But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just paying people to sit around, or even worse, pretend they're busy.

This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best

The idea of a job being some task that needs to be done is being lost in favor of the view that a job is something you give 8 hours to in order to fill up your bank account every two weeks. It's becoming so detached from the concept of production/productivity that people literally start inadvertently talking past each other when they discuss things like layoffs or employment. I find it very common in AI jobloss discussions; the Citrini article over the weekend was subtly full of this variety of thinking. For instance, his prediction that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities, but a natural conclusion of the "the purpose of a job is to give people money" type of thought.

Incredibly interesting to see, but the social contract, or at least the perception of what it ought to be, is definitely shifting.

on a macro-level yes; CEOs are only thinking about firm-level though (other tech firms will act differently or tech is small part of total economy, many ways to rationalize). they should be assuming others will follow in their footsteps but they are not incentivized to model that or think in the longterm.

These are not incompatible realities.

I would be willing to accept the statement that corporate revenues increasing and consumer spending decreasing are incompatible realities.

But it’s feasible to think the following occurs:

- labor income falls

- consumer spending drops

- corporate revenues drop

- corporate profits moderately increase because profit margins get much higher

- government deficit continues (which, from an accounting perspective, means other accounts are in surplus, potentially US corporations)

I’m not saying I strongly predict the above, necessarily! I just don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a conceivable reality.

Betting the company on becoming a conglomerate is just not a great strategy. It is almost always smarter to focus on what you do best, "core competencies" in MBA-speak.

Positive EV bets are hard to come buy. There aren't an unlimited number of them.

Visa: $3 trillion, 52% Mastercard: $1.4 trillion, 24% American Express: $1.1 trillion, 19% Discover: 0.3$ trillion, 5%

And human behavior is absolutely shaped by our environments and systems. We're quite easily manipulatable - whether we want to admit/realize it or not.

Social media literally hired human behaviorists to design their apps to make them more addicting. You're quite mistaken if you dont think apps arent engineered to drive human behavior.

Dark Patterns are very prominent and well known thing in tech UI.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns

1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams.

2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters.

3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular.

With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem.

The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.

My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance.

It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship.

I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z

You can absolutely design apps in a way that doesn't incentivize the worst human behaviors. Tech socially engineers our behavior all the time - just rarely ever in our favor.

We humans are both easily manipulated and often too egocentric to realize and acknowledge that fact.

The reason is stated vs revealed preferences. It's that simple. People say they hate social media while their actions reveal something else. So yes, you can easily design an app that doesn't incentivize the behaviours we say we don't like, and we won't use them, because despite saying we don't like them, we prefer them.