Egregoros

Signal feed

Timeline

Post

Remote status

Context

11
There's something weird going on where the people who own everything have decided to let it be destroyed. Very unclear why they're doing this, but it's clearly a thing.

Look at Hollywood.

Look at landlords in NYC and San Francisco.

Look at every tech company that brings in an Indian CEO, gets their entire staff outsourced, and then ends up with literally nobody in the firm knowing the codebase....

These are people who are supposed to know better and it seems that they're intentionally committing economic suicide - en masse.
I've never heard of this, but I'm open minded. Can you give me a simple example?

It should be something that's *obviously* dumb, not like where technology changed and up-ended an industry, because in that case it's very rational to think the technology is going to flop - until it doesn't. And it shouldn't be just one company manager going nuts because that has been known to happen from time to time, but what we're seeing here is an entire economy losing their collective minds...

One is enough, I'm not asking a lot. But I need you to explain to me the part where the actual owners of businesses started to make decisions which were obviously detrimental to the future of their business. My knowledge of those events does not include anything like that.

Replies

5

@cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @valleur @pepsi_man Of course there was a lot more going in the background than what's recorded officially. But it is a classic example.

Vladimir Lenin left Switzerland and traveled through Germany in April 1917 inside a famous "sealed train" orchestrated by the German government to destabilize the Russian Empire during World War I. Germany's ultimate goal was to spark political chaos in Russia, forcing them to withdraw from the war and freeing up German troops to fight on the Western Front.

Sending Lenin into Russia with a train load of cash definitely backfired for Germany - and it might even be considered bad strategy - but it's not self-evidently stupid. Causing chaos for a geopolitical adversary is a legitimate wartime tactic, people do it with the intention of improving their own situation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Owning property in San Francisco and letting the place go to shambles and your property values go down the toilet has no possible path to "and then we win"...
@cjd @valleur @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @pepsi_man Yes.

Someone in this thread, maybe you, described these people as midwits who got lucky.

If you've ever been around homeless and criminals you will run into people who made choices that are inexplicable. The consequences of their choices are obvious but they went ahead anyway. Granted they often are stupid or damaged in some way. But even having a normal or above average intelligence does not seem to protect some people from the exact same self destructive behaviour. It's just built into us.

This is from observation. I can't explain it. Many of us have family member who do this.

Just getting lucky and landing in a big pot of money does not protect you from doing the same.
I've known some rich people, and what I can say about them is they're not necessarily any smarter than anyone else in general - but in the domain of "not getting fucked over", they're fucking geniuses.

But the people who run Hollywood, NYC, and SF seem to have lost that knowledge...
@cjd @valleur @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @pepsi_man It could be insularity leads to it to. Consequences take time to develop and they do not feel the consequences themselves directly anyway. The French royalty and aristocrats leading up to the French Revolution would be an example. Things reach a tipping point and then everything changes.

If we lived far longer than we do, say with a thousand or five thousand year lifespan, where many of us would have personally known Plato, St. Augustine, Locke and Marx, and all the lessons from and personally experienced political success and failures during that time, we would be a far different species.

But a 70 year lifespan locks us into the same repeated cycle of success and failures over those thousands of years instead. It's innate. It's our curse and destiny.