Maybe it does. Minimalism periodically gets in and out of fashion. But even if it doesn't, that's just a hobby, like any other.

Fast-forward 40 years:

Old people: Everything was better when people used TikTok, it was fun and when you looked up you still connected with other people, it was real.

Young people (multitasking from within brain-wired-VR with "orgasm mode" enabled 24/7/365): k

Not even left-of-center, unless by "center" one means the center of US politics, whose Overton window is so skewed to the right it's almost entirely on it. For most everyone most everywhere else, the NYT, even at its most leftist moments, is still at best center to center-right.

Super hard left? Cool! I didn't know the New York Times advocated for the suppression of private means of production, for worker-owned factories, for collective decision-making via assemblies of workers, for the disalienation of workers through work and the dialectical materialist critique of class consciousness, for an international armed revolution of the proletariat, and for the implantation of a dictatorship of the proletariat through which a Socialist State will open the way to the stateless Communism!

I'm quite interested in those articles! Could you please link to some of those? If they're good I might even subscribe!

Real sociopaths look for what's best for themselves. Everything and everyone is a step to be stepped on in the pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement. They don't care for the company, much less for what's best for it, at least not directly. They do care, on some level, but only to the extent it serves their own self-interest. The instant it doesn't, they couldn't care less.

That's why laws generally try to rein in their worst traits. Left to their own devices, sociopathic CEOs are all too happy to use slave labor, kill competitors (literally), let their employees rot in hazardous environments, look dispassionately while they lose limbs due to lack of safety, decapitate children before their parents to incentivize other to work harder, and so on, and so forth -- all things they did and continue doing whenever they can get away with it.

All of which may help a company succeed, for a certain scale of succeeding, but going for that specific scale versus any other that might be adopted isn't an automatic, natural, it-couldn't-be-anything-else fact of nature. It's a social choice that could change and go in any other direction, and under those the traits that make sociopathic leaders be the best might instead cause them to sink to the bottom.

Which isn't to mean they'd have na place in society. For example, sociopaths and psychopaths would do well working as social media moderators to block content uploaded by other sociopaths and psychopaths, this being a job that causes normies to go through mental breakdowns. Those just wouldn't be places of authority.

As for wars, indeed. If one's goal is to kill the enemy no matter how many of one's own side die, then sure, sociopaths easily take that path, no doubt about that. In those rare, rare instances, they might deserve command. But as soon as the need was fulfilled, they should lose it, so as not to cause any further damage.

The answer is likely in this bit: "I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted."

Given C-suites are, way more often than not, sociopaths, I read that as "I have heard from well-paid, trusted people, that normal people, for some reason I cannot really comprehend, feel some kind of 'difficulty' to see colleagues and teams impacted. That was a very novel information, and I'm curious to learn more about that strange feeling you normies experience, so I'm trying a few things. How did it go?"

There's no single good source on the concept of "intangible factors" in business, so I'm linking a search. Glance at those and you'll understand something Google's bean counters aren't grasping.

That's exactly what their goal is. This is why Private Equities are so profitable. They destroy the companies they purchase, firing everyone, putting the product on life-support, hijacking prices, and squeezing every cent they can. They don't care if this will cause ill will, because they don't intend to keep that business long term. Once customers managed to run away, they simply shut the operation down, sell its physical assets, then sell its patent portfolio for patent trolls to use, or use them that way themselves.

This tactic brings massive profits short term, which are used to purchase even more companies with captive user bases with which to do the same. Wash, rinse, repeat, until you're so rich you don't want to waste any more time on this, or regulators catch wind of what's going on and forbid it. Either way, by the time they stop, all "investors" have increased their wealth by orders of magnitude.

KbG will need a new categorization scheme, as Google is innovating. Before, they killed products outright. Now, they've moved into killing by a thousand cuts.

One can easily do that with ChatGPT already. Just suitably fill the "Custom instructions" fields to turn it into a language teacher and it's good enough to make one acquainted with the basics of any major language.

It can do more advanced stuff too. I have an autistic friend who has a deep incapacity to understand non-autistic interactions, so I developed a set of instructions that allows him to type what someone said and what he understood of it, and ChatGPT "translates" that into autistic for him.

In 5 to 10 years the entirety of Duolingo and similar services will have been reduced to short scripts available on this and that LLM app store. There's no future for basic language teaching.

The trick involves moving what counts as $0. The rich person has boatloads of stuff that counts as guarantee against their borrowing. They borrow so much they go into the negative. If they ever default, their stuff is taken, but they never default. So they basically turn all their stuff into a new baseline, the new "$0". Then they start operating below that line, into the negative range of the reframed line.

If "$0" means having $1 billion in assets, then transferring titles within the negative range backed by those real assets it, in accounting terms, and for tax purposes, operating in the red. This works either because they own enough stuff, or because they are trusted as able to own more stuff in the future compared to now, so they can play with exchanging those negative numbers with other people in a similar situation. Literally exchanging. They transfer their bank debts among themselves in exchange for exchanging things.

The math works out, it allows exchanges, and it is used for exchanges, or to put it another way, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

Good points, and I completely agree.

That misses the point completely. Money is a facilitator for the exchange goods and services, it has no value of its own outside those relations. A $100 bill, for instance, is basically a promise -- of being able to acquire a certain range of goods and services in the future. No more, no less.

A debt certificate has the same "power" of working as a promise of goods and services being exchanged in the future. The arrow of the promise is inverted compared to a $100 bill, but as long as the promising parties are considered sufficiently trustworthy, that promises hold and can be transferred around. Hence, at that level debts work as money.

In reality, down here, in the concrete world, not that of fancy monetary math, nothing changes. The stuff that concretely exists and that can be transferred from one party to another, and the services that are concretely available and can be provided by a party to another, remain exactly the same, irrespective of how the numbers associated with them flow around. All that varies is the creative complexity of that flow in between actual stuff and actual services exchanging hands.

You're poor or middle class, and deals only with other poor or middle classe people, so you don't know how to use a situation of permanent indebtedness to avoid paying taxes. Google something like "rich people avoid taxes by borrowing money" and you'll find dozens of articles explaining the exact techniques rich people above a certain wealth level have to switch from using positive to negative money as the preferred way to protect themselves from taxes.

Notice that's not for someone who has a few millions at most (a big house or three), that's for those at the level of hundreds of millions and above. If your net worth is at a measly seven digits, those techniques don't apply.

Debt is money. That's what power players do, they rake up debt and keep trading that debt around. It has the additional benefit of, in most case, being tax free, as nominally you're perpetually going from -$x to -$y to -$z, and there's no tax on debts.

Taxes are for the middle class, people who keep moving around the positive side of the axis. Rich folk know how to be efficiently, richly, wealthily "broken" 100% of the time.

Oh, and just for the record, f**k your transphobia.