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Hi former Wall Street employees the planet could really use your help. Tech, Capital, and Web3 may be in a slump at the moment but industrial, environmental and

• lpapez 3y ago
  Neither is it a problem which can be solved with magical techno solutions alone. The primary way is to solve it is through systemic and habit change, so I would say if these people wanted to help the environment, they're better off getting into politics.
  • thebooktocome 3y ago
    Something tells me these Wall Street types aren’t going to be too interested in the pervasive industrial re-regulation necessary to make a dent in atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Something tells me these Wall Street types aren’t going to be too interested in the industrial re-regulation necessary to make a dent in atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century What or who is that? Wall Street’s rank and file is left of centre on social issues.
      • archgoon 3y ago
        [dead]
      • sydbarrett74 3y ago
        Regulation of emissions isn't a social issue. It's an economic one.
        • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
          In the way worker non-discrimination isn’t a social issue.
    • jghn 3y ago
      Steve Castle from Futurama [1] is all I can think of when I read this https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Steve_Castle https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Steve_Castle
      • zelias 3y ago
        Do you think the severance money may go towards efforts to find a cure for boneitis?
    • tootie 3y ago
      You're very, very wrong. Most Wall St employees are coastal, big city, college-educated. They tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. I was at the Goldman Sachs headquarters the day after the 2016 election and the mood was utterly morose.
      • thebooktocome 3y ago
        It’s not really about liberal versus conservative. Their livelihood depends on the federal government maintaining a certain consistent laxity in financial regulation; unfortunately, it seems like consistent strictness in regulation will be necessary to make real progress on climate change. This theory of mine explains their post-2016 depression, I think. Everyone knew he would make chaotic policies and wild card political appointments. I’m sure he was horrid for their bottom line. But yeah, I could be wrong. Never really got in with that crowd for some reason. If GS’ charitable arm has given some reasonable fraction of their pool to green charities or something, I’ll change my mind.
        • tootie 3y ago
          I think you're missing what we're getting at. OP was talking about rank and file employees. 99% of people who work at Goldman Sachs don't really give a shit what's good for Goldman Sachs. A substantial percentage actively dislike their employer, but just want a nice paycheck. They are people working a job. Like 1/4 of GS employees are technologists. They don't know or care about how climate regulation affects their business. In fact, a lot of employees jobs are mitigating compliance risk so they literally depend on onerous regulation to stay employed. I'd wager a substantial percentage of GS employees don't even know how to trade stocks.
          • thebooktocome 3y ago
            I find it really hard to believe that even a mere “technologist” wouldn’t understand how their bread gets buttered, but maybe they’re even less engaged than I’ve heard & seen. I think we’re starting to talk past each other, but for the sake of pointing out where we seemingly agree: GS employees are more-or-less self-interested, and they do depend on gaming (or mitigating risk, I suppose) regulations to stay employed. Neither of those make great bullet points on a green tech pivot resume, which was more or less my original point? I brought up their charitable org specifically because I recall an acquaintance who works there saying it was more employee-driven than the average corporate tax amelioration scheme. Maybe he was wrong? He’s only been there for five years or so.
  • tootie 3y ago
    You don't have to engineer magic solutions to be part of the solution. Configuring Salesforce and automating payroll for a climate company is still helping. There's an industry around changing minds as much as there around reducing CO2.
• browningstreet 3y ago
  Fossil fuels are more than 70% of our GHG emissions. We need to replace fossil fuels faster than we currently plan to. How will Web3 help with that? UPDATE: Indeed — Apologies, this is what I get for reading on my phone in bed without my glasses. I mashed the passage together and misinterpreted the suggestion.
  • vector_spaces 3y ago
    I read it as "Some things, including web3, are in a slump; why not do these other things" Good lord though at "unsophisticated parts of the country"
    • alistairSH 3y ago
      Cue the banjos. What a great sales pitch. lolsob. But, there are many 2nd/3rd tier cities and towns that have a reasonable number of jobs, better COL, and possibly better quality of life (depending on your priorities). Places like Roanoke VA. Small, old industrial city. But, the downtown is fairly vibrant, outdoor recreation is excellent, and between Roanoke proper and the adjacent Blacksburg (Virginia Tech) and Christainsburg, there's a reasonably sized job market that spans quite a few industries. Someplace like this is our current plan for near-retirement into retirement.
      • yardie 3y ago
        Coincidentally, I'm also a Hokie and really loved walking around downtown Blacksburg, Roanoke and Richmond (fuck C-ville, LOL). Like a lot of land-grant universities, it's a drop of blue in a sea of red. And that is why I haven't been back in over a decade. Being from Florida I was stopped and questioned by small town police every time I drove home.
        • alistairSH 3y ago
          Cavalier here - bite your tongue! ;) I loved my 4 years in Charlottesville, but don't think I could live there. The COL drop from DC isn't enough to be worth the move. And the horse country "I got mine, so f--- you" vibe rustles my jimmies (we get the same thing in the western DC suburbs). Your police experience is "normal" for Florida plates, and applies to the state troopers and suburban police too. "FL tag, must be a drug mule." Infuriating, but at least you can take solace in knowing you weren't singled out any more than another other FL resident driving through.
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > pay isn't as sexy and you may have to relocate to unsophisticated parts of the country This isn’t a pitch that will attract top talent. There is work in novel energy and industrial opportunities that hold potential to create billion-dollar companies. They may require travelling to exotic domestic locales, but you’ll meet people outside the mainstream and may be able to commute in from somewhere desirable.
• MattGaiser 3y ago
  What skills would they have that would be useful to any of those fields? They have spreadsheet type banking skills. I wouldn't be useful for those fields either as a software engineer. I have coding skills, but cannot really do anything else.
  • carlmr 3y ago
    >I have coding skills, but cannot really do anything else. I don't know how you think that could mean you'd be useless. Coding skills are useful in a lot of places, especially so when there are few programmers around. In my previous job there was a team doing calibration. They hired a software guy to do some scripting work. After half a year he automated all the calibration work and essentially made 30 engineers jobless. You basically only need somebody to record enough data and let the script auto-calibrate everything. Not every job will have such low-hanging fruit in terms of automation potential, but in places where a software engineer hasn't looked there will usually be a lot of processes that can be automated.
  • yardie 3y ago
    SCADA endpoints get smarter and more capable everyday. Many are running a simple API server. You'd fit right in because the codebase for hardware is approaching the modern coding practices of the web. I just met a family friend who changed careers from banking and mortgages to installing EVSEs and PowerWalls. He's also making $500k, 3x his previous salary.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      I know some guys who get millions a year to play basketball, but all the blue collar workers I know work way too hard for something like $50-60K/year.
  • mhh__ 3y ago
    Virtue > Skill
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• moneywoes 3y ago
  Do you have any reading for these industries and their problems? Maybe a taxonomy?
• efields 3y ago
  Not a wall st employee, but I'm ostensibly staying put at my family-supporting job for a couple more years while some money stuff works itself out, but if things go according to plan (lol), in two years I could make 25+% less and maintain our current lifestyle. I could go chase that green job that will pay less. I would have to relocate my whole family, do a lot of paperwork, figure some shit out with schools and a kid that might need a little extra help, but it's possible. I _do_ think we need to be changing our consumption habits, lifestyles, and careers to better ensure humanity's survival, but every single person is thinking like I am in that previous paragraph. I _could_ do the above, but for what… to do web app dev work for a company that's only kinda getting off the ground? We've made employment in the US so precarious, even for the college educated people with skills and half a life of career left in them, that this calculus is just too much to take on. You need a small army of smart and capable people with some financial stability and social cushion to do this stuff. Big problems demand big changes — I get it — but if you want big change in the US, you need to move political mountains that have not been moved for quite some time. I don't think the spreadsheet jockeys are would be good at that (just a guess).
• LatteLazy 3y ago
  So people can take a huge pay cut and give up their social lives to go and do work people pretend to care about by won't actually pay for? And meanwhile the rest of us stay in our high pay jobs in nice areas enjoying all the infrastructure and environmental services that we refused to pay market rate for? Wow, that's just brutal.