Matt Glassman is Bear-blogging
The excellent Matt Glassman is now on Bear. He has a characteristically high-value take on Venezuela. I'm posting this for a few reasons:
- Matt is a great read, and given what my email says, my readers are likely to appreciate his style and approach.
- Relatedly, Matt has said that he modeled his approach to Bear on mine. This is extremely flattering and also interesting: I'm starting to think that there's a subgenre of blogging that Bear is particularly good at, and has nudged me to--but that's another post.
- There's a software angle to what Matt says about Congress here. One explanation for the current software job market is that the biggest tech companies hired hyper-aggressively in order to build "standing armies." The unknown opportunities around the bend were huge, and they wanted excess capacity to meet them quickly. Now, because of generative AI (can we seize opportunities with fewer humans?), regulatory pressure (is it permissible to seize the opportunity, and will we see the benefits of it?), or whatever else, the biggest companies are less motivated to construct these "standing armies." I heard the standing-army hypothesis of the early-2020s hiring spree from Byrne Hobart on some podcast or other, but unfortunately I can't find the citation. Again, this is just one hypothesis, not original to me, and perhaps not accurately characterized by me, but I do find it worth thinking through.