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QAPereo commented on Getting free of toxic tech culture blog.valerieaurora.org/20... · Posted by u/zdw
Do you have the evidence to cash the checks your mouth is writing?
Until you do, you're also making a fallacious appeal to conspiracy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
why would I need evidence? Dang isn’t contesting the point, just the terminology.
dang 1 hour ago [-]
Apart from the cloak-and-dagger tone, this either says something obvious—that HN is moderated—or says nothing.
QAPereo commented on Getting free of toxic tech culture blog.valerieaurora.org/20... · Posted by u/zdw
Bit of an awkward moment for a searing indictment, as we'd just turned off flags on the OP. With suppression like that, who needs promotion?
It's a common misconception, but Hacker News really isn't identified with or immersed in Silicon Valley. Those of us moderating it are largely on the margins of SV and always have been, and the community by no means has its center of gravity there. It's globally distributed and on the whole rather anti-SV in orientation.
(The parent was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 but I detached it to contain this offtopicness.)
You turned off flags, but now you’re doing something else yourself. You’re being honest, but not really telling the whole story.
Your thumb is very much on the scale however, where existing community sentiment doesn’t do the job.
Edit: I didn’t intend to be cryptic or confuse you. I mean just that proclaiming you’ve put one of many tools on the shelf for this thread in no way implies what you tried to imply.
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QAPereo commented on Getting free of toxic tech culture blog.valerieaurora.org/20... · Posted by u/zdw
> The refrain of how a startup CEO is going to save humanity is so common that it’s actually uncommon for a CEO to not use saviour language when describing their startup. Cult leaders do the same thing: they create a unique philosophy, imbued with some sort of special message that they alone can see or hear, convince people that only they have the answers for what ails humanity, and use that influence to control the people around them.
I agree. I've been working in Silicon Valley for a few years now, and it honestly feels like a page out of Animal Farm. The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.
I don't know how veterans of the Valley can keep this up.
From what I’ve observed, the idea is to work in hell (edit: obviously hyperbole) until enough money is made to work on your own. Needless to say that doesn’t seem to be the majority experience. The carrot is money and security and the dream of fuck you money. The stick is being a code monkey who is still treated like shit, but who can’t even dream of early retirement and personal projects. It’s a shallow philosophy, but there it is.
The willingness to take tons of shit from above, and the ability to rationalize the waste of talent seems to be what you’d expect from a glorified casino for billionaires. Variable-Ratio reward training will fuck you up.
Edit: I would guess that fear plays a role too. I recall a poster here saying they wished they could change their circumstances, but they look at the guy delivering their pizza and feel terrified that could be them.
Edit: Or a mod can just minimize this, but sadly it changes nothing, least of the the reality of your situation.
QAPereo commented on Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/jrwan
You don’t become president of the United States by accident.
I wonder if he had some kind of political connections that could have helped?
>McDonnell and CDM engaged in a deceptive and fraudulent virtual currency scheme to induce customers to send money and virtual currencies to CDM, purportedly in exchange for real-time virtual currency trading advice and for virtual currency purchasing and trading on behalf of the customers under McDonnell’s direction
>In short, McDonnell and CDM used their fraudulent solicitations to obtain and then simply misappropriate customer funds
This raises some interesting questions: how do these schemes (which have been around much longer than cryptocurrency) differ when virtual currencies are involved instead of fiat?
Because it still bears saying, especially given how many people are just looking for greater fools to hold their bag. Inevitably the replies include a barrage of whataboutism centered on “fiat currency” in an attempt to normalize or justify the cryptocurrency shitshow.