Patrick McKenzie

I tripped across this information while deleting old posts from Gist of the Gemini which started as an astrology site and then morphed into my newest personal blog for a time and eventually returned to being an astrology site.

Slightly edited for clarity and to remove information about me.

February 2, 2018 Hacker News comment on a patio11 AMA:

im so over patio11. I didnt know bingo cards made you an expert.

Of course, it is flagged to death and posted under a new account. Another comment in the same discussion essentially calls into question Patrick's competence and the moderator said the comment was uncivil. It is basically social suicide on HN to call Patrick out on the fact that he isn't really all that and a bag of chips.

Patrick's bingo card generator is the basis of his claim to fame and it isn't really that impressive. He worked on it 5 hours a week. It made enough to let him quit his day job. But it wasn't what most people would view as a serious business.

In common parlance, it was a lifestyle business, not a startup. If a woman had supported herself with some little side project for a few hours a week, she would have never been able to use that as a means to become the darling of HN, like Patrick used to be but never really deserved.

Yet, according to his blog, he is worth at least a million dollars, or was at one time. Probably most of that money comes from him playing consultant while living off his bingo card money. He just kept raising his rates and, to his surprise, people kept paying them -- up to $30k per week. When he asked $50k per week, someone said no. After that, he briefly had a failed business, sold his bingo card generator and then went and got a job again.

He is barely short of being a charlatan. The only reason he isn't an actual charlatan is he isn't that competent. He straight up did not understand why people paid him so much money when he likely was never worth $30k per week. He has said he was surprised that it worked to keep just dramatically upping his rates. He was surprised he could, say, double his asking rate and get it. So he kept increasing his rate until someone said no.

But here is why that worked: He had his silly little bingo card business, so he wasn't going to starve if no one hired him as a consultant. This let him ask for outrageous sums and not care if people balked at the figure in question. But asking for crazy high amounts of money and not caring if the client walked away instead of hiring him sent important social signals to prospective clients that helped him get those sums, having nothing at all to do with his ability to improve the client's bottom line more than he cost them. Those signals included the following:

1. He must be confident in his abilities.

2. He must have other clients lined up and waiting.

3. He must have a lot of experience with this kind of work.

4. He must know he is really worth that much.

None of that was necessarily true. The only thing that was true was he had basic financial security. He could make rent and keep food on the table even if you did not hire him as a consultant.

He did not believe himself to be worth that kind of money. His blog says it was the kind of money he wanted, not the kind of money he thought he deserved for his skills.

It was a game to him and he was surprised it worked. It was a game of brinkmanship and he played it until it failed. Then he had to go get a real job again.

If he understood how and why that worked, he would basically be a con artist. He's not actually a con artist because he doesn't have the social savvy to be a con artist. He's just a guy who found himself in a very unusual situation and he got away with something because he had all the social sophistication of a toddler gleefully pushing an elevator button or light switch to see what it will do. And he continued doing that until his luck ran out, so to speak. Or, metaphorically, until a grown up came along and made him quit that shit.

From what I have seen him say over the years, he probably developed his bingo card concept on the job. He used to be very open about that fact, then began reframing it at some point. Maybe he realized that was possibly not quite kosher, because in recent years he denies that the intellectual property was really born on the clock at a previous day job. (His current employer wisely forbids him from doing that again -- possibly because he did it once before and they realized that.)

Then he took some vacation time and used that vacation time to set up a website, etc, and launched his bingo card generator. After the initial setup and his vacation were over, he only worked on it a few hours per week because it was a side project. He was a Japanese salary man, so he likely worked very long hours. He simply didn't have the time or energy to put more than a handful of hours per week into his side project.

It eventually became profitable enough for him to quit his Japanese day job. His bingo card generator kept him fed, but it wasn't keeping him in the lap of luxury. However, it didn't take much of his time and this left him free to play consultant.

End old post.

Once you are in good with the right crowd, then rules of civility tend to protect you even if you really are behaving extremely badly as Patrick McKenzie was doing.

I don't really know how to fix this. I don't really know where this post should go because I would like it to make a meaningful point beyond me repeating what I've already said about Patrick McKenzie being a con artist and Hacker News not wanting to man up and admit they screwed up and should have never helped him play this game of brinkmanship.

There are two things that come to mind related to public life versus private life patterns of interaction which is a theme of this blog.

There was an unfortunate incident on Hacker News where a woman was publicly dragging her tech bro famous boyfriend and claiming he had abused her and his new squeeze showed up to call the old squeeze a liar.

Historically, when most people lived in much smaller communities, if a woman was being abused, probably people knew. Homes were small and walls were thin and you were unlikely to be able to really hide it if he was behaving inappropriately.

The core people in any online project typically know each other in the flesh. I was slow to realize that, but it puts someone like me who is medically handicapped and participating because I don't have a life in meat space at a huge disadvantage.

And it doesn't really work to say "Believe women" when they claim sexual assault or abuse. There's an inherent problem today not being adequately addressed by anyone that when the world has fewer people and we lived in smaller communities, women could have private lives as homemakers and still have neighbors have some idea of who they were and what their character was.

When two women barge onto Hacker News to both talk trash about someone -- one talking trash about the ex-boyfriend and the other talking trash about the trash talker -- when neither has a history with Hacker News, no one knows what to think about either of them. There's no good way for anyone to interact with that.

I'm a woman and I'm basically trying to kind of do what Patrick McKenzie did: figure out how to rke out a living via Internet working part time. Because I am medically handicapped.

And I get no end of SHIT about that and get told I'm expecting too much. And it makes me NUTS because I continue to feel like "Why do you assholes say that?"

But most of them don't seem to really see Patrick McKenzie that way. I don't get it. I look at that and go "Are you STUPID???!!!" But I'm some "loser with no life" and maybe read more of it live while it was happening or my mind catalogs information differently from theirs or whatever and they don't see what I see.

The other thing that comes to mind is another example of "how to do it wrong" I guess and probably has bad idea written all over it to mention it at all.

I'm banned from Metafilter and I feel I was unjustly banned and it's clear in my mind I was unjustly banned, but I can't prove it.

You would think highest ranked woman on Hacker News would come with more reputation benefits than it does. Like Rodney Dangerfield, I get no respect and I don't really understand that.

Anyway, Metafilter is both a highly Christian environment and LGBTQ friendly in a way that makes me go "You have to wonder WHY any nominally cis het male would spend tons of time there."

I'm banned because the then owner, Josh Millard, was very cringe-worthy SQUEEING at me in public in front of our ten thousand closest mutual friends, including his very religious little wifey playing the Christian helpmate role in the marriage while they nominally had a very modern two-career couple marriage.

Most likely, little wifey saw me as a threat to the marriage and potential Other Woman and so I had to go. Reality: He's probably GAY and felt I could actually understand him and accept him and blah blah blah.

He likely also saw himself as attracted to me and in some sense he was. He felt drawn to me, but not really "because some woman fourteen or sixteen years older than me is SO HOT."

And if he and I had really talked and been "friends" which allowed him to get free therapy better than most high paid therapists can offer, it would have led to the end of their marriage anyway, even without he and I playing footsies.

I did, in fact, try to open the door to letting him know "You can talk to me instead of doing whatever it is you are doing here, Mr. Big Feels about something every time you interact with me." And he treated me like a problem child imposing on his time and told me he didn't have the bandwidth to give ME his time instead of leaping on the opportunity to have whatever important conversation he was apparently dying to have.

I can't prove any of that. He was the forum owner. I was a homeless woman. Most people will go with his story. He doesn't even need to argue it. The facts speak for themselves. Everyone who knew both of us knew he was the forum owner and I was some homeless loser. Case closed.

Genevieve told me once "The best lies are the truth." I didn't understand it at the time.

This is an example of that. It's actually TRUE that I was homeless and he was the forum owner where I was banned. The rest is mostly private information and even the bits I could support if I wanted to bother by looking up posts where the bitchy little Christian wifey was ugly to me without provocation or Josh Millard was squeeing at me.

His wife was Secretariat and she replied twice to politely shoot me down in this piece about Christianity. She posted very early in the piece to piss on it which is termed thread shitting and because she was married to the forum owner, it didn't need to be strongly worded. A "Meh, not interesting. Doesn't merit our Best Of The Web attention." was enough. And she came back to double down and it ended not long after that. People stopped posting, which is almost certainly what she wanted.

But it's also easy to say I'm suffering paranoid delusions and reading in too much and blah blah blah. Even if you could ask her her side, it's easy to say "Gosh, that was years ago and she is long gone and I don't recall."

I don't think it works to say the moderator of Hacker News, dang (Dan Gackle), was wrong to enforce civility as per his job. I don't have a solution.

I'm beginning to think there simply isn't one because I don't smoke, drink or do drugs. I'm educated. I'm willing to work to earn a living, I want to earn a living in spite of my medical situation and none of that appears to count for spit.

I managed to make the leaderboard of Hacker News and I appear to be the only woman to have done so and anytime I talked about that as a proxy for saying "I appear to fit in here better than most women." I got dismissed and told it's meaningless Internet points.

I managed to adequately support my point that those meaningless Internet points got men there respected and rather than respect me, the stopped squeeing at the guys "You must be smart! You have so much HN karma!" I still got treated like crap.

So once you have a fly in the ointment like Patrick McKenzie causing "losers" like me with the wrong demographic details -- like the wrong bits between their legs -- to go "Wait, he's doing well and just had a small side gig with using stolen IP from his employer. ***I*** should be able to support myself working part time as a medically handicapped person!" there's no fixing it.

Because the big dogs who stupidly paid him $30,000 for one week of work don't want to admit "Our system of how to judge character and value failed us and that was a mistake." And rather than examine what I have to say and take those criticisms and observations seriously and figure out how to course correct, they are just going to double down on their misinterpretation of what happened with Patrick McKenzie and piss on me until I leave.

And then we wonder how a turd like Trump gets into office. Like that's a MYSTERY.