(Graham Platner had the tattoo covered up 10/2025)
2,159 karma · joined October 1, 2019
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/2026-rei-board-of-direc...
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-announces-2026-boar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1qw14k6/rei_hosts_thei...
Your comment stated that college doesn't add much to a person's employability. (If you had wanted to be less obfuscatory, you could simply have said "a [HS] education is already adequate qualification for many jobs; college doesn't add much").
That was your claim. (I don't think your claim is correct of many OECD countries' colleges, but it was the claim you made.)
You then replied to J-Kuhn to say that they had misunderstood your comment by (mis)paraphrasing it as "Students attend college to become qualified to work."
Orthogonal to whether people find print vs video trustworthy or authoritative, which I think is conditioned by what each person grew up considering to be trustworthy or authoritative.
- the Vastaamo ex-CEO was in fact criminally tried and convicted (even if that conviction was overturned on eventual appeal) and had his reputation destroyed. That compares well for GDPR vs US state privacy laws, which is what I was saying to you. That was my point by saying the US Comcast CEO hasn't been grilled by Congress on those (he has on media mergers, but not his company's business practices). I'm agreeing with you that Congressional grillings aren't consequences in any meaningful sense.
- the Vastaamo hacker was not charged under GDPR, they were charged with criminal offenses: aggravated data breach, aggravated attempted extortion, aggravated distribution of information infringing private life, blackmail, breach of confidentiality and falsification of evidence.
- I was not aware the Vastaamo hacker had been freed after serving part of his sentence (although his conviction was not overturned), but it seems [0] it might have been for implicating other people in the cyberextortion/ransomware ring. And since those people were operating in countries without much rule of law, we'd expect actions were taken that didn't involved courts or journalists. I can't find any press coverage of that part.
[0]: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/vastaa...
They did face consequences. That ex-CEO (and CTO) also essentially had their reputations shredded, and their behavior was publicly scrutinized (have you ever seen the Comcast CEO grilled by Congress? I haven't). Sure, it would be better if they had actually gone to prison. But my point is GDPR has teeth, unlike US state digital privacy laws.
- CEO Ville Tapio was convicted criminally under the GDPR.
- The company failed in 2021.
- Finland's NBI tightened criminal code on privacy violations of data subjects, either intentionally or through gross negligence, if they cause damage or significant inconvenience to the data subject.
- CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux was married to Karine Jean-Pierre (Biden's press sec, 2022-5)
- CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour is married to James Rubin, (was Clinton admin asst. secretary of state for public affairs, 1997-2000)
- Jen Psaki's 2017 revolving-door when she was said to be actively shopping herself for a job at CNN while still Obama's WH communications director (no 12-month "cooling-off" period). Left WH 1/2017, joined CNN 2/2017.
- for decades now, CNN seems to function like a retirement home for Clinton-era operatives like James Carville and Donna Brazile. In particular this was a blatant conflict-of-interest in the 2016 primary (Hilary vs Bernie, and the DNC shenanigans). I've seen many bloggers say that TV loves these commentators not because they're that relevant or insightful, but because they steer candidates and their budgets towards big wasteful traditional media spends (and not more targeted internet campaigns, like Obama 2008 or Trump 2016).
- the legendary 2004 takedown of CNN's Crossfire debate show (a younger Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala) by Jon Stewart ("You're on CNN! The show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls! What is wrong with you?")
I don't find talking heads persuasive, and one simple antidote is to flick between coverage of the same issue on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS, ABC/NBC/CBS, BBC, DW, RT, foreign channels, etc. to see conflicting narratives, or sometimes conflicting facts.
Maybe the better converse question is: when did CNN stop being any more credible and up-to-the-minute than other news sources (incl. internet ones, or SM)? Maybe late 1990s. Its rise and fall parallel the Clinton admin.
https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-update-will-help-your-pc-...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/04/22/reduc...
It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to death, or at minimum, underachieved. And those companies had scheduled meetings too, so beware success bias and survivorship bias. My key positive message to OP is to emphasize cultural signs of accountability (or lack of), without which everything else (like standups and progress reports) is out the window. For example, how many of you have ever seen someone organizationally punished for accurately reporting status in a meeting?
Also you asserted "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting" not "... can be a solution, under some conditions".
> I've seen this work across across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations*
and I've seen it fail across orgs as small as 15-person startups and as large as ~100k organizations; and sometimes work. How large was your sample size N?
> Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
As I emphasized above, the mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" If there isn't any such person running/chairing the meeting/ or at absolute minimum reading its minutes, you just get a meaningless talking shop, which as other people here are saying is negatively productive and intensely annoys engineers, rightly so. a) A meeting is only as productive as the subset of people invited (or, equally, excluded). b) You can only enforce or appeal to as much accountability as the management chain intrinsically has (unless you or the senior mgmt or shareholders get them replaced, which is usually major power politics. As a consultant in particular, beware of fighting other people's battles, especially executives.).
(and to help answer the conundrum about who's actually incentivized to make a project succeed, I said you have to do some archaeology on what happened on their previous projects in that org (or previous orgs); the pathological case is if they failed repeatedly but kept getting rewarded, or developed an old-boy network around them.)
> The Child Support Enforcement Passport Denial Program was enacted as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. While authorized in 1996, the program was jointly implemented by the U.S. Department of State and the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement in June 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_support#Enforcement
[1]: "The [US] Child Support Enforcement Passport Denial Program" https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12660
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._ratification_of_the_Conve...
So your claim "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting... works across organizational boundaries too." is way overly strong. Just because you've had an instance or two where it did work, doesn't mean that works in general, for other orgs.
Meetings may or may not be forcing functions, depending on the organization. Sometimes they are. Oftentimes they aren't.
The better mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" Sometimes, believe it or not, the org doesn't have much of that.
Instead of your claim, I'll tell you the key organizational symptom that I found actually determines accountability, or lack of: (discreetly) find out what happened to the careers of CXOs/VPs/directors/execs/managers on projects that failed: were they promoted/ given bonuses/ retained/ demoted/ reassigned/ fired? (sometimes they get a token punishment/demotion, leave, go found a startup/sit on the beach, then get reacquired at a higher level than what they left).
So how stable were Windows 95, or Windows 3.x, IYE?
Was that your editorialization or theirs? I doubt it was theirs.
Perhaps one of the silver linings we eventually get from current happenings is meaningful anti-insider trading legislation, with criminal penalties, timely reporting, nonpartisan enforcement. In principle that legislation could happen as soon as 2/2027. Or perhaps not.
I don't think it's a useful interview practice, at least in tech, below director level, but you just have to keep your composure and gently assert control. If that CTO favored it maybe their company culture was unusually aggressive.