Kyle Brady: Blog » Idiot

Rush Limbaugh’s Idiocy [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:53:32 +0000

I was browsing Rush Limbaugh's page last night (because I sent him an email about my Obama post the other day, hoping to provoke a reaction, so I was looking for some sort of response), and came across this bunch of nonsense:

Essentially, he's attacking President Obama for the decisions he's made regarding Chrysler recently. I don't support the massive amounts of money that we've given the U.S. auto industry, to little effect, but I still respect Obama as our President. I like him, yes, but even if I didn't I would respect him and his office.

Limbaugh apparently doesn't feel the need to treat him with any modicum of respect. Here's the highlighted excerpts transcribed:

"Barack Peron", "Argentina-Style", "Left-wing fascism coming out for Chrysler", "I heard all about the enchanted question, and that's what happens with the feminization of our culture", "president Barack Peron", "What this means is that the laws of economics cannot be changed. Liberalism is a failure."

I honestly wonder why people pay him to spout such nonsense. What advertisers would want to be known for supporting him? He compares our President to a legitimately fascist regime (I wonder if Limbaugh can even properly define "fascism"), assaults the culture at large (Are we all supposed to be gigantic fatass idiots like him? Is that what being "male" is?), and then somehow associates the auto-industry's failure directly with economics and liberalism.

I could spend hours dissecting how wrong he is on almost every point (not to mention the horrible scare-tactic Photoshop job he included), but there's one flaw worth pointing out...

Ronald Reagan, the supposed darling of the GOP (including Limbaugh) at the moment, was a Republican. But by today's standards, he would be considered a Democrat, or at least a "liberal". If you want to scream and cry about this, consider what our party system's history looks like.

Chrysler's failure (along with the rest of the economy) is not a failure of our current President, nor is it a failure of a loose collection of ideas known as "liberalism" - it is, in fact, a direct result of deregulation, lack of oversight, and attempting to have a true free-market economy. Even disregarding that his party created this whole mess while in power in the first place, at the end of the day he's insulting (by indirect association) what he claims to believe in.

Idiot Interviewers [Old Content]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:20:01 +0000

I really hate people sometimes.

I just got off the phone with the "Lead" on a project over at Slide (very much like RockYou), who was supposed to gauge my technical abilities. He asked about my experience - fine. He then asked me a database question that I answered, but prefaced with "I'm not a db admin, and this isn't what I want to do/was told the position entails".

Next question was a "data sorting" one... I gave him a correct answer, but he wanted a faster one. I gave him one. But he wanted faster. Said I couldn't think of any more, but this is the sort of thing I'd do some quick research and documentation digging on. The guy told me what he wanted... I immediately recognized it, and it was the type of thing that only academia and Google care about/use.

The best part? He ended it there, and said I was "too junior" for what they were looking for. After asking me a n/a question, and then giving him an answer that was correct... just not "enough".

And then he called the hiring manager and told her the same thing.

How the hell do you judge someone's programming talents based on that? You can't. Even if you're going to talk by phone, it's difficult. This sort of crap is what pisses me off about snooty nosed academia idiots... you don't know everything unless you've used everything, and apparently that's not a good answer.

Even if you're awesome (like me), how can they know if they don't bother to go any further than two questions - one of which you answered right, but docked on?

God damn bullshit. Good thing I don't like companies like them anyways.

Funding: An Insightful Insight [Old Content]

Kyle Brady — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:31:46 +0000

[aka "Funding != Good Idea" or "Funding Doesn't Mean They're Smart"]

I spoke to a recruiter via phone yesterday who was trying to interest me in getting a job with RockYou. When I politely declined, he wanted to know why, and I said something to the effect of "I have no interest in working for companies whose sole existence is, and always will be, dependent on outside funding and other people's platforms...not to mention those without any real business plans or actual use value".

His response? A resounding "I don't think they would have gotten [insert large number here] of funding if they didn't have value or a business plan."

So, out of that lovely event, comes this exciting installment of "Kyle telling you what should already be obvious."

How VCs Work
Venture Capitalists are well known for investing in things that have either:

Already been funded
Already been proven successful

This isn't true across the board, but when you look at the subset of VCs that invest in Internet-based "software" companies, the probability of truth gets much closer to 1.

Don't believe me?

How many fully-funded Twitter clones are there?
Facebook clones?
"Digg killers"?
"Google [search] killers"?

Web 2.0 Is Not Business
Another widely acknowledged nugget of gold is that most "Web 2.0" properties are not profitable. In fact, most of them have no idea how they could generate a revenue stream even remotely close to their operating costs, other than "oh, well we'll just put ads on the site!"

Good Idea? Yeah, Right.
One of my biggest pet peeves of the Internet at the moment is the "me too!" atmosphere. If one person does something that becomes popular (note: popular is not the same as successful), or gets a large round of funding, there's immediately a gaggle of idiots who want to do the same thing, but with some twist.

Alot of good ideas don't get funded, or even noticed. Why? Because no-one has done it yet, or it's "too risky". The big money would rather bet on something other people have bet on before, because it's "tried and true". So these groups of people with original ideas trundle on their own for awhile, and sometimes end up with a startup company that took years to put together while they cooked sausages at children's festivals.

Developer's Platforms
Newsflash: basing your entire "business" (without revenue) around the whims of someone else is stupid, and roughly equivalent to swimming in the ocean while chewing on a giant electrical line that's dangling from a satellite in orbit.

Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. can change their APIs, data access levels, or platform structures at any time, for any reason. You want to develop a way to throw Zombie feet at your friend's pig farms? Great. You want to create a company, and get funded, so you can do random "social activities" with other people through another company's platform? Right.

One of the cardinal rules in running web software is that you should control as much of the user experience as possible. This is why Facebook has massive data centers instead of cloud-sourcing to someone like, say, Amazon S3... and you don't see someone like Google betting the virtual farm on MySpace's clunky architecture.

People Are Idiots
If you follow that motto, you'll see the world clearly. Ok, maybe have alot less friends, but you'll thank me for it. Why? Because once you realize that people are lazy and want to do the least work possible to get fame/success/fortune/whatever, you are able to see the giant flaws in their plans without falling into the potholes containing many fellow sheep.

There's only two reasons why someone would assume that having funding equates to a "good idea", a "great business", a "revenue stream", or "really smart people":

They have no idea what they're talking about
They're an idiot

Conclusion

So why, in all that is mighty, would anyone assume that an extravagantly funded Web 2.0 "software" company is going to exist in 5 years, be profitable, or even be remotely valuable to real people?

I have no idea.

p.s. If you want to cry and complain and argue that I "have no sources", then use what little of that brain you may have to do some Google research yourself.

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Update (6/26/2008 4:00am PST): How fitting! Mashable just put up a story about a major Facebook Application "magically disappearing", and not due to something the app developers did... it either got "accidentally removed" or banned. Hmmm... [see more]

Update (6/26/2008 1:15pm PST): Valleywag picked this up. Nice! And it seems that people agree with me...