pleroma 2.7.0
Whenever I'm trying figure out whether a friend or a colleague would be a successful candidate for public office, I always find myself coming back to one quality:
Can they wrap up a meeting or a phone call quickly while still making all counterparties feel respected and heard?
I seriously think that might be the single biggest qualification, at least in U.S. elections. It covers so many situations: talking to constituents, talking to campaign donors (which one will be spending a lot of time doing), talking to journalists, talking to legislative peers...
Are you good at getting off the phone and on to the next thing without hurting anyone's feelings? Not to put too fine a point on it, but as you can see some pretty mediocre people regularly get elected here in the United States. Consider running.
This is also the answer to the CEO crowing about giving his customers two-day turnaround time. Dude, if it only takes your people two days, then it'd only take your customer a week just to do it themselves.
-- My friend Jim, on the new world of AI-assisted software construction
The one point that has resonated most strongly with me in recent months is that there is a consistent pattern with autocratic takeovers that succeed. They are imposed by presidents or prime ministers who, for contingent reasons, are actually very popular. Fujimori in Peru, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Bukele in El Salvador. The pattern is the same. Either they tamed inflation or a crime wave or removed a deeply unpopular government. They did it in a window of overwhelming popularity. Trump is not popular. He’s actually quite unpopular. So I don’t think he can manage this if the opposition is concerted. So this is the right thing, really the essential thing, to do. A necessary but not sufficient condition of turning back this threat. So it’s essential to fight this. And what happens happens.
(from https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/let-it-happen/sharetoken/52054b21-3905-4f1e-ae46-4d0c80461ce3)
There's a gem, placed with exemplary subtlety, in the recent New Yorker article about Sam Altman (emphases mine):
At the behest of his fellow board members, Sutskever worked with like-minded colleagues to compile some seventy pages of Slack messages and H.R. documents, accompanied by explanatory text. The material included images taken with a cellphone, apparently to avoid detection on company devices. He sent the final memos to the other board members as disappearing messages, to insure that no one else would ever see them. “He was terrified,” a board member who received them recalled. The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full.
Well, well, well. The analog hole is ever with us, it seems :-).
Least surprising headline ever: "Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts".