pat dwarfens

real men wake up and start drinking and smoking and gooning and killing people and start being misogynistic and don't take out the trash and hop on the game and snort blow and piss on the toilet seat and leave the toilet seat up and eat all the food and punch a hole in the wall a

Yeah I feel u. I’m just saying big law is more meritocratic than big tech. The selection gates are each an independent market from one another, and the business is tougher. Law firms don’t operate at 50-70% gross margins and don’t get vc funding. It’s inherently a more competitive market

I agree with you that these are good tests for effort and probably some intelligence. I don't believe they are better tests for value creation than an open free market. Effort and intelligence are necessary conditions for value creation, but value created is the definition of value creation. I think there's this idea that you would get spotted by luck in writing code. You don't write code in the ether. You can / can only contribute to specific projects, and the community and project owners can recognize your contribution specifically. There is no equivalent barrier-less contribution and recognition of value, given the existence of UPL. Separately, you can absolutely have vigorous obstacles that reward effort and intelligence, while still ending up with a less-than-meritocratic environment. The Imperial Exams in the Qing Dynasty were extremely rigorous and rewarded relatively high-intelligent / high-effort individuals from all walks of life. Yet, many of these scholars ended up in sinecure positions and contributed little to society beyond poetry. I don't compare big law to this, as the comparison is flawed, but the principle we are addressing is identical.

The 'Which is more meritocratic - Big Law or Big Tech?' debate is insane. In tech, you can write open-source code as a high-school drop-out, get spotted, and make billions of dollars. In law, you need to go to the best Ivy-league schools and survive in one of the most politicized industries in the world to effectively take a % cut of your associate's billings to make tens of millions of dollars. How is this even vaguely a debate?

@chiajy2000 @SteelToeScribe So Ellison has still got it as CTO at 81 and Zuck still writes code ?

@Goblin_Mode_69 @SteelToeScribe Someone wise once said this. I don't believe you would see many similar comments in tech. x.com/SteelToeScribe…

Not really a defense for the data centers themselves. But Typically municipalities are responsible for zoning industrial facilities so if they allowed these to be close to residential neighborhoods that’s on local regulators. Separately most places, in U.S. at least, have a utility commission that sets energy pricing structure so also on regulators if data centers distort broader energy pricing. Basically saying is it the data center developers fault if the local government is dumb ?

@Goblin_Mode_69 @omgsidewalks Ok now defend the deafening sound that ruins neighborhoods and energy cost where installed?

SERIOUS QUESTION: why do AI data centers need fresh water. Not recycled. Not wastewater. Fresh, drinkable water, burned through by the millions of gallons just to keep servers cool. Why are we using a basic human necessity to prop up machines ??

@chiajy2000 @SteelToeScribe Ivy League school a good judge, bar exam good judge, big law recruiting good judge. In tech you theoretically could be competing with no one or very few depending what you’re working on

@Goblin_Mode_69 @SteelToeScribe How would this argument work? “Spotted” seems to imply a type of “proof of work” system. Wouldn’t a system that allowed anyone to pro-actively produce work to be judged by the public (and even used in commercial settings freely) be more meritocratic?

@chiajy2000 @SteelToeScribe Oh okay, maybe I misread. I just meant more that the fact you cannot “get spotted” in big law kind of supports that it is more meritocratic than tech

@Goblin_Mode_69 @SteelToeScribe I didn’t make this claim. Credentials is a necessary condition for an equity partnership. I do not claim it is the only requirement. I also pointed out that the reward of effort is not the only necessary condition for the definition of meritocracy.

@SteelToeScribe @chiajy2000 Have yet to meet a Kirkland equity partner that is keeping their job by Ivy League credentials or a licensing exam alone. The best ones are also raking in top dollar compensation. They eat what they kill. Don’t think original poster has any idea what they’re talking about

@Goblin_Mode_69 @chiajy2000 First sentence is great

@svembu lol their strategic shift to ibm consulting now seems kind of retarded since AI hurting all professional services and they had to grovel for us government to invest in their new “quantum foundry” instead of any normal investors

lol naturally the ceo who’s company is broadly struggling and light years behind on AI is trying to drum up skepticism. Good news is that data centers have broader use cases beyond AI and we needed more capacity long before AI was used broadly. Cloud computing generally requires data center capacity and a lot of companies are still trying to run their own on premises data centers much less efficiently than outsourcing. AI demand might slow but data center demand retracting materially less likely

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says the muli-trillion dollar AI data center build out is a bubble. We are investing in creating capabilities like data curation, reinforcement learning, and most crucially the compiler infrastructure to ensure AI output can be verified but we will not chase the investment bubble. This is just our normal prudence. To some people that would sound defeatist, but we will talk in 5 years.

@SteelToeScribe @chiajy2000 Also I’m not talking about associates. They don’t really add value til their 4th or 5th year. But the partners really are the best of the best at the firms I deal with. Truly impressive individuals

@SteelToeScribe @chiajy2000 I think in tech you can get lucky and have a fantastic outcome. In big law you cannot get lucky to have a good outcome. You have to win in a series of very competitive environments where lucks ability to help you fades as you progress in that career. You truly have to be the best

@PunishedKebbin Although the aamc in us has since acknowledged they made a mistake. This paper explains most of the issue in the U.S. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12…

@PunishedKebbin lol in the US this is led by doctor associations and they do the same thing

India’s medical system fails because it lets state bureaucrats micromanage seat counts, curriculums, and college approvals, tasks only independent medical peers can judge. This top-down command economy creates artificial doctor shortages, invites corruption, and enforces minimum compliance over elite excellence. India must strip the state of its micromanagement powers and delegate gatekeeping to independent, doctor-led professional associations.

@its_ShubhamK @imPraveenk @nirajxdev Would actually frustrate the U.S. product managers to no end because they all knew we were suggesting a dumb idea but wouldn’t say anything cause we were their bosses. We eventually inserted an India based pm too cause the deep tech guys in India would tell them but not us

Yeah back when I was upper management in tech, The Indian developers / architects were way cheaper and always did what we said. But worked way harder than the Americans. That being said the Americans were generally better / more valuable all-in. Their willingness to argue usually resulted in better outcomes cause they would tell me when I was wrong. My Indian boys rarely did or were extremely hesitant to do so

Indian tech workers aren't "hardworking". They're just the cheapest, most obedient labor on the planet. 12-14 hour days, weekends, festivals, 2 AM calls, all accepted with "sir, no problem". Meanwhile foreign engineers do half the work for 5-8x the money and still have boundaries. We don’t have a talent advantage. We have a desperation advantage. That’s the real Indian tech story tbh.

@dennisZamenace @GammaOverTheta @rishabhm Also US execs / equity owners generally don’t value companies themselves. The buyers or stock markets do

@dennisZamenace @GammaOverTheta @rishabhm Yeah India has corruption at basically all levels of government and in all three branches. In the U.S. you can’t bribe 99% of police officers and that 99% never expect to get one. That’s like the lowest level of political role and India generally still has bribery there

It's quite rich for an American to say this considering what is playing out in that country.

@bookwormengr Headline here is falling in love will have you doing the most random shit. Since my fiance and her family from India I’m on Twitter spit balling Indian trade policy reform

guess one final point would be the protectionist policies that most need change would be political career suicide. The farming and heavier industrial industries dominated by the wealthiest families have the most protectionist tariffs / non tariff favoritism. Eliminating those would hurt both votes and funding

A few serious issues with Jss' argument: 1. The $10k figure is wrong. China's individual forex quota is $50,000/year - not "less than $10k." That's the cash-carrying limit for travel, which is a different thing entirely. If we're going to criticize a system, let's get the basics right. 2. Capital controls exist on a spectrum, not a binary. India's LRS of $250k is itself a capital control, just a more permissive one. Framing China's tighter version as "extraction by force" while treating India's as "freedom" is intellectually inconsistent. Both are policy choices about how much capital flight a developing economy can tolerate. 3. The US model isn't replicable. The US runs persistent current account deficits funded by dollar hegemony. It can sustain high consumption + growth because the world holds its debt as a reserve asset. This isn't an "achievement" other countries can copy. It is a structural privilege. Telling India to emulate this is like telling someone to be born taller. 4. China's model didn't just "work because the US consumed." Chinese domestic consumption is ~38% of GDP and growing. The rebalancing challenge is real, but reducing 40 years of the most dramatic poverty reduction in history to "collectivism funded by American shoppers" isn't proper analysis. 5. Nobody serious is arguing for communism in India. The actual debate is about industrial policy: how much the state should coordinate investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology. Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all did this aggressively. Are they communist? People like @svembu are arguing for that playbook, not Maoism. 6. "High consumption + high growth is rare and an achievement" US real GDP growth has averaged ~2% for 20 years. China averaged 6-8%. If growth is the metric, the consumption-led model hasn't outperformed the investment-led one (off course different base, but you get the point). The US is rich because of accumulated wealth and institutions built over 250 years, not because consumption-led growth is a magic formula. 7. Also, USA has vastly more resources than resource poor China: Oil, Agricultural land etc. The right answer for India probably isn't copying either model wholesale. But dismissing folks who sees merit in East Asian industrial policy as people who "haven't thought for 2 minutes" isn't fair....