It's not Enron.

It's Sun Microsystems in 1999.

The growth is a one time surge due to AI hype, like Y2K fears which required double hardware purchases for pre-y2k testing and the internet boom. When Y2K passed, while the internet boom continued, all those test servers (and routers and other hardware) bought pre-y2k were freed up and reused, cutting growth #s and driving up P/E ratios for Sun instantly, and with Sun serving as a proxy for the internet boom, the boom was declared a bust in Q1 of 2000. Oh and low end x86+Linux competition didn't help.

This.

Many emotional problems that are highly dysfunctional can be missed or masked by raw intelligence until a certain higher level of intellectual competition or pressure is present.

Having participated in frequent academic competitions in high school in a top-5-biggest metropolitan area in the US, there was one guy in my era who pretty much won city-wide awards in any subject he touched all the time. So bright. He got into an elite college and spiraled out and dropped out for what, in hindsight I'd armchair-diagnose, were a mix of ADHD/Autistic/anxiety-oriented tendencies that collided with online gaming that hadn't caused failures in earlier environments for him.

Agreed. And local NIMBY can get surprisingly personal and politically vicious fast.

I have a friend who argued in public forums (local newspapers+blogs) for denser housing being more walkable and sustainable (in a wealthy small neighborhood we both lived in.) "Small towns" was/is the nationwide name for the trend.

Unknown opponents dug up and published dirt on him that even his wife, friends and employer didn't know. It was quite sobering.

And so they keep blocking efforts by resorting to smear tactics. Own it and reverse it back on them. Debate class 101, they have nothing if they attack you personally.

It sucks that your friend had his closet ransacked for skeletons. This is why I’m completely honest with mine.

Uber's abusive terms are interesting to me. 10+ years ago I refused to use it because it wanted access to all my contacts on my phone and wouldn't run in my browser (android).

I revisited years later and it worked well in a browser an the downloadable app didn't need so many crazy permissions

If his admissions are true. your statement is more misleading than his. He wrote it. AI edited it. Right?

I wonder if under the covers it uses your word choices to infer your Myers-Briggs personality type and you are INTJ so it calls you "The Architect"?? Crazy thought but conceivable...

Possible :) GPT 5.1-thinking, Sonnet 4.5-thinking, and Grok 4.1 don't make up names like that.

“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”

This apparently is an old African proverb coopted by the modern managerial class.

For those thinking about this issue, there are tech-specific related arguments similar to and contrary to the above. I heard the phrase from a Microsoft leader in early 2010s:

* "Heroism doesn't scale" (similar)

While I'm not sure it is completely true, there are respects in which it is deeply true (e.g. ops). It's a double-edged sword I think though; if you take the "Heroism doesn't scale" too seriously, you can suffocate out other key success drivers -- vision, innovation, motivation, design clarity/consistency, etc.

There's also (Fred) Brooks's Law (from Mythical Man Month):

* "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." (contrary)

I.e. there are limits to how many people "going far, going together" works for fundamental communication/coordination reasons.

P.S. There are also similar debates about optimal authority/responsibility/coordination across various military cultures, e.g. search for "military command".

I agree with your comment that getting feedback is different to making the final decision.

But I'm not sure the real problem fits solely in your two buckets.

I've been in recent situations where there is a less-technical person charged with making the "final decision" and a lot of other senior people in the room who don't all /have/ to agree. But the degree of "why not do it this way?" questioning+discussion will grow with the number of meeting participants (and/or worse, the # of meetings before a decision is made if it is not settled in one meeting and then new stakeholders arrive and have their own thrashing out to do.) And even with one final decider, you can end up a bit still with "Design By Committee" decisions when the final decider goes along with the group consensus or doesn't have a strong point of view on an issue.

Sounds much cooler than what my management likes to call it. RACI or RASCI for every key project.

Perhaps a prior promise to someone else?

Or you know... just the definition of a FIFO Queue. I mean, using a FILO Stack to organize your work would certainly be a choice...

Definitionally if they're "pushing it near the top" they're not only using FIFO, there's a priority ordering involved...

My guess is there's stuff in progress and maybe they need to arrange access to or setup the readers for a tape that old and of potentially unknown format.

Yes it's probably better to finish in progress stuff first.

So much of this is old and potentially delicate and they don't have unlimited space to work in so they'd have to pack up some other in progress digitization project to setup the tape flux digitizer and maybe have to arrange to get the correct one for this type of tape too.