_fhnu

Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society.

We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.

Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.

So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.

They won't be entering the labor force at 40+. Without some kind of disability benefit that keeps them housed and fed, they'll end up living out of a car or a tent, playing games on a phone they charge by running the engine on the camp Winnebago. Bloomberg will run articles about how cars, tents and gasoline are holding them back from participating in the economy.

We ran out of frontier, and are rapidly running out of the sort of high-risk, high-reward opportunities that get young men excited. We need a new gold rush.

No one wants to sit in a cubicle for 35 years, grinding out pennies while having all your value extracted by a cadre of semi-literate, power-tripping middle managers who punish anyone that displays talent. Not only have a series of crashes in 2008 and 2020 firmly demonstrated just how rigged the game is, but everyone can see what everyone else is doing on social media. There's little opportunity to trick these men into believing they should work hard when they can clearly see so many people skating through life without any effort, and watch laborers have their livelihoods stripped from them during crashes while billionaire fortunes double. Bloomberg has lost the plot completely, they don't yet realize that the jig is up.

Want to get people excited about work? Bring back drinking and loud music at the office. Let people be themselves without having to put on a deliriously upbeat, false persona while sitting through endless, pointless meetings about nothing. Stop asking them to constantly fellate the worthless middle management caste. Pay them well.

Life expectancy is dropping like a rock, and that's a number with a little more rigor behind it than PG's moronic hand waving. The guy has no idea what he's talking about and comes across as incredibly desperate to justify obscene hoarding of wealth. He'll draw a line between any two data points you can dig up, no matter how distant and spuriously correlated, if it will allow him to fellate a few billionaires.

We get it, these people pay you. Just say it: "I can see nothing wrong with the current distribution of wealth because the lenses in my eyeglasses are actually solid gold, a gift bequeathed to me by the Duchess of Facebook." The guy needs meritocracy to not be a myth, because he's styled himself as some kind of kingmaker who can selectively pluck only the most deserving young founders from a bubbling vat of Stanford alumni DNA. It's been a good run, but it's just getting gross now.

I've done both of these my entire career and no one ever cared, mostly because it's not remarkable.

Do you work somewhere that has a large management apparatus? These behaviors are sort of bare minimum expectation in smaller companies. It sounds like you perceived developers as a group to be mostly anti-social curmudgeons.

Hmm, surely there are cheaper forced labor options available in China?

Hyundai seems like they might be paying their employees, which seems a little off-brand for a company like Apple.

My frustrations with this behavior are less about not getting it, or not being able to participate, and more about finding the exercise distasteful, dishonest and ultimately destructive. The absolute worst aspect of this game is how clumsy and obvious these machinations can be. Employee trust in the entire organization is damaged when dimwitted ass-kissers with the subtlety of a brick are rewarded in lieu of any actual contributions and at the expense of decent people. Too often these environments are constructed in such a way that good people cannot succeed without serious comprises to their integrity. They get weeded out by their own moral disgust. The hierarchy then functions as a reverse sieve, allowing only the slime and detritus to remain.

It's also really less about being socially outgoing and schmoozing, and more about vociferously agreeing with everything that comes down from on high, and sniping at others for not immediately falling in line. I'm an introvert who generally enjoys going out for drinks, telling absurd jokes and making a fool of myself in public for cheap laughs, but unless I start puckering up and tonguing more asses, it won't help me navigate the corporate world. For someone like me, rather than forcing myself to be more extroverted, I actually need to do a better job at keeping my jokes to myself and limiting my self expression, so as to not threaten the fragile egos of those cursed with small amounts of power. I think your comment seriously underestimates the levels of animosity and petty one-upmanship that permeate the corporate ladder.

Social media is not the government, and has no obligation to maintain free speech. That said, social media has big problems.

The biggest is that they have, quite intentionally, encouraged the spread of outrage and mob mentality all across the political spectrum. These companies have installed levers for manipulating their users emotionally, and these levers are for sale. You can even fiddle around for free if you have the time, or get (un)lucky!

Oppressive PC culture, that can manifest as an almost Puritanical form of moral authority, spreads quick on social media. As someone who grew up in conservative, small-town America (and rebelled against it every chance I got), I'm not about to have my opinions dictated to me by the new boss either.

If your social sphere is mostly composed of middle & upper class, highly educated professionals, you might just feel surrounded by PCness. If you have any connection to the white poor and/or rural however, you also know that right-wing authoritarianism and racism are boiling too, with lethal results. As far as PC culture can be viewed as a defensive response to racism, I think it is clearly the lesser of the two evils, but it's probably a false dichotomy.