Comment by MrDarcy
17 hours ago
I think this is the comment that drives me off this site permanently. It’s been a good decade and a half.
17 hours ago
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.
I'm not commenting on the the particulars of different ownership and operational business models. Certainly private equity backed portfolio company structures deserve their fair share of criticism; the balance of incentives they create can certainly be net negative for the business and its customers in the long run, however I think it's a separate conversation.
My point is just that there are lots of people that wake up every day and make serious, sustained efforts to exercise due care in their professional duties.
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.
It seems more to me like an acknowledgement of the realities on the ground, which is the first step to actually fixing things.
To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.
That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.
Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.
Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.
Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.
Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.
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.
> ...although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
Speaking as a USian:
If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).
I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.
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