The MAGA base does not care about the international reputation of the US. They lean heavily towards isolationism (irrationally, imho).

This is very much untrue in terms of being a soldier in a high-functioning military.

Technically, you’re not wrong (at least for lighter weapons). That said, there are many more physically demanding things that are involved in doing infantry things (which is what you’re describing) other than running and pulling a trigger (and ideally hitting the target).

> or do all those technical jobs.

Depends on the job, but much more likely.

The vast majority of the jobs in the military are not infantry or infantry-type jobs, so I can see a lot more scope for drafted women who aren’t cut out for infantry doing these things.

Could you please explain the how and why of the mechanics of this process (edit: from the perspective of the lender)?

It seems like the lender is taking a massive sucker bet.

Or is the reality that the lender gets repaid the vast majority of the time, and we only hear about the bad outcomes?

I will go out on a limb and suggest that they are probably happy that you’ve self-selected out of the process.

I’m not saying your expectations are unreasonable, but you have higher expectations than most consumers, and that ultimately becomes a pain in their ass.

Obviously request a reasonable accommodation and sue if you don’t get it.

/s

Data does not support your sense.

Most students do not have good time management skills, usually because they have no models and/or have not been taught these skills.

Furthermore, continuous feedback, whether graded or not, has been found to be more effective than one-shot feedback.

Evaluation and assessment is a complex topic towards which many people (not necessarily you) want to take an overly simplified approach.

There are trade offs for any system that is chosen. The organizations providing the grades have to decide what their priorities are (e.g., time, accuracy, etc.).

Only rubes think this.

The formal education at most elite universities trends towards quite bad, with a few exceptional classes.

The access to resources (academic, social, professional, etc.) at universities is phenomenal, but this only matters if the student uses those resources (most don’t).

Elite colleges typically have a great education, but they are usually just as expensive as elite universities, but with much less prestige — they are only “worth it” (if you’re looking for value) as a stepping stone to something else.

> This obviously doesn't make sense from an educational perspective. If education is good for you, why make it unaffordable and out of reach?

If someone chooses to go to an elite school while not understanding the value prop (or lack thereof), that’s on the applicant rather than the school.

> Low cost colleges are supposedly inferior and not everyone gets to become "an educated well rounded individual".

Low cost colleges serve an important function, and imho it’s just as easy to be “an educated well rounded individual” at one of these schools. They may not be as prestigious, but the value of most average or better universities and colleges is largely based on the efforts made by any given student (which trends towards being very low effort).

Sort of.

1. It’s a place where capital can make friends with capable people who will be willing to work for them later.

2. It gives the smart and ambitious “commoners” enough exposure to elite social circles such that they can learn and adapt some/most of the social standards (if they choose to do so, which most don’t). This is important, as all the brains in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t fit in, especially when it comes to the bigger money positions.

3. The social shibboleths between the two groups are very real, and it usually takes less than 5 minutes hanging around someone to know which group they are in. There can be some false signals about being higher status, but those are hard to sustain for very long.

Note that many “commoners” who go to elite schools end up hitting a glass ceiling in their 30s or so due to focusing on being smart and a skill person rather than being a socially savvy person. The social people will be able to make it rain later in life, and the skill people just get shifted around as needed.

This is a great narrative for folks who want to be fatalistic.

From my view:

- Much of what you call “nobles” and “commoners” are more about values than blood. Yes, “noble” values are difficult to develop if you’re not born in that class. That said, these values are easier to learn and develop today for a wider group of people than has ever been true in the past.

- Some people think the “noble” side is all rainbows and unicorns. The noble class is shedding its weak non-stop. It may take a generation or two before a branch of a noble family becomes common, but it happens often, and it’s a source of great consternation to that branch when it does.

> What’s sophisticated are the layers of ideology and falsehood that made people believe that aristocracy was dead.

Did anyone actually think the aristocracy was dead?

The relative power of the aristocracy dipped a bit mid-20th century, but what they may have temporarily lost in economic power was gained in social and political power.

0. Sure, some products will be made in house. That said, being able to spec a product well is a skill that is not as common as some folks seem to think. It also assumes that an org is large enough to have a good internal dev team, which is both rare and relatively expensive.

1. It sloughs responsibility, which many folks want to do.

2. It allows for creation to be done not by committee and/or with less impact from internal politics.

3. It facilitates JIT product/tool development while minimizing costs.

That’s off the top of my head.

The realities of business often point to internal development not being ideal.

Do you spec software for a variety of businesses?

I do.

It’s rare that one SaaS or software package does what the people paying want it to do. Either they have to customize internally (expensive and limited to larger orgs with a tech department) or Frankenstein a solution like Salesforce or WordPress with a lot of add ons. And even then, it’s not hitting all pain points.

Being able to spin up or modify an app cheaply and easily will be a massive boon for businesses.

> Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

Yes. Products will become more tailored/bespoke rather than a lot of the one size fits all approach that is pervasive now.

I think many developers, especially ones who come from EE backgrounds, grossly overestimate the number of people needed who understand what is going on underneath.

“Going on underneath” is a lot of interesting and hard problems, ones that true hackers are attracted to, but I personally don’t think that it’s a good use of talented people to have 10s or 100s of thousands of people working on those problems.

Let the tech geniuses do genius work.

Meanwhile, there is a massive need for many millions of people who can solve business problems with tech abstractions. As an economy (national or global), supply is nowhere close to meeting demand in this category.

1. He talked about them to people who were interested in listening.

2. He was able to apply the knowledge he gained for his specific task in a variety of team tasks at the event.

Both.

Smart because you realized that BTC is an incredibly flawed currency, or store of value, or whatever you want to call it.

Idiot because you grossly underestimated the desire of the general public to gamble on the “next big thing”.

In $big_corp, everyone seems to have penis envy over “head count”, constantly checking whose is bigger.

If you want to see an executive have an existential crisis, ask them how many of those folks are necessary for the org to run.

This is the entire sentence that I wrote that you seem to be referring to:

“These are examples of how bad management thinks, or at best, how management at dying companies think.”

MS falls under the first part — bad management. Let literacy be your friend.

To elaborate, yes, I think that MS is managed incredibly poorly, and they succeed despite their management norms and culture, not because of it. They should be embarrassed by their management culture, but their success in other areas of the company allows the bad management culture to persist.

> From the perspective of modern management, there's really no reason to keep people if you can automate them away.

These are examples of how bad management thinks, or at best, how management at dying companies think.

Frankly, this take on “modern management” is absurd reductionist thinking.

Just a few points about how managers in successful companies think:

- Good employees are hard to find. You don’t let good people go just because you can. Retraining a good employee from a redundant role into a needed role is often cheaper than trying to hire a new person.

- That said, in any sufficiently large organization, there is usually dead weight that can be cut. AI will be a bright light that exposes the least valuable employees, imho.

- There is a difference between threshold levels of compliance (e.g., docs that have to be filed for legal reasons) and optimal functioning. In accounting, a good team will pay for themselves many times if they have the time to work on the right things (e.g., identifying fraud and waste, streamlining purchasing processes, negotiating payment terms, etc.). Businesses that optimize for making money rather than getting a random VP their next promotion via cost-cutting will embrace the enhanced capability.

Yes, AI will bring about significant changes to how we work.

Yes, there will be some turmoil as the labor market adjusts (which it will).

No, AI will not lead to a labor doomsday scenario.

Good accounting teams will have more time and resources to do things like identify fraud, waste, duplicated processes, etc. They will also have time to streamline/optimize existing practices.

Good teams will earn many multiples of their cost in terms of savings or increased earnings.

There may be increased competition for the low-cost “just meet the legal compliance requirements” offerings, but any business that makes money and wants to make more will gladly spend more than the minimum for better service.

In many cases, this is a fallacy.

Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can be done more thoroughly.

Source: Me. I have worked waaaay too much on cleaning up the innards of less-than-perfect accounting processes.