Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

You had me at communication. That’s like 95% of any relationship… Literally everything is up in the air … Except being on the same page

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

Yep… My first “career” job was for a mid sized company. In my onboarding they gave me my employee number but said “you’ll never need this, here you’re a name, not a number”. One time I emailed security saying I forgot my badge because it was with my lunch, and one of the founders called me up and gave me his prepackaged lunch because he said he usually doesn’t get through them all. When we closed a big deal, they called us all upstairs to have champagne during the workday. Our mission was unambiguously to help people

Then we got acquired… They gave me my new employee ID and told me I’d be using it for everything. They just milked our contracts and refused wages until we all left

And unfortunately, mid sized companies can give an equally good experience with much better pay and job security… But they’re being bought out to secure contracts and gutted at an insane rate.

It’s late stage capitalism… If you want to keep growing but you’ve already destroyed your ability to complete, buy them out to take over their contracts

Oh absolutely… There’s tons of petty tyrants out there too, which is different, but also bad or even worse. They might also be just staffing something just as soul crushing too, so it could just be worse in every regard

But small business means your boss is probably there to stay. Ideally, you meet the owner in your interview, often they’re the same person. But if you find someone loyal to their people, you can actually give them your loyalty and they’ll see you as a person

Security is not obscurity, and while obscurity can slow down a bad actor, it is not security and is not reliable

Transparency can lead to security through outside audit, the more eyes on it the more will security holes will be noticed

It’s crazy how this simple thing I was taught on day 1 of my job just can’t be properly understood by people. Not even just non -technical people - across the board we have constant leaks, in part because we don’t collaborate to build together nearly enough

IDK if this would be viable with an H1 visa and I’ve seen many other options I’ll be looking into, but here’s what I normally tell people in this position: small businesses are built different

They’re harder to find, they usually don’t pay amazingly, but they’re way more human. It’s not all run through spread sheets, you work for humans who get to know you and (can sometimes) actually be like a family…(If they say that phrase it’s a red flag though)

It’s hit or miss, you likely would be working on legacy stuff or have to wear many hats… But it’s work where you know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for

They’re different - when I say “brush” my tongue stays in the middle of my mouth against the bottom and the back spreads slightly on the r, when I say “blush” it touches the top of my teeth before flicking down on the u

They’re slightly different phonemes, if you don’t hear it naturally it’s difficult. But if you focus hard enough on the details you can eventually learn to hear it - you have to listen intently to the comparison over and over until you can hear the difference. From there, you can practice to make the sound yourself

Maybe not you…I can’t unsee shit like that. I can’t look at paintings in homes near airports… There’s a lot of people who easily see misalignments of a fraction of a degree without trying

And it’s always worse from a distance, always worse in person

I think the CIA has used them pretty extensively, but I don’t think they set them up directly

What the US did is force Mexico to join in on the drug war. We threatened to block all pharmaceuticals to Mexico if they didn’t ban marijuana, which they really didn’t want to do

It kinda does… We’ve had a dark history. Our period of being better was basically just WW2 to recently

It’s not about egg prices. It’s a shorthand for inflation, it’s nailing Trump supporters down to this one metric

These people are divorced from truth, but they want eggs. It’s hard to ignore how much eggs cost. It’s apparent how the egg section is half empty

This is a drum beat for people to look through their lying eyes, to pay attention to the world around them despite the lies

It’s unempathic to tell people they’re being judged by unfair standards?

I don’t know what you read, but it isn’t what I wrote

How does that work? Environment is everything

I don’t think your sick, I don’t think I am either… I think we’re hunters in a society of farmers

I mean… They’re not exactly hiding it. The expressed purpose of belts and roads is to invest in their infrastructure and partner with them to build industrial capacity. Conveyer belts and roads. They openly state they’re doing it to build up trading partners and global influence

It’s literally the same thing… Will they be better partners? Hopefully, it’s not exactly a high bar

They’re not Marxist-Leninists at all though… They’re just a highly regulated form of capitalism.

The government doesn’t own Tencent, they just keep a strong grip on them. They have their own billionaires, the factories have owners, companies bid to fulfill government contracts, you apply for a job and get paid what they offer. It’s just capitalism

Their government does a lot more than in the US and has a lot more influence, and they do influence the market more… But that’s just regulation and public services

They basically do what we did to tik tok. The US government can revoke a corporate charter for any or no reason, China just actually uses this authority actively

Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I’ve even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful…I couldn’t, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it’s probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there’s bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways

They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn’t need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already

Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers

Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That’s after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they’re kept in perpetual debt as leverage

It’s a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn’t hidden, it’s just spun in a positive light

Belt and roads is China’s attempt to do exactly what we’ve been doing with the global south, invest for influence and put them on a debt treadmill. Build infrastructure, pressure them to take on more debt with new projects, say it’s time for austerity, open up more foreign investments, use pressure to buy up raw resources, etc

It’s worth mentioning Coca-Cola… You can get American products everywhere, opening them up as a new market isn’t a different strategy, it’s part of the process

He thumped his chest and did it emphatically. Then he turned around and did it again. The only way it could’ve been more nazilike is if he stomped while he did it

Because they’re just teaching their understanding of the world, it’s not like they’re lying. Propaganda works

And it’s not like it comes up often. And even if it does, very few people are able to explain why that’s wrong on the spot