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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#381

Post by cess11 »

cafard wrote: post #175
cess11 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity. Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretion…

Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb. But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.

Sure, every tyrant has a story that superficially allows some shift of blame.

They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.

Re: Careless People

#382

Post by FireBeyond »

hylaride wrote: post #235
generic92034 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?

IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twi…

> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.

Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).

Re: Careless People

#383

Post by myroon5 »

rsynnott wrote: post #170
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.

'absolute power corrupts absolutely'

Re: Careless People

#384

Post by rozap »

Arainach wrote: post #256
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them. Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta h…

The Koolaid is stronger at Facebook, because it has to be.

It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.

Re: Careless People

#385

Post by hirvi74 »

jajko wrote: post #286
llm_nerd wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc. In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other progr…

> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money. I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with…

> dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025

Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.

Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.

Re: Careless People

#386

Post by Thoreandan »

binaryturtle wrote: post #15
matthewdgreen wrote: post #4

I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from…

It's called the Streisand Effect. :)

It's right there in the URL, along with #ZDGAF

Re: Careless People

#387

Post by hylaride »

FireBeyond wrote: post #382
hylaride wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twi…

> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).

I really do wonder if outright financial fraud was occurring. There was a period of time where they were going through CFOs like water over Niagara Falls (whom I assume were refusing to sign off on the books?).

Re: Careless People

#388

Post by hirvi74 »

rottc0dd wrote: post #87
Jevon23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.

I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Re…

> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.

Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.

Re: Careless People

#389

Post by ashoeafoot »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.

Re: Careless People

#390

Post by amanaplanacanal »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #337
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. 108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently. Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent. So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many bil…

Circumstances and luck are hugely important, but you have agency even if you don't have full control. Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?

That's assuming that free will actually exists, which is an open question at this point.
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