Absolutely horrible? He absolutely lost his ass on the purchase and is one election away from fraud charges.
I guess congrats you bought Twitter and then spent half a billion dollars just so you could temporarily dismantle the regulators who were preventing you from committing open fraud?
Or, you know, if you did manage to permanently dismantle the regulators it means you’ve destroyed your primary source of revenue.
> Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there.
That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it.
Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
You are still falling for the evil genius trap. The truth is all of us treat our fellow humans this way, see Singer's drowning child. We're simply not wired to care as much about even large groups of people when they are not people we regularly interact with.
Evil is boring because it is so usual. With the small power I’m given I choose not to recycle, I jaywalk, I say the “R” word in private conversation. If I were a line manager I would play favorites and skip mentorship opportunities if I were tired or busy. As a middle manager I might forget the names of some of my indirect reports and unwittingly pit teams against each other. As my power increases, the fallout of my human actions has larger and more “evil” sounding consequences.
Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.
>Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.
"estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%." [0]
You do most of humanity a disservice by lumping them in with that cohort that may or may not identify themselves as evil (I have no idea) but are certainly capable of deliberately and with calculation behaving in ways that most of us would label with the "E" word.
It's the transparent subtext. Like, blindingly transparent.
GGP's comment is talking about how CEOs are special or different than we are. That is, that they're not just evil, but that they're evil geniuses. It's just Great Man Theory with a Snidely Whiplash costume.
"Mental Retardation" used to be a common term signed into law and documents but was removed in ~2010. Since then, it has become more of a slur than a description.
> The truth is all of us treat our fellow humans this way.
Nah, I think it is more common of a cultural thing in individualistic societies. I know plenty of people who are worried about the future outlook of others they have never met. For example what phones and social media is doing to our children, or the state of the economy for young people.
I don't think it has much to do with individualism/collectivism. A lot of people are worried about a lot of things beyond themselves; most eventually realize it's bad for mental health and grow out of it, some pick a cause or three and act to make things better, and then there's also the lot that signal worry because it makes them look good.
Of course this is a process, so especially with younger populations, you are going to meet a lot of people worrying about random issues big and small, because it takes time to process it and learn the coping strategies.
I really don't think the collectivist societies are that far ahead. People just invent out groups. India's castes, China's Uyghur's, Japan's castes and treatment of Korea and China, etc. Religious out groups, ethnic out groups, cultural out groups, linguistic out groups, etc. The list is just as long.
I think you'd need to present some stats that compare how much the ultra-wealthy and normal people donate to altruistic causes (adjusted for income) to make that argument
Uh, no. That you believe that is more indicative of your proclivities than anyone else's, and also indicates the people around you are such that haven't challenged you to disabuse you of the notion. It isn't normal. It isn't okay to treat people as just numbers or means to an end, and Dunbar's number is not a license to be a psychopath to people beyond the handful we actively maintain relationships with.
You should treat people empathetically. You should treat the failure to do so by people as something noteworthy and concerning. The fact we as a society seek to optimize for elevating psychopaths for personal gain is part of the problem we've created for ourselves, and to be quite frank, was probably hijacked as early as the founding of the United States into a really problematic, if value creating cornerstone of society that could probably use a good deal of sunlight being shone on it for disinfection and rot clearing purposes.
Two people see an opportunity to make money. One of them recognizes the venture would harm the people involved and decides not to.
The other either does not see the harm (so not a genius) or simply doesn't care (sociopath?). That person does the thing and makes the money.
That person is either some level of naive, some level of evil, but certainly not an evil genius.
> That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it.
Maybe. But I suspect that we tend to view those people that way because they play the I Am A Special Human game in public, especially around those they want to impress / are afraid of, and they really aren't very different from the rest of us at any time. We do the same shit when we're around people we want to impress / are afraid of.
I do agree that the situations such people are in will influence them. They'll have to get used to making decisions that make a big impact on a lot of people's lives, and they'll start thinking that such things are more normal than you and I ever will. I just don't think it changes them all that much.
> Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Okay. But I would do the same, and I'm farther from being a CEO than anyone I know. I can afford to care. If I were thrust into such a position, I would have to squash that caring in order to not cause a great deal of harm to those people I care about. Don't let a doctor operate on his/her own children.
But get me and the CEO sitting in comfy chairs and shooting the shit after work, and I don't think there'll be much of a difference between us. My jokes will be a little funnier, and he'll be more confident and less awkward. But that's just me, not blue CEO blood.
Tell you what. Give me a billion or two dollars and I'll go to a billionaire's hangout. I bet they'll make the same stupid wisecracks, talk about basically the same crap the rest of us do, and get indigestion from eating the too-rich food.
I don't exactly disagree with you. Power changes people. It is tempting and easier to become amoral and accustomed to some pretty messed up stuff. It just doesn't change everything about them. In particular, they have the same dysfunctional thought patterns, they make the same sort of cognitive errors, they struggle with the same shit.
> Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
I can.
Perhaps it's not that I have a higher opinion of the CEO/billionaire class, it's that I have a lower opinion of all of us. Nazis were not uniquely evil. I think that's become even more obviously true of late. (Did I just invoke Godwin's Law? So be it.)
Your entire point of humans being clumsy and stoopid and not inherently evil is generally true but for this benign incompetence is why all the discrimination layers, from scool grades to referals, etc. exist.
Whould you give a physician making life-or-death decisions and opsi-budget before you walk away? No. Then where do you draw the line until this irresponsible behavior becomes evil? Evil is defined here not by the individuals intentions but by the outcome.
Would you agree with me, that all the decision makers and elites sabotaging renewable energies and sustainability are evil? Keep in mind, they all might have their clumsy excuses.
All your analysis does is ignore what folks' actual concerns are.
Of course everybody eventually has to take a shit and has dumb jokes.
You're just ignoring some very real differences in how folks relate because of their circumstances and declaring that those of us who understand those differences are dumb.
You're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Having hung out with them, their concerns really are very different than say, the line cooks and journyman HVAC electricians.
While it's tautologically correct that the billionaires also have to have lunch at some point in the day, the specifics of it are vastly different. But more importantly, the ways in which they make their basic livings are fundamentally different in ways that lead them act differently.
That's the difference that folks are point out, and ignoring it just makes you look ignorant of some basic facts about the world.
I agree. It would be great if we were all to keep our guard up and recognise the Germans were fathers sisters and daughters as well, yet they were also consumed by evil.
From a distance I disagree with how Israel conducted itself in Gaza but I have no doubt any other western country would do the same if 1000s of their civilian citizens including children were kidnapped and murdered.
I always imagine what I would feel if some people in a music festival near Guadiana river (Portuguese Spanish border) went through what the Israeli citizens did. I would feel like being evil.
That is by the way why I don’t watch the news. I know all the far flung evil deeds are not for the “other”. They are in my heart and everyone around me.
After all Eischman was just following his moral imperative of obeying the law.
The US does not set out to capture civilians, while the hamas does. It matters. All the rest of the comment makes no sense in light of that.
Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.
Much like a president, most of their decisions take years to really be felt. The major changes Pat made weren’t going to change the balance sheet for years.
What exactly has Intel done that’s dramatically different than Pat’s vision that you feel is increasing share price?
Or is it just that they sold their soul to Trump combined with Pat’s choices finally bearing fruit?
> You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write.
I don’t think this would bother the average enterprise in the least. We used to have entire rooms dedicated to tape libraries that housed dozens of tape drives and thousands of tapes each.
The read and write speed are absolutely critical but having to utilize multiple devices isn’t anything new at all.
I didn’t mean to imply that tape is dead despite the 40 years of insert new technology claiming they’ve finally killed tape.
I more meant we no longer have room sized libraries unless the cloud providers have commissioned something custom and not available to the public. I believe the last installed powderhorn I’m aware of was decommissioned almost a decade ago now.
> it's the nicer alternative to descending on the boss's mansion with torches and pitchforks.
And those bosses are hoping a combination of drones and altman’s AI will keep them safe the next time. Meanwhile we’ve got Altman selling his AI to the military with essentially no restrictions telling us we just need to patiently wait for all the good things it’s going to do for the common man.
Just keep grinding and waiting, he can’t tell you what the benefit will be for you but he promises it will be amazing!
You weren’t a human shield. It would have been very easy for the US and Israel to not have blown up a school, the attack was intentional.
Notice they had 0 issues precisely striking the building housing Iranian leadership when this whole thing started. They didn’t “accidentally” hit the grocery store two blocks away.
So you think there was a conspiracy to target a school? Who do you think did it? Why? What was their goal?
I think either an intelligence failure, or a mistake or a miss is more likely. Maybe missiles don't always hit where they were meant to go. Especially if there is anti missile defences (which Iran is likely to have). Maybe Iran anti-air hit the school, or sent a US missile off course?
More than a conspiracy, they actually did attack the school - twice - about 30 minute apart (double tap).
They would have had live video feed from drones, and images sent from the first tomahawk missile for target confirmation. Yhey knew exactly what they were targeting and hitting.
> They would have had live video feed from drones, and images sent from the first tomahawk missile for target confirmation. Yhey knew exactly what they were targeting and hitting.
You sure? IIRC it was one of about 6000 strikes. Was it all a cover to bomb one school?
Forget "rules based order" or any sympathy from US Military/Pentagon/DoD.
When "arabs" bomb "the West" - it's "terrorism". When "the West" bomb "arabs" - it's a "mistake".
Same forces that did laser precision strikes against Maduro or countless military heads of Iran are attacking civilian infrastructure with double tap precision.
I am amazed how since WW2 there wasn't a military coup in USA as many wars from them were against any logic. I guess it just proves year after year, generation after generation that US military from top-to-bottom thinks that they are the only "good guys" and have been brainwashed just as their counterparts (be it Iraqis, Iranians, Chinese or anyone).
It is amazing how readily some people believe we target civilians, often based on the words of actual terrorists.
With this particular incident with apparent US strikes on a school adjacent to a military complex, and formerly part of that military complex, you would think it must be obvious to any reasonable person that we did not knowingly target a school.
And if it was an accident it only gives us more reason to oppose the whole operation. Why should we believe what they think they "know" about uranium stocks or anything else, if they couldn't figure out a building has been a school for 10+ years?
I also wonder if they really should have known by the second or third strike, but I can't readily find whether they had a live visual or anything, so probably did not. Arguably you can't in good conscience strike a target you can't see well, but I'm sure it happens all the time and doesn't usually go this bad.
When terrorists like the Trump administration openly admit to it in some cases and threaten to do it in others, and we see the evidence, it’s easy to believe our eyes and ears over your fantasies.
We are so far past there being any merit to “Israel would never knowingly target civilians/children/hospitals/etc” that you just shouldn’t even bother. Just own it, if your leadership thinks the only winning strategy is the annihilation of another people, or at least their complete displacement, own it. Stop trying to hide behind “it was a mistake” while simultaneously showing you have no issues putting a missile through a singular car window to assassinate people labeled an enemy. Nobody buys it anymore.
For planning Operation Epic Fury, the US military utilized the Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence software designed to streamline the targeting process and greatly reduce the amount of personnel involved in it. Capable of producing 1,000 target packages in one hour, with the use of the system the US military said it had struck 6,000 targets in Iran during the first two weeks of the war.
...it goes on to say...
The [NYT] inquiry suggested that the school was likely targeted due to outdated coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency
Advanced rockets bolted onto mainframes guided by data from Palantir.
> For what reason would they attack a single school?
Couldn't it be to terrorise the other side while still being able to claim that it was a mistake? Remember that the school was hit by three distinct strikes.
Because Trump is already facing a bloodbath in the midterms and his next step is either a ground war or dropping a nuke, and both of those will ensure he not only loses the midterms but has a legitimate shot at seeing the inside of a prison cell.
I don't even need to read the article to know that he unequivocally can't be trusted. Every action he's taken to this point have shown he will say literally anything to get what he wants.
I do find it rather ironic that economists can pretty much universally agree on this concept. And yet when you point out the very existence of the billionaire class inherently causes the exact same issue you're suddenly a communits.
How is it good for an economy to have a small subset of individuals hoarding wealth through property, artwork, and offshore bank accounts - not spending it in the economy from which they extracted it? "Job creators" is a farse, the subset who you can point to who ACTUALLY create(d) jobs a-la Page and Brin have long since stepped away from that job creation and have joined the ranks of: number go up.
>America is as fully employed as just about anytime in the past 50 years.
And what percentage of those workers are Walmart or Amazon warehouse employees who don't have healthcare coverage and don't make enough money to actually cover their monthly bills without being on welfare/public assistance?
Because my linkedin extended network says there's an awful lot of highly skilled people unable to find jobs in their respective fields.
I guess congrats you bought Twitter and then spent half a billion dollars just so you could temporarily dismantle the regulators who were preventing you from committing open fraud?
Or, you know, if you did manage to permanently dismantle the regulators it means you’ve destroyed your primary source of revenue.
reply