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Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

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Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#161

Post by solarmist »

WalterBright wrote: post #142
solarmist wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is moral and what is legal are different. There is overlap, but they are marketed as being the same thing. They are not. I think you are mostly reacting to GP's word choice of "moral flexibility," and are missing the point. Do the moral thing, but view the legal as pay-to-play. A great example is parking tickets. Violating parking rules results in a fine and is not immoral in many situations.

> What is moral and what is legal are different. I understand and agree with that. "Having moral flexibility helps so much. Being actively willing to "fuck over" arbitrary, faceless entities makes all the difference. If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life." This clearly adv…

> it is dishonorable to be a cheater because others are cheating

I disagree with this. Cheating can be moral or immoral. Cheating just means not following the rules. At least as often as not, the rules are meant to maintain the status quo or benefit the existing organizations.

Terms of Service (TOS) are great examples of this. Companies blatantly stick in illegal terms just because they can since it's expensive to challenge them. I don't want you to do this, so I will make unfair rules in my favor.

That said, I agree with the sentiment, but it's too reductive to allow the creativity needed in problem-solving to compete against entities that have many times the resources.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#162

Post by underlipton »

abeppu wrote: post #152
aidenn0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spots are limited, but it's not super hard. This depends on the instrument and your location. If you play a popular instrument (say the violin) in a metro area with just one orchestra (some have zero!) then you ain't getting on that orchestra any way short of nepotism. If you live within commuting distance of multiple orchestras, there are more spots, but you still aren't going to be playing violin in the orchestra…

This is definitely not my area, but in other contexts I have heard of blind auditions as being a common practice in orchestras (i.e. people auditioning literally are hidden from view while they play and evaluations are then based only on hearing one play) which improved gender diversity in hiring, but not really racial diversity. How does nepotism work in this system?

How do you find out about the audition?

Also (though perhaps closer to a privilege issue than a nepotism issue):

How did you find the teacher who helped you get ready for the audition?

How did you "pay" for the practice time to prepare for the audition?

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#163

Post by olddustytrail »

WalterBright wrote: post #150
digging wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your mistake is thinking that there is moral equivalence in stealing from your neighbor vs stealing from a billionaire. and please define what honor means to you in this conversation, we've moved too far past pithiness.

> there is moral equivalence in stealing from your neighbor vs stealing from a billionaire They are the same. You said it yourself: STEALING

No they're not, even with caps lock engaged.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#164

Post by fiprofessor »

bena wrote: post #143
fiprofessor wrote: post #115

Nice essay, but some of the contemporary examples in this paragraph about the independenlty wealthy are not really that compelling: I’m not saying wealthy people can’t make incredible artists. Without Marcel Duchamp’s monthly allowance from his father throughout his adult life, we would never have Dada. Giacinto Scelsi was literally the heir and Duke of La Spezia castle estate. Something more contemporary? Grimes’ mo…

Grimes's dad was a former banker working on "the business side of biotech". That's two very solid incomes. And then she was with Devon Welsh, a singer/songwriter whose father was an actor. And most famously has been the partner of Elon Musk. She's had probably a larger share of carefree living than most. However, success is never just one thing. Because there are plenty of people with the same or greater level of sup…

> And then she was with Devon Welsh, a singer/songwriter whose father was an actor. And most famously has been the partner of Elon Musk. She's had probably a larger share of carefree living than most.

No doubt she's had a good life, but Devon Welsh was himself basically a nobody when they dated, and she was already extremely successful as an artist by the time she became Elon's partner.

It's just strange of the author to pick someone who had already released two studio albums during her time as a student at McGill as a supposed example of someone being able to succeed because their parents paid their bills for an interminable amount of time. This is after a paragraph where the author said:

> Who paid for all this time? How does someone outside of a conservatory program have the time to compose, record, and perform new original material every month, let alone to even practice their instrument an hour a day? The answer almost always comes down to the ability to not have to worry about paid work while pursuing your craft. As in, most likely, someone in your family pays your rent.

The answer, in the case of Grimes, is she was a college student, probably neglecting her studies a bit, being supported the way many college students or even people in conservatories are.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#165

Post by solarmist »

hitekker wrote: post #153

> It’s because of this harsh reality that romanticizing the lifer lifestyle in 21st century Brooklyn, or any other major American city, as anything other than the struggle it is can be incredibly dangerous. Millennials and Zoomers have been sold the lie that the big cities remain a bastion for cutting edge arts and culture, let alone that they are even livable for working artists. What year do they expect us to belie…

Isn't this the modern definition of romanticism? The longing for a beautiful story that may never have existed?

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#166

Post by Mistletoe »

ketzo wrote: post #109
Mistletoe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can think of music teachers as a zero interest rate phenomenon then by proxy, so maybe it wasn’t all bad (but most of it was).

Listen, can we all agree to stop calling any expenditure of money without a direct expectation of return a "zero interest rate phenomenon"? "Starving artists" have existed for millenia. The arts patronage system began either or thousands of years ago, depending on who you ask. People have paid lots of money for gold jewelry basically since we figured out how to pull it out of the ground. I saw someone call dog-walker…

But dog walking businesses weren’t getting $1.35 billion dollar valuations before the interest rates were zero for so many years in an unprecedented way.

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/pet-sitting-marketplace-rover-...

Hit max- https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#167

Post by solarmist »

zeryx wrote: post #147

This doesn't just resonate with creatives - the startup / path to tech entrepreneurship is structured in a very similar way. I've seen lifers, trust funders and day jobbers succeed and fail in different ways, raise funds or bootstrap with nothing for years. Obviously the trust fund kids succeed substantially more often than the lifers or day jobbers

Yup, threw my hat into the ring to try this for three years and I can see the path forward, but I don't have the income cushion or (VC) sales skills to pull it off except as a dayjobber.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#168

Post by api »

hitekker wrote: post #153

> It’s because of this harsh reality that romanticizing the lifer lifestyle in 21st century Brooklyn, or any other major American city, as anything other than the struggle it is can be incredibly dangerous. Millennials and Zoomers have been sold the lie that the big cities remain a bastion for cutting edge arts and culture, let alone that they are even livable for working artists. What year do they expect us to belie…

I see a lot of today’s dedicated artists who don’t want to have to grind like mad just to afford rent moving to mid-size cities or even small towns. It’s really the only economically rational move.

Big cities have priced out any culture that is not either subsidized somehow (e.g. trust fund) or already established.

I’d argue that many have even priced out entrepreneurship that is not lavishly funded by VC or founder capital.

My generation (I am on the young gen-X / old millennial cusp) believed, with some truth, that one had to go to one of maybe six to ten cities to do anything cutting edge in most fields. For young people today I don’t think this is true anymore, and if anything these cities have become traps that will destroy your ability to become established.

As would be predicted by the “law of rent,” real estate costs have grown so as to soak up any advantage in being in these places.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#169

Post by CPLX »

dxbydt wrote: post #159
Hermitian909 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curation happens all the time in commodities. Tomatoes are clearly a commodity, but blemished or misshapen tomatoes (a purely aesthetic concern) are often worth far less and may even be discarded. Much of this process is done by hand (I've done it). Corn is a commodity too, but I buy my sweet corn exclusively from one of a few vendors growing varietals that I enjoy more than what I can get at a super market (the vari…

Exactly this. OP is needlessly beating the horse to death. I have enough graduate microecon credits under my belt to happily declare music is a commodity. You don't have to tick off every single i and t from the microecon literature to meet the standard definition of commodity. Its the intent. I have a curated playlist in the 10s of 1000s, probably way more than the average music listener. I'm listening to music pret…

I have a degree in economics.

Recorded music just like isn't a commodity. It's not close.

In fact, if you took a spectrum of all mass consumer products and ranked them from most like a commodity to least like a commodity recorded music would probably be on the side of least like a commodity.

It's not really an argument. Recorded music is not "kind of like" a commodity. There are tens of millions of recorded songs and literally every different iteration is wildly different, people consider some of them literal core elements of what gives their life meaning while other examples of the exact same product they have a visceral and intense hatred for.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#170

Post by tiedieconderoga »

bob1029 wrote: post #51

> Knowing that the game is rigged is liberating! > how should you be expected to earn a living using their platforms unless you find a way to game the system? Do you have 20 smartphones lying around, per chance? This is the message I'd take away. Once you learn that the whole capitalist hellscape operates in approximately the same way, you can start to explicitly target its mechanisms in order to improve your life. H…

In the words of John Oliver's character on Community, "It's just that the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
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