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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting so sick of hearing the word 'disrupt'. It's been so overused that it I feel that it has basically lost all meaning.

Edit: I see that the HN title has been changed in the meantime.

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Well... thus always with cliches. They're often good before they're cliches, a concise illustrative choice of words that conveys nuanced meaning even though it's literally nonsensical. She set the stage on fire. Her fans think the sun shines out of her arse. Most cliche's seem to gradually get long winded and meaningless as they age.

Venkatesh Rao in his epic "Gervais Principle" has some good bits about Gervais' character speaking in all cliches. In American Gods, the new gods speak in all cliches and the show is doing a great job adapting it to their version of that pantheon. That kind of cliche overuse seems to go together with meaninglessess.

The cliche of cliche rich dialects is corporatespeak, where it's used for both its euphamistic quality and the safe haven^ of meaninglessness it creates. Synergies and customer centric approaches.

TechStartupSpeak is (I guess) a subdialect of corporatespeak. It's churning out cliches at a good clip. "Disrupt" conveyed a lot of meaning at first, subtly referencing a particular theory of innovation and cutomer adoption of new technologies.. examples like digital cameras & microcomputers.

Strictly speaking, Tesla's wasn't "disruptive" strategy because they started with sportscars instead of electric bikes. But, that kind of nuance is long gone from this particular cliche. Disrupt is interchangeable with "revolutionize" or and other "be really successful" cliches.

^I guess idioms are cliches that survive without going through the normal lifecyle. Theory needs fleshing out perhaps.

I blame TechCrunch. They fucking beat that term to death like a wounded horse.

Gotta get those eyeballs.

Were disrupting eyeballs

mainstream spoils everything.

btw, what about Bezos paying taxes instead of "optimizing" ?

What evidence can you provide that the government provides a more efficient allocation of ressources? It is well-known that a lot of the taxes go into the military-industrial complex.

Isn't the USA pretty much middle of the pack when it comes to percentage of GDP spent on the military? And I feel like I don't hear too much about Raytheon Billionaires although I'm sure some of the upper echelon at these big contractors must be doing pretty well.

It's also well known a lot of taxes go into our healthcare complex. Is that good or bad? Seems like we overpay for worse outcomes statistically but we also have some of the best healthcare facilities in the world and pioneer a decent amount of drugs.

At the end of the day both are employing a lot of solidly middle class folk who are spending their money moving the economy which seems to be the ideal situation in a lot of ways.

None, it's beyond the question.

When you play games, do you actively not explore how to make the rules work to the best of your ability?

The problem is not companies "optimizing", it's that the tax code is so complicated that they can do it in the first place.

Nice try, tax code may not be the best, but they're not playing a game with unfair rules anyhow. It's just that they have the manpower and financial mass to step on the line.

A citizen trying to "play" the same game who be hit hard by the system. Here's the issue.

This is literally only due to complexity of the tax code. I don't understand how we're not saying the same thing? The citizen is being a rational actor by not stepping on the line of the tax system, and so is the corporation playing the other role.

I see, still not 100% agreeing but I see. Simpler code ensures equality (no need for manpower to use it)

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