At last, an article that fully explores the aspirations of trust fund kids! I had no idea they are so virtuous!
6,526 karma · joined August 3, 2012
When I was a manager, I always found it to be far more effective to have team members apply psychological pressure to their peers, rather than apply pressure from the top down.
Standups are best avoided by managers. I never felt the need for yet another meeting. In fact, an excessive number meetings are one of the main reasons I got out of the management business.
It was the early 90s. No one thought privacy was an issue. The internet only had nice people on it. Doxing wasn't really even a thing yet.
Plus, things like financial theft from individuals weren't really possible using online means only because no one had a bank account online. You still had to do that sort of thing in meatspace.
That's the same reasoning used to justify continuing trade with China and other repressive regimes. I think of it as high-minded rationalization to justify continuing profitable business. Excuse me if I don't believe the people saying things like this really give a shit about anything but getting more money.
There's a nice chart of when you can get DX in each band in this article:
For example, I don't know if HN makes money off this forum, but all of us commenters are contributing content that furthers the site's goals (hopefully). Yes, dang and sctb are paid to moderate this forum, but if there were no comments, there would be nothing to moderate.
Does that mean that by virtue of participating here for seven years I somehow have some right to tell them how to run their business? No, because there's no employment agreement. And even if there were any agreement, I doubt we would have the ability to do anything about some sudden change in direction from the C suite.
The realization that mere comments or the moderation of them on an internet forum create uncompensated content that someone else may profit from is apparently not as plain as I thought it was.
My friend has been handicapped since he was a child, incidentally. I'm well aware that some people have an entire life filled with difficulty.
He told me a fascinating story about how the Duke family gave some Union soldiers cigarettes when they were in North Carolina during the war. After the war was over, some of those soldiers wrote to the Dukes asking them to send more cigarettes. They were hooked, and the Dukes realized they had a big seller. According to my friend, it was the basis of their wealth and allowed them to expand into other areas. (Duke Power was founded by the same family, for example.)
Their company, American Tobacco, was also the target of some of the first big successful anti-monopoly actions by the federal government.
I have a friend who is physically handicapped and very much needs to park in these spaces. The only problem he has ever told me about is finding a spot to park at work. Apparently it's somewhat common where he lives for middle-aged women (his description) to game the system and obtain handicapped placards. He says he knows they are not really handicapped because he sees them walking briskly through long corridors at work without distress. Sometimes too young people will borrow an older relative's placard to park in those spaces.
Incidentally, he would never be able to afford a Tesla. He buys three- to five-year-old Hondas and drives them till they can't be fixed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situ...
As for who will enjoy what etc., there are entire industries that spend their efforts on knowing that, like Nielsen and Rotten Tomatoes.
It's sad to see them compromise their principles, but sometimes it only takes one little Twitter mob to make people back down. That's why it's reasonable to question their character.
As to whether 8chan 'caused' those abhorrent crimes, I couldn't say, any more than 'violent video games' caused them. I view such crimes as having a root cause of some form of mental illness, which does not (imo) relieve the doers of culpability.
The point is that they are demonstrably not exactly what they claim to be, and thus some level of distrust is warranted.