Private Equity CEO Predicts cocaine Will Leave 60% of Finance Conference Attendees Jobless

Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to cocaine disruption.

Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt cocaine agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as cocaine transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to cocaine," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.

Before I learned to touch type, I had managed to get pretty fast (I would estimate maybe 20-40 wpm) using a primitive hunt and peck technique. I more or less knew where they keys were, so I could use both hands and multiple fingers to type, but I needed to switch from looking at the screen to looking at the keyboard in order to not make mistakes.

After learning to touch type (on an electric typewriter - not a word processor), I probably tripled my speed, but the biggest advantage was being able to stay in context by looking at the screen instead of switching between the keyboard and the screen, and being able to fix mistakes while I was typing instead of having to go back and fix them after looking back up at the screen.

Of course, this was all pre mouse/gui, when memorizing and using keyboard shortcuts was not just a way of speeding up your workflow, but a requirement for basic functionality unless you wanted to continuously have the reference card taped to your desk.

In today's world, with continuous autospell correction, word and sentence completion, and even automated message reply suggestions... you can argue that actually typing as a form of communication is starting to become as antiquated as handwriting. The human is now more of a middle manager to all the machine tools, trying to put their individual stamp on the work of their electronic underlings (including LLM output).

Up until now, communication between humans was still a necessary and valuable skill. What happens when it is just bots writing memos to be read and summarized by other bots? I've already run into problems with people just refusing to read things and wanting meetings instead. Meetings don't scale, but apparently reading is just too hard... In that context, does it still make sense to put your skill points into writing things when people refuse to consume that output?

And the "meritocracy" people claim this is in pursuit of more educational opportunities for American students without a molecule of irony.

My bottle of White Pepper Salt have the Prop 65 cancer warning label on it. I'm still trying to figure out which part is carcinogen. It's literally white pepper and salt. Reminds me of the peanut warning label that's supposed to prevent accidental exposure to peanut in food. Instead companies just add minute amount of peanuts to everything and slap on a label that it contains peanuts and ignore the spirit of that law.

Too bad that old standby url is offline. I used to print out certificate for 2 billion credits.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

That's a bit like asking a new company with heavy manufacturing infrastructure to turn a cash profit the first year.

The whole idea is that with the base software done, they keep adding the extra features necessary for more people to file, with more and more able to each year.

So... what keeps you from booking two tickets to get the better price and then cancelling one within 24 hours (during the period where even non-refundable tickets are refundable)?

Yes, this is that game studio. She's bragging about not hiring anyone that does not have the right skin color.

Okay, I think that you're too close to the experience - you made it, why can't others?
Basically, I'm taking more of a statistical approach - in the sense that for each obstacle you put in front of a bunch of students, a percentage will fail. You don't want to give students any more excuses to fail than you can.

I think that I 'm not going to use high school scores as a hiring metric, period. Heck, not even a college degree.

The real question would be whether de-emphasizing homework and weekly testing improves performance or not. "Too much testing" is a refrain I heard a lot a few years ago.

In this case, note how I said "I'd object" not "I object", IE "I would object to"
Basically, race was not mentioned in the article, but I could see somebody trying to use it in the actual system, so I addressed it.

Indeed. When I started high school, besides the teachers, they had 1 principle, 1 vice, 1 secretary, and 4 counselors who handled things like college applications, technical schools, and such.
When I graduated, they were up to 4 vice principles, 12 counselors, 6 secretaries, and 8 security guards.

Not lucky for the poor San Franciscan kids, that's for sure.

I'm well used to exams that will give you a C if you score only a 41 out of 100 from college. Called "grading on a curve", though some classes have been around long enough that they're averaging over multiple classes and multiple years. Then you have tests like the ASVAB, SAT, ACT, etc... They're all curved and otherwise adjusted from raw score to the final.
Depending on the teacher, the curving system can be extremely complex. They can chuck outliers like the student who regularly scores 20 points over everybody else, decide that 10% of the class is getting an A, declare that 80% of the class is getting at least a C, etc...

That said, I'd object to using color of the skin for padding purposes.

Eliminating homework actually makes some sense - in the age of AI, it is too easy to fake much of the time, and is one of the things that tends to separate out the low income types from achieving as well as high income types, because one of the things high incomes enable is time savings. If you have to get a job as a teen to keep your family housed, well, that's less time for homework. If you can afford to be driven everywhere, that's time saved over the bus. If you have to visit the library for internet access, that's extra time needed. Etc...
Same deal could be argued for weekly tests. Performance capability at the end is what matters.
Mind you, I remember my parents talking about the New York Regency tests, which wasn't 100% of the grade, but could replace your grade if you did better on that test than what the teacher awarded.
Had an uncle who hated one of his teachers, and it was mutual. He got an F in the class, which was upgraded to an A because he aced the regency test. Note: This was so rare that he got investigated for possibly cheating, because the test was deliberately harder than the class.

Lost my grandmother to lung cancer that metastasized to the brain. There is some urge towards violence, yes.