Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I'm always a little bit torn, because there is definitely a specific skill set involved in running a business, and a lot of those skills should be pretty consistent regardless of what the business does. Like, there is a lot of finance, contracting, negotiation, communication, etc. work that has to be done to go from a theoretical model of a light bulb to experimenting to make a working product that can be mass produced. And there's a specific skillet needed to go from there to replacing all the gas lights in New York City with GE electric lights.
But at the same time, the recent trend to prioritize those skills by rewarding absentee shareholders, venture capital, and "founders" has created a situation where if you have those skills you can get impressively far and do a lot of damage to the overall economy and the lives of your customers and workers, even if those business skills are completely separate from an actual concept of what the business should do. You get all the Edison exploitation and bullshit but with no light bulb.
Yes there certainly is a skill to running a business (some of it applies to all businesses, some skills are business type specific, runnign a research lab is different from running a franchise vs running the company on top of the franchises vs SV style tech companies etc). What makes it sneerable for me is that PG only sees the later as valuable, and then makes up a Rationalist style binary option for managers which is also nebulous as fuck. It is the sparkling elites + hedgehog/fox style thing.
It also feels very post hoc, you have founder mindset if your company is 'successful' (that he picked Airbnb as an example caused me to eyeroll so hard my optic nerve now has a knot in it). The talking about being gaslit now means I have a Gordian optic nerve.