This has of course been Dominic Cummings’s plan for years - you can read about it quite openly on his blog, and on the blog of his friend American physicist/eugenicist Steve Hsu. The point is to allow private industry to capture the health information of private citizens in order to turn Britain into a genetic modification powerhouse- pitched on the basis of fighting genetic diseases, but in fact founded on the anti-egalitarian, genetic-determinist, race-and-iq worldview of much of the modern right
Complete nonsense - if you believe for one second that those “reports” were legitimate or that this was a genuine public safety measure you’re an absolute rube and a mark. This was just an elected official pandering to his electoral base of suburban fascists by validating their heroic-murder fantasies.
Just to not mince words: many of them are white supremacists and cultural chauvinists. Tweet a picture of old town Sarajevo or the Alhambra at one of those “traditional European architecture” twitter accounts and see how they respond.
There is no equivalence between property damage equivalent to killing, much as there is no equivalence between a random twitter user “calling for the guillotines” and the commander of the armed forces threatening to unleash a massacre. It is beyond bad faith to argue otherwise.
The American Presidency is a storied and historic office, not just a job but a symbol of the nation, of its civic and cultural identity, so it has been difficult for a lot of people to come to terms with it being occupied by someone who is quite so openly and vocally a gibbering idiot. Hence the need to pretend that these pronouncements represent proposals into which serious thought and effort has been invested, rather than the momentary whims of a bloviating narcissist.
I think based on the events of the past three years (or really, the past three months) the most parsimonious explanation by far is that the President and his staff and advisors are simply lazy and incompetent.
This order was hastily drafted by White House staff to soothe a temper tantrum the President had after a day of being extremely online. Why would you expect it to be anything but sloppy and inconsistent?
That's great for them, but it means the current employees day-dreaming about leaving their luxuriously appointed home office in their palatial Mountain West exurban home for a Wednesday afternoon skiing trip are going to need to seriously readjust their expectations towards "splitting an apartment in Sacramento instead of SF"
Yes, my point is that this is the same mechanism that will reduce the inertia for "move half of our engineers to low-wage countries and squeeze the wages of the ones that are left"
>> If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently?
Well, by the same logic, why didn’t FB have a remote forward strategy before now? Presumably the pandemic has changed firms assumptions about the relative value of remote and in person work.
I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary - while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life” and massively sharpening the knife of competition hanging over every engineer’s head
This may be different in firms where the workers actually have a say in the management of the company, but god knows there aren’t too many of those
Part of the problem is "the ability to do abstract symbolic manipulation" becomes conflated with "talent" which then becomes conflated with "human worth"...
Part of the allure of the job is that it's supposed to be about abstract values like honor, duty, loyalty, patriotism etc. and not about compensation. It can't be otherwise, because then you have to accept that the job is basically just about killing people in exchange for money.
Between their salaries, hazard pay, pensions, government hiring and contracting preferences, free lifetime healthcare, free tuition, free graduate tuition, free job retraining and zero-interest mortgages, U.S. soldiers are amply compensated, and there are plenty of legitimate opportunities available for guys from elite units like the Green Berets. None of the guys writing tell-alls or turning to a life of international crime and /or mercenary work are doing it to put food on the table, they do it because they're thrill- or fame- or money-obsessed psychos.
Well, in this case, it involved hiring mercenaries, arranging an elaborate heist involving traditional Lebanese musicians and bribing airport workers in at least three different countries. I think the ability to improvise is crucial.
This is a serious misrepresentation of the actual content of the leaks, propagated by a gallery of pro-Assad freelance writers and regime mouthpieces. In fact, the "leaks" never seriously contradicted the OPCW's conclusion.
It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.
That doesn't make it not explicitly racist and white supremacist. If you set fire to a synagogue and then explained it was just to trigger the libs, do you think that would make it less of an anti-Semitic act?