As the destruction of Github illustrates, leftism is rule by priests, by priests selected by priests on the basis of superior holiness. Degree inflation, Sarbanes–Oxley, and the Social Justice Warrior attack on tech is a program of seizing the means of production for the holy, just as communism was.
There’s “holiness” and then there’s holiness. To confuse the two would be quite depressing.
I think that it would be more accurate to call it rule by poets, or advertisers. The way to trap people is by calling one’s own method beautiful and right, while letting the integrity of the idea’s participants fall into greater and greater neglect, hypocritically. It’s a siren’s song of art that is dedicated toward the officially permitted ideas only, while ugliness is demanded everywhere else in order to make sure the attention is where it’s officially supposed to be.
A.J.P.
oh fuck off. Jim’s entire thesis has been cut down to less words than your comment, and you’re splitting hairs over accuracy. Try doing that to Bob Whitaker’s Mantra.
I think Moldbug’s initial word ‘polygon’ would have been more effective at penetrating mainstream discourse than ‘Cathedral’, but it’s instructive that the biggest pushback against ‘Cathedral’ was the people pushing ‘Synagogue’. I’ll also note that you didn’t give a suggestion for one word to give to the quality of being good at virtue signaling. Pick one better that holiness to save your larpy cuck religion.
I do wonder if “Cathedral” was picked as a reference to “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”? Anyone familiar with that book would grasp more than a few parallels to the Cathedral that gets talked about in alt right circles.
What a stupid comment. Your strawman is a lightweight, P.P.
A.J.P.
Christianity IS a larpy cuck religion.
It’s worse. It’s the origin of the evil idea of salvation and its reality denying beliefs.
http://theanti-puritan.blogspot.com/2016/02/broken-world-syndrome.html
Mr Wagner HAS a very trendy grasp on the English language.
Christians are larpers, disavowed larpers, or have the self-awareness of grandmothers, no exceptions.
-~*tips fedora*~-
brawt *tips fedora* brawt. Never would’ve guessed that you sublimated your dogmatic personality from Christianity into Neoreaction, Mork.
You never “would have” but you did, and managed to be wrong.
>I think that it would be more accurate to call it rule by poets, or advertisers.
Doing well until you dived with both feet into the broken window fallacy.
People like me make people like you do this so it becomes impossible for you to attack us directly.
The article you link to does not at all describe Github being destroyed in a leftist holiness competition.
It describes Github being attacked by its capitalist owners using internal leftist proxies in order to maximize shareholder value, to take its value from $2bn to $20bn.
In other words, this is not a bug/hijacking of the JSO institution which you so dearly love, but a feature. Strictly business. If the tactics used are ugly, well, that’s business for you. What, you think the titans of mercantilism got what they wanted strictly through appeals to rationality and morality in a transparent process?
Other than morality, a belief in objective truth and goodness (i.e., holiness,) there is no ground to object to this disgusting process. As someone who has praised inequality, you should be all for it-what could be more unequal than wealthy private stockholders using their leverage against GitHub’s founders and users to maximize their profit?
Incidentally, the rise and Stalinification of the USSR followed basically the same scheme:
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_the_bolshevik_revolution-5.pdf
The leftist rhetoric is unimportant, orthogonal to the truth.
Burnham’s intro to the Machiavellians lays this out quite clearly: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.il/2007/08/james-burnhams-dante-politics-as-wish.html
Just as GitHub’s value to its current stockholders will be higher as a bloated, robotic, pump and dump Innitrode Corporation than as its current incarnation, so Russia was much more valuable to Wall Street as the Soviet Union. You could sell a lot more stuff to it, you could get a lot more resources out of it at bargain prices, and you could use it to conquer the world, both through outright military conquests and as the bad cop in a good cop-bad cop sale to the citizens of the free world (“if you don’t submit to this mild totalitarianism, we will lose to Comrade Stalin, who’s twirling his mustache in anticipation of eating your children.”)
Imperial Russia was run for the benefit of its ruling family and the peoples they had been responsible for for centuries, just as old GitHub was run for the benefit of its founders and users. Getting them to make deals with small near-term upside and massive long-term downside would have been hard. Revolutionary Russia was run by a gaggle of murderous scum whose main priority was staying on top and surviving the next few years. There was nothing they wouldn’t make a deal on.
Just as the howling, demonic peasant mobs of Revolutionary Russia, the food expropriators of those peasants during the Collectivization and the NKVD interrogators beating confessions out of those expropriators in 1937 thought they were driving the train, while they were actually the coal being tossed into the furnace, so the Silicon Valley feminists, the Shanleys, Horvaths, etc. think they are driving the process of Women In Tech, while in reality they are disposable tools being used to consolidate power and then be chucked in the trash.
Github is committing suicide. Any remaining assets, whatever value is not destroyed by priestly disregard for its mission to create value, will be handed over to social justice warriors for feminist outreach, native american culture, etc. Which is to say, looted from shareholders by priests.
Feminists will be given very large sums to encourage female participation in software, which they will pocket. People with dubious claims to be members of various racial minorities will be given very large sums to store minority “art” on Github.
>will be handed over to social justice warriors for feminist outreach, native american culture
Crumbs will be thrown to SJWs. They will not be invited to the table.
GitHub will have an exit. The exit will (unless the Silicon Valley bubble pops) be at a significantly higher valuation than that of today. The current shareholders (VCs) will make a lot of money. The public will acquire the shares and be left holding the bag. GitHub will then die a slow death a la AOL/Yahoo.
It’s pretty obvious.
They are getting millions. When they discover that they have run Github into the ground overnight, they will hit up some other company, likely Intel or Google, to bail out Github so that they can run it into the ground all over again, as recently happened with the Gnome foundation.
What has happened to Gnome is happening to Github: Burn and loot. (Which is backwards. You are supposed to loot then burn.)
Who is getting millions?
Julie Ann Horvath? Who studied unspecified subjects at University of San Francisco from 2009-2011?
Sarah Nadav? Who has a BA in social analytics from Hampshire College and an MA in Nonprofit Management from Hebrew U?
Don’t make me laugh.
The article you linked says Github is worth $2bn and could be worth $20bn if properly gutted and Yahoo-fied.
Even a couple of million is nothing when compared to the profit to be made. Minor operating expenses.
Why the fuck do you think that Medium, a $400 million privately held (i.e., VC-owned) company created by the co-founder of Twitter, which is just a crowd-sourced blog (i.e., propaganda dissemination organ) and owned by some of the same people who own Github, served this steaming pile into my inbox this morning? I mean, at the top of the appropriately named “daily digest”:
https://medium.com/life-tips/vcs-don-t-compare-me-to-your-wife-just-don-t-9dc2c8c1ac93#.qbad6esu8
It is ludicrous to think that Horvath and Sarah Nadav, who couldn’t run a lemonade stand between the two of them, have it together enough to hijack a $400 million company and overthrow a $2 billion company. Pull the other one.
It is not ludicrous to think that Andreesen Horowitz, IVP and Sequoia would like a $20 billion exit as opposed to a $4 billion one, and are not above using a couple of 20-something marketing majors to achieve that goal.
Let’s use some Occam’s Razor before launching into convoluted theories.
As I said, burn then loot.
The net result of the burning and looting of revolutionary Russia was massive concessions for Wall Street.
It is hilarious that you (mostly rightly) declare it impossible for Jabhat Al Nusra, IS and the rest of the jihadis to independently conquer Syria (a highly unstable structure run by monkeys) without foreign sponsors, advisors etc., even though they have domain expertise based on 35 years of jihad.
You simultaneously claim that a ditzy liberal arts major whose expertise runs to running Facebook PPC campaigns and copy-pasting CSS is perfectly capable of independently overthrowing the head of a $2 billion company, structured using state of the art managerial and legal tech based on 300+ years of experience.
As I said, pull the other one.
It’s like asking me to believe that the Ferguson riots were organized by and for the benefit of those gentlemen with their drawers coming out of their pants looting 40-ounces of Old English Malt Liquor out of the Quickie Mart.
Sure, dude.
The left devours its own. It is never predictable, except in retrospect, who will devour, and who will be devoured.
Good comment B.
I am being talked out of capitalism as I grow older, at least as practiced.
That’s not the usual path but these aren’t usual times.
Capitalism is a rather vague concept which could mean anything from medieval guilds to 19th century industrialists to today’s American system (private business supported in one way or another by government money.)
Ibn Khaldun says that the biggest market is always the government.
I’m neither for nor against capitalism, because it’s a nebulous concept. I am, however, very much against those who are against capitalism.
I’m against them too.
Clowns to the Right and Heath Ledger’s Joker to the Left.
“we love our nation, but we are not socialists, so we are not nazis” — pegida
I may be thick but I don’t quite understand the mechanism through which SJW invasion of Github raises its stock value.
The only thing I can think of is that going public requires shitloads of compliance nonsense that the SJW help achieve, and the media hype needed to raise the price of the stock when going public requires paying off the media by hiring their SJW friends.
Something else I’m missing? Couldn’t they do without the blue-haired lesbians?
I think the theory is that the founder cares more about having github continue to work as github but the insurgents will do whatever to github to make it look good to the market (but what they’ll do will kill github in the long run). The SJW infestation is used to drive out the founder and those allied with him.
They’re a cat’s paw.
What does “look good to the market” mean in this context? Diversity hiring?
I don’t know the players but my guess is – blow the company up to something that you can plausibly bullshit as an up and coming bubble tech company even if you compromise the functionality of the company. Expand into a developer hiring platform or an uber for development work (actually that sounds like an amazingly good business idea) or any number of other things that sound good but are low likelihood to actually succeed.
Presumably the founder just wants to run a functioning organization and is very happy with the level of pay and wealth that that generated.
The SJWs get bought off cheap with a few dollars and some jobs they can hold and the investors get a pile of bullshit they can sell to the greater fool. It’s 21st century Baptists and bootleggers.
In the context of gamergate, the social justice initiative against open source software, and the attack on gnome linux, the proposition that the intent is to increase buyout value of the company by bloating its management is unlikely.
ding-ding-ding, we have a winner
>In the context of gamergate, the social justice initiative against open source software, and the attack on gnome linux, the proposition that the intent is to increase buyout value of the company by bloating its management is unlikely.
Let’s not confuse tactics for purpose. The tactics used in each case may have been broadly similar. That is not the same as saying that the purpose behind those tactics was the same in each case.
> Expand into a developer hiring platform or an uber for development work
There’s already lots of such sites and has been for a long time, complete with trials and escrow facilities. In a few years they tend to devolve into fronts for cliques of ethnic developers – Bulgarians on one site, Serbians on the other and so on. About the only way you could make it a temporarily good business model for GitHub is to liquidate its accumulated information capital – the informal rankings of developers doing open-source projects there.
If I went purely by first principles and didn’t concern myself much with actual facts, I’d come up with the hypothesis that valuation of companies that produce nothing is driven by printed money, which is directed by the Cathedral, and the Cathedral directs its printed money into SJW causes.
From reading the linked article (does anyone do that anymore?) I get the impression that Github got to where it currently is by having a very tight product-market fit, serving a key need (version control and code repository) in a very valuable niche (software devs) very well. It did this with a relatively small team of highly competent people working under very loose management, often remotely, under the fuhrersprinzip. It raised a ton of money, had probably hit a near-ceiling in terms of valuation in its current niche, and the VCs were/are looking for a way to go public/get acquired at as high a valuation as possible.
In their estimation, rebuilding the company under Stanford MBA Soviet central planning principles, with a bloated middle management would increase the plausible valuation at IPO, sort of how Yahoo, a giant pile of shit which sucks at all of its core functions (search, mail, news, etc.) is worth $30 billion: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-yahoo-is-really-worth-2015-12
In other words, rather than having a small team doing lots of good things their way, the way to a bigger IPO is having a lot of people Dilberting along badly, and acquire a bunch of other startups.
One of the co-founders did not want to play ball, so, bingo, sexual harassment allegation.
Having a Chief Social Impact Officer spouting Goodthink, cancelling working from home, etc. is just a way to be like every other bloated corporation with a large valuation that started off as a small team doing something necessary well and quickly. In this culture, the fuehrersprinzip is dead, you can’t get anything done without committees and lots of resources, and getting those resources is how you get promoted, so the company’s staffing grows and it makes pointless acquisitions (hi, Whatsapp!) And that’s how you get to be the next Yahoo. They hope.
I recommend looking at Github’s investors on Crunchbase, also.
It is not that a few median IQ social justice warriors have superpowers enabling them to steal a two billion dollar business from those smart and powerful people who created it, it is that the Cathedral intends to smash the rule of merit wherever it is to be found and replace it by the rule of holiness.
“rebuilding the company under Stanford MBA Soviet central planning principles, with a bloated middle management would increase the plausible valuation at IPO”
How exactly does that follow?
Is Yahoo actually worth 30 billion? Is anyone actually willing to pay 30 billion for Yahoo?
$30 billion is their market cap. Meaning, if we take the current price of the shares of Yahoo being bought and sold on the market (a small portion of the shares of Yahoo in actual existence) and multiply by the total number of shares of Yahoo outstanding, this is the number we get. Of course, were all of those shares (or even a significantly larger small portion of them) to go on the market, share price and Yahoo’s market cap would tank.
Why is the big pile of shit that is Yahoo worth $30 billion? In large part because it owns 15% in Alibaba and 36% of Yahoo Japan: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-yahoo-is-really-worth-2015-12
Also, because it is making a profit of more than $1 billion per year, and market cap is supposedly some consensus of the projected future worth of a company based on its projected future revenues.
Also, because it has a lot of users.
Also, because it has a lot of people working for it, and many of those people are worth quite a bit as employees (many startups’ exits take the form of an acquihire, meaning, another company doesn’t see much value in that startup’s users or product, but wants to acquire its team.)
Also, because it has massive brand recognition.
Also, because it has a lot of intellectual property.
In short, Yahoo is worth $30 billion because that’s what it’s worth. There is no objective measure, or rather, there are many of them, and when you try to weigh them against each other, handwaving ensues. There is no inherent reason, based on similar handwaving, that Yahoo could not be worth $500 million, or that Github could not be worth $10-20 billion.
I haven’t checked the latest numbers but at one time Yahoo had a negative value because its market cap was less than what its Alibaba share was worth.
RTFA
The regulators are already SJW captured, so rather than ‘help’ it’s critical to look as s-jew as possible.
In other words, yeah that’s my best guess too.
Google “Marketing to SJW is not profitable, why do you waste your time”.
The top commenter explains why companies kill themselves, sometimes literally, trying to appeal to the SJW demographic. TL;DR to make any money they need customers who’ll click on banner ads, buy the crap advertised therein, and brag about it to their equally stupid friends.
reddit com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2q267e/marketing_to_sjw_is_not_profitable_why_do_you/
No, he explained why companies succeed at appealing to the SJW demographic, specifically, their wealth and gullibility.
Twitter does not need the wealth and gullibility of SJWs to sell Twitter Chic t-shirts to. That’s not their business. But they destroy their business to appease SJWs anyway. That’s a bad deal. It’s sad. They should buy a copy of The Art of the Deal from amazon.com and read it.
“..leftism is rule by priests, by priests selected by priests on the basis of superior holiness..”
When you ask progressives, why did you cover up the Cologne attacks for 4 days, the answer is:
Because if we don’t silence the sexual assault victims people will question mass immigration and the Evil God Adolf Hitler will ARISE and blot out the SUN!
When you ask progressives, when the Italian volunteer was gang raped by migrants why did all her progressive friends pressure her into not reporting it, the answer is:
Because they thought that if she reported it, it would make migrants look bad and that therefore the Evil God Adolf Hitler would ARISE and blot out the SUN!
When you ask progressives, now that Sweden has the second highest rape per capita in the world and 38% of women are in fear of leaving their homes, why is criminalizing criticism of immigration considered the solution, the answer is:
Because if people blame immigrants for the mass terror woman live under, the Evil God Adolf Hitler will ARISE and blot out the SUN!
When you ask progressives, why did Facebook ban that German girl who made a video complaining that she and her friends are now living in permanent fear, the answer is:
Because if her right to speak is not sacrificed the Evil God Adolf Hitler will ARISE and blot out the SUN!
And on and on.
Every time you ask a progressive to explain their maniacal censorship frenzies, the answer is always Hitler. Always.
A religion is a system of ideas based on faith. To be a religion it is not necessary for the believers to have special books, special buildings or even that they be aware they are religious. The only criterion is whether it is based on faith.
Insofar as progressives believe in an event in the FUTURE, i.e., that their Evil God will arise, they are religious BY DEFINITION.
It is not a matter of history. Stalin killed more than Hitler but you don’t see any religious maniacs screaming for marxists to be silenced because of “the lessons of history”. Stalin is history whereas Hitler is also religion.
looks like someone needs to lay off the vaccines for a while
That’s mostly true, but they’ve also tried to get some “white guilt” based on this side of the Atlantic…
History becomes a religious tool in pagan societies.
A.J.P.
GIt hub will never be worth $20b. It’s market isn’t big enough, not enough users and advertising $2 billion is a stretch. All it is a code repository.
Have you heard of a little thing called Whatsapp?
whats’s app has 1+ billion active users. Github has only 3 million.
A Whatsapp user contributes absolutely nothing to the company’s valuation except a pair of eyeballs. There is zero lock-in, and no path to monetization (except B2C communication…maybe.)
The typical Github user contributes code, and some portion of that code will be very valuable at some point in the future.
The only reason Facebook bought Whatsapp was to prevent someone else from buying it. A purely anti-competitive move. The price didn’t have much to do with what Whatsapp is worth on its own, it had to do with what damage could it deal to Facebook. Ditto Instagram.
Whatsapp could do no damage whatsoever to Facebook. It was not a competitive product by any stretch of the imagination.
Facebook bought Whatsapp for similar reasons that Google bought Waze, I think-to incorporate its user base and functionality into a core product. In Google’s case, it was Google Maps.
In Facebook’s case, I think Whatsapp’s user base and functionality will be incorporated into Facebook Messenger, which Facebook is rebuilding as a conversational commerce tool. It bought Instagram for a similar reason-to use as an additional PPC advertising channel.
Instagram was a direct competitor to the photo sharing part of Facebook’s business; Whatsapp – to the messaging part.
Nothing from Instagram or Whatsapp was incorporated into the core product.
People don’t really like Facebook very much, but are very willing to tolerate it because everyone else uses it so it’s how they stay connected.
If Google+ hadn’t required you to use your real name, Google+ would have replaced Facebook, making Facebook worthless.
WhatsApp could have added profiles, maybe with some privacy features, got touted in all the major magazines, and been a major competitor.
Facebook will eventually be replaced by some kind of streamlined Amazon EC2 Docker containers that run a standardized database protocol and some messaging services.
“Degree inflation, Sarbanes–Oxley, and the Social Justice Warrior attack on tech is a program of seizing the means of production for the holy, just as communism was.”
I’m not sure that this is true. SJWs seem indiscriminate in their attacks. They target SFWA, Github, Twitter, cosplay conferences with equal vigor, and pay no attention to means of production. In fact they probably don’t believe that production exists. It’s magic to them.
“In fact they probably don’t believe that production exists. It’s magic to them.”
That’s accurate.
yes, genuinely not in it for the money, hence the burn first, loot later pattern.
So let me see if I get it.
VCs want to make money by hyping the company like crazy, then going public, selling at a stupidly inflated price, and then run away leaving the public with a worthless company.
In order to hype up the company, they need the cooperation of the media, and they need to grow the company, to it seems to be worth what they’re asking for it. In order to grow the company beyond what’s reasonable they need to come up with some bullshit projects which make no sense, but which sound kinda cool. But in order to grow the company under false pretences, they must fill it with SJW, as SJWs by definition are so dumb and insane they will never question the bullshit the company is feeding, and will keep up parroting whatever their bosses tell them, Soviet style. And their SJW cousins in the media will help their brethren on their side, hyping up whatever bullshit they came up with.
I think I get it now. Basically they need to run a cult, and they import cult-addicts (SJWs) to run the place until they cash out. Once that’s done, some other company will come up, become a cult, so the cult-addicts always have jobs to fill.
The truth is much less extreme than that (which is what makes it more hopeless.)
“Hype” is a relative term. The company’s worth might be high because of hype, but it might also be high because of acquisitions (as in, Yahoo buying Alibaba shares or whatever.) The company’s market cap post-IPO is determined by how willing people are to buy its stock, which is determined by the market expectations of the company’s future value. One of the ways to do that is by expanding the company past its initial staffing and scope. Acquisitions and new departments, for instance.
We can of course say that these are bullshit projects that make no sense but sound kinda cool, and they might be. But then again, they might not be. Yahoo owns a big chunk of Alibaba. Is Alibaba a bullshit project? Google has gone very far past its beginnings in search, for instance making Android. Is Android a bullshit project? Amazon used to sell books (still does). Now it sells cloud servers. Is AWS bullshit?
So, to justify a market cap of $20 billion, GitHub would have to do something similar. Use its core offering as a springboard and expand into other niches. To do so, it would have to expand its team significantly. When you do that, you have to adapt different management practices (says the conventional wisdom.) You can’t run a company with hundreds or thousands of employees the way you run one with a dozen or two, even if the latter was very productive. So you will need to hire Stanford MBAs and have them run your company’s operations. At least, the Stanford MBAs who run your VC fund think so-and they have 30 years of experience. So your company will get a lot less fun to work at, and a lot more corporate. Maybe your valuation will be based on real value and maybe on bullshit, but it will be the valuation of a big company regardless. And of course you’ll have an HR department, with all the typical gleischaltung involved. Google has, for instance, Laszlo Bock, who seems to me like an emissary of the devil: https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/aVYEGnqRHPM
This does not seem to have prevented them from creating a lot of cool stuff, any more than the fact that every Soviet research institution and industrial shop had to have a department of cadres and a Party organization kept them from building reactors, missiles, planes, and all kinds of other cool stuff.
If you are a founder, and not down with the program, well, you’re standing between your funders/cofounders and $billions. Not a good place to be. In China or Russia, they’d probably just have you killed/jailed, or maybe blackmail you. In the US, a crazy UX designer chick makes spurious accusations and you get fired (keeping your stock, etc.) Not a good system, from the larger POV, but not the worst imaginable one. Needless to say, Andreesen Horowitz does not then appoint the crazy UX designer chick to head your company, or give her $millions, or anything like that, any more than Cotton Mather was going to install Abigail Williams as mayor of Salem.
What a way of completely avoiding the question. Why then are all the SJW coming in? Are they going to improve the company? How?
Did Google fill the company with SJWs just when it started running Android? Did the acquisition of Alibaba stock by Yahoo entail SJWs coming in and running diversity workshops saying white people are evil?
What are you talking about then?
Not sure I understand the question.
I suspect “all the SJWs” are not coming in. Every company has roles that are mostly male (back end dev) and mixed (marketing, design, etc.) Many of the women filling the latter roles have whatever latest software update of the dominant ideology was when they were in college a couple of years ago installed n their head.
As a company grows bigger, it has to develop some sort of HR witchhunter department to cover its ass. The people whose complaints this department exists to deal with/generate as needed will be those described above.
Again, think about how a large Soviet R&D shop worked.
“Again, think about how a large Soviet R&D shop worked.”
OK… And how DID it work, smartypants?
There are plenty of memoirs available. Would you like me to summarize?
Your summaries of your supposed sources have never shown much resemblance to actual sources.
My superficial understanding is that the design bureaus (Sukhoi, Mikoyan-Gurevich…) operated basically as competing corporations with CEOs. Which explains why they could hold their own against the West. The Russian space industry, somewhat ironically, also used competing design bureaus.
1. Now it is preventing Google from creating any more cool stuff.
2. Stalin decided that high techies needed to be protected from commissars, perhaps as a result of the Lysenkoism debacle, and techies were allowed to get away with lots of stuff that no one else could. So it seems that the commissars were at least somewhat apt to stop techies from doing tech stuff.
>techies were allowed to get away with lots of stuff that no one else could.
Eh? Like what?
Techies were lucky if they didn’t get thrown in jail on trumped up charges and forced to work in a “sharashka,” a prison R&D shop.
This doesn’t ring quite true to me. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with this explanation per se, but VCs have always wanted to make money, and have always been doing all of what you describe, yet companies inexplicably going full SJW retard is a very recent phenomenon.
The tactics evolve. Obviously, if you wanted to remove an uncooperative founder in 1976, a sexual harassment campaign or social media pressure as was applied to Brendan Eich were not in the cards.
I’m not seeing companies going full SJW retard. I’m seeing companies using political correctness as a gleischaltung tool externally and a control mechanism internally. It is very useful to have a standard set of undisproveable charges to use against anyone who is uncooperative or inconvenient yet is doing nothing wrong. If everyone is guilty of witchcraft, then everyone must go along to get along. Every once in a while you hang a witch pour encouragement l’autres-kill the chicken to scare the monkey as the Chinese say.
Getting away from this sort of bullshit is exactly why bright, driven, creative people found new industries and companies. But when you take VC money/make a deal with USG, you must dance to their tune. And implementing an official antiwitch policy/publicly deploring witchcraft is only the responsible thing to do. After all, if you are sued for witchcraft, unless you can show you’ve covered your ass properly, this will adversely impact shareholder value, and those shareholders can demand you be removed (and even if you’ve covered your ass properly, they can probably have you removed.) So you need a witchhunter department to implement said antiwitch policy. Enter Laszlo Bock.
Now, a good corporate witchhunter is not an idiot, and will not attempt to take over the company or stick his nose where it shouldn’t go. Laszlo isn’t out there giving Google engineers guidance on how to teach their robot car how to drive, presumably. He works for Google, after all. If he did this kind of thing, they’d find themselves another witchhunter. His job is to cover the company’s ass. If an Abigail Williams shows up without his invitation, he needs to work in the company’s interest in order to appease the powers that be while protecting the company’s assets. Similarly, you’ll notice that the Salem Witch Trials came to a halt shortly after important people started getting accused of witchcraft.
“But when you take VC money/make a deal with USG, you must dance to their tune. And implementing an official antiwitch policy/publicly deploring witchcraft is only the responsible thing to do.”
Yes, I agree with that, but only in part. The responsible thing to do has always been to have an official antiwitch policy so that you’re properly covered. Going out of your way to publicly deplore witchcraft, unprompted, and organizing meetings with notable blue-haired witch hunters seems new to me. Laszlo Bock doesn’t do that (or if he does, I haven’t heard of it). Companies lately seem to feel a newfound need to signal social justice which I don’t remember from the past.
I wanted to give, as an example of such signaling, a link to a report of an “anti-abuse” meeting at, I think, Twitter, but I can’t find the link. I did find a similar meeting at Google Ideas:
https://twitter.com/JigsawTeam/status/646783722570682369
There’s also this, of course:
https://twitter.com/jack/status/548521681225277440
Why does Jack signal so hard? How would that improve Twitter’s valuation?
I, however, am seeing companies go full retard. Google search used to almost simulate sentience. Now it is pretty stupid. New google projects release buggy and crappy, and instead of debugging their programs, they deprogram their bugs.
Machine sentience is very politically incorrect. Very.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologizes-after-photos-identify-black-people-as-gorillas/29567465/
For a more recent example,
https://www.rt.com/news/332539-google-muslims-support-terrorism/
Who told you that the purpose of Google, as it exists today, is to make cool stuff? The purpose of Google, as it exists today, is to benefit its shareholders, and its market cap is at unprecedented levels. Its core products work okay (in my user experience.)It seems to be that they’ve relegated the “making cool stuff” to their skunk works department. In short, doing okay as far as a giant corporation goes.
AI/machine sentience/”cool stuff” IS the core business of Google.
It’s true enough, “Spandrell”. You also get points for not promoting the cultist-soothsayers to the Politically Correct priesthood, which is particularly found in the professorships of “higher learning”.
Best regards,
A.J.P.
>VCs want to make money by hyping the company like crazy, then going public, selling at a stupidly inflated price, and then run away leaving the public with a worthless company.
VCs are not allowed to invest in companies that produce goods, only those that produce crap. This is because the state hates it when the market chooses the winners instead of itself.* I don’t know how exactly they apply this pressure to VCs, but rest assured they do. But basically it will work out the way science does – you get your seed money from the state or not at all.
>In order to hype up the company, they need the cooperation of the media,
Since the company produces shit (or produces a mild good nobody would actually pay for e.g. twitter) the company will never look objectively good. Hence the state restrictions function as a media subsidy, for the purposes of paying them off [/having them buy in], making VCs codependent on their lies.
>But in order to grow the company under false pretences, they must fill it with SJW, as SJWs by definition are so dumb and insane they will never question the bullshit the company is feeding,
They must fill it with SJWs because the regulators are paying off the media, and the media and regulators are both friends with SJWs. They are providing sinecures for their tribe/buddies.
>Once that’s done, some other company will come up, become a cult, so the cult-addicts always have jobs to fill.
Not being a cult is illegal. It’s just a question of who it gets enforced on next.
You missed the part where regulators take completely legal kickbacks from the VC cashout stage. Again, I don’t know the details.
*(This implies both VCs and the state are hiding their strong ability to notice good companies in advance. I believe this hypothesis holds up to the evidence.)
OT:
Swedish women set up vigilante ‘molestation guards’ in public pools
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3450713/Swedish-women-set-vigilante-molestation-guards-public-pools-protect-young-swimmers-wake-migrant-sex-attacks.html
Heh.
They have been taught that they are warrior princesses, deserve what they will probably get, and are likely looking forward to it.
To be fair to warrior princesses trope, it inspired some great hentai genres, like female knight getting raped by monsters.
– “I won’t lose to your penises!”
spoiler warning: she loses to their penises
This blog has minted some really good definitions of leftism over the years:
“allegiance with far against near, and therefore a good indicator for evil”
“rule by priests, chosen by other priests, for their superior holiness”
“The State”
What others?
[…] quick note from Jim on what Leftism is, as illustrated by the destruction of GitHub. And Poland goes alt right. Or something in that […]
The SJWfication of Github continues:
https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/
“I’m thrilled to announce that I will be joining the team at @github next month to work on community management and anti-harassment tools.”
“I am confident that under the leadership of @nmsanchez and many other revolutionaries inside Github that this will be a successful effort.”
“Note: I interviewed with 8 people. 6 of them were women. 2 of these were women of color and one of them was transgender.”
“So far it’s the Eastern Europeans that seem most angry about my announcement.”
“Lots of positive support so far!”