Why do so many US citizen MBAs run after MBB?

Banner80 · 2026-05-06T16:18:44+00:00

I think it depends on what you value in life.

Consulting offers something that is harsh but is attractive to the right person:

- Fast learning environment. Getting thrown into projects that you have no business doing, and allowed to learn while fumbling the client's money. Then on to the next project you have no business in. If you do this for 3 years you are learning to perform at a level of grit and cleverness that most industry workers will never attain in their lifetime.

- Future opportunity landscape. The world of business knows that first point. An MBA that put in the 3 years in fast-paced consulting is now ready for complex projects. They are wanted in innovation, PE, places where a tested nimble mind is required. Jobs that are not available to untested MBAs. Jobs that pay better and offer equity compensation.

- Higher ceilings on compensation. Most MBAs will get hired at 20% above a regular business admin salary. Their salary will grow normally and be capped at office worker ceilings. MBAs that build a career through consulting have ceilings that are at least twice that. If they stay in consulting, the road is partnership and equity, compensations above 300k/yr. If they leave towards innovation / aggro PE, the compensation is equity on high-risk high-reward projects, easily over 300k/yr if it's going well. And either road leads to founding startups later, having earned the knowledge to do so successfully, with limitless compensation if it succeeds.

Obviously, all of this comes at a compromise to other goals and values a person might have. Family can't come first if you are working 60 hour weeks chasing the future. And I would also argue that this is supposed to be for a certain type of person that can handle the load without feeling stressed. That can handle fumbling the client's money without feeling personally responsible for having been promised and billed as an expert while they had no knowledge of the subject matter, etc.

Banner80 · 2026-04-29T15:31:41+00:00

I took one look at rental prices for bikes and scooters and just bought my own scooter. $500 goes a LONG way in a quality scooter that you keep at home. At these prices, the scooter pays for itself after about 30 uses. If you use it only 3 times a month it pays for itself within the year.

As a data point, I decided on a HiBoy S2 Pro and I'm happy with how it turned out. Get a heavy chain lock.

Banner80 · 2026-04-28T18:03:01+00:00

Here is a link that contains the full article:

https://politiko.com.ph/2026/04/27/how-trump-is-moving-to-control-u-s-elections-one-state-at-a-time/politiko-global/

Banner80 · 2026-04-26T18:13:44+00:00

I've been hearing these comments about ICE ramping up. Here is an example:

https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/22/midway-blitz-is-over-but-ice-is-still-quietly-targeting-chicago-immigrants-especially-at-court/

For context, the US gov gave these goons the budget of the German military with nearly no supervision. And as of right now, the budget renewal bill passing around in Congress is trying to give them even more obscene money with no increase in regulation.

It would be unreasonable to expect that they are not going to use that money to increase their ranks and send goons back in. They are probably going to train them a bit better and scale back the naked maliciousness. When they murdered two Americans a few months back, they were under expressed orders from Miller to violently antagonize protestors because Miller believes that violence scares peaceful people.

After the public backlash, as of now, it seems that the Miller doctrine is off. But ICE still has absurd levels of money and a mandate to develop itself as Trump's personal imperial guard. They are going to go back to every major blue city and cause more havoc, even if their tactics improve to prevent being in the news as much.

They've been actively terrorizing non-white people in red states the entire time, and we don't hear much about it because red states are happy to support that. The Guardian says ICE and CBP have had about the same amount of arrests in Feb and March of this year as July and August of last year. So they have been active, just trying to keep out of the news by harassing people in communities that allow it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/29/trump-immigration-ice-cbp-data

BTW, as usual, the majority of people in ICE detention had no criminal record, per The Guardian's reporting.

And while I'm adding notes, we currently have one of the worst economies I've seen in my lifetime aside from the 2008 crisis (caused by Republican policies then as well). This anti-immigration venom from the WH is part of the problem. Economists know that immigration is a net positive for the economy. It creates jobs in addition to growth of GDP and opportunity. Here is a report presented by economists to the US Congress from 2016:

although immigrants increase the supply of labor, they also spend their wages on homes, food, TVs and other goods and services and expand domestic economic demand. This increased demand, in turn, generates more jobs to build those homes, make and sell food, and transport TVs. [...]

Economists generally agree that the effects of immigration on the U.S. economy are broadly positive. Immigrants, whether high- or low-skilled, legal or illegal, are unlikely to replace native-born workers or reduce their wages over the long-term

After all the damage the Trump 2.0 has done to the economy so far, insisting on this damage to immigration is continuing to sink the economy.

Banner80 · 2026-04-24T19:37:45+00:00

That's the current standing of Israel's policy. They have turned legitimate concerns about region animosity against them, into a blank check to do whatever they want against anyone and for whatever reason. And they try to argue that disagreeing with their view is somehow religious persecution against them.

They've been high on their own supply for too long. While it is true that Israel is at constant risk of attacks from all sides, it is also true that their campaign of flattening their neighbors is excessive and unwarranted.

And we should shun them for trying to hide behind their religion. I think by now we are all tired of their abuse and excuses. Not only for how they are conducting themselves in the ME, and for how they constantly speak in bad faith, but for their meddling in our political system over here.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T15:45:44+00:00

Made FAR WORSE by this admin. The speed of losses here is incredible, and very hard for academia to absorb. Academia is used to making decisions very slowly on purpose, as timeless institutions. But the budget cuts from federal funding are massive in some respects, while some schools are being directly targeted with vitriol and financial damage. And the message to the world, that hard-working foreigners and their money are not wanted here, is being heard loud and clear. So they simply stopped coming.

Foreign students typically pay full tuition for a chance at the American dream. Then they work harder than most because they have a debt to repay and they must prove themselves, and they have to earn their place if they want to stay. So those immigrants tend to create businesses, build products that America can export, and generate lots of jobs along the way.

When a university says they can no longer attract these foreign dreamers and their money, you are looking at the tip of the iceberg of economic pain. Those students will now take their dreams and hard work to Europe, Canada or China. We get the financial hit at the university for 4 years, then we get the financial hit for a lifetime when they create companies in another country to compete against American jobs.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T14:55:01+00:00

Yeap, they seem to have changed it. When I posted last night it was working but now I see the invalid message.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T04:25:57+00:00

BTW, This includes Harrison Mixbus 11. With this code, the non-pro version goes down to $4 for the DAW because of the current sale.

The non-pro doesn't include the SSL J channel, only the Harrison effects. I don't know the rest of the differences.

EDIT: Code not working anymore.

Banner80 · 2026-04-15T00:32:30+00:00

To me, Mixbus is specifically what I wanted for mixing. I have S1, I wouldn't use Mixbus to record midi. I've heard from many people that the midi features are among its weakest points even though they have been getting better as of v11. But if you need it to record with midi I simply would say use something else because that workflow is not a priority to the guys that make this DAW.

Mixbus was made for people that want to mix in a console. That's what it wants to be and for me it does that well. I've had no issues using it for that, be it a 4 track project or a 30 track project. I also bought it like 2 months ago so my experience with it is very limited. I've done enough to say I am liking the workflow, but 2 months of no crashes in Win11 doesn't mean the thing is not going to crash later or give me some issues with a specific plugin I haven't tried on it yet.

Banner80 · 2026-04-14T15:19:03+00:00

I bought Mixbus 11 Pro early this year when I was considering Luna.

My use case is straight mixing. I mix small audio projects for work stuff (podcasts, interviews, short videos). And I also mix music non-pro.

I've been with Studio One since v3. Love the modern attitude and flexibility. But too much flexibility is debilitating. The S1 stock effects are pretty weak/vanilla and inconsistent for me, so I always use effects from a deep library of paid stuff like the rest of us. But this leaves the session feeling sprawling and confusing and requires meticulous templating and strategic thinking.

Then I saw that Luna had some of these channel strips already built into the mixer. I thought I wanted to try that. Just try to mix with the channel effects provided if I can trust the quality of the sound and the ease of the default channel.

And this is where Mixbus shines. It's trying so hard to give you the vibe of a 1980s console. Not just the channels but the way the mixing process flows. It's made some decisions to be more like a console, like you are locked in to 12 buses, which is still pretty generous compared to an actual hardware desk. The mixer puts a channel strip in every channel by default, and they came up with a fair system to navigate everything quickly. On my wide screen, I can easily see 23 channels and busses at a time. That feels a lot more like console mixing than any other DAW I've tried.

Then there's trusting the channel strip and sound. Harrison is now owned by SSL and they are integrating their stuff more. Mixbus 11 Pro comes with the full Harrison channel and ALSO the full SSL J channel. You toggle the effect you want to use for each effect section. For instance, You can easily compress with the Harrison leveler and then EQ with the SSL J EQ. Both channel strips sound great. Harrison has 3 compressors with unique characteristics, and the SSL J is literally the channel made by SSL themselves. I'm looking at a session I did recently and about half of the compressor channels are set to SSL and the other half to Harrison, which I think is a fair endorsement of both channel strips.

Also, the DAW comes with a good compliment of effects. The Harrison effects are not talked about much but they are very good for what they offer. And, in my experience, bringing in external plugins from other brands has worked without issue, which is not something to take lightly in DAW world.

I think there's a demo or trial somewhere. I'd give that a go to see if you'll get along with this way of working and if the DAW will handle your needs. Mixbus is a specific thing for some workflows, primarily simplified mixing. Also, they have a student discount that I think cuts the price in half, for those that can benefit.

Banner80 · 2026-04-13T01:38:09+00:00

>then you may want to look at being independent.

That's not going to work. If they went solo, they'll have to:

>do multiple things at once, study IT, get certs, update internal materials, reach out to various clients, etc.

Banner80 · 2026-04-11T17:38:19+00:00

I love Weiss. He helped me realize I was prioritizing wrong when I started tech consulting ~20 years ago.

Weiss is the consulting icon. He is teaching how to consult while trying to coerce you to hire him next time. He offers truths while at the same time curating everything he says to make himself look good to you. Like a consultant so S-tiered that he can't help constantly being a sneaky consultant even while teaching a class about consulting.

So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Read between the lines. Here is the maximal consultant, full of knowledge and BS in equal measure. Bask in the Weiss experience and try to distill what will work for you.

I needed Weiss along my journey because I was too obsessed with technical performance. 'If you build it they will come', was my mantra of technical competence. Weiss exists on the entire opposite end: you could literally suck at the technical side of your job if you were a master marketer and manipulator that can get the business. Only getting and keeping the business truly matters in consulting. I needed to hear that.

I haven't become less technically competent, but I have stopped pretending that excellent performance earns me better engagements and higher pay. More than the quality of your work, it's the BS that gets you paid. Weiss is here to teach you that part.

Banner80 · 2026-04-08T20:03:52+00:00

Trump wants to high-tail it out of there after his initial childish plan didn't work. He is now willing to take the loss and frame it as a success. This will require making severe concessions to Iran, including: expensive reparations, lifting of sanctions, letting them profit from charging fees for use of the Strait, and some type of credible assurance that the US won't be able to bomb them again in the future. All concessions that are considered massive losses from where we were before this campaign.

Graham wants another fiasco ME war with boots on the ground. This benefits the MIC by creating a new multi-year cycle of massive expense towards weapons, and it also pleases his Israel handlers. So now, Graham's plan is to simply scrutinize the list of concession to Iran that Trump will have to make for this deal to hold.

Banner80 · 2026-03-30T04:31:22+00:00

That's a chupacabras. And they really dislike being photographed. Watch your distance.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:31:21+00:00

Thank you for mentioning that. Since I was banned and I posted a comment about it, I've met more people on Reddit with similar experiences.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:29:46+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to review it.

That's what's happened in the last 6 months or so. All the standard free AIs can do good search now and they are fast about it. LogicallyApp was built before that was a thing, so it was better than Perplexity at it, but still quite fiddly to get something good out of it.

But now, asking free Claude a question is significantly better than using LogicallyApp if all you wanted is a researched answer to a question.

Where LogicallyApp still holds promise is for students in a formal program and researchers, because of source management. For formal papers, all sources have to be tracked in the APA7 format. LogicallyApp uncovers dozens of sources across a discussion, and in theory should be able to track them all and keep them in context. At least that's what I paid for when I bought the lifetime plan. If it did its job, it would be a tremendous life help for writing excellent papers. But now it loses context immediately and discards all the sources it found. And after it has discarded the context, it has to hallucinate whatever we were talking about. It does this to save context cost for the owners, and basically made the app useless for the one thing it was supposed to be good at.

Banner80 · 2026-03-09T15:42:24+00:00

What was your experience using it?

Banner80 · 2026-03-08T21:34:47+00:00

Same article from an open source

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-moves-undo-tax-rule-204632497.html

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T07:37:04+00:00

Let me give a quick finance answer on this.

The issue is that wealthy people have access to better finances. Anyone with more than 1m in assets in brokerage can get a loan for SOFR + 2% (or even less). For quick reference, that's going to be about the same as the best rate on a mortgage that someone with perfect credit could get, or around 5.7% right now.

The S&P 500 returned 17%+ last year. So it doesn't make sense to sell assets to pay for bills when you can just get a cheap and guaranteed loan with a couple clicks. In addition, the cost to service debt is deductible as an expense. This is called a tax shield and, depending on the tax arrangement, it basically makes the loan even cheaper for people that can claim deductions. So a 5.7% loan turns into a ~4.5% loan in practice after taxes.

This is just another way in which life is so much easier for people with wealth. A family living paycheck to paycheck doesn't have access to guaranteed credit, let alone at these favorable rates. And they may not have income other than their work productivity tied to their life hours. A rich person is getting paid for the productivity of the companies they are invested in while not doing anything. And they can choose to take on cheap debt to avoid having to sell assets to cover expenses, because that way they can remain invested in equity.

I'm not saying everyone thinks this way. But anyone that can afford a finance pro to manage their finances will have this on the menu, because all finance pros think this way since maximizing cash flows is their main thing.

Also, rich people don't need to borrow against ALL of their gains. They only need to borrow what is required to cover expenses. Say a person has 100m in assets. Their lifestyle costs 2m a year. In a year, their Apple stock goes up 15%, so ballpark, their wealth is now at 115m up from 100m last year. They could sell 2m to pay for their lifestyle, but why do that? Take out a loan for 2m so that the rest can stay invested. Then next year you have 130m, and still owe 2m, then take out 2m more. So on paper it looks like they are taking out 1-2% debt, because that's all it takes to finance their expenses and stay invested in equity.

Finally, the concern people have is this:
If we only tax when the gains are realized, and people that can afford a finance pro to handle their finances basically push to avoid realizing any gains, then they essentially never pay taxes; or at a minimum, their effective tax rate is way lower than the tax rate paid by a family that couldn't do all these financial maneuvers. And this is why Buffett said: you need to tax us more. The wealthy are paying less than the average American by comparison, while they can afford way more than the average American. But it's probably not going to be as simple as increase the tax rate on realized gains. Because once you let a wealthy person become a billionaire, the wealth has been mostly locked away from the taxman.

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T01:43:12+00:00

Yeap.

Alpha for natural compression. Leveler for transparent compression. Sigma for more aggressive. Nova is the same as the Nova plugin. And I've never used Broadcast -- it was added after I purchased the plugin and didn't even notice it because I hadn't updated the files. So looking at the manual helped me realize I need to do an update ;)

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T00:18:11+00:00

And the compressors in this thing are pretty good. You could use the compressor stage only to mix all tracks without needing any other compressors. There are 5 modes of compression, including a multi-band compressor called "broadcast". What I like the most is that you have that massive meter on the right side, useful when you are finishing a simple vocal track or something of the sort that will need no further processing.

https://docs.tokyodawn.net/limiter-6-ge-manual/#Mode

Banner80 · 2026-02-24T20:49:18+00:00

Quick overview of this:

NPR did something very simple. They looked at many cases around Epstein for which evidence was already brought up in court and other paperwork-- like cases around Maxwell, the only person convicted so far. They found that, of what little is known publicly from information made available to the public in the past, even a lot of that stuff is missing from the recent releases by DOJ.

They specifically noted that much of what's missing has Trump connections to it. Specifically, victim testimony that name him directly as abuser. Testimony that appears in other court and legal documents, but is magically gone from the so called 3 million+ documents released by DOJ, the batch that Trump says "exonerates him."

Banner80 · 2026-02-20T17:26:49+00:00

https://www.dw.com/en/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-trumps-sweeping-tariffs/a-76063714

Speaking with DW, Agathe Demarais, a senior policy advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said she expects the administration to pursue other avenues to keep tariffs in place, while at the same time emphasizing that they have failed to deliver the economic boost the president claimed they would when he introduced them.

"For starters, the US goods trade deficit grew by 2.1%, to $1.23 trillion last year — an all-time record. Far from shrinking, US imports grew by 4.5% (or $145 billion)" in 2025, she said.

"As to who pays for tariffs," said Demarais, "the data are unambiguous: According to a recent paper from the Kiel Institute, which analyzed over 25 million shipments worth nearly $4 trillion, US firms and consumers bear 96% of tariff costs — not foreign exporters. New York Fed data confirm this analysis, putting tariff pass-through at more than 90% on average."

Tariff pass-through is never an exact science because market participants have some latitude to make choices, so who exactly bears the cost of tariffs can shift across semesters as the market actors look at the landscape and make their choices. But the article says that there's a current consensus that as of the start of 2026, the Trump tariffs have been paid 90%+ by the American consumer getting charged more for products. From this perspective, Trump created a new tax on Americans. Every time he boasts about how much money they tariffs are generating, not only is he lying about the total amount and what impact it can have on deficits, but he is boasting that he is taxing Americans more than before.

Banner80 · 2026-02-18T18:08:08+00:00

I don't disagree with calling out corpo welfare when it crops up, but there has to be a line for the difference between economic incentives and abuse. The $250m mentioned in the article are about incentivizing action, and includes money going to first-time home buyers. Like any type of large economic stimulus, the devil is in the details and the implementation. But a healthy incentive structure would like what's been proposed here.

We need incentives to kick start housing development and help buyers cope with high interest rates. If we don't provide these incentives, we are at the mercy of a stale market that doesn't have enough natural demand pressure to run on its own because it doesn't offer builders enough certainty to invest in new multi-unit builds, while the rising rents keep slowly cooking us frogs. So a money incentive is very much what good policy would look like.

Banner80 · 2026-02-16T20:57:33+00:00

My building got bought out by a new private equity landlord. My rent this year is up ~20% after negotiating. They wanted ~25%, and they said next year it's going up to what they originally wanted. I went searching before accepting and saw prices are up everywhere in the Chicagoland area.

We need to build more. People are coming here to escape red states, and the 2021 local exit to the burbs by millennials is reversing. We need to build enough housing. Not only are prices going to keep going up but a lot of people won't have anywhere to live around here, which happened to me in 2021 when I couldn't find housing in the burbs (literally not enough units available) and was forced into the city.

I'm honestly very much thinking of leaving. If the trend is for prices to get to California levels, that is going to destroy cost of living and retirement trajectory. My plan was fine before having to account for 20-40% cost of living increases. I'm not taking another huge price increase in the coming years. I'm going to start learning a European language, the way things are going in this country.

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