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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?

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Maybe we shouldn’t be casting stones from the HN glass house, because literally every other startup here has a mission statement that sounds as ridiculous as this

The C-Suite coming up with this garbage is in every industry. You notice it more with tech companies on HN because that's the industry we usually focus on

Arguably, startups should have absurd mission statements, while managers of the city of London should be more sober.

A sober Englishman? Is there such a thing?

Bit unfair. Plenty of sober Englishman. During the week, anyway. Well, Monday to Thursday. Before midday, at least.

Before breakfast. 'spoons opens quite early in the morning for a reason ...

Wait why should startups have absurd mission statements? That doesn’t make sense to me

They shouldn't but they do. Making the world a better place is not what founders have in mind. What they have in mind is "we are looking for an exit and retire young", for nearly all of them. Unfortunately those words are not something they can write in a mission statement so they must be creative.

Not just startups, this cognitive dissonance is everywhere in business and we're supposed to just swallow it. Honestly I've been a cynical prick for most of my adult life and for a while I played along with it but it just does not align with my values and keeping up the pretense is draining.

I mean uh. Come work for us / hire us, we're the best at what we do! Honest! AI!

Silicon Valley made fun of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

Unrealistic goals seem to be a core tenet of capitalist realism. You see the same thing in politics: Trump is going to stop the Ukraine war in one day, Musk is going to cut 2 trillion from the US budget with efficiency improvements, etc... . A couple of years ago my company gave OKRs a go. One of the principles is that objectives should be practically impossible to reach, i.e. if you hit 100% of an objective then it wasn't ambitious enough. It's a surefire way to ramp up anxiety and stress on a team.

I wish they didn't, I have such a hard time figuring out what any of them actually do.

That's the great thing with such an ambiguous statement is that they can pivot at any point without having say they are pivoting. They are in a position to do what ever it is that someone inquires

Mission statements have the main function of obscuring that. It is safe to assume that the more obfuscating a mission statement is, the most likely the business goal is to steal investors' monies while finding another fool to buy the whole operation, ideally someone from the FAANG crew.

Nobody drags YC startups through the mud like we do here.

And they are relentlessly mocked for doing so (as they should be)

Wall Street eat your heart out; London has a proud and lengthy history of producing corporate psychopaths.

I imagine the people behind this furiously knocking one off while watching the "Greed is good" bit from Wallstreet on loop.

Im sure schools like Eton have special courses just for this.

Five weeks in any major corporation outside of IT, and you will be spewing that kind of talk like a machine gun. It's mind-numbing. Avoid the suits as if they were spreaders of the plague, because their brain-rot is not much better.

If you knew, you’d likely never be able to leave the house. Or could never go home again.

Go to business school?

Sounds like an AI trained on decades of lies.

I mean, other countries would kill to preserve such long-lasting heritage, especially one that's in active use and very much a part of the city.

But the English of late are exceptionally good at bending over and showing their rear-ends to new foreign overlords for paltry sums of coin.

Indeed. It is shocking how little money it takes to buy influence in the UK. I reckon I could afford my own MP.

You can afford the PM for 50k pounds and the chancellor of the exchequer for 20k if they're Tories.

You can get yourself a seat in lords for about £80k of donation, still - the threshold is surprisingly low.

> I mean, other countries would kill to preserve such long-lasting heritage, especially one that's in active use and very much a part of the city.

Nah. In China there wouldn't even be an announcement, you'd just turn up one day and it would be gone.

Tokyo famously redeveloped their fish market, and that was far more of a piece of popular heritage than either of the markets mentioned here.

This is no different from what happened to Covent Garden 40 years ago, and no-one sane wishes we'd kept that as a fruit and veg market.

Quite simple for the psychopath is nothing, nada, zilch, nil, nix.

Sociopath, well. The world is cruel, including for children.

The things people say in the era where comment fields have been removed from news websites (in the name of "avoiding misinformation")...

I’m not sure the comment fields are considered by media organizations or public figures… like, at all. I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic. I don’t think anyone with a shred of influence or responsibility in western society reads them.

To be fair, a lot of comment sections are garbage, and they can be trolled and brigaded.

For an article like this, the negative comments would be aimed at the people in the article, not the journalist. So the article can be a great (muckraking) article, and the comments might also be vitriolic, and everything is good if the rage is well-aimed.

> I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic.

There are two quite different possible interpretations for that fact pattern.

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