According to Billet themselves, they heard nothing about compensation or payback until about 3 hours after the original GN video went live… Which Billet hadnt even replied to before Linus made his post saying they’ve already made the deal on compensation.
its not unprofessional to give the subject of a story that is doing active harm a heads up so they can use their position to pressure you into silence, or try to come up with some last minute hooplah to try to discredit the reporting rather than addressing the core issues in their own company.
Thats like telling a company that is actively dumping toxic waste into a river that you know they are doing it, and you would like comment before they report on scene next week. All you do is give them time to stop the dumping, clean up the obvious signs, and put out an undercutting statement to try and discredit/dismiss the legitimacy of the story.
That has got to be the most corrupted take that could be possible taken from that.
You know what serves the public good? Reporting on it, So people can see what the company is doing, So they don’t get away with turning off the valve for a couple days… So they get held accountable for having the valve at all, and the exposure forcing them to spend their money on cleanup and decontamination, while the public outcry gets so bad that government steps in with regulation, and legislation, and oversight.
You know what doesnt serve the public good? Letting the corpo hide its shit and get away with everything, because you think theres some insignificant, nonexistent benefit to letting it do so.
By not letting Linus use his position to try and pressure Steve, by not giving Linus time to get a coverup in place, Linus got outed for lying about the Billet compensation, Further showing the lengths he’ll go to, to lie, double down, and shift blame to anything but himself.
Using your toxic waste excuse: if it gets the company to stop dumping toxic waste a week sooner then… that is a week less of making three eyed fish and killing kids.
And then they resume the dumping next week, maybe at a different location and long term nothing changes.
Surprised Linus didn’t make them sign an NDA with how shady he played that.
So fucking sad to see. I want nothing more than Linus and LTT to continue to be massively successful but FFS he needs to pull his head out of his ass and accept a bit a constructive criticism now and then. Even LTT’s own staff agreed on a number of Steve’s points but Linus keeps putting his ego ahead of everything else.
GN absolutely destroys Linus in this video. I mean Linus gave him all the ammo by repeatedly lying and not owning up his mistakes, but still. He’s calling like it is, without any sugarcoating.
I did change my sub from LTT to GN.
Nah.
GN didnt destroy Linus.
GN just assembled everything into a easily digestable package.
It was Linus’s Ego that destroyed Linus.
Compared to sifting though God knows how many hours of LMG content to find this information yourself, it sure is. I was aware of perhaps two of the data accuracy issues Steve presents, prior to the GN video. And I had no idea about the Billet Labs thing, or that an LTX charity auction even happened.
That’s what good reporting does. It takes complex issues with disparate data points, then makes connections and filters out the noise to make it digestible to a wide audience. It may be a long video, but having watched the whole thing, I’d say at least 90% of it is necessary to make the points being conveyed.
Yeah yeah, and if it was a 30 second tiktok like you wanted, you’d handwave it away as “Well he has no real proof, why should i care”
Nah.
GN didnt destroy Linus.
GN just assembled everything into a easily digestable package.
It was Linus’s Ego that destroyed Linus.
Absolutely. I once had an absolutely terrible boss, 10000% a sociopath and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a headline that said she’d been caught with multiple bodies buried under her house, but I’m still thankful for the experience because of one sentence that she said to me:
“People fire themselves.”
And that’s 100% true.
She then quoted Stalin’s “Death of one is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic” as justification for trying to fire an entire department immediately after that though, so maybe it was just an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters situation. Either way, it gave me whiplash.
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say I strongly disagree with this. In some scenarios, people get fired because of something they did. However, if you have a company that consistently fires a large number of employees, then the people getting fired aren’t the problem. It is more likely that the manager is the problem.
I had a boss that consistently fired about 25-30 percent of their department every year and replaced people. Every time someone got fired, it was somehow their own fault. In reality, that boss was just horrible and kept treating everybody in the department like they were beneath her. Besides the firing, quitting rate was pretty high and the department had high turnover. The only consistent people that stayed were people who are personal buddies with the boss.
…Yeah that’s enough.
Blatantly, and knowingly, lying (let’s not pretend that wasn’t the intention) about his compensation to billet is too much. No excuses for that.
You know what really sucks? Owning their stuff. I got the screwdriver (it’s pretty nice). I’m drinking from one of the water bottles right now (it’s also pretty nice).
How am I supposed to go on using that shit? I can’t do it in front of anyone who knows. “Oh you like that LTT stuff? You know what they did right?”
All that goodwill flushed because of ego. All that cost, sunk. And the worst part is that this discourages me from buying merch from anyone else again, lest I get burned again someday when it comes out they too are the opposite of the image they portray for money.
I guess there truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
I bought a couple of hoodies from them on sale, so I’m in a similar situation. Luckily most of their merch is pretty stealthy so the only people who would recognise them are other ltt viewers. I just hope that Linus can get his head out of his ass and give a proper apology and make things right
Or… just don’t give a fuck and reply with “Bought it before the shennanigans, bro. Not gonna toss it.”
Yeah, I suppose I’m not going to actually give a shit. Still feels bad, man.
I’ve been eyeing their screwdriver for a while, but I don’t want to give Linus my money after seeing this… Wanna sell it to me? I don’t care if it has any minor damage from regular use.
Edit: After the whole Madison thing, it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth… Nevermind the screwdriver, I’ll just buy a megapro or something…
What’s so special about their screwdriver? Can I fight off a Dalek invasion with it or something?
How am I supposed to go on using that shit?
Lmao. I keep forgetting they sell merch. I refuse to buy merch from those guys. They’ve come across like a bunch of Windows gamers who built a bunch of gaming PCs and then became self proclaimed tech experts and started a YouTube channel.
Yes, I know Linus worked at NCIX and has memorized a lot of product numbers, but that means nothing.
Where you see his true (lack) of expertise is in the storage server failure video and all the Linux stuff he did.
He got mad that Linux was outside of his Windows power-user comfort zone and crapped all over Linux to make himself feel better.
He’s a tool.
What a joke. Linus’s response was horrible and I’m glad Steve is calling him out on it.