wasn’t it a metaphor

Maybe. I just remember re-reading the book in preparation for the TV Show’s release, and being somewhat set back by how low tech even the more advanced set pieces were in the book compared to the show. It makes more sense when you recognize these books were written in the 1940s, practically before rocketry was a thing. But it’s still a bit of a trip to see what Asimov considered the future would look like.

Hey, sometimes it’s a ramshackle alleyway or the back of someone’s car.

In Foundation, Asimov suggests that spaceships start running on coal power, after civilization collapses so far that people forget how to build nuclear engines. He was always more of a Big Ideas Guy than a Fine Details Guy.

My favorite is how there is only ever one city and like 10,000 people on any planet.

I would spot you that some of this makes sense if the world is largely inhospitable and the one city with the singular mono-culture is the corner that’s human habitable.

Mos Eisley Cantina makes sense if you consider it a tiny space port on a largely inhospitable planet where you literally have to farm moister to survive.

If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on

Hey now. You can land on the surface of Jupiter if you’re dense enough.

Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden.

Idk about that. “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” did numbers.

Would be very funny if we manage to eliminate Linux OS distributions on the internet before we eliminate CSAM on the internet.

I’m not holding my breath on either.

What an amazing grift.

Under socialism, you will live next to a first generation immigrant from a country full of brown people, you will eat their food, experience their culture, and work side by side in pursuit of a better life.

And you will like it.

The biggest liar I know is still in jail for raping children

I will happily spot you “Don’t hire child rapists” as a rule of thumb. I think “fudging your resume is a slippery slope to sexually assaulting a minor” is a stretch of logic.

My industry and group are weird when it comes to credentials. We don’t have a strict, you need this degree situation.

I know employers who use “college degree” as a proxy for “capable of following instructions” and won’t hire anyone without a bachelors.

I know employers who are much more fast and loose, bringing in anyone with “potential” as they broadly define it.

Idk exactly what the right answer is. But “powers through a MOOC in a few weeks to get a certificate that says I can competently execute a job” doesn’t strike me as a moral failing.

If a hire is open about their credentials I would not care.

Typically, any job that gets filled at my company has to have a competitive candidate to consider. I’ve seen them fudge this a few times (bringing in someone they know isn’t qualified just to balance against), but it’s a hiring standard that you have to consider at least two (preferably three or four) candidates for any position.

If you show up and you don’t have the credentials for the position, you’re simply not getting the job.

I’ve witnessed what happens when people are ok with liars.

Sure. The Enron offices are spitting distance from where I work.

But I also see a lot of people fudging resumes to get feet in the door. And I don’t see people who were honest, but got screened out by a filter. So I’m the victim of selection bias, in many regards.

On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.

Ideally, I wouldn’t hire them. But if they were already on the payroll, I’m much more interested in their work output than their transcript.

This is just the industrialization of “Fake It Until You Make It”.

If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them?

That’s half the joke, though. The employers are using automated tools to sift for staff. Why would prospective staff not use automated tools to bump themselves up in the queue for a job?

Or maybe you’ll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?

Because then it’s not a “false” transcript. It’s real and true, fully accredited and identical to a transcript issued by a four year school.

Of course it’s partly the student’s fault

This is a structural failure. It isn’t the fault of any single (non-billionaire) individual. As we pull more and more humans out of the bureaucratic chain and dump more and more automation onto lowest-bidder third parties, we accumulate technical debt. That technical debt exposes vulnerabilities in our bureaucratic systems. And then people naturally move in to exploit those vulnerabilities when they can’t get what they need out of a normally functional bureaucracy.

I’ll consult a historian.

This would also be a funny interpretation.

The buildup begin in '21. Although I’ve had people yell at me for suggesting the war didn’t actually start in '14.

Age verification that will, itself, be quickly subverted and spoofed. And which they won’t bother to manage internally, because that’s hard

$1500/mo

Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Panama makes some sense, because of the loch system.

It helps to know the history of Panama. Namely, how it exists because an independence group was sponsored by the US to break away from Honduras, because that group would then give the US better terms for using the soon-to-be-constructed canal.

Each ship that passes takes a lot of their drinking water, and they don’t need to bomb ships to stop them passing.

Ask Noriega about that.

I hate the US and Russia equally

If I were a native or neighbor of one, I might hate it more than the other, merely due to proximity.

I dont think anyone is saying we should invade Russia.

I seem to recall a bunch of anti-Russia hawks saying exactly this when the invasion happened in '21. The US, the EU, the rest of the Asiatic continent - they were all told they needed to team up and crush Russia, once and for all.

Now that the US has collapsed into a fascist regime marginally sympathetic to Russian white nationalism, the Keyboard Commandos of Reddit don’t really expect Cheeto Mussolini Von Putinkisser to take the fight to Moscow.

But I’ve also heard (1) Putin is senile / infirm / on death’s door and regime change in Russia will come any day now and (2) The Russian military is absolutely on the brink of collapse, so another year or ten of drone skirmishes will be the end of the entire Russian armed forces with a bit of patience. Just a few hundred more billion to Ukraine will be the end of the Russian army absolutely for certain guaranteed. So we never really needed to invade directly, just finance an endless parade of mercenaries to get the job done.