Comment by underlipton
19 hours ago
>established respectable professions
>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism
In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
19 hours ago
>established respectable professions
>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism
In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
I think this is the comment that drives me off this site permanently. It’s been a good decade and a half.
I am CPA, former auditor, and a self-taught programmer. I am in a director level finance & technology role at an American, private-equity backed portfolio SaaS company. I have worked with all kinds of finance professionals.
I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.
There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.
It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.
It may seem glib, but if there are good ones out there, they're not typically "private-equity backed portfolio SaaS companies". IME (3 times now) this is where good companies go to die. I'll reluctantly take the naked (but aligned) greed of the VC startup over PE from here on out; it's one thing to implode on the launch pad but I can't watch PE destroy real value any longer.
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Why?
I'm not quitting the site myself, but the kind of cynicism evinced in the comment is toxic. If your response to the very ideas of accounting, law, healthcare and journalism is to wave your hand and nonspecifically declare that they couldn't possibly be respectable, you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people, even if you understand yourself to be doing it in a wise and savvy way.
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it's evidently a dig at Trump and Republican morals, although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years.
Thus the poster is evidently indicating that:
The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class.
Journalism has been undermined because major media outlets have been purchased by rich people who only allow the media to publish pro-conservative, pro-rich, talking points.
Healthcare is a larger stretch for their dark joke, but the governmental agency that sets the rules for healthcare research and what are the socially approved recommendations is run by RFK Jr. who is a well-known anti-vaxx guy, also the U.S has left WHO and may not get access to WHO data anymore, and last year the CEO of an insurance company got shot basically for denying insurance claims for healthcare, indicating some level of corruption. There may also be more dark joke levels in regards to healthcare if one is a female.
Accounting is also something of a stretch, but there are governmental shenanigans where common accounting practices are involved that indicate corruption and that might make you feel like "accounting, what a joke" /strawman quotes there
That, at any rate, is what I suppose can only be meant by the somewhat obtuse phrase dark joke in 2026.
On edit: no wait, CEO of United Healthcare got shot at the end of 2024.
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