> I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?
How would you have formed that impression? Whatever media and culture you’re consuming, or how you are interpreting it, is leading you to incorrect conclusions. You should examine that.
We all live in a cultural bubble but any time you find yourself thinking that millions of people somewhere else do something crazy, you should probably talk to someone from there.
Sleeping meds might be prescribed at a higher rate in the US, that wouldn’t surprise me due to the specific incentives in our health care system. But that’s a far cry from your impression.
Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.
That's what I'd say in 2026. 2-3 years from now, not sure. But right now, AI can't run a vending machine without selling too many tungsten cubes.
Sure, Europe is different than the US in many ways. I think most people know that.
What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.
A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.
A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.
But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.
Ubik is a mindbender inside a mindbender. Try to read it consistently. If you put it down for a couple of days you will be lost and rereading the last page will not help much.
Who was the moderate candidate? We had Trump and a candidate who wanted to continue the open borders policy and racial quota system in hiring and university admissions.
Moderate/smoderate. There was an insane choice, which people chose to vote to the detriment of most, and a sane candidate, which people rejected due to misinformation and bigotry.
No, they lost because much of the population is bigoted and did fall for misinformation. People started sharing the nonsense about Haitians eating cats and dogs, they fell for the transpanic ads...and many were still not comfortable with a woman in charge. Misinformation and bigotry, and it's not out of touch to recognize that.
The problem is with the people more than the party, and fighting that so we can actually progress the country out of the dark ages is an uphill battle.
No, it seriously was not that. We didn't refuse to vote for Harris because of the idiotic cats nonsense. It was in large part her and the whole DNC's explicit embrace of DEI (note: "i don't like DEI" isn't anti-minority. Plenty of minorities also want to get jobs and admitted to schools because they qualify for and earn those things and not as a free handout because of their skin).
Not 20 years ago, like 90% of Americans would have agreed that it's insane to use racial quotas and different standards of qualification for different groups. Today, the 20% or so who disagree with me on that have dragged the DNC into this unpopular position, abandoning a lot of their previous voters. This has consequences.
And for that you threw the entire country away? Based on mostly fear and misunderstanding? There was another user I saw on here who defended voting for T because, despite apparently having always voted D in the past, he "could not look his white teenage sons in the eye and tell them he voted for people that would make them the enemy" - what absolute nonsense.
DEI may have gone too far in some areas, but that would largely be corporations trying to cash in, not anything planned by the possible Harris administration, and nothing demonstrable by the Biden administration.
DEI went too far the second it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which explicitly bans all discrimination based on race in hiring. It doesn't matter if Biden or Harris or any other democrat leader didn't explicitly initiate any of these policies. Their failure to prosecute for these obvious (and sometimes even publicly bragged about by the companies) violations of civil rights law that is supposed to protect me is more than enough to lose any chance of getting my vote. I am willing to watch quite a lot of things burn if the alternative is a racist regime against me.
The fact that you are white and claiming to be a victim of racism because minorities are getting more opportunities is laughable, but also absolutely means you were part of the problem.
The only way for the US is to progress is to eliminate the electoral college so views such as yours count for as little as they should.
Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do. And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
> Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do.
You obviously don't hate it that much lol, you clearly want white people to keep the unfair advantages they have had for most of modern history.
They wrote a book about people with you views: 'White Fragility' - you should check it out.
> And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
Giving oppressed people equal opportunities isn't racism. We'll get rid of the EC eventually, and the votes of people like you simply won't matter.
Sure, go ahead and keep telling yourself that comforting myth that it was all because of lies and dirty tricks. But according to polls the general public, even during the chaos today, supports the Republicans over the Democrats on most of the major political issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep...
It was absolutely due to lies and dirty tricks at least in part - I'm sure I can find objective analysis of people who said they voted because they believed various lies and disinformation if you like?
But, let's say you're right to an extent, that's just incredibly depressing and shows that the problem ultimately lies with the people.
Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
Now you can claim that Trump is bad, we'd agree with you. We're saying it's VERY dangerous to state why people voted for him because it enables it to happen again!
DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
> Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
I'm not claiming it was all that. For example, some people are single issue voters on abortion, so of course they are going to vote R. But a lot of people bought into the trans panic ads, the xenophobia, etc.
> DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
The voters were misinformed, though. Without a doubt the last election showed the people are much more of a problem than any party.
Neither did Biden, and he won. Neither did Clinton and she didn't, but still got more votes than Trump. And the Republicans are leading on the issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep.... In an election between a boring Republican and a boring Democrat, the Republican probably wins.
Vance will "have the charisma" of being the focus of the palace cult (around a quarter of the country) while Trump's corpse is still warm.
These people aren't people anymore, they're cultist NPCs. They have suspended personal agency and independent reasoning about their interests in favor of the vibes, in favor of the grift, and in favor of arbitrary Strong Executive Leadership. They will say literally anything Fox News et al tells them to say.
Vance's job was always to end democracy by replacing Trump with somebody more subservient to capital who could stay on-script, while seeming less crazy to liberals. He was practically raised for this. MAGA has been trained to water at the mouth when somebody jangles their keys, and will happily transfer their utter loyalty and devotion to somebody else who can jangle keys.
This reads kind of like you see half the population of the country as subhuman. This is often used by radicals as the first step in justifying extreme measures to achieve policy goals that would be considered unthinkable otherwise.
I know you think only the Right could be fascist, but most of the extreme left has become so distraught over their recent losses that they are losing most of their own ethics as well. "These people aren't people" is a shitty look when it's a white-supremacist saying it, and it's an equally shitty look coming from Team Blue.
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.
All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.
Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.
Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.
It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.
That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
Unfortunately some managers get lonely and want a friendly face in their org meetings, or can’t answer any technical questions, or aren’t actually tracking what their team is doing. And so they pull in an engineer from their team.
Being a manager is a hard job but the failure mode usually means an engineer is now doing something extra.
How would you have formed that impression? Whatever media and culture you’re consuming, or how you are interpreting it, is leading you to incorrect conclusions. You should examine that.
We all live in a cultural bubble but any time you find yourself thinking that millions of people somewhere else do something crazy, you should probably talk to someone from there.
Sleeping meds might be prescribed at a higher rate in the US, that wouldn’t surprise me due to the specific incentives in our health care system. But that’s a far cry from your impression.
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