I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
This essay really reminds me of someone I know who's integrity and impulse control has changed dramatically over the last 2 years coinciding with their descent into crushing poverty (e.g., phones and internet and electricity often cut off, forced to use the local food bank, narrowly avoided eviction notices, etc).
Perhaps Elon is experiencing a degree of stress in his life that most people just cannot fathom - I am certain this other person I know is. I can imagine that extreme affluence and fame might also be as stressful as dire poverty. I believe extreme stress negatively affects integrity and impulse control.
I can’t remember if it’s against HN rules to implore people to read the actual article.
The reason he became good at selling (according to the article) is because he changed his attitude despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment.
It’s an interesting and probably helpful lesson for the startup hustlers here on HN if they can make it through this admittedly long essay.
Yeah, but you are, at least seemingly, missing the point: the scripts he was referring to in context weren't the legal disclosures but the sales tricks that were handed to them to use. He is pointing out that the 'elite' saleswoman wasn't better at strategy or sales tricks, but was effective because she made them feel good.
The article was also written by someone who is not a reliable narrator.
The type of person who would skip the legally required stuff while working as a telemarketer is exactly the kind of person who'd tell you he got fired for a "technicality", while he was actually fired because he was breaking the law and lying to customers.
Especially considering that even the unreliable narrator himself admits he was one of the first ones to be fired - why would you fire the best employee first if it wasn’t for cause?
It is against the rules to imply that the person you are responding to hasn’t read the article, but I don’t think it is against the rules to implore the community to read it, generally.
Also just to be more explicit, people can (should) read the article and decide. It is not super long and it is engagingly written. I think the author is kind mythologizing his job… there’s clearly a fraud component to how he got better, and a skill improvement component. It isn’t obvious which contributed more from his telling, and given that his telling is probably inclined to put him in a good light, I lean toward the fraud.
It was astonishingly humane especially considering how effective it was:
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
You could always have the end user drop in their legally obtained copy of CARDS.DLL from older versions of Windows, and then parse the NE to extract all of the card images...at least, that's what I did when I made a clone of Windows Solitaire :)
Never mind mugshots - I think they already have access to most people’s faces, even those that have never been arrested.
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