Karoline Leavitt says SOMEONE is in charge of DOGE but she won’t say who.
It’s some guy named John Barron.
He looks vaguely familiar.
Should it, Elon? Should it really?
For those who can’t see it, there’s a picture of a flight path to Houston from San Francisco that curves along the southern border and over Los Angeles. Ryan Peterson asks “Why is this plane not flying in a straight line?”
Elon responds “It should be”.
No, Elon, planes do not travel like they’re on the route map in an Indiana Jones film.
Not understanding what great circle routes look like on maps is straight up flat Earther 101.
A great circle route would actually curve north, I think. This has a lot more to do with prescribed flight paths and where planes can and cannot fly, as well as with where the tailwinds are.
Remember in Illuminatus! where the Discordians infiltrate the Knights of Columbus and spike their drinks with a drug that induces severe gullibility, so that by the end of the meeting they’ve all denounced heliocentrism and declared the flat Earth to be the center of the universe?
Maybe Elmo’s ketamine dealer has seen the fnords, is what I’m saying.
You have to turn left at Albuquerque anyway.
At least this thread now has a definitive answer.
(i got that reference.gif)
This. There’s not that much difference between a ‘straight’ and great circle route between San Francisco and Houston.
In particular, flights at around the latitudes of San Francisco and Houston would, if possible, try to take advantage of (west to east) or avoid (east to west) the subtropical Jet stream which tends to vary north to south somewhere in that band.
Likewise, trans-Pacific flights between Asia and the US will tend to run Great Circle westbound while taking advantage, if possible, of the subtropical Jet Stream eastbound.
Shortest travel distance doesn’t mean shortest travel time, which you would think a space exploration genius like Elon Musk staring down from his 40000’ view would know.
Per the comments on that tweet, there’s another pretty good reason not to fly in a straight line from SFO to Houston - Area 51 is in the way.
Yes, but if you draw a straight (GC) line between SFO and HOU, it still goes at least ten miles south of the southernmost corner of the military reservation.
Still a little close for comfort.
Elmo’s gonna get a Delta flight full of Texans fans on their way back from an away game shot down by the Air Force.
Yes, they survived “multiple rounds of selection”, but what skills were actually selected for? Simply the skills of survival. They are good at ascending the corporate ladder which is mainly the skill of political maneuvering, taking credit for the work of others, and tanking your rivals. Most CEOs don’t come from hardscrabble backgrounds and work their way to the top. They don’t start with a better mousetrap and convince the world that’s the way to go. They’re born with at least basic class advantage, they maneuver into higher positions by choosing not to compete in skilled or unskilled labor.
I will grant as above that maneuvering up the corporate ladder is not a skill that everyone has. But I will suggest this is less of a skill and more of a sharklike quality of being willing to do the most shameful kind of maneuvering without feeling a sliver of embarrassment.
I have worked with CEOs. I won’t say all of them are morons, but a lot of them are quite stupid, and I’ve not met any who could be considered an actual “genius”. It’s kind of a bell curve, but you absolutely can be a complete moron CEO if you have no qualms about engaging in the most embarrassing kind of skulduggery and self-promotion. That’s not a “skill” that anyone’s obligated to respect.
No, this is flat out bullshit and the epitome of the attitude I was highlighting above. We would not find this realistic about any other arena of skill and yet this is somehow swallowed whole hog for “climbing the corporate ladder”.
I’m not saying those things aren’t involved but they represent such a tiny proportion of skills necessary to be selected at each level that to represent it as “mainly the skill” is living in a complete fantasy world.
You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills, CEO skills.
I can only speak for my experiences at a large company, but I worked closely with two CEOs in a row, and they got to the top by being having a wide array of leadership skills, from financial understanding to being able to motivate people on both a retail & wholesale basis. Both of them were also willing to listen.
That said, they both also had deficits, because that’s how people are.
That whole thing about the major skill being ambition and managing up, there’s some truth to that. I knew some of those people, one guy in particular, but in the end they capped out or were removed. That’s a culture thing, I think, and I suspect at other companies it might have gotten them to the top. But it’s not a universal.
We wouldn’t find this about any other arena of skill because they produce qualitative and quantitative evidence of their skill. We can stack up every basketball player’s stats against each other, we know how and why they perform. What’s bullshit is suggesting, in the absence of any objective evidence, simply insisting with all your heart that CEOs have some amazing hidden skill set other than ruthless self-promotion just because they’re on top.
I won’t argue that they are totally unskilled people, just that they’re a more or less random slice of people who are willing and able to engage in ladder-climbing. They will have more ambition than others, perhaps more drive, but other than that, no more talent or skill than you’d find in the upper 25% of any community college class (not a knock on community colleges). For every CEO in a company there’s probably a thousand project managers who could do the job just as well; there are just too many people for just one slot. One is good at putting themselves in the spotlight, so they get it.
How do we compare basketball coaches, though? By victories? But it’s not actually them playing, is it?
But that’s the thing, it’s not hidden, it’s extremely well documented. You’re just ignorant of it all so you substitute your conspiracy theories for knowledge.
The promotion process and skill evaluation matrix at large corporations is extremely detailed and extremely widely disseminated within the company (both the “official” version and the unofficial oral tradition). Here’s Dropboxes as a random example because I stumbled across it recently. The skills you need to ascend each level are extremely mundane but they are just flat out skills. You need to know how to run a recruitment, hiring and development cycle. You need to know how to do competitor analysis, positioning and branding. You need to know how to run your one-on-ones and spot team conflicts and how to resolve them. You need to know how to do goal setting, monitor your KPIs and set up experimentation frameworks. You need to be able to financially model, you need to know how to brief an executive team at different levels of clarity. You need to communicate strategy down so people below you are unblocked as to what to do. etc. etc.
All of these are just flat out skills, you are terrible at it the first time you try it and then you learn as you go and get better over time. Some people have more aptitude towards some skills than others, some people improve faster than others. Some people flat out just don’t want to do it and opt out at every stage from advancing to the next stage. Why management always looks so incompetent is because the skillset is so broad that nobody can even be remotely decent at even half of them and when you’re bad, it’s extremely obvious but when you’re merely competent, it seems invisible. At every level when you go up, the bar gets even higher and the natural aptitude caps out, just like any tournament selection game.
I’m not saying the selection game is perfect by any means but I’m saying that once you’ve reached even a few levels up, it’s easy to look at those people and believe they’re inept because they perform so much worse compared to their peers but like, even the worst player in the minors in baseball is someone who absolutely smokes the guy who’s “pretty good” amongst his friends and the same absolutely applies to business because these are all straightforwardly skills and people who have put in the effort to improve them simply beat out the people who think the job is just schmoozing and backstabbing.
No, this is cope.
Let me pose a simple question for you: Why, even at levels several levels down from the top, is it so common to bring in an unconnected outside hire in lieu of promoting from within? Even if we totally accept your Game of Thrones world view of toadies vying for a crown, what’s the logic of upsetting the apple cart? The person you’re bringing in doesn’t have his own personal fiefdom or existing political connections, you’ve butthurt a bunch of people who were only supporting you because of they were contending for the role, and you’re taking the gamble on someone who you’ve only seen the resume + had a few hours of interviews with vs people on your team that you’ve been observing for years.
I’m not talking about high level execs, I’m talking about like, GMs and Senior Directors of which a F500 might have 1000 of. And I’m not talking about someone who is a close family friend or nepo baby or anything like that, I’m talking literally about people who their resume lands on your desk and you go from knowing nothing about them to bringing them into the role 3 months later.
Every management guide will tell you outside hires are a terrible risk for all the reasons I’ve laid out above. The only reason you ever resort to an outside hire is because you simply don’t believe that any internal candidate has what it takes to be promoted in that moment and the outside hire is the less worse option than the risk of promoting someone unqualified.
And the plain truth is, even at that level so far down the company, it’s hard to find people who have developed enough to take the role. Those roles are hard and require a lot of straightforward skill and it can be extremely obvious to a manager that even at that level, you’re fighting hard for the talent. And it’s a opinion derived from hard won experience because you can actually do statistics at that level. Some managers perform well and others flame out and you can predict which ones flame out and see what skills they were lacking and if you believe the chances of your internal hires flaming out is more likely because they simply don’t have the skills, you reluctantly engage in an outside hiring process.