Right but the bubble of rightness you speak of is usually only assumed to include the company staff. Really powerful CEOs have their board inside the bubble too, or even public investors. But Elon thinks the customers work for him too. That’s really beyond the pale.

Oh wow Andrew Tate is one of them.

Gee, when you look at all these manbaby assholes who cry about being canceled, one thing starts to stand out. They’re all manbaby assholes. Maybe if every canceled person is a manbaby asshole, then getting cancelled is actually about not liking manbaby assholes? And not about killing freedom of speech? It’s just… the pattern is undeniable.

I was once employed by a startup that was about to go under, but got a last minute acquisition offer. The CEO pulled me aside at one point and made an observation I’ve never forgotten.

He said “You know, when it looked like the company was going to be a total loss, everyone was really great about it. The VCs told me not to be discouraged, that we’d given it our all. No bitterness or blaming at all. But once the buyout offer was on the table, everyone’s knives came out. Everyone wanted to take the money from everyone else, and get away with as much as they could even if it meant shafting literally everyone else. You’d think people would be at their worst in a time of deprivation but it’s when there’s something to be had that people really show their worst.”

OpenAI is a golden goose right now. I’m not surprised if there’s a lot of knifing happening in its vicinity.

How do you declare war on a state you don’t recognize?

Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively).

Does this control for the fact that Gen Z are simply online a lot more than Boomers?

I can’t tell what these are percentages of. 16% of scammed people were GenZ? 16% of GenZ have experienced a scam? Because both of those would be skewed if, for example, 100% of GenZ use the internet daily and 20% of Boomers have never used it.

Once again, a journalist doesn’t know how to present statistics in a meaningful way. They do this 72%!

I decided to look up some numbers and do some math.

So the CEO earns 362x the average employee at GM. Basically if they took the CEO’s pay and redidsteubuted it, they could double the pay of 362 lucky workers at GM. Or take twice as many workers as that and increase their pay by 50%.

But how many workers are there and how far will this CEO’s pay go?

GM has 167,000 employees. Collectively, their pay totals 167,000x the salary of the average employee. Very basic.

Now let’s add the CEO’s pay to that sum: we are now up to a sum of money equal to 167,362x the average salary.

And if we distribute that amongst all the employees, that’s:

167,362/167,000

Get out your calculator and you’ll see that this would fund a two-tenths of one percent raise for all employees. That’s 0.002%

The pay is very unfair. But we should be realistic that the CEO is one person and their fat salary doesn’t actually go very far in terms of worker raises.

Let’s do the math in reverse: to give all GM employees just a 2% raise would cost 9.2x the CEO’s salary. And the workers want a 40% raise over 4 years.

I hope they get it. I believe that money is there and currently going to the entire executive layer, the board, and shareholders. But when anyone tries to oversimplify and it make it all about the CEO’s salary, I cringe a bit because it really isn’t that meaningful a sum of money, unfair as it may be.

We should be looking at profit or better EBITDA and showing how easily it could be used to raise worker pay.

Let me summarize the core of the argument.

California: “You know what - we’re banning Nazis and Naziism.”

Elon: “This will lead to murdering kittens.”

I quit smoking years ago and I really felt like the world wanted me to quit. Indoor smoking at restaurants was being banned. No more smoking section on flights. Movies were no longer depicting everyone with a cigarette in their mouth all the time like they did in the 60s. Many hotels stopped offering smoking rooms. Nicotine patches and gum were available to help.

I felt like trends in the world were behind me and it helped.

Alcohol is a totally different story. Alcohol is not being banned. It is still something almost everyone does. It is allowed at restaurants and virtually everywhere else. Everyone I know drinks. They haven’t cracked down on advertising in the same way. Hotel rooms have booze in the room for you. Airlines bring you drinks. There are no OTC quitting aids.

If someone has an alcohol problem and needs to quit, they’re really going to have a much harder time than quitting smoking.

I make and restore wood furniture. I have taken plenty of “all wood” furniture apart, repaired it, or just salvaged whatever actual wood scraps I could find.

Whatever idiot wrote this has no idea how expensive true wood furniture is. There is hardly ANY actual wood furniture in the market, PERIOD. You think it’s wood, but it’s veneered ply or fiberboard. That is the state of the entire industry, not just IKEA. This is a simple fact of life in a world that has already been heavily deforested even before all 8 BILLION PEOPLE currently living were born. Wood is precious. You also don’t need solid wood for your fucking nightstand. So maybe you should buy a nightstand made out of the particleboard that is waste product from milling lumber for other uses, like construction. That’s called using everything, wasting nothing. It’s sustainable.

There is nothing wrong with IKEA furniture for most people’s everyday needs. And you are not going to get a 150-year all wood piece for the same price. LOL fuck no. When you are in your 40s and have made it big time you can go to a craft furniture maker and get a solid oak bedroom set. It will cost more than your first car did.

IKEA furniture does not fall apart in 3 years, either. I’m about to go get my pajamas out of the IKEA dresser I’ve had since 2001. It won’t last centuries like a real craftsman made wood dresser. But it’s not 3 year garbage either, and looks and works like the day I bought it, despite me using it daily for 22 years and moving it between at least 4 houses in that time.

IKEA furniture is good for what it is and very cheap. One of the reasons it’s cheap is that it is flat packed for efficient shipping. Assembly by the customer also saves cost. And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.

Well they made the smartest possible decision in letting us hear from the other humans at LMG. The last thing they needed was another smug non apology rant from Linus himself. These folks seem like actual humans, and they made some very frank admissions of error.

Of course, Linus has to come in at the end and minimize, deflect, and ultimately fail to show an ounce of real contrition, learning, and growth. I feel the most pity for him in this because he’s clearly trapped in his deficient little mind, unable to grow through a major challenge like this. He’s passed beyond his ability to just rant back, but he doesn’t have any other pages in his playbook. The best he can do is rely on the adults around him. I hope he does more of that.

Practical answer: because they haven’t installed concrete wheel stops on the ground in that parking lot. If that’s a used walkway, they should.

I know, people are assholes, etc. I’m just mentioning a solution that is actually available, where unassholing everyone isn’t.

I didn’t realize anyone earned anything on Twitter ever. Is this just video views? Is this new?

Also, fuck Musk, etc.