
Meritocracy and Doublethink - rms
https://rationalconspiracy.com/2018/07/11/meritocracy-and-doublethink/
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jillesvangurp
People should get a bit smarter about where and how they get their education.
You can go for a big brand university in the US and pay a premium, or you can
go to Europe; pay a tiny fraction, gain a lot of life experience in the
process, and stand out from the play it safe & stay at home crowd. All while
not building up any debt. I see lots of US students and expats here in Berlin
these days. Not surprising. Life is nice here, universities are good, and
there's plenty of opportunities in the local startup scene after you are done
studying. Sort of what SFO must have looked like when it was still cheap and
habitable a few decades ago and when smart people moved there because it was
genuinely a nice place to be.

Likewise, unless you are investing in the SFO housing market, there are more
interesting ways to burn cash than to fund the local housing bubble through
vastly inflated engineering salaries. For example in Europe where where you
can hire entire team for the price of a single mediocre engineer in SFO
(forget about getting the really good ones until you land that big series A
and can afford the 300K/year salaries).

