Hanna Horvath explains what is material and positional precarity in her insightful post about how the middle class was created by government policies, and now that the policy no longer exists it has created to two groups of people.

Material precarity describes people for whom the basics — not the aspirational stuff, the basics — are genuinely falling out of reach. As I said before, the middle class can’t truly be defined as an income number — someone earning $80K in rural Ohio and someone earning $80K in Brooklyn are likely living in different economies.

[…]

Positional precarity: when you have money and it’s still not enough

The HENRY — high earner, not rich yet, gets a bad rap. Though this group makes good money on paper, typically well over six figures, they find themselves in a state of disenfranchisement.

I believe much of this is because their expectations for the kind of life six figures would bring is no longer possible. A household earning $200,000 in 2005 could likely absorb a mortgage, two kids in decent public schools, a yearly vacation, and retirement contributions. That same household in 2026, adjusted for inflation, may find itself running calculations that don’t resolve — the house costs twice what it should relative to income, childcare eating a second salary, and the “good” school district has become its own arms race of tutoring, travel sports, and enrichment programs that didn’t exist twenty years ago.

This explains the quarterly viral Reddit posts about a couple making $800K in NYC who feel like they’re middle class.

Danny Hillis talks about 3 petty tyrants and 3 honest leaders and how they responded to challenges. It’s a long, but worthwhile read.

The post concludes with how truth-based solutions create along lasting legacy.

The difference in long-term impact between the effective leaders and the petty tyrants is clear. While the effective leaders were not very similar in their styles, flaws or motivations, the important thing they have in common is that they built systems grounded in truth.

Bismarck’s provocation of France worked because he had accurately assessed French and Prussian military capabilities, Napoleon’s character and the French sentiment. Roosevelt’s banking success came from fact-based diagnosis of the problem and communicating truthfully to the public. Singapore’s honest government gave it a competitive advantage over other small nations. Honesty was good for business.

The legacies of these truth-based leaders have long outlived the leaders themselves, and they continue to benefit us in the 21st century. Bismarck’s social safety nets are still thriving in Germany, and they have been widely copied. Singapore is now a prosperous nation, and a Singaporean passport will get you visa-free entry into more countries than any other. Roosevelt’s Social Security is so successful that politicians on both sides of the aisle now compete to take credit for protecting it.

Look at what endures from these six stories: not the propaganda, the posters and parades, but the institutions that continue to serve their nations decade after decade. The children who are healthy and literate. The elderly and disabled who live in security and dignity. The deposits, safe in the bank. The honest civil services that provide real protections and solve real problems. These are the legacies that matter.

The petty tyrants’ spectacles of power — Napoleon’s “Second Empire,” Mussolini’s “New Roman Empire,” Marcos’ “Golden Age” — collapsed because illusions require constant effort to sustain. Truth-based solutions match reality — they solve real problems, so they last. Lee explained this clearly: “I was never a prisoner of any theory. What guided me were reason and reality.”

Every leader is confronted with difficulties and must face that same fork in the road. The honest leaders chose truth. The dishonest chose denial and, as a consequence, they failed.

Petty tyrants cause real suffering and harm, but they leave few enduring legacies. The lasting institutions of effective leaders are not undermined by reality. They are sustained by it. They are copied and improved. They are strengthened by success.

Truth turns reality into a relentless ally. That gives me reason for hope.

Mandy Brown draws parallels from Andre Gorz’s book Reclaiming Work and the recent layoff announcements due to AI.

…instead of reducing the number of workers, companies could reduce the amount of working time. That is, rather than laying off twenty percent of the workforce, they could have everyone work twenty percent less. In fact, I’d venture that a great number of knowledge workers would be more than happy to take a twenty percent pay cut in exchange for a four-day work week. Time is very often more valuable than cash.

But the steady drumbeat of layoffs suggests that no member of the C-suite has even considered this path. Why not?

It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect.

This is what she wrote in April 2026. Below is the excerpt from what she wrote in September 2025 on elite work.

That is, the existence of an elite workforce—whether it’s workers managing a kanban process in a Toyota factory, or workers driving agile development at a product company—is predicated on an underclass of people who either work in less sustainable conditions or else are proscribed from work at all. The former has come into some awareness in recent years, as workers at Google and elsewhere have organized not only well-paid engineers and designers but also support staff and contractors who are paid in a year what an engineer makes in a month. Those very highly-paid engineering roles simply couldn’t exist without the people toiling in the support mines or tagging text and images for AI training—often dreadful work that’s barely remunerated at all. But what Gorz is calling out here is that isn’t only bad work that the elite work depends on—it’s also the absence of work. The “disruption” that the tech industry has so long prided itself on is just another word for “unemployment.”

But there’s also a gesture here towards another way: the less that elite identifies with their work and with their companies’ successes, the more they admit of their own insecurity and of their collaboration in creating it, the less menacing that threat becomes, the more space is opened up for different futures.

This was depressing and eye opening for me.

Barry Ritholtz talking about the thorniest problem in finance.

Consider some of the most challenging problems in finance: the equity-premium puzzle; binomial-option pricing models; do zero interest rates spur inflation or damp it; are stocks cheap or overpriced?

Challenging as those may appear, none compare to what Nobel laureate William Sharpe, 82, calls “decumulation,” or the use of savings in retirement. It is, he says, “the nastiest, hardest problem in finance.”

Why is planning for retirement so difficult? Saurabh Mukherjea explains the two key challenges.

Longevity Risk: None of us know how far we will live. What we do know is that with each passing year, improvements in medical science are likely to increase our lifespan thus increasing our cost of retirement. Even if we assume that most of us will die between the ages of 70-100, there are at least 30 possible outcomes with regards to our own longevity.

However, for retirement planning purposes, we also have to factor in our spouse’s longevity – after all, after I am gone, my better half’s lifestyle still needs to be funded properly. Since, even for your spouse there are 30 possible longevity outcomes, for a couple there are at least 900 possible longevity outcomes.

Investment Risk: Assuming that most retirement portfolios are a mixture of bonds & equities, the blended return of the portfolio through the retirement years and in the decade immediately preceding retirement could range anywhere from low-single digits to low-20s. Why? Because the world’s large stock markets have seen extended periods of ZERO returns. For example, from1967-84, the S&P500 gave zero returns. Between 1993-2003, the Sensex gave no returns. Then, again, from Jan 2007-Jan 2014, the Sensex gave close to zero returns. In fact, for half the years in the past 3 decades, the Sensex has given annual returns which are close to zero – see chart below.

Assuming however, that a mixture of bonds and equities, gives a retirement portfolio long term returns anywhere between 5% and 25% and taking intervals of 0.20%, there are at least 1000 different return possibilities to consider for your retirement portfolio.

Now, given that there are 900 possible longevity outcomes (30 for you & 30 for your spouse) and there are 1000 possible returns outcomes, there are at least 90,000 possible retirement outcomes for you to consider even before we add the next important layer to this problem.

He then adds two additional risks that a developing economy like India needs to consider.

This comment by hgomersall on Hacker News explaining how smartphones steal your—for a lack of better word—disattention.

I’ve recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention

I don’t know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it’s not so structured. It’s just those moments where you’d previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

Justin Smestad weighs in on why you need junior engineers.

Senior engineers know things. They have context, relationships, institutional knowledge. That makes them valuable. It also makes them expensive, and it gives them leverage.

Eventually this turns into a comp conversation. A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like. If there’s a bench of mid-level engineers who’ve been growing into that space for the past two years, the company has options. They can negotiate from a position of strength. The loss would hurt, but it wouldn’t be catastrophic.

If there’s no bench, because you stopped hiring juniors three years ago and there’s nobody coming up behind your seniors, you don’t have options. You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.

Junior employees aren’t just doing junior work. They’re a long-term bet. They’re future mid-levels and future seniors growing inside your organization, building context that you can’t hire in from the outside. Every junior you don’t hire today is a senior you’ll have to overpay for in three years.

Minas Karamanis talking about the impact of AI on academia.

Science is about people:

What’s great about science is its people. The slow, stubborn, sometimes painful process by which a confused student becomes an independent thinker. If we use these tools to bypass that process in favor of faster output, we don’t just risk taking away what’s great about science. We take away the only part of it that wasn’t replaceable in the first place.

Knowing why those buttons exist:

The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you’re doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can’t produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can’t sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.

Training first, tools later:

I use AI agents regularly, and so do most of the people in my research group. The colleagues I work with produce solid results with these tools. But when you look at how they use them, there’s a pattern: they know what the code should do before they ask the agent to write it. They know what the paper should say before they let it help with the phrasing. They can explain every function, every parameter, every modeling choice, because they built that knowledge over years of doing things the slow way. If every AI company went bankrupt tomorrow, these people would be slower. They would not be lost. They came to the tools after the training, not instead of it. That sequence matters more than anything else in this conversation.

Output and understanding are two different things:

Schwartz can use Claude to write a paper because Schwartz already knows the physics. His decades of experience are the immune system that catches Claude’s hallucinations. A first-year student using the same tool, on the same problem, with the same supervisor giving the same feedback, produces the same output with none of the understanding. The paper looks identical. The scientist doesn’t.

Jim Nielsen talking about how speed is not conducive to wisdom.

Speed is how you avoid reckoning. It guarantees you miss things, and you can’t learn from what you don’t notice.

Wisdom’s feedback loop is slow.

Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.

Wisdom is chasing all of us, but we’re going too fast to notice what it’s trying to teach us.

This comment by user roadside_picnic on how writing is the last step in thinking.

I’ve long considered writing to be the “last step in thinking”. I can’t tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking.

Joe Wiggins reflects on his ten beliefs about investing. For me, survival is the most important one.

Survival is the most important and neglected goal for all investors.

Investors rarely talk about survival, but it is the most important aspect of any strategy. It should define whether we make a particular investment and how it is sized. We should always avoid creating situations where there is a meaningful risk of complete disaster (being wiped out) or where we are unable to withstand spells of poor performance. The best investment is the one we can stick with for the long-run, not the one with the highest potential return. If we don’t survive, nothing else matters.