Whenever you see someone who you believe to be an idiot succeeding, it usually means they're really good at the game and you don't even understand what the game is.
When a company like Netflix launches a new product it is possible they thought about this with different teams for a long time. Then it's very naive to comment on the internet to say they are wrong and made a stupid mistake.
Companies make stupid mistakes all the time. When you're in the trenches there's a certain amount of group think, and issues that may be obvious to outsiders may be invisible and/or suppressed by internal politics.
Of course Internet comments may be naive and wrong for other reasons. But that's a different question.
Of course it is no guarantee for success. But an outsider has absolutely no clue about what was discussed and what the politics were. So I think it is naive to make comments like "this is never going to work", or "removing the headphone jack will bring Apple down".
Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't.
Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?
It is irrelevant that Triplebyte's public profiles may have been instrumentally valuable for the company in the long run. No one arguing against them cared about that. But they did care about the ethical implications of that decision -- it was wrong even if it turned out to be good for Triplebyte, which it didn't because their plan was so brazenly unethical that they got a spanking.
Called being born rich.
Plenty of idiots succeed because success was granted to them the day they were born.
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Also, a lot of times when you see an idiot succeeding, the idiot is a face for people to criticize while the master minds go about doing their magic, unseen.
If the definition of success is completely left to a person's own devices, the whole argument of the "game" falls apart too. Since there is no game to play.
[1] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...
There's no good solution to this either - if there was more kindness in the world, then that would just create even more opportunities for the people playing the game to get ahead, because they would have more victims to exploit.
If the definition of being ahead is to work in upper management, or at trendy FAANG making a large amount of money then you are kind-of forced to play the game in order to "get ahead".
However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game.
I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
Unfortunately in the US, if you don’t play the game, you have greatly reduced access to healthcare, which is a huge incentive to play the game especially if you have kids.
People who are not able or willing to earn money under the existing economic system are denied food, housing, clothing, healthcare, legal representation...
2) Even if it was true, is a society where freeloaders are rewarded equally to those who contribute a good thing or a just society? Healthcare, like all goods and services, comes from the labor of the working classes. It's perfectly fair and reasonable that the people working to pay for this (whether through insurance premiums, taxes, etc) receive the fruits of their labor, rather than having it siphoned away by non-contributing people.
Generally, if your employer doesn't offer subsidized health insurance, then it means you're not paid much as it is, so adding premiums that cost $10k to $20k per year plus needing $13k per year saved for OOP costs (double that if you have a problem at the end of the calendar year) is a tall order.
And yes, you get premium subsidies if you make less than a certain amount, but it's no where near a comfortable life. The government makes sure you are right on the edge of being able to afford the basics.
As Zizek often says, ideology shows itself exactly in the ways that you try to one-up the ideology. When you long to escape the rat race, you have to immediately associate to something that is only attainable via doing the rat race itself and making money (e. g. Travel the world, beaches etc). It has to be firmly in dreamland.
What the system doesn't want you to do: be frugal and marketing-resistant, demand payment relative to the value you provide, be satisfied with living in a normal house with a normal family, not craving products, being mentally self reliant, etc. There is no juice to squeeze out from such a person, but it might exactly be the kind of person your family and community would need.
Not saying this would be your best option necessarily, you can definitely put up with getting squeezed a bit, but be conscious of it.
My point is not to shit on philanthropy though it's a bit more nuanced.
So there are some who do go to save the kids a continent away, and who gave up their jobs and then go to travel the world, the interesting thing is not them, but why they are fascinating to the audience. It's all about "if only I could do that, then..." A dream, an outlet. And it has to be far away.
How about this (nothing personal). When did you last talk with your family members' and friends' deep thoughts, fears, desires, worries and things of pride, cherished achievements, aspired goals etc. Not in an interrogation way, but naturally, while doing activities, cooking, fishing, sitting at the campfire. How many of them can you rely on to know yours?
How often have you talked with your neighbors? How is your local community (street, apartment block) doing, what are the problems, is someone in need of help because their kid is sick?
I found this articulated really well in Jordan Peterson's writing (I know, divisive guy). The point isn't to denounce faraway volunteering and a philanthropic traveler lifestyle. Rather that people are setting up dreams at a safe distance that they can then safely regard as unattainable.
It's much more scary to think of helping people in your apartment block, because eww, those people are nasty they are loud, they cook smelly cabbage on Sundays, they are too dumb for your liking. If only you had some angelic far away people who are simply waiting for you as their savior, it would be so much easier.
This kind of "set your house in order first" idea is upsetting, but humans and societies are complex enough that you have to get a feel for how things go wrong and how they go right, if you learn by setting yourself straight first, then attend to your family and close friends, then the community etc. Yes, your neighbor may betray you and always beg you for loans if you appear to philanthropic. True. You'll have the same issue when trying to hand out stuff to Ukrainians or the Syrians. Which group is the "good guys"? Are you being manipulated, etc.?
It's complicated, but we can push it all away to dreamland by saying, one day, I will travel and have a beachfront house in Africa and help all the kids (or one of these). Till then, I hammer away to get that promotion.
Again, travelling can be extremely beneficial if you have the right mindset and prepare. You can see different ways of living, different ways of thinking, mentalities, types of interactions. Or simply different sceneries than the one at home. But as someone who has traveled to some places and swam at beautiful beaches, it isn't all that euphoric in itself. Perhaps this is a "no shit, Sherlock" type of claim, but actually sunbathing on the Copacabana isn't that much better than sunbathing by the lakeside in Hungary (but one is more useful than the other in spiting your colleagues). It's more about the people you're bonding with while doing it. Plus if you actually interact with locals, but many just stay in their hotel resort. And you could indeed already do many facets of it at home, bringing your communities closer, but of course everything incentivizes us away from this. (People constantly move around etc.)
(PS. I'm crap at all of the above and just ranting)
"If you reject the food ignore the customs fear the religion and avoid the people you might better stay at home." - James Michener?
Money – and thus at least understanding the game enough – is often a precursor to getting enjoyment out of those things though, to various degrees. Probably less so with family, if the dynmaics are healthy, but definitely more needed for certain hobbies and travel.
Capitalism believes you can win the game.
Communism believes you can tie the game.
Religion believes that you can quit the game.
But they are all wrong, because you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even quit the game.
So yeah, often idiots can be super rich and its absolutely ok.
Also you can be a genius going something without resources and connections, so there are millions of reasons why you can be way smarter than the rich guy on top while you are not rich at all.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-how-l...
Making money is not a function of pure "intelect", but being able to predict what others need and being able to meet those needs.
You can be Einstein smart and not business smart.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Don't take it too seriously, but there is also many kernels of truth in there.
Even the Romans knew you only needed to supply bread and games to keep the people pacified. Celebrity culture is just a modernized and less directly violent form of "games". The game modern celebrities are playing is apparently completely invisible to you?
I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.
For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time.
So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity
Rather, he united the country because it was in an economic disarray :)
If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue that Trump has done a good job.
Of course Covid has had a big effect. But there were many policy options for handling that, and Trump - and his far-right equivalents in other countries - reliably picked some of the least effective ones.
Regarding bankruptcies, unemployment, household debt Etc, Obama's first term would show really low score on these things, presuming that's all he had, almost none of it was caused by the actions taken by him during his presidency.
It is too soon to argue any of those measures.
You can’t take a single moment in time in the middle of a crisis to judge.
Number of his supporters arguing that objectively there's no such thing as a good president :-p
That’s probably a bad metric because his supporters love him.
It’s the swing voters making those kinds of comments because they want to vote for him but he’s done some dodgy things.
[0] https://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/privileged-kids-on-a...
After years of losses that almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain he made it into a moderate success.
Outwardly, at face value, he's doing pretty well, until you count the decade of losses which nobody talks about.
Another friend is a moderately renowned documentary maker. Again, facilitated by family wealth. Outwardly, the appearance is of being successful, which cost a fair chunk of family wealth.
I think in both cases, family wealth drove something akin to an obsession to appear successful, which they largely achieved and nobody mentions the uncomfortable facts about how they got there in polite company.
Almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain the costs that made it into a success.
What matters is the bottom line.
With more money can of course learn to fail in greater scale, but IMHO this also has benefits in it's own. Learning to think big is a skill of it's own. Small business plays by different rules than big business, even if they have overlaps.
And I also think how succesfull you really were can only be said after staying on your peak for some time, because some games go really really long.
This is the blank slate fallacy where people believe (for political correctness reasons) that any kid had same chance of success if he was given the same opportunity as the success of kids.
Unless by "good at the game" you refer to the skill of dropping out of the right vagina, like royalists do.
The game the (alleged) idiot is playing is "don't lose the family fortune". If you weren't born wealthy but want to be, you are playing the "make more than you spend" game in one of its variations. There is for example an obvious slow way that might give your children a better shot at the "don't lose the family fortune" game and there are also many also many higher variability games like the "lottery" and "startup" games.
Not every game requires the same skills and personality type.
And some people are born athletically gifted, or extremely attractive, or with very high IQ and a temperament for grit.
There are lottery winners that lose everything in a few years.
Just because you are born into money, doesn’t mean you will succeed.
That doesn't mean that being born into a privileged life doesn't have advantages, but it's about way more than just the money. It's also the connections you have. The best example right now is Trump, who is a complete and utter failure as a businessman yet people keep throwing money at him.
Perhaps you are judging him by the wrong metrics?
Trump has always wanted to be a “great man” of history while being able to live a life of excess.
He's failing at that to. He'll go into the history books as the worst president the US ever had by a wide margin.
Unlikely. Once the constant negative media coverage dies down the hate will fade as well.
There are many many unemployed useless Stanford, MIT, Harvard graduates in this world.
Thus, attending a fancy school is a big advantage if you've got the money or have another way to get in.
Is this really true?
All the statistics I've read suggest otherwise.
The real question is whether those graduates are more likely to be useless and unemployed than people who did not graduate from the same universities.
One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of businesses and products fail. Remember survivorship bias. For every successful Netflix there are a dozen failed movie streaming services. Anyone who has had a few weeks worth of software engineering can produce a Twitter clone, but none have been successful.
2010?
Normally they don't get 60 in the Senate though, which means that the system is working at intended (you need to stay consistently popular for 6+ years to start swinging the Senate).
Many smarter people with more money and better connections failed, see e.g. Bloomberg.
Check Scott Adams’ writing on Trump’s persuasion abilities.
When did Mexico agree to pay for the wall?
He's like a vacuum cleaner salesman who can always get his foot in the door, but can never manage to sell a unit.
He's like a vacuum salesman who promises to give his customers dishwashers and toasters for free if they buy a vacuum cleaner.
When they buy the vacuum cleaner, it turns out he lied about the other goods but they still ended up with the vacuum cleaner. But what a lot of people really wanted was the dishwasher.
I may have pushed the analogy a little too far...
Plus he's a construction magnate -- get enough traction to get a preliminary budget and start allocating funds to his buddies. Even if it's just a concrete wall for 1/3 of Texas that's big $$$ for his construction cronies.
You could also think of it as, "Those with enough money and power to influence who gets elected president are good enough at the game to get Trump elected president."
How much of his agenda is really his, anyway? He's a punching bag to distract everyone while the real power players get their way.