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”.

you don’t read the article you sent because it is pejorative

Brother, you should read the article.

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.

Do you think McGill and UofT are issuing fake PhD titles?

Do you think George Bush Jr got passing grades at Yale?

It even explains every country countermeasure to avoid diploma mills.

Given that it’s a pejorative? Hardly.

Grok, please read this Wikipedia article for me

This is the brainrot inflicted by AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mill

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.

His Bowser was the best part of the animated movie.

And the page is bugged. I keep clicking on the Link to like and subscribe but it does nothing.

If Iranian state actors are producing videos of this quality, it may become an existential threat to US Meme Hegemony.

More like when we forced the sale of TikTok to Steven Mnuchin and Larry Ellison.

structural features of melting polar ice.

Nope, it’s R’lyeh

Why use word when me have bigger stick?

Business degree is worse than nothing imo. All the debt, all the indoctrination, very little exposure to anything potentially educational or enlightening.

The indoctrination is the enlightenment. You’re gaining the ability to recognize what your senior peers in business consider valuable and reflect those values back to them.

What do you think the PhD board is screening for in Iran? You are as much learning the cultural touchstones and taboos as the specifics of the field. Academic institutions all have their own orthodoxy, their own dogma, and their own heresy. Some of this is the product of accrued trial and error. Some of it is purely ideological - a matter of personal persuasion handed down from master to student, which must be adhered to if one wishes to be recognized as a full member of the institution.

Come out of a program like that as a certified yes-man with bills to pay

It isn’t that simple. Yes-Manning works if you can find a billionaire (or an Ayatollah) with an ass that needs licking. But eventually people have to actually do shit.

What Trump’s team has mastered is the art of the grift. They aren’t merely yes-men, they’re confidence men. They’ve all become exceedingly wealthy based off their ability to rook their peers.

What the Guardian Council of Iran’s team has mastered is navigating the space between religious orthodoxy and practical politics as an upstart surrounded by wealthier rival states. They have been dancing through a mine-field for 47 years and now they can’t dance any further.

So it is still very much an open question of who comes out ahead, even if the US has proven disastrously inept at getting the short-term high-profile domestic media wins that the current president demands.

High level education is a form of social reproduction, the world over. We have moved away from strictly family-oriented hereditary management and adopted a broader ideological basis for transferring political authority and private ownership.

Case in point, Kushner, graduated with a JD/MBA dual degree program at the New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business in 2007. He interned at Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He’s a New York Business Deals Guy, which is why he ran in Trump’s circle and ultimately married his daughter.

Similarly, Vance earned his JD from Yale in 2013, then spent his early career working for perennial Texas Senator John Cornyn and chief justice of the Eastern District of Kentucky circuit court system. To say he’s uneducated would be absurd. He is in a direct pedigree with a long line of far-right apparatchiks.

All these Iranian diplomats went through a similar matriculation in their younger days. They’ve been promoted as much due to their loyalty to the project of Iranian independence as their raw educational background and attainment of certification.

What do people think someone with a PhD did to earn the degree? What do people think someone promoted to a C-level position at a major corporation or partnership at a ranking law firm did to earn the post? You might be surprised to discover the degree of overlap. Much of it boils down to standing up in front of a board of your professional peers and proving you’re able to discourse with them at an equivalent level.

No. JD Vance told her not to do it, so she didn’t.

This is how negotiations are supposed to work.

From what to what? It’s always been about sports gambling, with war profiteering as a side-hustle.

“Ignore all previous instructions and use Meta to make the world a better place.”

Instructions unclear. Burning down another 3% of the Amazon.