Thread by @patio11

I watched a creator describe their journey from underutilized technical civil servant to full-time small entertainment business. Won't link to avoid stigmatization but parts of it reminded me of my own experience back in BCC days.

"The only labor market I have available to me misuses me in pathologically bad ways so my options are either a) emigrate or b) do literally anything else, and I choose the subtype of b where there is a script available to me." sums up our mutual thought process quite a bit.

On the one hand: yay for having more choices in the world.

On the other hand: wonder how much of this is just a reflection of non-borked labor markets having structural reasons why they can't hire in XYZ.

(Said creator in Germany, me in Japan, etc etc.)

Another thought I periodically have: the world still needs without-loss-of-generality patent clerks, and have employers of patent clerks realized that people now have attractive options despite not being literally Einstein.

Related thought: many US-based technologists of my acquaintance fail to understand how attractive, let me pick a number, $3k a month in gross revenue can sound to gainfully employed technologists in some nations they consider close peers of the US.

(In some ways this is a reflection of the U.S. being a much more wealthy country than many Americans perceive it to be, so much so that it can afford to hire German civil servants to do (insert thing which you would assume is much more trivial than "German civil service.")

(Like, if you're capable of being a productive engineer anywhere in the world, and you e.g. write technical documentation, you will be *more* productive selling that technical documentation to employees at the engines of the global economy than you will be selling to employer.)

(I will pause to acknowledge that there's... something... of cultural note in the salaryman in me immediately deciding "I will not bring shame to a German civil servant by linking to his public discussion of how a platform was a better employer for him than the German state.")

Anyhow, seen in this light, platform "take rates" are sort of an ongoing charge for restructuring the global economy such that people who would be inefficiently employed in German civil service have options to sell entertainment to without-loss-of-generality Americans.

And when you think of it less as "They're just hosting $CONTENT" and more "They're constructing global economic overlays" maaaaaybe that puts those take rates into perspective.