It's just a giant thundering herd in the valley. Sure would have been nice to hear exactly one of the so-called intelligentsia saying things were going to be bad 9 months ago.

Not that it isn't true, because if enough people controlling enough money believe it to be true, it'll be true.

Well, pmarca predicted "nuclear winter" in April and people thought he was nuts. Not quite 9 months ago though:

"We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things."

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/04/ning-news-serie.html

I stand corrected. And by someone whose writings I do (mostly) respect.

It's amazing how Guy just recycles the same crap endlessly for decades.

"All you have to do is listen to your CEO talk to people for a week and determine if she uses these lines."

Little sexist there. Why does a sucky CEO have to be female?

I wonder if the correct approach is to use "she" when talking about positive things so people don't think you assume all CEOs are male, and use "he" when talking about negatives so people don't complain you think all bad CEOs are female.

The correct approach is to just use "he" like people have been doing since the language was invented.

use of 'she' as a gender-neutral pronoun is bullshit counter-sexism... think reverse racism...

There is no such thing as reverse racism. There is racism or not.

There is not even "not racism". There is just racism.

Everyone's a little bit racist anyway :-)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KBzv6JSm-No&feature=relate...

I'd have an easier time accepting the argument for just existential Otherness. But +1 for Ave Q - I loved that show.

my point exactly. weak, superficial attempt at political correctness.

The real question is, why don't people understand English? "He" is not always gender-specific, depending on the context. Don't like it? Well, I don't like the word "moist", but I put up with it since it's part of the damned language.

If you haven't already done so, check out http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=540

"Moist aversion: the cartoon version"

Haha, was thinking the same thing when I read it :P

But I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm not sure if there are any rules to the use of 'she/he' when talking about 3rd person?