If people can't recognize these basic stan tactics when they appear in pop culture contexts, such as a Twitter thread claiming "I'm 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter," how will they ever recognize the same strategies when political actors use them to influence elections, policy debates, or global narratives?
One time I pitched the following idea to help manage the lifecycle of policies and procedures:
Create a git repository Write the policy in Markdown Changes to the policies are merge requests Policy approvers approve the merge requests That's it Writing Markdown doesn't require anything more elaborate than fucking Notepad. The GitLab instance was already there. It was just a matter of learning 3 git commands, if that. This was deemed too complicated, so they went with a Confluence add-on that was about $50,000 per year and did basically the equivalent of a Shields.io badge.
The best diagnosis for exception handling I can think of is to wait on line at the post office. If you’ve ever done that, you know the thought of “doesn’t anyone just want to mail a package” comes to mind. As it turns out the entire flow at the post office (or DMV or tax office) is about exception handling. No amount of software is going to get you out of there because it is piecing together a bunch of inputs and outputs that are outside the bounds of a system.
At the core of Musk’s vision for the Boring Company and autonomously driven robotaxis is the notion of “individualized mass transit.” In 2017, he told Wired he hated mass transit. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said, claiming no one likes buses or trains because there’s full of “a bunch of random strangers” that could include serial killers — a rich person’s delusion if I’ve ever heard one. Instead, he claimed everyone would prefer individualized transport, refusing to accept that individualized instead of collective mobility is at the root of what he hates so much about modern transportation: all that traffic.
I've known for a long time that I can't change things here. But in this moment, I realize that the organization values things that I don't value, and it's as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren't better, but you know what, my values are better. Having tested code is better. Having comprehensible logs is better. I'm wasting their money sitting around until December, which is unethical. I'm disrespecting myself waiting two more months for a measly Christmas break payout, which is unwise. I've even degraded team morale because I've convinced some of the engineers that things should be better, but not management, so now some of the engineers are upset.
“While we’re not perhaps guardian angels,” Rubenstein said, “we are providing a social service, and that social service is making companies more efficient.” The authors highlight the essential problem with this fetish for “efficiency.” Industries that serve a social function require excess capacity, so that they can continue to provide care when demand surges or an employee calls in sick; nursing homes have to be properly and conscientiously staffed. Cut everything derided as “fat” and you will eventually cut to the bone.
Some suppliers will have a part in an aircraft they certified in like 1990 and they’re not going to touch it, because why would they? No one’s going to compete,” Mali said. “The aircraft is in service for 30 to 50 years, so they’re just bringing in money every year, making the same thing.
Palmer Luckey tried to crush aeronautics startup Salient Motion. But Anduril backer a16z invested.
the board has struggled to establish its relevance. It remains unknown to the vast majority of Facebook and Instagram users; it hears only a small number of cases each year; it takes hundreds of days for cases to be heard and its decisions to be implemented; and when presented with the biggest case it ever got — whether Donald Trump’s accounts should be restored after he led an insurrection against his government — the Oversight Board punted.
Getting Musk to join Trump on stage is a big coup for the Republicans, though, not just because the two men actually seem to hate each other personally. Musk, after shattering his reputation as the benevolent “I fucking love science” guy, is, ostensibly, just an influencer now, arguably the biggest right-wing influencer in the world. And so, he’s doing exactly what an influencer would do, and is now running a scammy payola scheme to pay people to register to vote in swing states.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "man I need the job" line but this "well a manager lied to me first?" thing – just play the fucking tape forward. Just put your anti-capitalist self-righteousness on hold for one goddamned second and think. If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.