Not the same thing. You're comparing the relationship between a fake version of an artwork and the artwork itself to that between two digital objects both of which are derivative of a third thing. The third thing is the analog to the artwork, making the metaphor unusable
Your like ironic actual point is well taken but I just wanted to note that even without the irony this is actually a very cool thought provoking question and I couldn't answer it at first.
In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:
As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.
Well said! I came here to say this. Founders of successful businesses usually are not exceptional geniuses. They often happen to be in the right place at the right time, or they steal ideas from other people when the business is too young to be worth litigating over. See, e.g., Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Or they get government assistance at a critical time. E.g., Elon Musk. There are so many species of selection bias at work here; I totally agree with your comment about reading "Ten morning habits of billionaires."
Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.
That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.
Standing and merits are both terms of art. Merits essentially means whether one side wins or not. Standing OTOH is a preliminary matter like jurisdiction. If the court lacks jurisdiction over the defendant or the subject matter of the dispute, they kick the case on jurisdiction without reaching the merits. If the plaintiff doesn't have standing, they kick the case on standing without reaching the merits.
Your confusion is 100% reasonable because there is _conceptual_ overlap between standing and "who wins." For example, one aspect of standing is "injury-in-fact." That means "you suffered a harm recognized by the legal system." If the court says no standing because no injury-in-fact, to a layperson that's similar to saying "stop crying, go home." Which sounds a lot like saying "you lose the case."
You cited a source which proves you were wrong in exactly the way I pointed out. Your entire original comment hinged on a bizarre metaphor you created out of your false premise that in protection rackets, the "threat" is fake or choreographed. It isn't, so your comment isn't an intelligible critique of the comment it was intended to respond to. Yes, that's my point: your critique is wrong. I told you how: it is based on a false premise.
> (i'm citing them, you are not)
You cited Wikipedia, and you haven't cited a single source for any proposition other than the one you were specifically wrong about.
> I'm sorry i'm not basing my arguments on movies i've seen.
Deliberate obtuseness. The obvious implication of the reference to gangster films is that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with protection rackets knows that harm from the racketeer is not the only threatened harm. The third sentence of the Wikipedia entry you mentioned confirms this: "Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients." That means that the analogy between the CIA and a protection racket is perfectly tenable—in the parlance of your Wikipedia entry, a "broader protection racket" rather than a "pure extortion racket."
Not sure how to spell it out any clearer than that. I'm not implying you're getting concepts wrong. You got them both wrong.
Can't tell if you're trolling/deliberately obtuse or what
Here's what I meant: Your wrong conception of how a protection racket works undermines your argument that the person who said "That's like supporting a protection racket" is wrong.
No idea what you're talking about with "implies that the protector has the absolute ability to control if an attack occurs or not." Have you ever seen a gangster film? Anyways every time you invoke a new concept you're getting it wrong so maybe take a step back and think about what people are talking about instead of just randomly generating provocative hypos because you disagree with someone
No they haven't. That's why it's breaking news when they get discovered.
> In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling.
How would you possibly know what this looks like when, as you concede, there never have been meaningful investigations into the justices?
> The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.
No better than the history of their acceptance of lavish gifts from ideologically motivated rich people.