Introversion @ Introversion @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Why are we allowing the legislation of Christian morality?

Because Republicans and their voters.

As a liberal, I don’t need to idolize my president. I don’t want to have a beer with them. I don’t buy Democratic President merch.

I do want them to be competent. I do want them to respect the rule of law. I do want them to be truthful though I understand politics means they sometimes aren’t. I want them to govern for the good of all, even conservatives that didn’t vote for them. I want them to respect history and science, rather than spouting bullshit conspiracy theories with zero basis in fact.

By those criteria, Biden has been as good a president as I could hope for.

Trumpers just seem to care that Trump hates the people they hate. They seem to love the bullshit he spouts; the endless lies, the conspiracy theory nonsense, all of it.

I think I understand Trumpers well enough, without reaching out and trying to understand their point of view. If they could coherently form complete sentences that didn’t involve regurgitating Trump lies or rightwing media conspiracy nonsense, I might try — but they can’t and don’t, so it’s a waste of time. Two groups who can’t agree on the difference between up and down might as well be speaking different languages, so, just no.

Totally. But Adam Neumann wasn’t going to settle for “low-margin”, nosirree! Low margins don’t buy you jets and mansions.

An audience of tens of millions (of MAGA idiots), too.

Yumm, just like grandma used to make (before she killed the rest of the family)!

In the beginning, WeWork definitely was about renting to smaller companies (or individuals) at reasonable prices, providing decent (if not upscale) accomodations. That’s probably a decent little business.

But their CEO had (or at least, promoted) delusions about WeWork providing a fundamentally different experience. Some of those delusions were IIRC software projects he claimed would allow renters to automate and improve their network and electricity use. He sold this bullshit on talk shows, and gave this as a reason that WeWork wasn’t just another renter of office space. In reality, they didn’t have the expertise to do anything like he claimed, and it all came to nought.

Maybe if he hadn’t been spending money like a fleet of drunken sailors, much of it on himself or vanity projects, they might’ve not cratered as badly, or at least as quickly.

If you’re interested in some of the gory WeWork details, I can recommend either reading The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, or (if you have an Apple+ subscription) watching We Crashed.

I frankly don’t understand how so many people didn’t quickly peg Adam Neumann as a charlatan. I guess everyone was more worried about Fear Of Missing Out than Fear Of Losing All My Money, and it drove some really dumb investments in WeWork.

In the era of low interest rates, a lot of stupidly-high valuations happened in tech. Many of those idiotic valuations were predicated on the idea that companies could afford to lose money for a long time in pursuit of “market share”, and then pivot to profitability when they wanted that. Never mind that if your business model is fundamentally about being the cheaper alternative while losing money — waving at Uber — the only path to being profitable goes through gaining monopoly powers and hiking prices to much higher levels that consumers will hate — waving at Uber again.

The truly dumb thing about WeWork’s valuation was that it was being valued as if it were a tech stock. It was a renter of office space, period. All of its “secret tech sauce” was a combination of lies and aspirational bullshit from its bullshit-artist CEO.