blackbagboys
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
1,811
Submissions
304
Member since
Sep 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
If Tesla refused to cut the power but required the work to be done anyway, it's absolutely their fault.
Comment · 8 years ago
On the other hand, you're much more likely to be able to carve out a niche for yourself and be niche-famous in a huge and varied country like the United States.
Comment · 8 years ago
According to the government, every leak of classified information "may" put the goverment's personnel and interests at risk. That doesn't mean it's true, and even if it is true it's not necessarily a sufficient reason to halt publication.
Comment · 8 years ago
Good point! Hopefully the Kickstarter crew will incorporate the "incinerate whole families based on probabilistic guesswork" card in the public release.
Comment · 8 years ago
Doesn't seem particularly true to life. Where are the cards for kidnapping innocent people off the streets, keeping them locked in secret prisons, pulverizing their internal organs and torturing them to death?
Comment · 8 years ago
Nah, this is wrong. Putting a Nazi symbol on your car with the intent to piss people off is a juvenile provocation and in no way requires that the perpetrator actually harbor a secret desire to bring about the extermination of the untermenschen.
Completely relinquishing the ability to judge things on their actual context in favor of the unthinking punitive application of absolutist principles is the beating heart of every anti-human ideology.
Comment · 8 years ago
At absolute best, it's tasteless, and certainly grounds for social exclusion, but criminalizing and especially pathologizing mildly anti-social behavior is profoundly immoral, reckless, and inhumane.
Comment · 8 years ago
Ironically, this is exactly the sort of conformist, vindictive, authoritarian mentality that helped the Nazis stay in power.
Comment · 8 years ago
They were good problem-solvers and Tesla needed a PR win. Let's not mysticize Musk more than has already been done.
Comment · 8 years ago
Monasteries of the medieval / renaissance time period usually had very large complements of lay staff and tenant farmers, who maintained the estates and produced goods for both internal use and sale at market.
This is not to say the monks didn't work or didn't follow ascetic regimens, but they weren't doing all the work of keeping the monastery running.
Comment · 8 years ago
True. Any organization in which the incentives for an executive to increase or maintain their own power within the organization trumps the incentives for them to work for the benefit of the organization as a whole.
Comment · 8 years ago
Tuchman in her heyday was the recipient of an enormous amount of opprobrium from her generation of academic historians (of which the nearly-fossilized Bachrach is a member), mostly for being a non-academic, extremely successful female popular historian. Modern academics are generally much more positive about her work. Just remember that it's an introductory popular history.
Comment · 8 years ago
There's a book I remember reading - I can't remember, but it may have been The Dictator's Handbook - which talked about how this is a common management pattern in authoritarian dictatorships (although typically somewhat more extreme in its implementation). The dictator ends up weeding out most people of exceptional talent and competence, but it consolidates his personal power. Bad for the state when it faces a crisis, but good for him personally. Easy to see how this applies to senior management at a public company.
Comment · 8 years ago
This is a useful academic introduction:
https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/05211829...
Comment · 8 years ago
companies and wealthier people moving in makes everyone in the area more wealthy.
This would only be true if everyone owned their own residences and profited from the increase in land values. In reality, the inhabitants of gentrifying neighborhoods are usually just evicted from their homes so the owners can sell to developers, and they end up worse off than they were before.