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Careless People

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91–100 of 575 posts

Re: Careless People

#91
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.

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

I think they don't have to pay the same amount of taxes if they use the stock as collateral for getting loans

Chances are there are some considerations which I don't know about

Re: Careless People

#92
post #69
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.

I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything. Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about…

Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.

Re: Careless People

#93

> 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…

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 excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.

It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.

Re: Careless People

#94
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…

Have you heard the stories about Uber?

Re: Careless People

#95
post #12

> 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…

> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.

> this insecure

I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.

Re: Careless People

#96

> 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…

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.

So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

Re: Careless People

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.

There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are. N…

From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.

Re: Careless People

#98
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…

Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.

Re: Careless People

#99
post #57
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.

Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people. Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all thi…

> crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people

Melon should fire his!

Re: Careless People

#100

> 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…

I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)

So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.

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