a strawman

The Appeal to Fallacy is the last refuge of a person who knows they’re wrong

Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.

I don’t think this guy was being reasonable

Cracked had a good rundown of the messy details.

In the early '90s, Heemeyer got involved in a campaign to bring legalized gambling to the city, even launching his own newspaper to promote it. Patrick Brower’s paper had come out against the measure, which was eventually voted down. That’s the first time the local press and government wound up on Heemeyer’s bad side.

Around that time, Heemeyer bought a patch of land for $42,000 and opened another muffler shop there. Several years later, a group looking to open a concrete batch plant offered to buy the land for $250,000. Heemeyer reportedly agreed, then later bumped the price up to $375,000, and maybe went as high as $1 million. Instead, the buyers went to the city to rezone the land around the shop and build there instead.

Heemeyer attempted to start a grassroots campaign to fight the plant. The problem was that the new plant would cut off customer access to his shop completely – he apparently bought the bulldozer to create a new road, but permission for that was denied too. He lost his battle and was forced to sell the shop, at which point he immediately started building a Killdozer. The rampage would come a year and a half later; it was hardly done on impulse.

Did the zoning dispute go badly for him? No doubt. Did he have multiple chances to avoid that outcome? It seems like it. Did the city leave him no choice but to do what he did? Well, most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options.

…

In addition to the newspaper, Heemeyer tore through the concrete plant, the town hall, a hardware store owned by another man he had a dispute with – he’d made a list. That’s where the noble vigilante story comes into play. He wasn’t out to hurt anybody, they say, just to do to others what they’d done to him.

But as Piechocki points out, the lack of a body count was down to pure luck. “When he attacked the town hall, the library is in there, and my son was in that library at that time. Gambles, the store he got stuck in, what happened if somebody was stuck in there?” In fact, most of the buildings were occupied right up until the inhabitants ran away screaming that a Killdozer was coming their way.

“Do you think my tattoo is cool?” No, I don’t. There are no cool tattoos.

This is borderline “I don’t like art”.

I mean, you do you, but it’s definitely a bad take.

The Cybertruck of face accessories.

Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster.

I’ll concede that trying to soak Altman for $14k/mo when he’s already hemorrhaging billions is a bit like pissing in the river.

I might ask what you plan to do with the $14k in tokens you’re burning. If you’ve got a material use case for them, and Altman wants to sell you $20 for a nickel, go wild.

But half the joke of AI is that you’re burning tokens to do nothing. That’s why businesses recoil as soon as they’re asked to justify at-cost AI spend.

Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.

Uh… famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That’s long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.

You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.

Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.

There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you’re ambitious.

OpenAI’s financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So… just read them if you doubt what you’re reading in the news. But it’s not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn’t something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.

I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce “business professionals know more about business than internet idiots”. Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don’t routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.

“The business people know more” line is akin to saying “This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him”.

you do not need special skills to apply for the job

That’s definitely the textbook economic definition.

But the colloquial definition is that you don’t need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).

And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.

And if you couldn’t pay for the pizza, they’d have sex with you

The world is in a leadership crisis

😏

That cave is shaped like a vagina.

Total missed opportunity for

They invited me to their house for drinks. As we approach, you can hear the music blaring through the windows.

Open the door

get on the floor

Everybody walk the dinosaur

My favorite episode in the series.

“It’s not a swimming pool, it’s a reflecting pool. Going to be very serine. Nothing in the bylaws against it.”

You can get away with a lot of zingers from behind bullet-proof glass.

show up to my old fishing hole two weeks later

dozens of EMT fishermen

Tbh, I think Valve needs to design an addon for the Steam Machine that’s a blu-ray player that hooks onto the side or bottom

Congratulations, you just invented Sega CD.

This is a feature they’re rolling out, specifically with an eye towards the PS6. As far as I’m aware, that console hasn’t even been released yet.

If Sony is retailing games for $100 on their new console, that would strongly dissuade me from buying the console.

A PC without Steam is still a PC.

When the PS2 released, it was a cheaper blueray player than the current iteration of retail blueray players. People would buy the console just to watch movies.

The direction consoles have gone make them more like PCs with a home entertainment configuration than video game machines with some extra bells and whistles.

total price control

Isn’t this the same line they used with Steam?

Can’t you just… buy a different console?