Re:Quibi Is Shutting Down
by jeffbee on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @04:08PM
(#24851546)
Merit is not a component of American meritocracy. If you're born into an ancient line of people with ridiculous ordinal suffixes after their names, study at Princeton and Harvard, and marry some other guy who also has a ridiculous name, you are guaranteed a lifelong supply of lucrative opportunities no matter how many times you have to write down an eight billion dollar loss after a botched acquisition.
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Re:Quibi Is Shutting Down
by throw_m239339 on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @04:22PM
(#24851712)
While there are outliers, it was never a meritocracy, it's just an aristocracy and all these people at the top are cronies, sitting on the board of each others companies, paying themselves and others outrageous compensations, that why they can fail upwards and get promoted even more with each screw up, because they are here to maintain the power of a clique. I don't know anything about the Whitman family but I guess it's a bit, old, rich one with a lot of political ties everywhere.
Calling all that a meritocracy makes no sense. It never was. Now the problem today is some people thinking that replacing an aristocracy with a nomenklatura is going to make things better for people at the bottom...
The very origin of the word meritocracy is to satire the very concept it has taken now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology