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Comment by s3p | Hacker News Reader

Oh this is hilarious. Didn't AT&T also acquire HBO and spin them off too?

They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.

The "credit" for that move actually belongs to WarnerBros Discovery

My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.

You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.

They are also functionally both a way for certain well-connected shareholders to exert disproportionate influence and a placating propaganda machine for the shareholders who aren't

Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism

McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"

One of those jobs LLMs can easily take over.

I'm not sure if you are suggesting the CEO hedging their bets or the consultants, but I'd say both of those jobs could be replaced by an LLM.

You can replace low and maybe mid skill employees with software but it’s the high end ones consultants or CEO that are great at their jobs with good software can be orders of magnitude more efficient.

They will increasingly rely on increasingly good AI and in the process the mistakes will inevitably not be made by humans.

My joke referred to having someone to blame in general.

I cant help but tell stories, sorry... I got a new job once, an inspection happened, same things were wrong as the previous 3 inspections but this time the other employees blamed me for everything. I greedily took the blame. I wish I had pictures of the faces they made.

Nope the entire point of the job is to have a person to blame when it goes wrong.

the blame is absorbed by McKinsey the corporation, not the people working there

they'll just use AI like everyone else but charge extra for it

Society is already buying in the "AI did it" framing. See the latest 'jailbreaks' at openai and anthropic. They said "oh dear, look what our AI did, somebody needs to do something why don't we have regulations yet".

Consultants are for decision based evidence making.

They also somehow made everyone download new apps because apparently the old one couldn't be updated.

HBO was part of Time Warner.

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