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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

> keeping his wife in line.

I have never cringed so hard in my life.

Please, just delete this comment. Yeah oh my god that sentence could be interpreted wrong. We don't need a tangent about it. The real meaning has absolutely nothing to do with subordination. It's a simple matter of keeping your friends/relatives/partners out of your job. They don't work there, they shouldn't be interfering.

Also, shame on anyone that upvotes such a derail just because they agree with the words.

Considering the context, I think it is perfectly reasonable to lament the choice of wording and no, I will not be deleting my comment because you don't like it. It has a rather higher score than I anticipated, so I didn't react to that wording in a vacuum, now did I?

For someone who hates tangents you're sure good at them.

Sometimes people complain about comments getting downvoted out of disagreement, even though they contribute to the discussion. But I am far more bothered by the inverse problem: comments that get upvoted out of shallow agreement even though they serve no purpose, focusing on some negligibly relevant detail in a haughty way. These comments make it harder to participate in the conversation for fear of people latching on to completely irrelevant details and drowning out the message.

In short: Upvotes correlate with good comments, but they also correlate with certain types of poisonous comment.

As to continuing tangents, I would have been quite happy to see both of our comments dug into invisible gray together. But even if that fails I'm happy to provide a bright warning against being reactionary, and to hope that any wasted space is meta at worst.

What do we have, if not words, to convey complex meanings? We can't all be telepaths like you.

His wife doesn't need to be kept in line... his wife needs to be kept out of company business unless she's an employee.

The 'line' seems clear to me, the company/not-company boundary.

And I wasn't disparaging words. But if I pick some post and comment 'freedom is good!' I'm not contributing to productive discussion no matter how many people agree.

You fucked up, you got called on it. Stop blaming the person who pointed out your mistake.

What? Is this comment in the right spot?

Well, not in the offensive sense of "bitch, you better behave or ima smack you", but at least something modern like "honey, when you talk to my employees and act really strange and intimidating around them, it makes things very difficult for me at work".

The wife's behavior seems to be the catalyst for nearly all the drama described here.

In many marriages, there's one spouse who keeps the other in line and then there is the spouse who is kept in line. One does not simply reverse these roles.

That's true, but when that leads to the (hypothetically) more powerful spouse taking on a shadow role at her husband's company, then it can lead to potential abuses, as it may have done in this case.

(Disclaimer: not an insider, wildly speculating, etc)

According the the story we have so far, he should have actually kept his wife in line but failed to do so. You only cringe because you read too much into what he said.

Pretty sure they meant work/personal balance or boundaries (line).

Yes, husbands need to keep their wives in line gasp AND wives need to keep their husbands in line.

If you form a life partnership with someone being able to steer them around icebergs is 1. Good for them, 2. Good for you and optionally 3. Good for your offspring (and mutual assets). If you can't trust your partner to do this for you, and you for them, its not a good partershaft.

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