This is my favorite and if you believe this is a fucked up idea of corporate/government America, I’m afraid to say I’ve lived this 
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I wish him peace. I gave it a little thought, and realized that I’d think poorly of MAGA-types that didn’t do the same for Biden. It was a good little bit of introspection.
FWIW, prostate cancer is typically noted with a Gleason score. Basically, they take multiple samples from a biopsy, and rate them for how aggressive/nasty/etc they are, on a scale of 1-5. They take the two worst (higher numbers being bad) and add them together. That’s the Gleason score. High Gleason cases can be very aggressive and need treatment. There are a few ‘recent’ threads that dive into it in more depth.
So have I. I did much of my work in academia and for enlightened companies that genuinely believed in individual empowerment. They knew what they were doing without “mission statements” and meaningless corporate babble. They had no Pointy-Haired-Bosses. I could easily have believed that Dilbert’s world was composed of ludicrous exaggerations.
But then I started doing consulting work and found out that Dilbert’s world was very real. The worst offenders tended to be telecom companies and their subsidiaries, and the big banks (interestingly, Adams had previously worked at PacBell). I spent an unfortunate number of years consulting for one particular big bank (hey, they paid well!) In my frustration, I had no hesitation in posting relevant Dilbert cartoons all over my office, particularly the outside. It was my hope that some of the PHBs passing by would realize the cartoon was talking about them!
In retrospect, I’m surprised I wasn’t asked to take them down, but that might have been too much of an admission that they hit too close to home!
In his own words: Dilbert creator sparks outrage for saying you should ‘kill’ your own son if he is a ‘danger’ to others | The Independent
I’m sad for his late son, and the mom.
Adams is one of those Dunning-Krueger victims who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room on any given area because of his expertise in one area.
Dilbert was funny because the office stereotypes are universal, but moreover when you’re in the room with the Pointy-Haired Boss, you can’t help but feel like the smartest guy in the room. Adams tapped into our inner know-it-all.
And knowing what we now know about Adams, well, reading the old strips certainly puts things in a different light. You want to ask Dilbert if he’s so smart, why isn’t he in charge? And you know the answer will be an angry rant about how high-IQ guys should really be in charge, and the only reason they’re denied their rightful rule is because, well… it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.
I suspect Adams was a good enough guy at one point. I hope he can reconnect with that before the end. If not, oh well.
I’ll never forget when I worked tech support for a medical software company, and we put out a brand new product that was broken. It was a big deal. Basically, we had three different types of back ends for our software… The smallest, most common product was based on the “c-tree” database, and then we had the bigger databases that scaled to huge organizations (like major hospitals, universities, and the like) based on SQL and Oracle. The vast majority of our customers were smaller clinics and used the c-tree products. (Imagine one server and a half a dozen client machines, like a couple of front desk machines and a few computers in the exam rooms.)
Anyway, we put out a brand new version of the c-tree database. And it was totally broken. Literally, every single customer who got that product would have a dead system. We had no fix. It was a lemon. (I believe that our developers were frantically working on a fix, and it did eventually come, but it took a while.)
(And just to be clear, this was our implementation of the database that was screwed up. Not the original database architects. I’m not calling out the people who designed c-tree.)
As tech support, we were getting these calls from customers saying our system doesn’t work, please help us fix it. And of course, we can’t. There is no way for tech support to fix a product that does not work. (Don’t ask me how this thing got out the door without anyone catching the fact that it doesn’t work; I don’t remember, but I think it had something to do with the old tired story of putting out software to meet some deadline when it wasn’t ready.)
Anyway, we asked, what can we do? We normally can fix things by changing settings, running a database repair, showing customers how to do a work-around, and so on. We have nothing here. Our instructions were clear. Do not ever even hint to customers that there is a problem with the software itself. Just play dumb and do the usual crap we would normally do (look at settings, run a database utility, and so on). We know we can’t fix it. Just show a reasonable amount of effort and when it doesn’t fix it, say you are escalating it and someone will contact them. And hopefully there will be a fix before everyone loses their patience.
What was driving all of this was the sales team. They steered the ship because they brought in the money, and if it got out that we sold garbage software, nobody would buy anymore. I seem to recall people eventually figured out it sucked and they struggled to sell it anyway, but I’m confident that none of us squealed. I hated the whole situation, because I loved helping people (and still do, my job today is to help people and it’s very satisfying). I hated lying to people.
I am no longer in the corporate world. I’m not going to pretend that working in government is a utopia and everyone is an angel, but when you take away profits as a motivation, you can afford to be a lot more honest. It’s pretty refreshing. At least where I work it’s like that, since our agency is devoted to workplace safety and helping ensure that employees are treated fairly by their employers.
I have no idea what he was trying to say with that. He knew his son was going to shoot up a high school and so he let him OD?
Aside, I have a friend who looks a lot like Scott Adams and he despises conservatives so that’s unfortunate.
Apologies for being slightly OT, since this is not a Dilbert cartoon (it’s from the New Yorker) but while I’m on a roll about posting all those Dilbert cartoons all over my office in my frustration at one of those soulless bureaucracies, this was one of my faves and was prominently featured on the outside in a (probably) futile attempt to deliver a subtle message:
He’s actually not entirely out of the game just yet…
New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com
And my favorite Dilbert was always the one where (as I recall, I can’t find it just yet), Dogbert was making vendors jump through flaming hoops. As a long time corporate IT guy, that one always warmed the cockles of my heart.
I like that one more than the Scott Adams ones.
Although i used to keep his cartoon about password rules taped to my wall at work, and wrote my passwords on it. That was my protest to our then-crazy password rules.
I had a friend who once said if his theoretical kid did something truly heinous like rape or murder a child, he would strangle them to death with his own hands out of a sense of personal responsibility. Big talk, perhaps - but this was one of the few individuals I’ve ever met that I would think would be at least hypothetically capable of following through. Good guy generally, but he was very uncompromising and self-righteous in his own sense of morality and owing to a less that stellar upbringing, pretty compartmentalized when it came to family. He was most definitely not a ‘blood is thicker than water’ type.
I was going to say exactly the same thing.
I admire your grace, but let’s not both-sides this. Biden might disagree with people on the right, but he was never purposely mean or cruel, or actively wished harm on those who disagreed with him. The same can’t be said for Adams.
If he was speaking seriously, your friend was deranged. And it appears to me, just going by your description, that his “less than stellar upbringing” instilled a deranged value system where the meaning of “personal responsibility” became perverted. Part of the responsibility of bringing up a child is instilling the appropriate civilized values, and in cases of mental issues due to neurological anomalies or addiction issues, recognize the problem and seek the appropriate treatment.
From the way you described it, this person isn’t fit to be a parent – but people are complicated, and the complicated reality might be quite different if he really did become a parent.
From my superficial understanding of the situation, it sounds like Scott Adams failed his stepson. Realistically, his options may have been limited – none of us know the exact circumstances – but the quote from The Independent posted previously suggesting that Adams posted that if you have a kid addicted to fentanyl, you have a duty to either kill him or watch other people die and “there are no other options” suggests that Adams was no longer speaking from a place of sanity. If the kid had been any younger, Adams could well have been charged with manslaughter and child neglect.
Since you mentioned high IQs, Scott Adams was a known member of Mensa for some time.
So what? A lot of Mensa members join just to use it as a false badge of superiority based on their success on Mensa’s artificial testing criteria and have rarely contributed anything useful to society. I once argued with an alleged Mensa member on another message board (or it may even have been this one) about some trivial subject I’ve forgotten about now and he was a fucking moron.
Yeah, that pretty much puts a bow on what I said. Even bothering to join Mensa is a sign of deep insecurity, and telling people about it is worse. His only real achievement was drawing a cartoon about a guy who’s smarter than everyone else, yet not recognized for it. The pathology is pretty clear.
I would look for him to go down hawking some miracle cure that the normies haven’t thought about yet, or somehow blaming his cancer on the woke establishment.
Too many people my age are dying. I wish Scott Adams all the best.
I would agree. Nobody should wish him ill or take delight in his suffering, but neither do we have any special obligation to wish him well or pretend like it’s an irreplaceable loss of a kind-hearted man. The best I can say is at least he’ll be able to lay down his burden of being bitter and resentful. Seems like it was a heavy one.
This is my favorite one, really nailed corporate reorgs (sorry for the link to Twitter, couldn’t find a better one):
As to the topic, I was very sad when Dilbert went south and then Adams revealed himself as a racist jerk. I guess I did my mourning then.
I’ll be damned if i’m going to waste what precious empathy I have left these days on a magat like Adams. Karma is a bitch. Fuck 'em.