Posts by fajensen

Wonder why I always got passed over for promotion?

Of course, you are violation of Corporate Prime Directive #1: "Never make a colleague look bad".

Bosses see this and think "I don't want to be sitting in a project review meeting with that person".

If one must critisise, one must frame it in the form of a trivial analogue adjustment, like: "I believe we have experienced some quality issues. If we increase the coverage of the test suite a bit more we could improve the quality that the customers experience". Instead of: "The code base is a mess, it will take six months to refactor it to something half decent".

With the right framing, Every Problem is just Another Opportunity (for self) - is the way to "work" today (Most "work" is perfomative anyway).

Re: I think that I might have also worked for that company

do you want the flight control system written by exactly the 'correct' ethnic diversity of people, or the best people, regardless of ethnicity

Nope, I want it very much to be done by "The Right People"! Even if that takes a bit longer.

"The Best People" have too often, in my experience, been one off: Arseholes (gifted from the competition with the warmest of recommendations), Boss's Cronies, Has-Beens / Never-weres (usually washed in from Academia or Big-4 Conslutting), Useless Power-Pointers and Gladiators (People picking fights over *every* *issue* there is, to prove how Superior Only They are).

Absolutely Not Always. Think a bit more about the situation.

What if the debt can never be collected? What if you can get others to pay for it? What if by borrowing more than anyone else, the growth exponents of your investments will be larger than the competition and culturally you are a fervent believer in the world as a Zero-Sum Game?

The utility of being debt free kinda reverses then!

The USA can (and does) use the debt it assumes to monopolise key ressources like Oil, Intellectual Property, Land, Water, Minerals, Agriculture, Political power, et.cetera. Sure the USD is dropping slowly in value over the years, but, that could from the American perspective be seen as a "Trade Tax" that everyone using USD for transactions must pay. It is not really a problem for the issuer of the USD, they can always issue MORE currency to cover the gap.

Bidding up ressources and talent with printed money, that The Competition must first work hard to aquire, will certainly harm them and favour yourself. Which is Win-Win, USA-Style.

Competiton from China, the EU and the global push for renewable energi (reducing the need for USD to buy Oil with) is eroding the importance of aquiring USD and thus the American power base. So of course the USA is going to fight all of those existential threats tooth-and-nail to keep the shenanigans going. Regardless of who the puppet in the White House is.

Eventually the USA will default like Russia did and since there is nothing anyone can actually do about it, most of the show will go on in the end. Maybe with a different reserve currency or maybe a basket of individual currencies. "They" will cook something up, like always.

They are only going to be worth less if there is a real alternative to using USD for trade. There isn't at the moment and won't be for a long while. It is what it is.

One can look up how much the Chinese are sitting on, which amounts to just about 1 Trillion USD (https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt). The national debt of the USA currently amount to about 28 Trillion USD (courtesy of "Wolf Street" https://wolfstreet.com/2020/09/17/who-bought-the-3-3-trillion-piled-on-the-incredibly-spiking-us-national-debt-since-march/).

Between March 2020 and September 2020, the Treasury piled on another 3.3 Trillion up to 27 Trillion, meaning that soaking up Everything that China has amounts to about 2 months of "Business as Usual"!

Re: Facts...

Everybody is just waiting for the US to have a functional government after the election.

We should be careful what we wish for, in this case: A more effective, better-looking Evil!?

In My Very Jaded Opinion, "The Problem" that "western leaders" seems to have with Donald Trump is that Trump and his mobbed-up family of cronies, are too uncultivated, straight-up "standover men", for "everybody" to earnestly "sell" whatever new obscenities America comes up with to their supposedly discerning Western electorates!

They *liked* Obama for being such a smoooth, good-looking, polite, mass-murderer, torturer and war-monger! Gave him the Nobel Piece Price too! Never minded that he bugged everyone and took a huge dump all over Nürenberg!!

In a perverted way, I do like the earnesty of the Trump Regime and I like to see that "our leaders" can at least still be embarassed enough to not do something terrible when a terrible person demands it. Maybe a habit can be deloped of not doing it regardless of who is asking?

Re: It's a passing phase

Can any of us be sure that chinese kit doesn't have the ability to provide some access?

Nope. We can, however, be pretty sure that it doesn't provide the seamless NSA-access-experience that all of the not-sanctioned western kit does. If it did, those US/UK TLA's wouldn't become so uppity about us "free people" deploying it.

The thing is, since China cannot (at least not for a long while yet) put me on no-flight lists, "Authorization to Action lists" and freeze all of my meagre assets, I just personally feel more secure with us using the Chinese kit. Whether it being Instrumented or Not.

Re: While I am entirely ... Germany paying it's previously agreed-upon share of GDP on defense.

Threats, Bullying, Sanctions and Wars is sadly all that the USA has to offer the world these sorry days.

It probably comes from them beliving that having won the cold war, they no longer have to offer any more incentives for countries to adopt their "winning world view" rather than that of the USSR. China is still a bit too far away culturally, but, we are making progress, money makes friends :p

Diplomacy from the EU/Merkel- side is obvously concerned with keeping the USA in the Threatening- and Bullying- modes while working something out along the way. Hoping against reason that this will all pass with Donald Trump.

I.M.O, This is nothing new, Donald Trump and his thuggish cronies just made the nature of the USA visible to all, not only to those people unfortunatly living in designated droning or "regime" areas.

Not that old rubbish again. Everybody knows, including China, that: The FED both can and it totally will buy up all of Chinas "big chunk" in about 200 milliseconds with money it can create an infinite amount off whenever the need arises.

Compared to the amount of "assets" the FED already has "under it's management", dumping China's Big Chunk into "The Market" all at once will be like a single drop falling into an olympic size swimming pool.

Re: I've come to believe

Whenever an adjective is used for marketing or in naming a protocol, it's meaining becomes inverted!

Re: Sounds familiar

The one problem electronic voting does solve solve is that the losers does not get their fweelings hurt by having their little faces rubbed in tiresome facts like maybe they ran a rubbish candidate or their program was shite or maybe everyone by now just hates their guts and wants them Gone!

Instead they can blame The Russians for their losses and argue endlessly on how they actually won!

Re: Not possible?

Don't have to jam anything - just (get telco to) set up a picocell at the place where one want to control cellphone access, create a list of devices allowed access to data services, to be switched on, and so on und zu weiter .... but ... with everything "important" in IT it is never important enough to put in the work or pay someone to do it!

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

If we do decide to preach to the heathens and not the choir, there some guides online in how how to talk to conspiracy theorists.

Tish, Tosh: The well-proven British Empire way of deling with heathens is way, way better: Lee-Enfields and Maxims deployed from fixed positions, a liberal supply of Redshirts and a plentitude of Ammo!

If one is not willing to do important work properly, why bother at all, eh!?

Besides, Going "online" and "talking" to conspiracy nutters / bots is *exactly* what THEY* want: THEY need especially the smarter people to waste their time and effort on a futile and meaningless crusade so that they dont spend their irreplacable time on changing things or creating new things or indeed doing anything at all that can affect the world that the oligarchs created for themselves.

*) THEY - Anyone who are sitting high on the hog and want that to remain so, Anyone who sees other nations as competitors in a zero-sum game and the weakening and the fragmenting of their people and institutions as A Good Policy!

got insanely rich by pushing sub-standard products,

OTOH - All sucessful ecosystems have parasites, meaining: If those products were of a higher standard, people like I would be driving crappier cars and live in smaller, crappier, homes because we wouldn't be fixing them all the time!

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

What do we gain by replacing words today?

We get Change, without any Change. A very nice and useful thing to have. If one is one of the lucky few that gains tremendously from the current system.

I'd say that Woke-ness and ID-pol has same kind of smells as the CIA influence operations that caused the lefties to atomise and tear each other to shreds rather than having a go at their capitalist oppressors, only now with a wider scope: Getting the proles to shatter into a billion fragments and then rip each other to shreads over words - while Wallstreet gets 200x the Apollo Program in Bailouts that the proles will pay over their greatly shortened-by-misery lifespans!