Morrie the Toupee Salesman

One of the real shocks for me living in California was how many stupid people are there. I knew that there would be lots of smart people, and there were, to the point of intimidation. In general the smart people tend to be at the bottom of organizations, and the higher up you go the greater the idiocracy level. Today we have this headline on techmeme:

Forget Disintermediation, Focus On Open Data Exchange

and the first few paragraphs:

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For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where all the comments appear on FriendFeed, rather than on those services. Today, the tech blogosphere is debating a service called Shyftr that allows users to comment on the full text of blog posts, drawn from full text RSS feeds.

These are all forms of disintermediation on the web — disintermediation defines distribution on the web, made possible by RSS and hyperlinks.

The funny thing is that disintermediation is like a hall of mirrors — there’s really no end to it.

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The funny thing is, of course, is that what the writer is describing is not disintermediation, but its exact opposite - intermediation. An honest mistake, I guess. But the funniest thing of all was the ten thoughtful commenters who talked about the post, adding to the completely nonsensical discussion. Amazingly stupid. The 11th commenter politely pointed out the emperor’s lack of clothes (as did I - though my comment is still in moderation).