The Iranian government is responsible of all sorts of human rights violations, and also for the drought (at least partly), but the economic collapse was triggered by the US.
Bessent said so at Davos:
"President Trump ordered our Treasury and our OFAC division (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it's worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. [...] So this is why people took to the street. This is economic statecraft". https://youtu.be/VQQXLnXlWqY?t=1722
Is this how America helps dissidents? Make them so miserable they can't bear it anymore? Anyways, it never works. It just makes civilians more miserable and the government more repressive. Look at Cuba or North Korea.
Yes, I concede the US is partly responsible for Iran's economic collapse. What a wonderful outcome should it result in the Ayatollahs losing their grip on power.
I think we’re talking about bank reserves, which is a fraction (in the order of 1%) of the total amount of money held in the customers’ transaction accounts. Reserves are convertible into cash. Not that any bank would suddenly want to do that, unless there’s a bank run, in which case it’s the customers who want the entirety of their accounts (100x the reserves) converted into cash, which is impossible not because the fed refuses to convert the money, but because the bank doesn’t have enough reserves.
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.
See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.
I think you missed the joke. The thing that was funny about it to him when he said it was he knew it was a natural extension of his public position, yes an extreme version of it, but he knew it was also true and’s logical and it was funny to get away with saying it behind closed doors. An honest person would recognized the truth behind the joke and change the position that it stemmed from because they cared about making the world better. The fact that he recognized he was making the world worse AND continued in that path is what is so blatantly evil and revealing about this memo.
If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.
Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.
I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.
Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.
And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?
Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
My brother in Christ, you keep tumbling yourself to see nuance where there is none. The guy is a piece of shit. Why such magnanimous effort? I suggest you take some time off.
I've mostly repeated the same perspective to people on this thread who would rather virtue signal than read what I've already written, and what I'm saying is not hard to wrap your head around unless you're the type of person to believe in caricatures as I've described above. I think they may need some time off from news, the internet, etc, if anyone.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
Contrary to your thoughts on the matter the Pintupi Nine and their relatives the Richter family spring to mind as the most extreme examples.
Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure.
Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Electrification is a necessary but not sufficient step to zero pollution.
Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed).
Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction.
Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets.
That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
No sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
I think your assumption that Dutch politicians defend the interests of Dutch citizens, if only for winning votes, is wrong. European politician respond first (or only?) to the US. As a EU citizen, I take no pleasure in saying this.
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
Good food in the right proportions is necessary, but not sufficient. The total amount of food is at least as important.
I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.
I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.
Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.
For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.
I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.
The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.
I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.
tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.
I agree that calorie counting in the strict meaning is not necessary.
What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.
Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.
What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.
This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.
I also read that counting calories is so inaccurate that you may die of starvation or become obese, on the same diet. That is, if you exclusively ate what you measured, and all of it.
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
> Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc.
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
Counting calories has low accuracy for various reasons, e.g. for variances in the percentages of food digestion and of nutrient absorption, even in the same individual. There are also appearances of low accuracy caused by the fact that the body adjusts the energy allocated for various internal processes in order to compensate the variances in daily energy intake, but this capacity of compensation is finite and it can be overridden by changing sufficiently the daily energy intake, i.e. the calorie count.
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
> this assumes models can achieve strict prompt adherence
What does strict adherence to an ambiguous prompt even mean? It’s like those people asking Babbage if his machine would give the right answer when given the wrong figures. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a proposition.
I’m not a native English speaker, can someone point me to a definition of “commiserate” that matches the usage in this article? It seems to have a different meaning according to the dictionaries.
Think of it like this: when two soldiers in boot camp are complaining to each other about their drill instructor, the difficulty of the situation, why the food sucks, etc. - they are commiserating. It is a bonding over being in the same shared crappy situation, and having sympathy for that person because of it.
The author is essentially saying this: a manager shouldn’t join in complaining about the job/company/personal problems etc. with his/her subordinates, because it sets up false emotional relationship expectations.
It's a verb used to describe multiple people lamenting the same bad circumstance, with the idea that it's made slightly less bad by the experience of having to go through it together rather than alone. The phrase "misery loves company" is somewhat common in English, and while it's more often used to describe situations where one person feels bad and acts out to make others feel bad as a coping mechanism, the roots of the word are pretty recognizable in it; "co-misery", as in "we're miserable in this together".
I'm a native English speaker, and I also have no idea what the author is talking about. I don't think that word means what he thinks it means. I think he is using "commiserate" to mean "complain".
Commiserating together means validating each other's negative feelings about something.
You may commiserate with a team member when you both get made redundant, as a healthy example.
When a team of several engineers are all thrown under a bus by a PM, they may commiserate with each other about the workload they find themselves with, as a slightly less healthy (but common) example.
But when you, as a manager, commiserate with the team about the PM throwing you under the bus, you are doing your team and the organisation a disservice, in that you're creating an unhealthy us/them dynamic when doing so, and the other things the article suggests.
It didn't make sense to me either. When normally I read "commiserate", I think someone is expressing empathy to someone else on their bad fortune. I assumed the employee was sorry something bad happened to their boss.
But I think you're right, he's saying employees are complaining and the boss is providing sympathy.
Yeah, I think it makes more sense when you consider that the former (boss complaining to direct) is something that should seem obviously bad to even non-managers, but handling the reverse situation correctly is also critical. It's confusing because the title is written as if I am the direct report, while the article is written as if I am the manager.
One teardown and rebuild of the words that make up the roots of "commiseration" might be "to share in wretchedness" or in another way "to be co-miserable".
it always used to mean some kind of shared negativity though like many words the nuance and original meaning has somewhat drifted.
I think the article is a bit weird. To commiserate means to empathize with another's suffering, such as the getting dumped by your girlfriend example in the article.
But the article launches (literally the first sentence) into "As people become managers, it’s quite common for their team members to want to commiserate with them." as though it is just obvious that all managers have some sadness that their team members need to help them through, which is obviously nonsense.
I can only assume the author omitted context. ex: seems to be primarily expressing sympathy with complaining/venting, particularly when it is about another department or higher level within the company. It is commiseration, but without that additional context it is difficult to understand why it is viewed negatively in the post.
I think of the word as a mixture of complaining and sympathizing.
I would consider it commiseration if one were to complain to their coworkers about an HR policy in the hopes of receiving sympathy or agreement about the problems with the policy.
Bessent said so at Davos:
"President Trump ordered our Treasury and our OFAC division (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it's worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. [...] So this is why people took to the street. This is economic statecraft". https://youtu.be/VQQXLnXlWqY?t=1722
Is this how America helps dissidents? Make them so miserable they can't bear it anymore? Anyways, it never works. It just makes civilians more miserable and the government more repressive. Look at Cuba or North Korea.
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