[sokoloff]

Sure. If the question is "How did John Delorean start manufacturing snowcats?", then I completely butchered the quote.

If the question is "How did John Delorean get his start?" it seems to me like "at General Motors" is a better answer than "by buying LMC".

[beatboxrevival]

There was no question posed. I was simply injecting a random piece of trivia (which I acknowledged). Now that you understand my intent, why do you keep pressing? These are the types of responses that make people not want to comment on news.yc.

[cestith]

To be fair the wording was a little ambiguous but sokoloff could have asked for clarification of meaning rather than dropping a "gotcha" sort of disagreement.

[sokoloff]

Given that at least two people found my comment disagreeable or "gotcha", I have to accept that it landed that way and apologize for that. It wasn't intended that way, but given that it landed that way, that's on me because I typed it.

What I intended was: Hey, John DeLorean started a car company with his name on the door, which is super-cool. If I wanted to go get started on creating Sokoloff Motors, what's the background I should seek to maximize my chance of succeeding? I wonder how John DeLorean got his start... In that regard, becoming a division head at GM is probably overwhelmingly the most relevant experience.

I'll drop the topic here with a final apology for any unfairness or "gotcha" feeling that I caused.

[cestith]

Hey, credit for lessons learned and all that, right? It's always uncomfortable when we end up in a disagreement when we're just trying to contribute to the discussion. As a dispassionate third party it's easier for me to chalk it up to where things could have gone better than to pass out fault and assign you both goals and motives I can't actually know.

When I was in school they tried to teach us self-esteem and all that, and that nobody else could make us feel any certain way. Water off a duck's back and all that. There's a little truth to that, but it's largely bullshit. The real truth they didn't so much teach is that conversation is not happenstance and although such a thing as talent for it may be real, it's mostly a skillset. It can be practiced and learned. It can even be trained.

One of you said something that wasn't quite unambiguously clear, which is an opportunity to improve. The other took one of those possible meanings and ran with it, offering a different valid interpretation of the phrasing and a correction based on that point of view. That's another opportunity to improve. Getting to the shared understanding first rather than after the fact would have been nice, but we're all human (or at least passed this instance of the Turing test) here.

Thanks for not being a dick about it, and I for one happily accept your apology.