Egregoros

Today's venture capitalists truly are scum of the earth (in large part because there's no money in it nowadays after SarBox, so it attracts C level financial talent at best).

Context is a company that lied about "building a ship in one year from scratch."

Because it's a boat (and lying about that is politically very bad right now while trying to get the attention of Congressmen and their staffers etc.), and not a terribly large ocean going one. And they bought a company that's been doing this for 61 years. And it gets worse:

https://nitter.poast.org/jamoses92/status/2060558854426099732#m

@PoalackJokes88 @poastoak OK, taking a step back and reading the full, thought out treatment by Konrad, the former SEAL CEO of Saronic is also a scumbag retarded psychopath.

He and his company are trying to take money and war winning or losing mindshare from shipbuilding, which is on life support, to a very healthy ecosystem of workboats where the US is a world leader.

The ecosystems are also almost totally disjoint, there's not much boat builders make or buy that ship builders can use. You can't lift a ship like the one they've created on a few straps....

And the autonomous naval boat business is red hot right now, which is no doubt one reason he and his company are trying this ploy. No matter that it might help convince Important People that things are in hand.

They don't care if we lose a real naval war because we don't have enough serious tonnage warships and auxiliaries. Actively so, so a psychopath in the common usage of that work.

If this wasn't a needed thing, I'd recommend killing the company outright to make a point to not fuck around like this (and, yes, that's how this game is played in D.C., much to our detriment).

Read the whole thing; it includes not in the Xweets details like how they're digitizing everything about the sixty year old workboat building company they bought, vs. "plan work schedules with a whiteboard and fridge magnets because its ‘good enough’...."

Not just the boat itself, which sounds pretty awesome for what it really is. Compare to the sixteen footers we're buying at a rate of one every day, and using hard right now.

https://gcaptain.com/saronic-marauder-ship-or-boat/

@poastoak @PoalackJokes88 He's not quite that perfect, closer to 95% I'd say. He's by self-admission mentally ill, and for a very good reason, a father with a very bad case of PSTD.

As one albeit nasty so don't judge him too hard example, he believes his father was killed by Agent Orange microdoses (no, it's not that bad even in large-ish doses, or at least not the dioxin the usual suspects blamed it on back when the latter was a campaign of their's).

But A and B are spot on, and he's avoided a lot of the usual bad tropes that consume too much of the online Right. No doubt comes from being the sort of guy with a licence to command everything afloat except nuclear powered ships. Or see my favorite anecdote he's told, quoting:

"Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire

"Capitalists spend their time building

"Communists and Islamists spend their time destroying

"This asymmetry gives the latter a 10x advantage

"One side is passive while the other side is active"

He replied:

"John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad

"I learned this the first time I navigated a supertanker under a bridge.

"Captain said 'You want to create jobs for thousands of people? Turn right in that bridge column.'

"Destruction creates a LOT of jobs for dems and even more opportunities for fraud.

"Apr 7, 2026 · 8:47 PM UTC"

This is the broken window theory of economics BTW; for a full demolishing of it, see Economics In One Easy Lesson

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2041618828493296058

https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson-pdf.pdf

@poastoak @PoalackJokes88 Hmmm, it occurs to me that Konrad was lucky to connect closely with at least one jati (there are thirty thousand endogamous groups layered under castes) that by definition had to do the needful, else they wouldn't come back home from sea.

He spent a couple of years on a wildly successful gas field exploration job, including an unexpected intensity of a tsunami going under his ships that then wiped out a lot of the families of his men.

But plenty of us, especially in IT I can attest, know of or have heard stories from people we trust of Indians from presumably other jati who are lazy and thus "do the needful" is even a thing in their English dialect. For example there was a case where one firm arranged to (try to) deliver the same system to at least two different small states and get paid double or more for what they did. That was too clever by half of course. Or see my stories of one, probably, particularly incompetent boiler room shop trying to scam me as of late.

Hmmm, and he hasn't talked about working under Indians, which tends to be dire. May not have happened, he/the foreign firm he was working for was as is typical thrown out of the country once they found their big find. One reason India is poor is a lot of foreign firms have been burned in that sort of way, electrical power plants were a big example of that a while ago.

That said, trying to understand India from such a remove is frankly not something most of us want to do, and see his comments about never, ever going back. He too learned a set of lessons about how bad it and at least some Indians are.

@PoalackJokes88 @poastoak Yeah, that'll certainly do it, if not be the majority of problems. And you indeed don't want to run afoul of the 1977 US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, don't know about other Western countries.

But here I'm talking about active measures. Not even an "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further," but kicking Konrad and I don't know who else straight out of the country after he had discovered a huge gas field, and for the power plants, ruinously changing the economic deal once they were built and connected to the grid.

The first was envy, but both the poison the well for potential future deals and accomplishments with foreigners. Modulo P.T. Barnum, but eventually a country can get a reputation so bad not all that many are willing to take a chance. The PRC for example appears to be in a harsh transition to that.

Earlier, in 1977 India enacted harsh ownership controls and IP transfer demands after socialists ousted Indira Gandhi and her Congress party (and that was very much needed). Union Carbide was foolish enough to relinquish majority control of their Bhopal plant while allowing its name to stay on it. It only took seven years for what was likely a sabotage disaster, preceded by the plant switching from packaging etc. for the market to making dangerous stuff. IBM was wiser, had much more IP to protect, and just plain got out by 1978.

Overall, one general label for all this is "regime risk." Something we should keep in mind during these decline and fall of the American Republic days....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act