop for sale on vinyl at Whole Foods. The article, of course, predated Whole Foods and Icona Pop by decades; their list included Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours."

Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two weeks. For a musician who normally goes into hiding and only emerges when it's time to promote something, it's been a pretty exciting time to be a fan. However, all the information being put out, promoted on social media and reposted on places like Reddit, have all been a little confusing.

This is a woman demanding that Bjork be less confusing for the ease of her musical fandom.

I ran lights for Gary Numan once. It was the Exile tour, well after Cars. And as I came out to the lighting console, all sixteen channels of it, and moved a pair of drinks out of my space, a couple yuppies grew outraged with me. "This is our spot!" they said. "This is the lighting guy's spot," I said. "Well we were here first!" they responded. "Well you aren't anymore," I said, and they wandered off to find a bouncer, then came back in a huff and glowered over my shoulder.

Until the first song, anyway.

The second song was Cars, but they didn't even stick around long enough to hear it. They came for that song they heard on the radio, won't it be fun to think back to that time when everyone took their musical instruction from Rick Dees or Casey Casem?

It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. I've been noticing this sentiment with society, this feeling of always being mentally exhausted. How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!" The reality is we're not going to watch it because we feel like we have no time to get through everything and we don't fully trust other people's recommendations.

This is a lady who wants Bjork to explain the riddles, who wants entertainment to be a puzzle she can solve, who doesn't "fully trust other people's recommendations" unless, apparently, those people work for Viacom. She doesn't want to order a Bedless Bones t-shirt off of Bandcamp because Kadri Sammel's cat might have left cat hair on it.

One of the things I found in the attic was a nasty-gram from Columbia House. Dude was delinquent on some 8-tracks; the one that really stuck with me was Burt Bacharach's Lost Horizon soundtrack. Now - there were a lot fewer ways to connect with music in 1972. It was a pretty forgettable year.

But still.

Speaking as a Billboard-reporting, Nielsen-tabulating, A&R-wrestling radio DJ...

I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.

Everything that ran on 120 Minutes or Amp - a 14-year and a 5-year run, respectively - was on a major label. 120 minutes was the product of the music juggernaut turning to "college radio" when they discovered that they could shove REM down everyone's throats as effectively as Beastie Boys, so long as they shoved it down the right pipe. Amp was the product of Crystal Method and Chemical Brothers colonizing the dance music channels more effectively than the college music channels. Anyone casually referring to Amp is speaking in an extremely specific '90s kid register of speech, an era where online culture was dominated by college kids on dialup. It died about the same time as TRL reverted MTV from countercultural juggernaut to corporate panderbear. If you're sitting there longing for the days when some dude at Columbia told you what to listen to, your problem now is that you've aged out of the demo not that Columbia can't figure out how to shove music down your throat.

The rise of social media has killed the art of curation because, these days, things are rarely curated. Criticism is dead (with Fantano3 being the one exception) and Gen Alpha doesn't know how to find music through anything but TikTok. Relying on algorithms puts way too much power in technology's hands. And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. Oh, you like shoegaze? Well, that's all the algorithm is going to give you until you intentionally start listening to something else.

To the contrary, my daughter, all of twelve years old, has gotten pretty damn good at tricking new music out of Tidal. That's because the algorithms don't predict content you've seen before - GraceNote has been doing things the exact same way since nineteen diggity two and it's got sound scientific data saying "this song and this song are similar along the following dozen metrics that decades of focus groups confirm track affinity." Spotify and everyone else have a preposterously large corpus saying "since 9/10ths of our listeners who like Nirvana also like REM, we're 100% going to shove REM down your throat." The author is absolutely right in that it's not going to suggest gregorian chants to go along with your REM because it assumes that rogue appearances of Randy Travis are negative for your listening style - "Aphex Twin" and "Squarepusher" are a pairing, "Portishead" "tricky" "Hooverphonic" "Poe" and "Veruca Salt" are such an agglomeration of major-label "indie" acts that I can basically know exactly what year your Spin Magazine subscription expired.

BECAUSE THAT'S THE PROBLEM: You forgot that you used to pay for curation.

Any streaming service worth their salt has a million curated playlists. You can listen to them. Not your cup of tea? Then you need to find a different curator.

Same with movies. Once a week I would watch Ebert and Roeper, who would discuss and review all the releases of that week, including indie and foreign ones. I would also sometimes flip through film magazines or randomly stumble across something cool being aired on the IFC channel or Bravo2.

Fuckin' nothing on Ebert & Roeper was outside a major studio's distro network. If it was on Ebert & Roeper it opened on a thousand screens. That metric has become so useless that nobody bats an eye when Tom Hanks releases a $150m movie on frickin' Apple TV, when Jeff Bezos somehow squanders $90m an episode on Hobbits. I love me some Lola Rennt as much or more than the next guy but (1) it was Sony (2) it had a six month theater run. I subscribe to the Washington Post and the Seattle Times and they both have theater critics. I ignore both of them because fuck you, that's why, but I mean for fuck's sake

How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

What do you want here, lady

If you pivoted from "I read it in Spin Magazine, it must be good" to "I don't have time to check out a show my friends are recommending" that's a you problem, not a culture problem. Like,

- You can literally stumble across a song on Spotify

- Look it up on Bandcamp

- Find every single person who bought it

- Pick somebody at random and look up every single thing they've favorited or bought on Bandcamp

- See every single person who follows them and see the same thing

- Listen to every single track six times before Bandcamp even asks you for money

But yeah if you're gonna sit there and go nobody is telling me what to listen tooooooooooooooooooo then I know exactly what happened:

1) You gave up everything in favor of social media

2) That was building affinity in order to demonstrate its value to advertisers

3) And now that the advertisers are questioning the metrics

4) Social media is milking you like a goddamn cow and you don't like it.

Anbody sitting there pining for Spin Magazine and waxing nostalgic about Portishead is (1) old (2) tasteless and you know what? If fuckin' Spotify isn't serving you up new shit to go along with your Portishead it's because you don't like it. Here's a Portishead-adjacent band whose new album came out last year:

And I mean... fuck. That's some nostalgic shit right there. 353 whole views! 54k plays on Spotify, 200 album downloads off Bandcamp. Goddamn song is called "Mixtape Days" so it's straight-up pandering to Portishead whiners. Sure doesn't have 47m views, though. If you want the true flavor of this discussion, read the comments on that video, by the way, but hey - how did I find that song? I (1) stumbled across one of their older albums on Tidal (2) followed the band (3) let nine years lapse (4) got a surprise in my "new music" section. GO ALGORITHM This is how you get exciting discoveries like holy shit new Bel Canto or, despite the fact that I almost never listen to Coil and have never played Coil in Tidal, it tells me that The Wraiths and Strays of Paris has been remastered.

I'n'I probably listen to six hours of new music a week. Not "new to me", "came out in the last couple weeks" music. I air about 40 minutes of new music a week. I R A tastemaker. And it's not that fucking hard! All you have to do is have an epiphany like this:

"Huh, it's 2013 and I'm listening to Orb's 'Live '93.'"

"Huh, it came out 20 years ago."

"Huh, the time horizon between me listening to Live '93 when it came out and me listening to Live '93 now is the same as me listening to Live '93 when it came out and the fucking Dark Side of the Moon"

"Holy shit I better find some new fucking music"

And you know what? It's fucking easy. Find a podcast you like. Find a Mixcloud DJ you like. Find a Soundcloud DJ you like. Find someone to follow on Spotify. Find someone to follow on Last.FM. ASK YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS.

And that's where curation comes in. We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.

AND THE CRITICS JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING LISTEN

"Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

Speaking as someone who grew up without a college radio station, without MTV's "Amp", who used to have to drive an hour to buy CDs without the opportunity to listen to them, the threshold for discovery has never been lower. here's fucking Angolan industrial music on Youtube. All you gotta do is be willing to go down the rabbit hole instead of bitching about how Spin Magazine isn't telling you how to think anymore.

FFS.

I fuckin' mixed Poe. Nice lady. She's... okay. She added... nothing. If you're nostalgic for this shit?

It's not the industry, it's you.

I mean, clearly aleina thinks you need to become a flexible entity. I can speak only for myself, but I could use a teleportation portal. Not so much with the thorny mazes and god knows I have enough unexpected traps but you win some you lose some, don'tcha know?

I fucking hate Cormac McCarthy and everything he touched and I've learned to honor that in myself. John Gardner made the point that most "classics" are chosen by educators and that they choose not because the books are good but because they allow educators to make easy, simple points. You have to exercise the self-care to honor your own perspectives and needs - the phrase "I can try to keep to a schedule but just trying to do that seems to cause conflict" tells me that sticking up for yourself is something those around you aren't expecting.

What's important is what you value. If you're not sure what you value, try a few things on for size. When my life upended in 2007 and I found myself transitioning from "I have two projects headlining the NYT business section" to "I am about to go to producing school" to "I am a worthless bum" to "I just mixed live for double the population of New Zealand" in six weeks, I discovered an important inner truth: I love pineapple. And while I had no idea what to expect on a day-to-day basis, I knew that seeking pineapple gave me a concrete thing that generally inched my needle an iota or two towards comfort and pleasure.

The other nice thing about pineapple is it's a concrete thing. there's nothing abstract about "pineapple." "I can try to keep to a schedule" is a long goddamn border to defend, d00d. "I listen to 20 minutes of music before bedtime because it helps me relax" is concrete. If you defend that every goddamn day everyone around you will leave it alone because it's easier for them. They'll push on it initially because what they're doing is testing your resolve but if you reveal your resolve to be stronger than their own they'll give over. That gives you a defensible border - you can expand from "20 minutes of music before bedtime" to "I go to bed at 11, you're welcome to join me".

I'd start with the physical therapy and branch out. Anything you're paying for can have the blame shifted. Also I just started Dragon Age:Veilguard and I'm not sure I like it as much as :Origins but it's fun enough.

https://www.404media.co/american-schools-were-deeply-unprepared-for-chatgpt-public-records-show/

Yeah, that thought occurred to me in the waiting room of the ER. "Man, I sure am glad I'm not on a sailboat pointed at Vanuatu right now."

I had to wait two hours for an ultrasound tech to drive up from Albuquerque when I was a kid. And while a fresh medical student at the University of Washington diagnosed the eczema in my fingernails before I'd sat down, three years previously I'd been made to sit as an exhibit while every third dermatologist in the Mountain West wandered through, asked me to hold up my hands, stroked their chins and left. The consensus was leprosy, until they learned that I'd been cultured for leprosy and it came back negative.

I sat down to a taco salad last night. Then I jumped and looked behind me because there was a giant shadow of a snake on the floor.

Unfortunately the snake jumped, too. And started to dissipate. And was only in one eye. "What does it mean when your eye fills with blood?" I asked my wife. "I don't know," she said, "let's call the consulting nurse line." Which came back with "yep, that's an ER visit, which one are you going to" which we answered with "well that depends, which one is in network" which they responded with "let me connect you with someone who can answer that" and that person responded with "bitch, this is the dispatch line, do you need a cabulance" because this is America.

If you're going to go to the ER in America I recommend Tuesday night, ideally in an up-and-coming commuter neighborhood at some remove from downtown. I was triaged before I could take a seat, had blood drawn within ten minutes, had an ultrasound and a CT scan within an hour and a prognosis within two: not a stroke, not a brain hemorrhage, not a detached retina, visit this ophthalmologist ASAP because.... maybe multiple sclerosis? During the entire 2 1/2 hr adventure my eye filled with Dementors three more times.

The 9am call to the ophthalmologist landed us a 10am appointment which landed us a 10:30 diagnosis of retinal tear ("they always under-diagnose retinal stuff") and a 10:35 optical surgery. Unfortunately I'd had another geyser while I was sleeping and it clotted so I have a persistent black jellyfish in one eye. My vision is also yellower. I've been told this will dissipate. The guy who told me was Obama's ophthalmologist so he has my trust. I will follow up in a week.

I bring this up because apparently lots of people go "huh, my vision is full of blood, I'm sure that will pass" which means your retina detaches and you aren't looking at two minutes with a surprise laser you're looking at an operating room and a week of lying on your face recovering. So don't sleep on eye shit. 'cuz i guess as you become an old fart your eye jelly cuts loose and starts rolling around and most people never notice but for a lucky few it rips your retina on the way out and that shit won't necessarily heal itself.

There used to be two schools of thought about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The one the wonks were circling around was "we never should have let all these investment firms come up with these crazy-exotic models of money flow and investment risk because they traded models of the models of the models and the whole world blew up." The one the bros were circling around was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Then Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short and the narrative became "nobody could have seen that coming - except my plucky heroes, d00d!"

I lead with this because "except my plucky heroes" is basic narrative storytelling whereas "we should have leashed our wizards" is advanced narrative storytelling. Basic storytelling is necessary to get the point across to The Stupids. Advanced storytelling might actually change things. The basic storytelling allows most of the world to go "well I guess that'll never happen again, good thing they fixed it" while the advanced storytelling, unobserved by nearly everyone, made it hella harder for super-crazy-hyperexotic math to break the world.

And by "super-crazy-hyperexotic math" we might be talking about diff EQ? Because the finance world sucks at math. See this thing? they gave it a Nobel Prize in Economics (which is not a Nobel and never will be) and it's literally "price over earnings times a seasonal coefficient." Which means anybody who can use an equation with an integral in it is a quant. And you don't get to go drinkin' with the boys on Tuesdays if you talk to the quants. Their job is to give us stuff to bet on. I mean sell to investors.

(I'm getting there I promise)

Buried hyper-deep in books that nobody recommends anymore is this very simple fact:

AIG built a model that told them that the odds of housing prices in the United States dropping by an aggregate of more than five percent was a "six sigma event" and described them as such. This makes them sound like they've been reading Taleb. What Taleb meant was "six or more standard deviations away from the mean" but what Taleb really meant was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Taleb starts Black Swan with the assertion that nobody could have predicted Hitler, despite both Churchill and Wilson expressly predicting Hitler at the Treaty of Versailles, in public speeches.

This only matters because AIG used that model to insure the policies of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns and all the rest. And those policies underwrote their risk of mortgages going bad. And the riskier those mortgages were, the more of a premium those bonds paid to the bondholders. And the more the premium paid, the more money everyone made. Including AIG.

Who argued, based on fuckall, that the sun was more likely to go nova in 2009 than that housing prices would dip 5%.

NOW

I would argue that not a single "quant" argued that a housing dip was less likely than the sun going nova. But a whole lotta quants put together position papers and equations and arguments and justifications for finance bros to blast clear through any safeguards or lending requirements. What's the Mencken quote that was actually Upton SInclair? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Mencken gets credit because Paul Krugman credited him erroneously in 1989. Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

So the problem you will encounter is that the smarter you are, the better you are with numbers, the more easily you can manipulate them, the more likely you are to be asked to lie with them. The finance industry uses math the way RFK uses science - they cherry-pick stuff they don't understand to sell to gullible regulators who already want to believe. The actual money-making portion of the program is back-room deals and insider trading.

The "mathiness" portion of this debacle began with LTCM in 1998. Timeline goes like this:

- 1994: John Merriweather builds a magic new math fund around Myron Scholes' risk model

- 1997: Myron Scholes wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

- 1998: LTCM loses $5b for not predicting that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be economically spicy

When Genius Failed is a good book about that.

Fast forward ten years and everyone who made fun of LTCM (their approach was mocked as "picking up nickels in front of steamrollers") is now discovering the profits to be made if you adopt a Schroedinger's Risk model: things are very risky when making money off them, not risky at all when you're insuring against them. There are dozens of books about what happened next, just watch this instead.

And yes, none of this is relevant to your actual request, which is "how do I do math stuff with finance" and that's not me changing the subject or evading, because the math stuff is all delta gamma zeta options bullshit which isn't really math, it's Advanced Gambling. The book I recommend on finance is A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is now fifty fucking years old but gets to the basics in an extremely accessible way. Here are my caveats:

1) It pretends that markets are perfectly efficient when it's thunderously obvious that they work by insider trading and informational advantage

2) It argues that you make more money by staying in the market at all times rather than admitting that knowing when to fucking bail is a more effective strategy

3) It basically says "don't" about options and exotic mathematical instruments because fucking hell in 1973 John Merriweather was a fresh MBA in the pit at Salomon

Michael Lewis chose Michael Burry as his hero for The Big Short because Michael Burry, autist, went through and read the prospectii of all these credit default swaps and went "wait a minute... this shit only works if the housing market doesn't drop more than five percent!" he was also monied enough that he could go to Goldman Sachs and say "I would like to bet against you, create a credit default swap that pays out when the rest of your shit goes into default and sell it to me." He then got Goldman Sachs to grudgingly pay out after they initially ruled that they didn't have to because the only person who bought this CDO was Michael Burry. I mention this because "it's stupid to presume that the sun is more likely to go nova than for housing prices to drop five percent" isn't arcane knowledge. It's fucking obvious. But the whole "quant" universe of finance is about burying obvious truths in illegible equations so that you can sell them to pension funds.

Now get back to me once you can keep down some apple sauce and oatmeal and we'll continue the purge.

One of my "favorite things" about finance - and by "favorite things" I mean "thing that had I known about it as a child would have colored my impression of the moneyed and their pursuits in a decidedly negative way" - is technical analysis.

"Well of course, klein!" you say. "You're an annoyingly technical person, of course you love technical analysis." Ahhh but here's the thing - "technical analysis" as espoused by the financiers isn't technical, and it isn't analysis. I read a whole goddamn book on technical analysis just to see if there was anything there. There isn't. Burton Malkiel ran a bunch of tests where he gave TA dipshits a ticker that had been generated by a literal coin flip and then asked them how they thought their "analysis" was doing. Some were happy, some were sad, none clued into the fact that they were using all their tools to scry the behavior of a coin toss.

The technical analysts won't even dispute this. They'll argue that technical analysis is so powerful that it can produce false positives and false negatives from random number generators so you'd best try even harder. True practitioners will lock themselves out from all noise sources. Some have even argued that they trade better if they don't know the security they're trading. All that matters is what magic shapes they draw on their graph to determine what the next candle is going to be.

That's literally the way Markov chains work.

The fundamental basis of LLMs is pattern recognition where the process is actually hindered by too much horizon. They work better if they're only looking ahead a little bit. They don't analyze shit, and they can't. They know that in 100 runs of seven times five, the answer is 35, one hundred times over. But if they need to know what seven hundred times five pi is, they don't have 100 runs. So they get it wrong sometimes. Because they're not doing math. They're looking up values in a table and if there are holes, they're extrapolating over the top of it.

I'm willing to bet Apple didn't say "LLMs suck at reasoning, duh" for the same reason they rolled their eyes and coughed up a $3200 nerd helmet - nobody is willing to talk about the emperor's new clothes yet. There is no part of the methodology underlying LLMs that bears even a passing resemblance to reasoning. It's like saying Tesla's Autopilot sucks at conversational Mongolian - Why wouldn't it? Ahhh - but you can set the UI to Mongolian so isn't that conversing?

Here's the other part: It's Pareto principle all the way down. Everything OpenAI or any of the other vendors have ever done is a solid B minus. Everything they do is 80% effort. It's not quite a C? But it's super-close. The ouvre of commercial AI is just good enough not to make your parents sign your homework. But for a lot of stuff, that's plenty. I don't need an A-plus meme, I need a B-minus meme NOW. I don't need an A-plus essay, I need a B-minus essay NOW.

One of the things about being on set is everyone on set can do 80% of everyone else's job on set. We've all been on set long enough that we know the easy steps. Do something hard? yer fukt. You hire the experts because when you're in a pinch, they know what to do. it takes me 15 seconds to explain how to mix major-market house reality television to any schlub who walks through the door - we used to do it as a party trick. Sure, your daughter can sit at the console. Absolutely Miss Celebrity can throw on some headphones. But if things get dicey you'd best get out of the chair quick because I don't even know if I can explain to you how to fix what just happened. Nobody ever asks intelligent questions, they ask the same stupid ones. Except Francis Ford Coppola. He came in and chatted with us (we didn't know who he was at the time, just that the producers were terrified) for a good fifteen minutes and asked some really insightful questions. And yer goddamn right - once I figured out I had been having a lengthy technical conversation with the writer/director of The Conversation I was over the moon.

Marketing schmucks? They don't really understand the Pareto Principle. Some of them are geniuses and they know it. Most of them occasionally catch lightning in a bottle, and that keeps them employed long enough to continue to muddle through. So all their ads for AI are about selling the 80% as if it were the 20%. They don't know, they don't understand it, and they can't tell the difference. The guys writing AI? They hope you can't tell the difference.

Let's talk paint-by-number because I think it's an interesting analogy. The thing about paint-by-number kits is they're generally bought by people who enjoy painting. Painting by number incrementally builds their skills. You do that enough, you might become an artist. I mean, jingle trucks are basically paint-by-number; tell me these guys aren't skilled.

Give 'em a blank spot and they will synthesize. They have their bag'o'tricks for sure but the good ones are novel.

It is physically impossible for LLM-based AI to be novel. It can arrive at an original place on the look-up table but it will never step out of bounds. It will muddle through just fine in the 80% but the 81% is luck only. 85% is a fluke. 90% is virtually impossible.

You mentioned Graeber before, but I'm not sure if that's fair, because the patternmatcher doesn't care if it's matchin' patterns for the next TPS report or at a charity to cure rare cancers. "We've always done it that way" tasks and jobs now have their head put under the guillotine, and they are not few or far between I think. Journalism...yeah, not looking great.

I think with academia and with journalism the problem is nobody needs the 80%. Essays have always been an imperfect analog of knowledge. A journalist can research undiscovered facts and can synthesize unformulated opinions. AIs can do neither but since so much of what both students and journalists produce isn't actually within the purvey of what they're supposed to be doing, the AI can do a B-minus level approximation of that make-work.

That is recognizably a jingle truck. It's not even obviously AI.

holy fuck is it boring tho

Fucking lol it didn't get within a dozen pixels in six different runs

I know a few former EMTs. My take is that it's a good interim career that opens you up to other things - one I know transitioned to property developer, another transitioned to midwife and then pharmaceutical rep, another is transitioning to full-time musician.

My suggestion is to look at it in terms of "I want to spend the next 5-10 years as an EMT" instead of "I want to be an EMT" and see how that hits. We interact with EMTs on the daily and the guys in the rigs generally don't do it forever - they either cycle into admin or they cycle out to other jobs.

Okay. I was going to write one thing. I probably still will. But this made me realize something. So I'm going to write that first. Because it was a "my god it's full of stars" moment.

The reason there are so many of these articles is journalists recognize that AI will expose them as the fucking frauds they are.

Oops, wrong tone hang on a minute

If my deep and abiding hatred for liberal arts education and its practitioners is unclear, here's a refresher. The TL;DR on that is "it's all about the unpaid internships and everyone knows it" but in case that's unclear lemme draw out a couple beats on Our Hero Chungin "Roy" Lee:

Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia.

It takes a special kind of NYMag article to start with that guy and roll into "zomfg our students will never learn Keats" or some shit but let's check back on Roy a couple hundred words later:

Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F_CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.) A month later, Lee was called into Columbia’s academic-integrity office. The school put him on disciplinary probation after a committee found him guilty of “advertising a link to a cheating tool” and “providing students with the knowledge to access this tool and use it how they see fit,” according to the committee’s report.

Note that Columbia disciplined him for coming up with an app that helped people cheat on job interviews, nothing to do with college. Hey, what's Roy up to now?

Before launching Cluely, Lee and Shanmugam raised $5.3 million from investors, which allowed them to hire two coders, friends Lee met in community college (no job interviews or LeetCode riddles were necessary), and move to San Francisco. When we spoke a few days after Cluely’s launch, Lee was at his Realtor’s office and about to get the keys to his new workspace. He was running Cluely on his computer as we spoke. While Cluely can’t yet deliver real-time answers through people’s glasses, the idea is that someday soon it’ll run on a wearable device, seeing, hearing, and reacting to everything in your environment. “Then, eventually, it’s just in your brain,” Lee said matter-of-factly.

This is Roy BTW, in case you were unsure

_____________________________________________________

If I had to guess, this started as an article titled something like "college is a fucking sham" and then the editorial board lost their minds and it turned into "Pearls Clutched; Are Our Children Learning." Because really, what it says is "college is a fucking sham, as finally revealed to one and all via ChatGPT." For my entire goddamn life there's been this hand-wringing "we must teach them the cultuuuur" aspect to education which is entirely about liberal arts majors justifying their degrees. Does anyone else think it's really fucking funny that we created an academic culture so heavily reliant on essays that one in five students have a learning disability diagnosis on file for that sweet, sweet extra test and assignment time?

My sister is working on a teaching certificate right now (until tomorrow, anyway, when she'll likely withdraw because she caught my mother's c-diff). It's some dumb bullshit University of Phoenix thing where she was super-offended that her first homework assignment was poorly graded because of the grammar and spelling (no notes on ideas or concepts whatsoever). I told her to take her essay and have ChatGPT grade it, and once she corrected it it got a 100%. If both sides of the divide are using AI what the fuck is the point.

I've used radar detectors as an analogy for arms races for going on 40 years. First you had cops and you had speeders. Then the cops started using radar. Then the speeders started using radar detectors. Then the cops started using lasers. then the speeders started using laser detectors. now you've got your speed trap reported on Waze. It's an arms race. Here's the funny thing, though: The NHTSA knew that radar detectors improved traffic safety in 1988. The point wasn't safety, though. The point was ticket revenue. So... arms race.

I'm fucking old. I'm so fucking old that I had to deal with "ZOMFG do we let the kids use graphing calculators in Algerbra" and then, four years later, "ZOMFG do we let the kids use calculators on the SAT." 30 years later, fucking of course you do. Because learning how to use a calculator isn't learning how to do math, it's learning how to do computation and the difference between learning to use a calculator, learning to use a trig table and learning to use a slide rule isn't "did you learn" it's "what's your source of error."

"What's your source of error" on liberal arts bullshit has always been a joke. I used to play with my teachers like a cat with a mouse. I'd inject logical fallacies to see if they caught them. I'd use metaphors that undercut my point to see if they'd notice. They never did. They weren't grading on whether or not I learned the material, they were grading on whether I could vomit up a five paragraph essay. Which have always been mad-libs, by the way. I taught my kid how to vomit up a 5-paragraph essay when she was eight years old. It's protective camo. If you say abject fucking nonsense with decent grammar and spelling there isn't a TA or teacher in the world who won't give you a decent grade because they're victims of this structure where they have to grade a hundred 5-paragraph essays a month. Hey pearl-clutching NYMag got anything to say about that

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.”

Protective coloration, sure. I can write in a bunch of different registers. My wife has handwriting in different fonts.

Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot.

Right. If you need the anecdotes you need to tell the robot.

Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

and nothing of value was lost because not a single five-paragraph essay ever written mattered fuckall even six weeks later but academia has been clinging to them for a hundred years anyway. If you can't say anything you fucking want in a 5-paragraph essay intended for an overworked, underpaid TA? you have a learning disability. Go get your doctor's note and another couple hours. Or, I dunno. Feed it to Saltman. It's fucking pointless anyway, liberal arts grading has been where knowledge goes to die anyway.

I did an engineering education at two schools. One of them was good, the other one was the #4 undergrad program in the world according to US News at the time. At the good school we were allowed a single page of hand-written notes for all quizes and exams. It became about density, and about selection, and about prediction - what formulae are you likely to need? easily 60% of our studying was about assembling that tool over and over and over again so that we could walk into class and bang out a decent answer with nothing but a TI-85 and a pencil. At the world-beater we slammed that shit into Excel's "Solver" and TAs literally weighed our Finite Element Analysis reports. I had to have mine regraded because rather than kill five reams of paper I'd do two and then write "etc" so the TA judged my report to be an F even though the answers were right. Yep, Denton's Folly (see above note).

I don't make much of this but I've been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. I've been interviewed by The Atlantic. I've been interviewed by The Daily Beast. Every article was deeply disappointing because even among these stalwart organizations, they're all fucking phoning it in. I have no Gell-Mann Amnesia because I've had enough personal experience with journalism to know that the only journalists worth bothering with are the ones who actually go visit what they're reporting on and those are few and far between. Why is journalism failing? because most of it is pointless. The entire fucking industry was propped up by classified ads, which is why the existential threat to journalism was never Google or Facebook or whatever it was fucking Craigslist.

The existential threat to academia isn't AI, it's the world discovering the dilution driving enrollment

You wanna solve AI cheating in college? Here walk with me it's fucking easy:

1) assign reading outside of class

2) give over half of class time to small-group discussion

3) Give over the other half to closed-note, no-technology short-answer quizzes.

Have the kids show up with a pencil and paper and demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter. No more fucking essays. FUCK ESSAYS. I say that as a dipshit with a novel, three graphic novels, two optioned screenplays and a history of being repped at three different marquee agencies - FUCK ESSAYS. They show that you're good at writing essays, not that you know what you're talking about and the fact that the liberal arts have leaned on this shit for a hundred years is why the liberal arts have such a self-inflated regard for themselves.

Liberal arts journalism: "ZOMFG AI is destroying knowledge as we know it"

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification.

Finance journalism: "ZOMFG kids are making $60k a year out of high school because they took wood shop"

A teenager can make $20 an hour as a welder’s helper after graduating from high school with technical-education classes, Hughes said. Another year of welding instruction at a community college can boost pay to $60,000 a year for pipeline jobs in Bakersfield-area oil fields. Even with the expansion of the district’s vocational classes, student demand outpaces available seats. Last school year, 6,200 students applied for 2,500 spots at the two vocational campuses. The wait-list for auto shop is 300 students, said Fernando Castro, one of the instructors.

Castro took a $50,000 pay cut when he left his job as an automotive technician in 2015. He said he was inspired by his mother, also a teacher. The district has since adjusted its salary formula to reflect industry experience. Castro now makes $100,000 a year, matching his former income. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he said, helping launch young adults into well-paying careers and having his summers free.

Hey University of Phoenix you got anything to say about this that aged really really well

Let's get back to my buddy Roy. This was likely the biggest event in his parents' life. He "got into Harvard" which means his parents bought their way in. Any idea why, Roy?

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

every.

single.

one.

of these articles.

Is about how students are betraying the hallowed glories of an undergraduate education without the barest acknowledgment of what a naked scam an undergraduate education has been for a generation or more. Journalists in particular are clutching their pearls about this because while nobody can agree about what flavor of bullshit their career is, they all agree it's bullshit.

I'll coin a rule of thumb: if you're worried about AI coming for your job, you should be. If you aren't, it might not be because you're a feckless moron who doesn't know when to listen to journalists, it's maybe because you actually have some expertise.