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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2023

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  • Let me start by saying first and foremost the paychecks and severance packages are beyond ridiculous. Like fucking unconscionable.

    Now, that being said yes, when the CEO rightly or wrongly (typically rightly) becomes the fall guy their career is over. If they manage to get another job it probably won’t be in a leadership position, and if it is it would be with a much smaller organization that simply won’t be able to pay them the big bucks. The best a CEO can hope for after a public downfall is to be put out to pasture.

    I don’t feel sad for them. While their golden parachute might represent literally the last money they will ever make it’s more than enough to live off of for the rest of their lives.

    There’s an even bigger picture, though. Their personal reputation is ruined, but so is their family name. With the amount of money and prestige they were building up they may have had aspirations of positioning their kids as the elites of the future. Family money and connections could have ended up with their children some day becoming Senators and Congressmen. If they end up taking the fall, their public failure will sully their name for a couple of generations.

    The kind of people that become CEOs of high-profile companies are a special breed of psycho. They’re willing to accept huge piles of money to roll the dice on their own career and the reputation of themselves, their children, and their grandchildren on the off chance they manage to avoid the chopping block until retirement.





  • There’s an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.

    On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.

    To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?

    Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they’ll make it through this quarter.

    When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company’s reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company’s face.

    This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don’t cost too much to fix.

    This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying “see, that’s the problem”. It’s much more effective to point at a human they didn’t make and scream that that person made a mistake.









  • It is, but teenagers and the emotionally stunted fall into it so they can feel superior.

    It’s basically a diet conspiracy theory. It lets adherents think they’re special and have figured something out that regular people didn’t. That’s a lot more comforting than realizing they’re just regular people because they aren’t mature enough to see obscurity as a good thing.


  • Nothing is stopping them from doing it, which is why when the cops get a report of someone pointing a gun at people they have no choice but to assume it’s real (unless it’s obviously shaped like a super soaker). If the person training their gun-shaped object on passersby points the gun at the cops they usually get shot because the cops aren’t willing to bet their life that it’s not some asshole who put orange acrylic paint on the tip of a real gun.

    There are some hobbyists that paint their guns to look like a Nerf gun or a Nintendo gun controller. The general consensus is “it would be stupid to take this out anywhere other than the range”. This is much less common than the opposite: toy or pellet guns that look very realistic.