#god you gotta respect a company that out in 100 years worth of work

[therabbitthatpostthings]

Goddamnit- the Disney 100 special got me

[fapangel]

What are your thoughts regarding Elon Musk?

A great question. Long story short, I alternate between wanting to love Elon Musk as one of the few venture capitalists on Earth with a fucking brain, and wanting to drown him in a scummy pond for being such a fucking West-coast weenie retard. 

Elon’s Genius

Waitbutwhy.com got a series of exclusive interviews with Elon, and while the star-struck explorations of the author might be of questionable objectivity, he did a great job of summarizing how Elon thinks. And the single most important thing about Elon was expressed in a verbatim quote from the man himself:  

Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

Yeah. You’re sitting there saying “no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t understand that?” But the shit some journalists say will just blow your fucking mind. Yes, this is an actual journalist, in one of the few semi-respectable, mostly-sane publications left on earth (by dint of catering to people who have to make sums add up at the end of the day,) saying that Trump should make space-based solar power satellites a priority. Not talking it up as a nice theoretical tech, not wondering about it, but pushing this as a serious short-term policy priority. 

Incidentally, this is how Elon Musk feels about that bullshit. Yes. Being a sane, intelligent human fucking being, he’s capable of understanding basic opportunity costs, and since he’s aware that hair-brained pie-in-the-literal-sky schemes must be constrained by the actual ability to fucking build this shit (i.e. engineering,) he’s capable of stopping long enough to realize that building and orbiting a vast fleet of satellites designed to blast the Earth with microwave lasers is fucking retarded compared to just building more solar panels right here on Earth. 

This ties into the second massive, massive thing that makes Elon Musk unique - he’s a venture capitalist that knows what the fuck a BUSINESS CASE is. Despite being a save-the-world-I-want-to-build-unicorns idealist, he actually understands the basic principles of economics and markets. To wit, nobody’s going to give him eleventy trillion dollars for free to do decades of R&D to realize his Big Dream, so it has to fund itself, and furthermore, major advances in technology and the human condition don’t spring from individual genius companies, but from entire industries. This nice diagram produced by Waitbutwhy’s eloquently fawning author expresses the same with more colored boxes and less exasperated fucking invective, if that’s your thing. 

What you’re looking at - especially the box at the very bottom that says SUSTAINABLE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL - is the concept that any gormless asshole on the street can grasp (business gotta make money) but the multi-millionaire masters of the universe that gave Juicero ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A WI-FI ENABLED JUICER COULDN’T FIGURE OUT. 

Yeah. Some of his businesses don’t make money, like Tesla. They release glowing reports that retards eat up, while anyone who worked in the actual 100+ year old auto industry look at these sillicon valley nerds who think they know fucking everything after a few years of research and just wait for the inevitable explosion. (Despite their cheery PR, people who know what they’re looking at see nothing but trouble in their business. To say nothing of how the Ultimate Dream of Everyone Driving Electric is flawed by the basic resource limitations of PLANET FUCKING EARTH. And then there’s shady shit. When they discovered that the established automakers have hundreds of acres and tens of millions of dollars worth of suspension torture-testing facilities for a goddamn reason, instead of repairing their janky suspensions under warranty, they offered to pay half the repair cost if the customer would sign a fucking nondisclosure agreement. Tucker Torpedo this motherfucker ain’t, is all I’m saying.)

But ya know what? I can forgive that, because SpaceX. SpaceX forgives a lot. And there is a business case there - there’s enough rich virtue signalling fuckheads to support a small car company, at the very least - so the premise itself isn’t just pissing up a suspension bridge cable on a bridge to nowhere, like most venture capital bullshit. Even the Hyperloop isn’t that bad, because even though it’s fucking retarded, Elon’s probably only looking at it because of his “Boring Company” project. He looked at the ongoing clusterfucked abortion of a high-speed rail line that California’s doggedly carrying to term, and correctly surmised that digging fucking tunnels the length of a huge earthquake zone would be cheaper, in the long run, than trying to navigate the political clusterfuck of buying contiguous right-of-way for the whole damn length. A tunnel is a tube, and as long as it’s a tube, you may as well use the damn Hyperloop thingy, right? There is thinking, there. A brain, is working. And hey, at one point SpaceX was an idea just like this - the Great Ones of industry often leave a trail of dead and dying projects behind them while the One Great Success just climbs higher and higher. It’s worth it, and it’s why Trump’s “six bankruptcies” don’t mean jack shit compared to his dozens and dozens of successful businesses.

And yet - despite that amazing presence of a god damned brain in his skull - he still manages to go full fucking retard sometimes to a degree that makes me want to catch his tongue with a vise-grip to make the stupid noises stop. 

Elon’s dumb-fuck bullshit

This slashdot article neatly sums up the problem. The short version is that lots of very rich people in Sillicon Valley were going around acting very serious about the possibility that our entire world and universe is just a huge computer simulation and we gotta try to break out of it somehow. 

Billionaires. These people are fucking billionaires. And this is how they spend their time. This quote from Business Insider sums up the reason why: 

The piece doesn’t give any clue as to who those two billionaires are – although it’s easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman’s friend Peter Thiel – but it’s fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it’s the most popular topic of conversation right now.

“The most popular topic of conversation right now.” If ever you doubted that there’s a vast wealth discrepency in the United States, look no further - not only is the West Coast rolling in economic opportunity for the right people - especially with the right connections - but there’s so many multi-zillionares out there that their entire social circle can consist of nothing but. This is some zany philosophical fad that caught on and percolated around, like memes and fads do, via usual social interaction - except for these people, their friends consist mainly or only of multimillionare tech CEOs. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why obviously intelligent people who’s words can make stock prices in multiple huge companies employing many thousands of people do a damn jig feel no reservations at all about saying things in public that make them sound like fucking idiots. When you contemplate the sheer distance between the world of us ordinary humans and these privileged Coastal Gods, it’s enough to fill you with an almost instinctive rage. As a good seal-clubbing communist-hating rabid frothing conservative bigot bastard from Soviet Mordor, I wouldn’t give a shit if these Masters of Industry at least bore passing resemblance to the Randian ideal. I’d be down with that. Even if their huge underwater cities did spring a leak and a massacre or two, that’s life, you know? 

But this shit? This!? No. I draw the fucking line here, pal. There’s some floof-ass hair-brained bullshit I’m not going to stomach. 

But entirely aside from my impassioned-downtrodden-country-boy-rage-at-the-coasties-grapes-of-ree, there is the simple fact that people idolize, hero-worship and generally LISTEN to this man, and that imparts some level of responsibility on him to not say fucking stupid shit. The reason I’ve resisted making a Paetron for so long (aside from my crippling depression, self-doubt and general talent for self-sabotage) is that it’d impinge, ever so slightly, on my total freedom to say any stupid shit I want, because I’m not beholden to anyone, at all, to sound sane or coherent. (My fiction writing is a testament to this.) So I’m keenly aware of the decorum and care a public speaker ought to have - it relates directly to how big an impact his words are liable to have on people, and for Musk, that’s a lot.

Elon’s latest shtick - which is also popular with all his millionaire friends - is screaming and crying about how AI is going to replace all of us. Well, no, that’s just the luddite screeching of Sillicon Valley in general now, Musk is actually claiming that AI will rise up and fucking kill us or some bullshit. His newest company, OpenAI, has a great business model and all - developing mind-machine interfaces, which is a thing and will be a much bigger thing in short order - but he’s still going around telling everyone that AI is some evil terrible scary thing, and that’s causing actual goddamn harm. It’s all fine and good to loathe “science deniers” if they’re arguing against climate change, food pasteurization, the Health Dangers of GMO Crops and childhood vaccinations, but when it’s bullshit like the health effects of radio waves and the coming AI apocalypse, suddenly these fucking geeks are all ears. And here they have a successful CEO who’s Made Science Things Fly and has half the world sucking him off repeating this chicken-little fear-mongering bullshit. In ten to twenty years the anti-vaccers are gonna be screaming NO AI NO DRIVERLESS WHATEVERS REEEEE AND IT’S GOING TO BE THE FAULT OF PEOPLE LIKE ELON FUCKING MUSK. 

[tipsbyfarah]

The healing phase

After a long and painful journey in so many jobs with so much hostility and losing myself along the way, the next period was labeled with my emotional numbness. 

  Here I must say this is a soft spot about me, I get emotionally attached easily to jobs, tasks and work. As far as I was concerned, everything was personal all the time. 

Saying goodbye on the last job was weird, I felt differently, it was my choice to leave that horrible place, yet it did not really felt like much of a choice I have made too. 

  I wished so bad for my career life to surprise me, you know, I kept waiting for the plot twist. It gotta get better from here right? I mean it certainly could not get any worse. 

Rock bottom my friends, I have hit rock bottom. 

Everywhere I went, friends and family would ask the same question, are you working now? Where? I was always in between jobs, getting fired from one or leaving another. And the thing about this question was, that I should not have to explain myself or my choices. 

  I can’t share what I have been through casually, so I have made fun of myself, and enjoyed couple of laughs at my own expense, I mean why not? 

Someone told me that the greatest people are those who don’t take themselves seriously, at that point, I did not know how to perceive myself at all. 

My best friend at the time asked me to try Reiki magical healing powers. I told her: Girl, am not gonna pay money I don’t have for some I don’t even know to tell me stuff I already know! 

Speaking of rock bottom, yeah it was dark, I was angry, sad, depressed and taking it all on my self and those around me, continuously wondering what’s the point of my life? 

Every job experience that had added value to my skills, have harmed my soul in even bigger ways. 

I have mad a decision to not work in start ups or with Bahraini managers. Enough was fucking enough.

  My cooling off period was not long, in the same week I got two calls around the end of September 2013, One from an insurance company about a graduate development program and the other was from an amazing agency called 4Spots. 

The insurance company called first, I googled, liked what I have found to begin with, I was aiming to join such a program since before I have graduated.  

  I went to the interview with the recruiting specialist and the former Head of HR (many he RIP). It was a very short and brief interview, but it was enough to show me that even in my state of despair, there was still hope. 

The Head of HR asked me for the reason I left mum last job, I stumbled for few seconds and I said: well, I haven’t received my paycheck for few months.  And as I went on to explain further he raised his hands and he said: well, that’s a reason enough for me. 

  They told me that they are meeting other candidates and the process will include a second interview and a test. The program was set to begin on Jan 2014. 

  I read about the company more and the first batch of the program, but eventually decided to not keep my hopes up. 

  Later that week, I got the call from 4Spots. The vacancy was Social Media manager, before I applied, I consulted google of course and I did my own Linkedin stalking of the staff.

 The more I found out about this group of people and this (at the time) 6 years something agency the more I liked it. 

It checked both items on my list: - Not a start up - No Bahraini managers 

As a bonus point, the location is in Amwaj island, literally 10 minutes from home *yay Me*! 

I met with the manager who had explained the role to me and the agency’s culture and basically what to expect working here, I loved marketing and been involved in social media as tasks from previous jobs, it was more a chit chat than an interview. I told him I knew Zainab Al Arab from uni, was not sure if she would recognize me, he encouraged me to greet her and talk to her, which I did.

  The atmosphere was comforting, nice it smelled of freedom, intimacy, trust and mutual respect. Most of which was strange to me in a work environment. 

  The more I read and found about it, the more I wanted to join the team, but, you know me ( did not wanna get my hopes up). 

Later that week I was offered the post and I happily accepted. Yes, I was confused and filled with what if the insurance company called? What would I do? 

But there was still a long shot, I was not sure of my chances, and here, God had offered me something that matched my requirements 100%. 

My heart told me to take the job and I listened. I started working at 4spots.

I was shy at the beginning, observing my surroundings and the way people dealt with each other. I still do that, I give myself the chance to know the best way to deal with each different individual. 

  It was an open space, all of us sharing huge tables sitting next to each other. 

The client I was assigned to work with was a local bank, the team wanted to hire a local person that can better understand and relate to the bank culture. 

I was happy. I loved the open free way of running the tasks assigned to you and the lack of micro management which is essential for one to be creative. 

One day at a time, the team grew on me, strange feelings of comfort, job security were introduced into my vocabulary. I was learning from everyone everything I can about team work and my specific role. 

I enjoyed long existential conversations with people from different backgrounds and interests. 

Previously I have had issues with managers who don’t set boundaries with their employees, but this was not an issue at all, respect was the foundation and trust was given to each person. Everyone would do their work cause they loved what they do, the managers did not have to impose respect, respect was already there accompanied by the trust and care they show to all of the employees. 

  This place have taught me how to regain my dignity that I have lost and how to respect myself all over again.   

I discovered Amwaj island and Muharraq with them in a way that I have never done before. 

Because of this safe calm creative passionate environment I have found my way to the old me that I have  lost for struggles and hostility of my old jobs. 

One of the rituals there was “groove time” which is basically allocating the last 2 working hours of Thursday for a speaker that could be one of the team or an outsider, the topics were different and doesn’t necessary have to be related to work. 

  One of the employees had a presentation - if I remember correctly - about the affect of spoken words on people. And when the female co-founder\manager asked about whose turn it is to do a presentation next week I raised my hands cause I was interested at the time in similar subjects, I still remember the look on her face,  she was surprised, I was still the new girl in the team, I told her I want to do something about the effect of the body on the mind. She accepted. 

That was the real me, passionate about work, team spirit and presenting things.

  The company wanted to register me at GOSI, but I was still registered under my old employer, which started a series of emails between me and my old employer as they were dragging this simple task for  reasons beyond my comprehension. When the secretary called me, she told me to was related for my late paychecks that they had to pay me as I was under the sponsorship of ministry of labor and they had to pay me first before officially terminating my employment. 

  When I went there to sign the papers. I was perfectly calm knowing I have moved on, I was in a better place. 

One afternoon with the team around tea, smiling at each other, exchanging stories about work, clients and life on lunch time worth more than all the dark months I have lived before. 

  My client was a tough one, we made a plan and I had to prepare the content on a weekly basis to be approved by them in addition to their events and national day holiday posts. 

I attended  few meetings with the team some for my clients, some for theirs. The place was always busy and the door is open to welcome friends, previous employees,  clients and everyone! 

At the beginning of my second month there, the manager told us that one of the groove times would host Waleed Hashim, Reiki master. 

  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the same person my friend has previously suggested I see about my rock bottom and I refused.  

The irony of this was just too much when I told her she said: God has sent him to your work place cause you have to listen to him whether you want to or not.

  The second month was as great as the first month if not better. At this point I managed to get to know most of the team members and that was such a comfort while dealing with my client, their impossible requests and the restrictions they imposed on social media, I guess they have never received the memo about social media being a fun medium! 

Anyways, one day I was working on next week content, I had my headphones on, completely indulging in the task. When suddenly the busy office sounded through my loud headphones strangely quiet. 

I left my head up to see the whole team observing me, I had a mini heart attack, got embarrassed and laughed and they were laughing even louder. My face was tomatoe red. 

 I did what I always do, I was humming and singing along to my playlist and they were observing what they later told me my soft voice and my oblivion of the world around me. Someone told me they thought it was music played. 

  On that day my heart was both happy and aching, I related to my old job when the same thing happened and they reported me to the manager and did not have the courage to be hostile and hateful to my face in contrast to all of this love and acceptance I was overwhelmed with by this team. 

I was on the verge of tears, the comparison was painful but at that very moment I knew that coming to 4spots was not random or a coincidence. 

That was God well for me to purify my soul from all the dark places I have been.

  The more I got to know the team, the wider I felt my heart open and my mind expanding and I found myself calling this place the home I belong to. 

  On Waleed lecture, he introduced Reiki and energy along few cosmetic rules. He said the life you want is the life you have blessed and lifted, and you will never get what aspire to get unless you are perfectly content with what you have now. 

I was in a fun phase of my life, beautiful place, beautiful people. So, I got a call for the second interview from the insurance company. 

Yep, Waleed called it first , be happy and content, things will fall into your lap ! A week after the interview I was informed that I was chosen, I was suppose to be happy about this right? I mean it was the DREM JOB. Well, I was not.

For someone who was not me, the choice was obvious, but for me it was not.

  I was finally in a good place, I was healing, yeah I had a tough client, yeah the offer was tempting but I valued my new found inner peace over everything. 

No one could relate to my struggle to make a decision. Stay or leave? 

I knew a girl from the first batch of the program so I reached out for her and asked her about the work environment, culture, people and all that mattered to me the most.  Will I fit in? 

When we ended the conversation, I knew I had to make the difficult call. I talked to the manager about this and gave him my one month notice, I was aching inside, I was not completely sure but when things fall on your lap, you should follow through right? 

I was anxious about this conversation and he surprised me as the main concern he had was if I truly wanted to join insurance? Was it something I am excited and happy about? 

He asked me to keep to from the team and he will tell them after the national day holiday. Well since it was a secret, people started to find out one at a time.

  My brain at the time still did not have adjusted as quickly as my heart, I still expected the worst so I expected a mean reaction about me leaving in three months time, but I was far from right.  They were beautiful inside out, each and every person. 

 The last few weeks were special, in a place who loved caked and celebrated everything I had the pleasure of celebrating Christmas with the team before I was waived goodbye with a cake. 

I ordered cake in jars for my last day for the whole team to say thank you for the encouragement and the beautiful experience and the impact they had on my journey.   

I still have the team card from the goodbye gift they gave me hanged on my mirror “ You will always be connected to us” 

  Now, while reflecting on my past life, I know for sure that 4Spots was an important and vital phase for me. 

I owe them so much for the healing energy they bestowed upon me and allowing a smooth and assuring transition for me to the corporate world. 

Thank you team for Everything 💜 

Love, Farah