When Silicon Valley quickly ran through all the competent core hires and started to grow staff at rocket launch speeds, the industry ended up with cubicle upon cubicle (and eventually table space after table space) of people who were in over their head. When presented with a problem, these folk devolved into what I called Pretend Solving. Sure, they’d provide a solution, but it wasn’t a solution to the problem, and upon close examination, it wasn’t a solution at all.

“Hey guys, we need a flying widget to compete with Fruit Company’s latest,” you’d announce from the management pulpit. Very shortly you’d be presented with something that didn’t quack like a duck, didn’t have feathers like a duck, and didn’t even look like a duck, but those that egged it into existence insisted that it was indeed a duck. Heck, it didn’t have wings, webs, or beak. But the cubicle/table residents insisted it was a duck. Right up until it needed to fly.

Which, of course, it couldn’t do and thus didn’t do. “Back to the cubicles, fellow code rats,” would go the cry, and another not-a-duck would get started pronto.

Here in 2025, someone—it wasn’t me or anyone in the Floppy family—seems to have elected a Pretend Solver. One with a pretend tan and pretend hair to go with his pretend abilities. Got a fentanyl problem? Fix it with tarriffs on logs and cars from Canada! That didn't work? Okay, sink some boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Pretend Solving is now a national pastime here in Merica. Need to pay off the oligarchs who footed your election campaign? Cut Medicaid and every government job, and hand the money saved over in a tax cut that is indeed big but not so beautiful to the average Joe. Oh, wait, no money was actually saved? Okay, increase the national debt instead. Someone else will pay for that later.

As a card carrying member of the intelligentsia, I have to say this: intelligent people see real problems and attempt or provide real answers to those. It sometimes takes a trial and error or two, but none of us try to solve a meat problem with vegtables. Strike that, I was just told that some of us seem to be doing just that at companies named things like Beyond Meat.

Let me try again: none of us Deep Staters try to solve a murder mystery with a cupcake. (Of course I wouldn’t be against eating a cupcake while solving a murder.)

Pretend Solvers were a real issue in Silicon Valley for my entire working career there, but at least you could bury what they did, tell them to start over or go on a retreat, then go peak at what the Real Answers Team was up to and ship that instead. The way I looked at it is that if I could ship one Real Answer for every two Pretend Solutions, I could still grow the company and make it more profitable. Moreover, I now knew the two-thirds of the staff we’d be letting go first if we ran into trouble.

Unfortunately, when a Pretend Solver gets to the top of the decision tree and makes all the choices, things get bad. Real bad. And when he turns orange while screaming at those that don’t believe his Pretend Solutions are going to work, it gets badder.

Already in our second Apprentice Administration I’ve lost count of the number of Pretend Solutions that have not only been proposed, but instigated. Some of these solutions boggle the mind. For instance, the way to end a war is to simply let the invaders win. The way to win the drug war is to make cars cost more. The way to deal with fraudulent waste is to simply close the agency that the fraudsters—who for the most part aren’t in the government, by the way—are taking advantage of. (Real Answer: hire more agents to investigate and bring to justice all fraudsters.)

There’s no there there with the Pretend Solving crowd. It’s all about seeming to do something, not actually doing something. If I were in charge of the US Government today, I would be firing people, but not the ones that are getting fired. No, those folk were doing their jobs, and many of them were on the Real Answer Teams. No, I'd get rid of all the Pretend Solvers that were just hired by the Orange Man and his do-anything-he-says posse. I’ve yet to see one of those Pretenders actually do something I’d call useful or that even begins to fulfill their job function.

Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned, mostly because fiddles hadn’t been invented yet. But the notion behind that statement seems absolutely appropriate today. The Pretend Solvers are running around decreeing faux solutions to real problems. They also seem to be ignoring the bigger conflagarations going on right in front of them. "Let’s play the Tax Cut Fiddle while we watch Democracy and true freedoms burn,” the pretenders are chanting.

One thing to remember is that Nero eventually lost. The Pretend Solvers always do. It’s not “fake it until you make it,” it’s instead “fake it until you break it.” We’re starting to see things break.