Misha G.

NEW ALL-TIME HIGH: Democrat James Talarico has a 53% chance to win the Texas Senate election

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

Being a bear for a week and a half has aged me like 10 years, can't believe people do it professionally for decades.

Clavicular grills the guy who has spent $2,000,000 on Alice Rosenblum Clavicular: “A lot of people probably have questions but really I’m just wondering where you get $2M from looking like that?” Subscriber: “I’m a day trader, I invest in stocks like Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple” Clavicular: Somehow this doesn’t seem to me like a guy who made $2M, I don’t know what it is”

But the data suggests it’s far too early to anticipate Miami rivalling Wall Street. This map of job creation makes it clear: for banking and portfolio management, Miami isn't the fastest growing—and still ranks behind Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles for finance employment.

Setting aside whether the allegations in the Kristoff piece are true, can we at least agree that the NYT’s decision to publish this in the Opinion section is ill-advised to say the least? Surely the editors knew that such extreme allegations, made at a time like this, with antisemitism on the rise, will draw intense scrutiny and outrage. Surely they knew that fact-sourcing of the kind Kristoff uses requires more, not less, verification. Publishing this as Opinion seems like the editors trying to put something out there while evading accountability if things go wrong, as they have in the past when the NYT reported on alleged Israel war crimes. The whole thing just looks so underhanded.