Perversely, I enjoyed reading this memo. Mark Pincus is a classic psychopath and it's always educational to observe how people like him attempt to justify themselves.
The psychopath's language is usually a caricature (sometimes to the point of absurdity) of going assumptions of the culture in which he's trying to win acceptance. Though they have no values, they are skilled at picking up others' values and using them to make their actions seem acceptable. In Pincus's case, he's taking the noble concept of meritocracy and twisting it into bizarre shapes, refusing to stop even at outright fraud.
Oh, and if I understand Mr. Pinkus right, people who work with food don't deserve to make money. Fucker.
Judging his attitudes from his writing and actions, he'd be a natural fit for the Tea Party. Since the Tea Party and Zynga are the two malefactors most responsible for insufferable activity on Facebook, this is a natural transition for Mr. Pincus.
To the screwed: sorry to hear it, but I guess this is what you get when you work for a company whose name sounds like 4th-grade anatomical slang.
I was with you until the Tea Party comment. You are completely wrong about the motivations of the people who show up at Tea Party events. The Tea Party definitely in no way resembles the actions of Mr. Pincus.
I really wish people would keep politics out of a non-political discussion especially in a way that characterizes people unfairly.
The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with cracking down on the "water drinkers" being the only solution to society's problems.
Pincus's bullshit "meritocracy" justification is eerily similar. He's trying to deprive people of equity now that it's worth something, and when people point out that this is scummy, he points his finger and whines, "but they aren't pulling their weight!"
That's the similarity I was trying to point out, though maybe I justified it poorly in the grandparent post.
Wow, whatever you are watching or reading doesn't even come close. No one in the Tea Party I've met believes it is a zero-sum game. Quite the opposite (heck, farmers can show the counter examples). The Tea Party believes the government is wasteful with its spending and is more into power grabs then helping people. The only cracking down wanted is on government foolishness and waste. Helping people is a deep belief out here in the heartland.
It's not really that simple, though I agree the Tea Party has nothing to do with this.
The problem with the Tea Party is pretty much identical to the problem with the Occupy movement - it's ill-defined. The purists would claim that Tea Party is about small government, like the Occupy movement purist would claim that it's about restoring bank regulation. But at this point both movements, being more or less leaderless, have grown wildly beyond the confines of the people that started it.
Like #Occupy, the Tea Party IMO has become an easy label and an easy rallying cry for whatever ails you. What started as a movement for small government has also attracted economic reformers, people who don't like taxes, freedom of speech activists, McCarthyan anti-communists, social darwinists, and yes, plenty of racists too who just aren't very happy about that black guy. Go look at what people are carrying and yelling at Tea Party rallies, and you'll see plenty of all of the above.
Similarly, go look at an Occupy rally and you'd have trouble telling what they stand for, even approximately. We have economic reformists, anarchists, environmentalists, black bloc hooligans, people who want to lynch all bankers, anti-corporate types, militant anti-corporate types... Some people want corporate power reigned in, an equally large contingent seem to just want the end of capitalism.
Both movements are really just a sea of disparate interests groups trying to pretend they represent some kind of unified voice.
Personally I prefer a division between "loaf-women," (hlaefdis -> lady) "loaf-guards," (hlaefwaerd -> lord) and "loaf-eaters" (no surviving descendant word). But then I always liked Anglo-Saxon literature.
This being said, the problem with the tea party is not that they don't recognize some of the legitimate problems in this country, such as the very incestuous relationship the government has with big business (a relationship which lead Adam Smith in his day to advocate invisible hand policies), but rather the fact that they advocate those same invisible hand policies which resulted in such great concentration of wealth the last time around.
BTW, concentration of wealth is a major issue, impacting everything from the living conditions of the lower class to national security, and the fact that the Western Roman Empire had so much more disparity of wealth than the Eastern Empire may have a lot to do with the fall of the Western Empire so much earlier.
Because someone is going to rush to argue with me here, let me lay out Prof. Wolfram's argument on that. Basically he says that concentrated wealth necessarily leads to a narrow tax base because you can only raise sufficient money by taxing the super rich in a society with the concentration that existed say in the Western Empire. This means lower tax revenues, which erodes military spending. He points out that the Eastern Empire spent more on the military than the Western Empire raised in taxes.
So when the Tea Party says we need to broaden the tax base, I fully agree. My only difference is that I'd note the only way to effectively do this is to address the issue of concentration of wealth.
I can spot a joke, but that seemed plausible enough for me to look up. Sadly, that's not given on etymonline.com as the etymology, but as it lists the OED as being uncertain about the commonly reported etymology, there may yet be hope.
"The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with cracking down on the "water drinkers" being the only solution to society's problems."
You seem to have confused the Tea Party with the Occupy movement? I mean, both are sort of amorphous and all, but to the extent that they have a distinct identity from each other that would seem to be one of the core such differences, and that's where the Occupy movement shows up, not the Tea Party. It's basically a restatement of the 1%/99% motto.
In that respect, the tea-party-affiliated "53%" movement has more or less the same structure, but disagrees over how to split the water carrier/drinker boundary.
I upvoted you accidentally. I meant to downvote you. I was just going to downvote and not comment but now that I upvoted I have to tell you why I meant to downvote you. We should keep this political squabbling off of HN, it floods every other venue right now and it's definitely off-topic. If someone makes a passing political mention, it's best to let it slide, lest we stop talking about "Hacker News".
I'm not going to downvote you, I'll just correct your logic.Your parent is someone who was doing what you're doing now: calling people out on HN etiquette. The OP making fun of the tea party is the true culprit here.
I disagree. OP mentioned Tea Party ill-advisedly. Tea Partier got upset and felt like he had to defend the Tea Party before saying not to bring political arguments up on HN. If you don't want to see political arguments on HN, don't participate in them.
I said "I really wish people would keep politics out of a non-political discussion especially in a way that characterizes people unfairly" which is not the same as "saying not to bring political arguments up on HN". It irked me someone would take a cheap shot in a discussion about rightful compensation. Particularly when we are talking about a company not honoring the spirit of a contract with a worker then basically mischaracterizing a group's motives to put them in the same category when they are among the antithesis of that position.
I've heard several times in these threads that Pincus is a sociopath. Can you provide some more detail on that? A quick once-over his WP page doesn't seem to indicate anything particularly shady.
Although I don't think that Zynga has the most ethical business goals out there, I don't think it's bad enough to qualify someone as a sociopath. I'm sure there's a lot of history I don't know about so if you could give me the scoop that'd be great. It will hopefully help other readers engaged in the same search.
Normally I would say it is hyperbole, but if you are classifying someone by the textbook (in this case DSM-IV) definition, his behavior feels and awful lot like it fits the criteria[1][2] to the people affected and quite a few people here.
That all being said, the DSM-IV is a pretty scary book. It has expanded quite a bit of previous editions and become a little more broad to allow for a larger billing footprint. When I used to work in those circles, I had psychologist friends who thought anyone could be categorized as some type of disorder.
Psychopath, sociopath, they are terms that get thrown around and there is an industry promoting these classifications where possibly none exist, just a sliding scale of individual morality. 'The Psychopath Test' is a good read on this subject.
The psychopath's language is usually a caricature (sometimes to the point of absurdity) of going assumptions of the culture in which he's trying to win acceptance. Though they have no values, they are skilled at picking up others' values and using them to make their actions seem acceptable. In Pincus's case, he's taking the noble concept of meritocracy and twisting it into bizarre shapes, refusing to stop even at outright fraud.
Oh, and if I understand Mr. Pinkus right, people who work with food don't deserve to make money. Fucker.
Judging his attitudes from his writing and actions, he'd be a natural fit for the Tea Party. Since the Tea Party and Zynga are the two malefactors most responsible for insufferable activity on Facebook, this is a natural transition for Mr. Pincus.
To the screwed: sorry to hear it, but I guess this is what you get when you work for a company whose name sounds like 4th-grade anatomical slang.