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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Trump spent most of his political career casually mocking the warmongering and deficit hawkery endemic to both the George and Bill administrations (in favor of his own brand of at-home white nationalist police state).

    That was his whole path to victory over the GOP Primary field in '16 and again in '24. He ran - quiet literally and explicitly - as a Mussolini style “national socialist”. Nakedly and unequivocally fascist in the 1930s sense of the word.

    Now he’s just another John Bolton / Jim Webb neoconservative. Everything the public soured on decades ago is coming back up like swamp gas. No wonder even lay Republican voters are souring on him. He’s indistinguishable from Jeb Bush.





  • 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.





  • Speaking to Mozambique’s President Daniel Chapo ​in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged support for the continent and its development needs, according to a state media read-out that did not mention Lai’s cancelled visit to Eswatini.

    Lai, in a post on his Facebook page, said China’s “suppressive actions” demonstrate the threat that authoritarian states pose to the international order, ​peace, and stability.

    Couldn’t he just fly commercial?

    I do think it’s curious to hear the Taiwanese President insist their airplanes have an unmitigated right to fly over African airspace, given how many times I’ve heard Taiwanese-aligned press scream bloody murder over China violating Taiwanese airspace.

    Even funnier to post this on Facebook, a website that’s made a mint squelching dissent on behalf of its political sponsors.

    Maybe do what every other country does when they want an African national leader (or Tech Company CEO) to bend their way. Bribe them.

    Or bomb them, if you’re in the US/Israel bloc.



  • 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.