OTOH: First flight: 1903. Moon landing: 1969. Humanity went from ”Look, we’re 3 meters off the ground!” to “We just parked on the Moon” in barely a lifetime. 66 years.
Both are in the wrong. WP Engine are morally wrong not to pay back with developer time or money to enhance the Open Source project they are making money with. But Automattic's claim that "Managed WordPress" and in extension "WordPress Plugin" and "WordPress Agency" should be covered by their trademark is crazy.
The problem is that they call it "wordpress" but it is actually "fork of wordpress". It was already made clear that if they used an unmodified wordpress they could continue to use the mark. Thats literally what half the blog post said.
From my European viewpoint US seems to have a thriving civil society.
Sweden used to have that. Workers movement, free churches and the temperance movement basically built the Swedish democracy. A large percent of the population were contributing members in them. They are almost extinct now.
The welfare state took their place. If something is not commercially viable in Sweden, it has to be funded by tax payers. And then you get all the issues of what should be funded and what shouldn't.
We no longer have strong, self-supporting associations. And we don't have the philanthropic tradition where rich people fund things.
My wife and her friends are all middle-class, doctors, lawyers etc. The have a book club and get tax money to buy theater tickets and cheese for their meetings. It's not tax money well spent in my book. They would have had the book club anyway. And all of them can easily pay for cheese themselves.
There are endless examples of fraud too. You just write down a meeting schedule and put in names of people and get money.
Another problem is the Islamistic "studieförbund" Ibn Rush who is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. They get a lot of tax money to promote their worldview.
JetBrains where silent when the war started. I was a bit worried what would happen. Then they announced the closing of the dev offices in Russia. They said that they needed to extract some people before announcing. It’s not an easy task relocating hundreds of people.
I didn't trust my instinct and hired a guy that was a pathological liar. Almost ruined the whole company. This was during the dotcom bubble and programmers where hard to come by. My company didn't pay as well as the (soon to be bankrupt) flashy dotcom firms. I really needed people and I let myself think "OK, he is odd, but maybe it's just my bias".
His office soon turned into a dump, he didn't show up to important customer demos ("Oh, I told you I was going to visit my sister", "I got a bad allergy after vaccination, I'm in the hospital."). He could spend weeks not producing anything, and have very elaborate excuses. Some periods in the beginning he did really good work. So I had to weigh the pros and the cons of keeping him. And maybe I wanted to avoid a conflict. I was young and had never met a person that could lie and cheat without feeling bad.
The worst was that he blamed his co-workers for everything. People wanted to leave. And I, as the middle manager, was caught between caring for the team, getting the work done and be accountable for the managers above me.
I should have ended his employment after a week. There where enough bad signs.
One day he just disappeared. We were worried and went to his house. It was empty. Never heard from him again. After a month his office phone rang. It was his mother. I had to tell her that he was missing. "Oh, not again", was her reply.
When recruiting, listen to your instincts. And be proactive when a team member is not functioning. One person could ruin a team.
Did the person do anything specific during the interview process that suggested the problems you ended up having? Just thinking someone is "odd" can be the result of, as you say, bias.
He looked like he was right out of bed. But it was mostly a feeling. I had recently hired a high school dropout and an immigrant who barely spoke our language. Both turned out great. Did not have the warning sounds go off during their interviews.
That period was strange. I got applicants with Microsoft certification in SQL Server who couldn’t explain the simplest SQL query.
Well, if the business owner himself engage in world politics it is relevant to follow the money trail. Musk is not any businessman. His influence goes far.
