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.

90% of the world online scammers and hackers

It’s crazy how these major tent poles of the modern internet - Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft - are all centered in the United States, but never bare any responsibility for the malicious traffic on their networks.

It’s crazy how Iran deciding to start taking fees for shipping is a blockade, when the entire national business models of Singapore and Panama hinge on their ability to do exactly this.

They’ve got concept art in the article.

If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶

given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights

“This far and no further” politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.

“Personal Rights” always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.

teaches you to take pride in shit you’ve never done

The better outcome.

I’m more disgusted by the fuckers who go out and do the war crimes, then come home and demand everyone else say “Thank You For Your Service”.

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

Rub a lamp

Genie comes out

Oooh, that felt good. Keep going and I’ll give you three full wishes.

Shrug

Keep rubbing lamp

Ooooh yeah baby. Give me your wishes. What are your wishes? You’re going to get so many good wishes, hon.

Victor Orban is also very much not Polish

Is he European?

We were talking about popluational trends and statistics though

Since the collapse of the USSR, the trend towards reactionary religious movements has only increased over time. You can definitely blame this on western evangelicals and Catholics piling into these countries during their brief liberalization phase. But to say Europe lacks a large and wealthy Christian community is to deny what’s in front of your eyes.

I will explicitly say that I’m talking about “median” population, not literaly the extreme 0.1%

The extreme 0.1% are the ones with all the money.

Past that, European parliaments all have their variation on the Christian Democrat Party. The CDU/CSU coalition is currently the largest party bloc in Germany, following the ignominious collapse of Olaf’s Greens. Idk how you win 208 MPs without a plurality of popular support.