> Similar arguments were made to defend Harvey Weinstein.
We're now comparing a SaaS product versus people you work with? I don't think ChatGPT will ever physically assault you.
> People shouldn’t have to switch jobs because they don’t want to provide Bill Gates with their phone number.
This is why the EU has very strong employee protection laws; in most countries here there are government agencies that will help you, you're not at the mercy of the HR department.
> In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
I consider this a typical case of statisticians massaging the data. In fact, I believe the Gini coefficient itself is flawed modeling. Even statisticians don't really use it much these days, right? The Gini index on Wikipedia actually reflects consumption inequality.
Also, high-fertility countries fundamentally have low contraception usage, low women's rights, and short periods of education. This is because labor is crucial in typical agrarian to light-industry economies.
Conversely, low-fertility countries are characterized by extended education and delayed job stability. The reason is simple: work that generates high added value requires a significant amount of time spent on education. Generally, the OECD doesn't view the decline in fertility rates in developed countries as being driven by just a single variable either.
Rather, there is a clear established relationship: higher housing costs correspond to a lower TFR (Total Fertility Rate) [1]. Classes exempt from these housing expenses—namely, individuals whose parents hold substantial real estate and assets—clearly have more children.
Actually, this kind of research has been conducted extensively in East Asian countries like Korea and Japan, yielding very similar conclusions.
> Rather, there is a clear established relationship: higher housing costs correspond to a lower TFR (Total Fertility Rate) [1]. Classes exempt from these housing expenses—namely, individuals whose parents hold substantial real estate and assets—clearly have more children.
This report is 122 pages. A cursory search did not turn up anything to support either of your claims. What page of the report are you drawing this conclusion from?
>
Fertility
The total fertility rate (TFR) indicates the average number of children born per woman over a lifetime given current age‑specific fertility rates, assuming no female mortality during reproductive years. The population is replaced at a total fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman.
Let's consider programming, which represents an entry into a high value-added industry.
To monetize programming, you fundamentally need to offer something more valuable than existing open-source software, or target a niche that open-source fails to address. However, this industry has now matured, and countless talented young individuals in the US have already contributed heavily to the open-source ecosystem.
As a result, it is exceedingly difficult for developers in non-English speaking countries to sell programs that are inferior to free open-source alternatives. This is exacerbated by the very nature of software, which can be instantly and perfectly replicated.
(Physical capital, on the other hand, is much easier for the establishment to control through protectionism. For instance, to foster the growth of Hyundai Motors, my country, South Korea, restricted American car imports, effectively forcing citizens to drive lower-quality domestic cars. That kind of national sacrifice was required.)
Consequently, citizens of non-English speaking countries face a double burden: the time required to master English, added to the time needed to learn programming and accumulate foundational experience. By the time they build this experience and reach a stable level of professional competency, they are typically in their early 30s. This inherently forces a delay in marriage and family formation.
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right.
This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.
> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...
Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them.
The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details.
Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
The law in North America and Europe (possibly elsewhere too, I don't know) is full of accommodations for special interests at the cost of everyone else, due to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs causing the former to lobby aggressively while the latter doesn't.
To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected.
1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes
> That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.
If you’re an immigrant from my home country of Bangladesh, you’ll be treated more fairly in any Anglo country than in any other country, including Bangladesh.
I saw a video from the ModRetro YouTube channel a few days ago and thought it was AI because it only had 10,000 subscribers. They’ve been at it since March of 2024 and have less than 400,000 views spread across 54 videos. Strong attention economy recession indicator that even a memeified billionaire can’t get organic attention on a platform like that.
Peter Zeihan
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