So they slept in hypoxia tents which activates the hypoxia-inducible factor molecule, but they also took xenon which also activates the molecule. So, it's not clear if the xenon actually did anything?
Back during the 2000 dot-com boom crash I met a guy who got into a top business school in part by writing about the challenges of climbing Everest. He confessed drunkenly at a party to me that he'd never even left the USA...
> Back during the 2000 dot-com boom crash I met a guy who got into a top business school in part by writing about the challenges of climbing Everest
I met a startup founder in my local community who would always bring up his ambitions to climb Everest. He made sure everyone knew and made it part of his personality.
Except, he was very out of shape and undeniably overweight. He was not doing any type of training or fitness activity. Everyone could see with their own eyes that this man was not on any path toward climbing Everest in any way.
Yet people around him always brought up his Everest ambitions like it was an amazing fact about him. I always wondered if it was some sort of litmus test to see who could be convinced to deny reality and follow what he said.
I met a climbing guide who had summitted Mt. Everest multiple times (and had the pictures to prove it). His normal cardio workout was to put on a heavy backpack, then get on a StairMaster machine and go at maximum speed for a couple hours. He looked amazing — although I don't think he ever founded a tech startup.
I have a coworker who talked to me about wanting to climb Everest. I asked him if he does any climbing or even liked to climb. The answer was "No". It's a really weird thing. Everest seems to be a symbol for achievement.
I love this anecdote, it honestly feels like satire.
If the business school is silly enough to accept people based partially on the idea that they climbed Everest, perhaps he was right to treat the task of getting in to the place as essentially theatre.
Isn't most business success about convincing people to buy expensive tulips while you (legally) walk away with the money and leave them holding the bags, then rinse and repeat? Seems like he'd be the right person for the job.
And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground. What's the point of ethics and hard work if those who just lie their way into much better opportunities will out-earn you by orders of magnitude? Granted, it's a bit more complicated than that, often those people also have connections, but the feeling still stands.
Not sure if meritocracy has been on a decline, or that we're now just more aware of it due to the internet.
I have to say, this really resonates with me.
I walked away from a full time job making $180K a year for 2 hours a day because the consulting company renting out my time wanted me to put 8 hours. I felt like I was helping them somehow fleece the client, even though the client probably had over a trillion dollars under management. In retrospect I was very foolish.
In the free market you have to learn sales, to do well. And most sales techniques are about making people realize they may need something (called “building the gap”) and then offering your solution. But your solution usually isn’t any good unless you raise money first.
In my case, I was too honest to overpromise to investors, or create fake volume for tokens, etc. So most investors walked, and it took years for me to build the products. Now I have them. But I am far behind those who overpromise and raise money fast, or create appearances of momentum, and act as if — they fake it til they make it. (Doesn’t need to be all the way as bad as Elizabeth Holmes.)
I have discovered a lot of ethical hacks over the years involving group dynamics, but in the meantime I had taken on hundreds of thousands in debt and repaid it. All for what… because I was too honest to stretch the truth too much.
If I was willing to do it, though, people downstream of me would have been much happier. And people diwnstream of you include your employees and your family and friends. It is a dog eat dog world out there… I have learned that total honesty has a price — you cannot overpromise to people downstream of you, either, otherwise they’ll be left holding the bag. It is better to overpromise to people upstream of you if you have people relying on you. It’s just not a perfect system.
I would have much rather been in a society which has UBI, free association and everyone has some discretionary income and isn’t always just trying to survive. Much more honest. And they wouldn’t even have to fake stuff to stay on disability or qualify for means tested stuff.
Most business is about providing value by delivering goods or services that people want and are willing to pay for. Visit your local shops, how many of them are convincing people to buy proverbial tulips and leaving their customers holding the bag? Look at the most valuable companies in the world; they all do or make stuff people happily pay for because they actually find value in it.
Certainly there are people who succeed in business by doing what you say, but it’s not how most success happens.
But there is a real magic that happens in the process there.
When two people make a deal, voluntarily, at least rationally (unless it is charity) both expect to be better off.
The magic of the businessman is to connive his way into getting the largest slice of the 'better off'. He generally can't legally make a deal without generating value, but if he can capture it to the point the customer is only one iota better off he is a good businessman and no one has been defrauded.
Customers also tend to try to get the largest slice of the "better off." That's not special. Do you take less pay than you could get because you don't want to be greedy? Do you voluntarily pay more than the listed price when purchasing items? Of course not.
In a properly functioning market, the limiting factor is competition. A business can't capture 99% of the "better off" because the guy down the street will undercut it by only capturing 98% and all the customers will go there. A customer likewise can't capture 99% because the business will decide it's not worthwhile and sell to customers who capture less. Somewhere in the middle is found equilibrium.
Bag-holding is different, it means there's some sort of trickery and the other side doesn't actually benefit from the transaction. And this does happen, but it's not the norm. Again, go take a look at your local shops. Which ones are engaging in this?
There is a 'human' process 'somewhere in the middle' as you say.
I'm not anti-capitalist, I just acknowledge this as a fundamental part of the human process. It might even be the case the businessman's incentive don't fully align with the stockholder/owner's incentive, in many case the businessman can profit at the expense of the company by capturing higher commission with side-effects that the company won't understand.
A clever businessman will get the better end of that, while still leaving his customer better off than if he hadn't transacted at all, as many witness at the car dealership.
My point is that most business is in that middle. A typical business transaction ends with both sides getting a decent chunk of the value produced. Abusive transactions happen but they're not that common, certainly not the majority as the other comment said.
Optimally, suppliers/vendors/customers would like to grow together. If the companies I'm the vendor for are only getting a tiny sliver of value from what I'm selling them then they might not grow in their market, and my business with them also won't grow.
There's a lot of narrow-sightedness in this zero-sum model of transactions.
I just described a possibility where the businessman is better off and the customer is one iota better off, that is not 'zero-sum'.
> When two people make a deal, voluntarily, at least rationally (unless it is charity) both expect to be better off.
That is not how the current US administration seems to see (foreign) trade. :)
Unless you take the skeptical view that the US administration does not represent the people but rather merely the administration and its ilk, who stand to profit immensely if they are in cahoots with corrupt import/export smugglers or are trading for gains in some of the few winners, or even just shorting the losers.
Trade is not a zero sum game.
I just described a possibility where the businessman is better off and the customer is one iota better off, that is not 'zero-sum'.
you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground. What's the point of ethics and hard work if those who just lie their way into much better opportunities will out-earn you by orders of magnitude?
Unethical people tend to get themselves better opportunities regardless of how society is organized.
Example here in Canada and Toronto in particular. There were plenty of independent pet clinics and they used to charge somewhat reasonable prices. Now nearly all of those were bought by big companies / investors. Prices went through the roof, competition is down, and the only thing they want to discuss with the customer is how to squeeze the most money disregarding of results.
Yes I do want those assholes burned at the stake.
Similar story happens in many other areas. People are being squeezed from their money on all fronts. North American IT persons are rare exception of an ordinary person who can still make the ends meet and still have some healthy chunk left to enjoy life.
> Prices went through the roof
This is just exhibit 8345346 that this type of "free market" doesn't result in lower prices for consumers, but this grift has been going on for a long time now. Free market now means private investors are free to take over entire markets and monopolize them and bribe/lobby the government regulatory agencies to look the other way at best, or enact regulations that act as moats to defend their position against competitors at worst.
The current state of Canada (stagnating wages, exploding CoL) is what's coming everywhere in the west. The US seems to be most resilient to this, probably due to its status as the world reserve currency and a larger, more competitive economy.
> This is just exhibit 8345346 that this type of "free market" doesn't result in lower prices for consumers […]
I think it's worth asking if you have a free market at the point there's consolidation and it approaches monopoly/oligopoly territory.
There is nothing even remotely close to a 'free market' in pet clinics.
A free market would be me with a sign in the corner, offering to perform surgery on your dog, with my engineering degree printed on a piece of paper and anesthetics I manufactured in my basement.
North America has severely limited the number of veterinarians and regulated the care, the monopolistic elements are likely largely a result of government intervention.
>>Not sure if meritocracy has been on a decline, or that we're now just more aware of it due to the internet.
As an Indian, let me tell you, to accept something is wrong, and then just being fine about it, and just adjust your life to bad situations is how the fall of societies starts.
Eventually everything becomes fine and acceptable, and you learn over time to adjust yourself to everything, like every bad thing ever.
> And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground
That's not why, particularly. They do so for various reasons:
- they compare the reality of capitalism with a nonexistent nirvana, rather than the reality of the alternatives. They haven't run the real counterfactual
- they gravitate to any philosophy that they're familiar with instinctively: most students are young, and they conceptualise "fairness" in terms of a loving parental figure with resources meting things out to them, and they think of the government in a similar way
- they believe countries they have heard are nice to live in, normally Scandinavian countries, aren't capitalist
- they don't know the realities of real non-capitalist countries such as the USSR or pre-capitalist China, or present-day Venezuela (not truly non-capitalist, but the central planning around their oil is their main problem), or East Germany, or Cuba
- they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
> they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
Let's not leave out think-tanks and orgs like the WEF that seem to exist only to launder the opinions of billionaires. And mainstream news publications like the New York Times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
While I don't disagree with many of your points, we shouldn't kid ourselves that we live in the best of all possible worlds for most working or middle class people.
"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"
Capitalism is undeniably useful, in some cases but so is a horse.
Yet theres a difference between hitching a horse to a wagon to move things vs joining a bestiality cult that worships horses.
A university is hardly the only place for terrible ideas to thrive, just look at silicon valley culture and this orange site.
> just look at silicon valley culture
Well, that is a similar place. If you have plenty of money sloshing about coming from some commercial process you probably disagree with, whether you're a SV day-in-the-life-of employee or a social sciences professor, you probably can have plenty of ideas that are never disproven because you're so insulated.
I look at Tesla stock in wonderment of how it can keep on rising.
The automotive industry has historically been the most important in both the United States economy and even the world's. It employed millions upon millions, in high-wage jobs. Some large fraction of marketing was for the automotive industry. Even today, having a new luxury car is a status symbol (all the more so if the youngest generations are basically cut out of that). If Tesla can plausibly promise to keep that going forward in an era where no one tolerates burning fossil fuels, then how could it be anything other than a good investment? Of course the "how could it not" could easily crumble (and has already started doing just that).
> hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air
I wonder if the shorter time at altitude also reduced the chances of slower-to-develop high-altitude cerebral edema and pulmonary edema (HACE, HAPE). Some climbers have been sleeping in camp in small tubular pressurized tents to reduce daily apparent density altitude.
"Back during the 2000 dot-com boom crash I met a guy who got into a top business school in part by writing about the challenges of climbing Everest. He confessed drunkenly at a party to me that he'd never even left the USA..."
It kind of makes sense. A lot of business success is about being able to bullshit convincingly.
Meta but the discussion from this anecdote drove so much societal commentary, I totally forgot I was here to talk about Xenon-assisted mountaineering and experienced whiplash when people started talking about xenon again...