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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • If progressive are going to gain a foothold in American politics, it’ll be despite and not because of the DNC. For as shitty as it is, Trump put everyone in place by winning again and again. He selectively sought retribution, but mostly took them and put them in line. Now they can’t be happier to go to bat for him.

    The only difference will be the GenX Democratic elite will say they always believed in these ideas and are glad to have helped in the fight. They wouldn’t have, but they need to save face.

    Stop getting mad that the established democratic leadership lies and cheats. Call it out and get back on message. I think the messaging is stronger than their relexive grasps to hold on to power despite having no vision of the future.




  • The following is not my opinion.


    People think poor people are lazy. If they were to work hard, they’d be better off. Also, they are impetuous. They have enough money, but they waste it on unnecessary luxuries like an iPhone. Then, when they don’t have enough money for food or housing, they ask the government for money. They wouldn’t have to if they were frugal and worked hard… Like me and the other successful people. And all those government handouts have to be paid from somewhere. The government taxes me so they can be lazy. Hell… Its so bad that it’s more profitable to not work and get money from the government than it is to work. Don’t these people have any self respect? So… You may be insulted by this, but if you had some self respect, you’d be insulted by it and do something about it. (If you’re a Democrat): I don’t mind helping, but you’ve got to help yourself first.


    That’s my best shot at it. Most Americans think poverty is contagious and try to stay far away from the poor. Its shitty because it’s not like there aren’t some people who live this, but the overwhelming majority want to work hard in a place that gives them some belong to earn them enough money to give the people they love the security from poverty.


  • Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

    When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

    Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

    I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

    It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”





  • Pets.com is held up as the example of these late 90s tech bubble. No one could ever believe your have pet supplies sold online when you have a pet store a short drive away.

    The problem with the company’s business plan was that pet supplies of all types—food, toys, clothing, and so on—could be found easily at the nearest grocery or pet store. Given the choice between ordering online and waiting for delivery or walking into the nearest store to buy the product and take it home immediately, the majority of people preferred the latter.

    But now Chewy is a very successful company with a loyal customer base and even Amazon covers much of what was sold at Pets.com.

    People will say things like it was a good idea that was too early. But at the time it was ridiculed for the naivete and exuberance of people in the tech world.




  • Anyone who knows the guy on the left: “Hindenburg went out of his way to empower Hitler and the Nazis when it was clear that his coalition was failing. Instead of working with the Social Democrats, he empowered the Nazi. Without his choices, there’s a chance that the Hitler wouldn’t have come to power. He’s an awful person.”

    You: “so you think there’s no difference between the two?!”


  • just to handle the processing of people as they complete the immigration process.

    United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) handles this. They and ICE were founded in 2002 along Customs and Border Patrol. ICE is the result of the merging of two separate enforcement agencies: part of the US Customs Services and the enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Services.

    Illegal entries caught within 100 miles of the border weren’t classified as deportations until the George W. Bush administration. Obama was colloquially known as Deporter in Chief for these high numbers.