The reason for this is the same as why real estate is so expensive and the price of gold is so high. There is far too much capital accumulation among the ultra-wealthy, who don’t know what to do with all that money. The expertise of someone like this founder lies simply in recognizing that this is the case and that it can be monetized.
There was a great Money Stuff blurb about that w/r/t Adam Neumann. I can't find it to quote it directly, but the gist was that if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense.
The truly amazing thing, especially the second time around, are the supposedly sophisticated investors who fall for it. "Oh, he's learned his lesson -- he won't do it again!".
Some of those sophisticated investors are also engaged in shameless capital extraction. Their investment thesis is based on the "Greater Fool Theory": they're gambling that they can dump the inflated assets on another bag holder before it blows up.
> ...if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense.
Sort of. I get the capital extraction part, but you also need to be a good steward of capital and make a profitable business out of it. He failed badly at the later part, and his reputation is an obstacle for the former.
Not saying you are wrong, but if I am a "capital allocator" at a16z, he would be no-go.
IMO you're being unfair; he talked his way into getting paid half a billion dollars for wework, and he's now a billionaire. That's a massive success at capital extraction.
This is too cynical for even a turbo cynic like me.
Basically, you’re saying he mislead investors and got a bunch of money, so those investors see themselves being ripped off as a valuable skill, so they invest in him again. Wut?
I say again — why would investors trust him if his only track record is losing investor money?
I misinterpreted you; I was arguing that he's already succeeded completely, so it doesn't matter if anyone gives him more money.
But, IMO the reason they're still giving him more money is that they're stupid and greedy. They know WeWork was a disaster, but it was a huge disaster. That shows them he's good at running a con, and they want to get in on the next one.
Class solidarity doesn't hurt either. Being a billionaire makes him an actual person in the eyes of other rich people.
EDIT: Also, it's funny you used a16z as an example:
> Not saying you are wrong, but if I am a "capital allocator" at a16z, he would be no-go.
because Andreesen Horowitz are the ones investing in his new WeWork 2.0 startup Flow.
If you know he is good at duping investors then you know he is good at gaining investors, and if you think you will be able to well time your exit you will make a shit ton of money off the other investor's investment. Many investors are just straight up gamblers and risk is just part of the game.
Its like people who invest into a ponzi scheme knowing full well it is a ponzi scheme, just thinking they are smart enough to leave before it all comes crashing down. And once you get enough critical mass, other people will invest based entirely on the fact that there is a lot of other investors and a rising price.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. The WN7 is intended more for the European market. For the Global South, something like the Zeno Emara is more suitable. Although I’d buy one right away if it were available here in Germany at a similarly affordable price. Since the beginning of the year, my perspective on e-motorcycles has shifted a bit. I ride an e-scooter to the office and have really gotten into it. Ride, charge, ride, charge, ride, charge, ride, and practically no maintenance: I find that very appealing! That’s why I took notice of the WN7.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
Interesting, I imagine the propaganda was also used for the German public, because they had no idea they were death camps.
Israel would doubtless keep its genocide a secret if it could, but there's just so much evidence created by smartphones. This is actually an example of how technology is making the world a massively better place--it's so much harder to genocide without creating tons of evidence.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
What does that have to do with the subject of this thread at all? Christians are also terrible to gay people, and European societies have only very recently (in the last two to three decades) become somewhat more tolerant.
In the context of Israel-Palestine, this issue is only raised in order to somehow justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, a la "They deserve it because they're not as enlightened as we are."
It’s relevant because most commenters here hold moral standards that are completely self-undermining because they choose to not apply them to the “oppressed” group.
Consider that it doesn’t matter how genocidal Israel’s Islamicist neighbors are. The IDF occassionally targets civilians when they shouldn’t. Meanwhile Israel’s neighbors don’t even draw the distinction.
The IDF killed more than 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.
"But Muslims don't like gay people" does not justify that.
And saying the IDF "occasionally" targets civilians is just completely divorced from reality. They've been systematically attacking civilians for more than two years straight now, racking up a kill count of more than 80,000.
Western governments don't fund their neighbors. They do fund Israel. You have to live up to the standards of the patron such as observing western rules of engagement, treatment of prisoners, and human rights in general.
Western governments do fund Israel's neighbors. This includes Egypt (one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid), Jordan, Lebanon (including indirectly through UNIFIL and UNRWA), Syria, and Iraq if they count as a neighbor.
Patrons don't necessarily apply any standard evenly.
Egypt receives US aid in exchange for maintaining good relations with Israel. That's the deal they have with the US. It's basically the same with Jordan.
And look at surveys taken by European Muslims on their opinions on what should be done to gay people like me, when they can answer anonymously or think the surveyor is a fellow Muslim.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
i am honestly puzzled as to why germans, with all the educations they have received during decades, are letting this rock as is. or maybe disillusioned would be a better term...
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's
role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
Nobody is arguing that this is about revenge, the holocaust is brought up as an example, to show the hypocrisy. Zionism is no different from Naziism in how it treats "the other", and the outcomes are unsurprisingly very similar.
>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
> The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews
This is true.
But denying Palestinians of any agency or fault is wrong. They made mistakes too. And if it’s wrong for Netanyahu to support Hamas, isn’t it just as wrong for any Palestinian to support them too?
"We must seek agreement and understanding with the Arab people only through the Arab worker, and only an alliance of Jewish and Arab workers will establish and maintain an alliance of the Jewish and Arab peoples in Palestine"
That's a Ben Gurion quote, who was a socialist and believed in shared class struggle of Jews and Arabs. The rest of your comment is influenced by other lack of nuance
Ben-Gurion famously preached coexistence publicly (sometimes) but his private messages and memoirs betray his true beliefs:
5 October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”
“It is very possible that the Arabs of the neighboring countries will come to their aid against us. But our strength will exceed theirs. Not only because we will be better organized and equipped, but because behind us there stands a still larger force, superior in quantity and quality …the whole younger generation of Jews from Europe and America.”
Ben-Gurion, Zichronot [Memoirs], Vol. 4, p.297-299, p. 330-331.
See also Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, p. 182-189
And that's the difference between 1937 and the 1920s. In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
Interesting to know that your quote is disputed in the original text, as to say the exact opposite.
> In between the Palestinians had committed the 1929 and 1936 massacres which included ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities which predated Arab presence, such as the Jews of Gaza.
What’s your point here? What I’m understanding is that you believe that the sentiment that Arabs must be expelled from Palestine is justified.
My point here is that saying it was "the plan from the start" like GPP does, ignores the fact the the zionist movement had became more militaristic as a defensive measure to palestinian ethnic cleansings, which is quite clear from the chronology of your own quotes
However, even if you wanted to show Ben Gurion wanted to "expel the palestinians", quoting a single personal letter that is almost unintelligible, that has your quote disputed between "we must expel" and "we must not expel", right after a British committee proposed solving the conflict by transferring Palestinians, is a weak argument
Well newsflash, the Israeli socialists and left wing have lost all influence for the most part. The only way you can form a government in the Knesset today is by a coalition of parties, most of which lean right-wing to far-right or ultra-Orthodox.
Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
Are you trying to justify or minimize families being killed for no reason?
I don't get your response in context of what I posted. There are truths, and pointing out someone that goes against that truth shouldn't have to worry about circumstances - especially if those circumstances have been widely documented to be violence since its inception.
If 2 teenagers end up doing drive by shooting on each others houses, all because their fathers were in gangs that did the same back in the day and thats the life the kids grew up in, how are you going to assign who is at fault? To either kid, the other side started it.
Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
Oh yeah, that old topic. We’ve already discussed this back when text-heavy websites started reaching megabyte sizes. So I’m going to go look for the posts in this thread that try to explain and defend that. I’m especially looking forward to the discussions about whether ad blocking is theft or morally reprehensible. If those are still around.
That’s exactly why I’ve refused to use autocomplete on smartphone keyboards from the very beginning. I want to express myself in my own words.
In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?
And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.
> That’s exactly why I’ve refused to use autocomplete on smartphone keyboards from the very beginning. I want to express myself in my own words.
Autocomplete drives me up the wall. I have what I want to say in mind. I go to write it. There are times when it can replicate what I have in mind word by word. I don't know whether the emotional reaction is caused by feeling robotically predictable or because the words no longer feel like my own.
Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description. For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of status may not be that complex, and the choice for pairings may be very limited.
I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.
Fair enough, but if you remove the evo psych explanation you're still left with "people don't want to look stupid in front of their peers because it might have consequences". This seems plausible to me regardless.
I still find that strange. If there’s something I don’t understand, you’ll just have to explain it to me again. If we’re pair programming and I need another minute to look at your code to understand it, then you’ll just have to put up with that minute. I’ll spend that minute trying to understand the code, but not worrying that you might think I’m stupid. If that leads you to think I’m stupid, I’d diagnose the problem with you rather than with me. There’s just no normal situation where I’m sitting among people and thinking, “Shit, I hope they don’t think I’m stupid.” I trust that the people who interact with me in everyday life will, over time, form an impression of my cognitive and intellectual abilities and my education that is reasonably consistent with my self-image.
You can’t hide your limitations anyway. I know people who have a hard time thinking logically and critically. They often do and say things that strike me as rather thoughtless or impulsive. They often think and speak in clichés, relying more on emotion than facts, mostly opportunistically, and never in a complex way. I don’t think such people are capable of reflecting on their own limitations. And I suspect that my own limitations are just as transparent to a superior intellect. Assuming that the inductive step I'm using here is even valid.
That’s why I don’t get this perspective. It sounds as if using more foreign words or wearing a button-down shirt or something like that would somehow hide stupidity. But that’s not the case. To pick up on your quote again: For me, it’s more of a red flag when I notice that someone is making a special effort to come across as smarter than they actually are. To a certain extent, we’re all stupid. We should use the resources we have to get along together in life and in the world, instead of engaging in a dick-measuring contest.
This seems like a description of why you, in particular, aren't afraid to look stupid. I appreciate the perspective but believe that it's specific to you, your culture, your friends, your employer, and your life. The social consequences someone faces will differ based on their social group.
Bullying, in the workplace and outside it, is a real-life example of the consequences of looking stupid if you don't have supportive people around you. Workplace bullying is a real phenomenon and surprisingly prevalent[0], even though it's never happened to me.
Do you agree that someone experiencing workplace bullying would be worried about looking stupid? And do you think that someone who wasn't directly affected by it might still change their behaviour to avoid it?
I've never encountered a person who was attracted to a stupid person.
BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today
"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
Even in small groups, being respected and considered valuable is important? I'm not sure what you mean here.
I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses
I dislike the style of Altman's language about as much as I dislike the bullshit language used in politics or the self-incriminating, overly specific denials used by prominent figures to defend themselves against criminal allegations: “I have never had sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 outside of my own family.”
The language is so coded that the many places where the core statement must be negated stand out like a sore thumb.
It's interesting. No one is a 100% law-abiding citizen. You can see this in traffic, for example, when a driver gets upset about pedestrians ignoring red lights, while they themselves are driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit and have the number right in front of them. The transgressions of others should always be severely punished. One's own transgressions are minor trifles that are not worth mentioning, or small privileges that one naturally claims. And when one is penalized a little for one's own misconduct, e.g., with a fine, one acts as if one were a victim of fascist repression.
It is productive to think about the world in terms of good and evil. But if you really engage with more complex events in an intellectually honest way, you will always find that they cannot be easily mapped onto the poles of geopolitical conflicts, as you would like them to be, if I am interpreting the thrust of your question correctly.
If someone points a gun at you, if the threat seems credible, and if you are defenseless against it, and if you would rather be shot than hand over your wallet, then I can only interpret that as false pride, but not as rational behavior and certainly not as ethical behavior. This is all the more true if you are not making this decision for yourself alone.
It is not heroic to die because you did not want to give in out of personal pride, national consciousness, or other false ideals. It is heroic to accept a loss of face in such a difficult situation in order to avert or minimize harm to yourself and others.
reply