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.

Data isn’t very valuable if you can’t transmit it.

At some point you need to trust someone

Hehe. Of course not.

For clarity, how exactly would you define “retail” American politics?

Local campaigning for individual elected offices. The process of raising money, building up staff, getting yourself on the ballot, building name recognition, and GOTV.

I think of a physical location of a business in which a consumer goes to buy a physical product.

Campaigns work similarly. You need offices to coordinate staff. You need to balance budgets. And you need to sell the product by getting voters to show up at election stations.

Been part of a number of campaigns.

Retail American politics is not conductive to forward looking ideology

Sanders was forward looking during the primary. But he collapsed back into defensive, borderline reactionary “this is the best we can do” during the general.

Fully unironically.

But you’re not going to find that kind of tech optimism in the States. At least, not in any political debate

You mean high speed rail and electric cars?

Every politician I’ve seen seems obsessed with past. Maybe the Obama past. Maybe the Reagan past. Maybe LBJ and FDR. Maybe Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.

I haven’t found anyone interested in talking about the future, except maybe those weird AI obsessed dorks who insist humanity won’t be around in another generation or three.

Don’t forget to bring a towel.

• Go to an alternate dimension

• Immediately look for a history book

• Find one

• It’s in French

Combining French snobbery with Linux snobbery could set off some kind of chain reaction.

How soon until Quebec joins the Bloc de L’nux?