@Stephen Stockwell: Jokes about our new Prime Minister being “The Ruddbot” have more than a ring of truth about them, eh? While burning the midnight oil is certainly a useful tactic for special situations, it simply isn’t sustainable.

“Rudd has spectacularly failed the exploitation test,” says Mirko Bagaric in The Age today… and I’ll quote more in a fresh post.

The moon, the moon!

Enjoyed it, but didn’t / couldn’t absorb it all.

Will return later.

“Look at me, I’m better than you because I have more expensive cool stuff” is an attitude which just shows how shallow one really is.

Sadly for him, Calacanis buying a Tesla failed to impress me. I didn’t know that apart from being a famous scientist, Tesla is also the name of an expensive electric car. Now that I know it exists, I’ll have more to say about it later.

No doubt celebrity and showmanship are a central component of JC’s business advertising strategy, I would have never visited Mahalo except for his appearances on TWiT. But as you mentioned, there is a real danger behind JC’s (and many other Web startup impresarios’) cult of flamboyant personality around himself. Many of these men have something to fall back on while their troops have nothing in reserve. The ground floor startup workaholic does not have millions saved in the bank, when s/he burns themselves out, they have nothing to fall back on. The cult leaders are rich enough that they can burn themselves out – cause they can follow it up with a vacation to Tahiti. If I burned myself out, I’d still have to get up tomorrow and look for a new job.

But then again, America and its uneasy relationship with celebrity (and the consequences of this liaison) is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Society does need risk-takers: look to any nation’s armed forces and emergency services for outstanding examples of bravery. However in those cases the end result is primarily for the society’s good, not for personal gain.

The other problem with is that if people burn out, the rest of us have to pick up the pieces — either personally as family, friends and neighbours, or societally through the burden of increased healthcare costs.

Nice point about the celebrity architects — and of course we see the over-rated “stars” in any field.

I’m an architect and I see this sort of issue all the time. The superstar architects are able to get interns to work insane hours for insanely low pay (like 12 hour days for $400/week). I’m not one of those, no-one can pay me that little for that much work for the privilege of putting their name on my resume.

That said, I think that there is a major cultural problem that you do address, which is best summed up in your penultimate line, and we really do need to knock down the high stature of the “high-risk/high-reward/high burnout” approach to life.

However most of those readers would have commented back on whichever higher-traffic site they first came from, because there’s where the discussion was. And it soon became obvious that there were two diametrically-opposed viewpoints. Everybody said their piece a few times, then stalemate.

And after that, 36 hours later or whatever, it was the storm in a teacup over Mark Zuckerberg’s supposedly “disastrous” interview at SXSW. The feral goldfish had moved on. This piece has only scored 500-odd readers so far (plus RSS traffic).

It’s also a few too many words for the poor little petals.

@Joel Brians: What we’re actually talking about here is the different approaches to treating employees — as disposable meat-assets or as, well, people. Still…

All you’re really saying is that 37signals’ products don’t do everything for everybody. They’d be the first to agree. In the same way if I buy a Ferrari, it’s fine for driving around the city but “sooner or later” I’ll want to drive off-road and then it’s no good.

Given that you don’t actually address any of the issues we’ve discussed, and the wording of your comment sounds like a canned PR testimonial, can I assume you’re just some dishonest lackey whoring Wrike? If so, have the balls to say so — you’ll earn more respect that way.

[Stil says: I've edited this post to remove the hyperlink until I get confirmation back from the poster that he's not a PR person for Wrike.]

Maybe all your readers agree with you?
Are we all ‘Yes menPeople’?

<Sigh> I was looking forward to a noisy debate.