New Testingstan

Jung wrote:I think our culture's dismissive attitude toward manual labor and the people who do it is one of the great toxic attitudes of our society that nobody talks about.

evilsoup wrote:in my fanfiction

Oxymoron wrote:This has been a ranting point of mine for a while now.

Oxymoron wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:This has been a ranting point of mine for a while now.

I mean, the whole sum of our culture on Education can be summed up as :

"If you are reduced to work a manual job, if you are reduced to follow vocational training instead of pursuing proper studies, then I am sorry for you son, but it is clear enough that somewhere along the way you have failed."

Jung wrote:Never mind that somebody has to do the "bad" jobs.

Our society seems to have this idea at the back of its mind that the answer to poverty is not to make the lower paying jobs pay better, but to somehow move everybody into the higher paying jobs, and I guess the rest would be done by ... magic? robots?

xon wrote:

Bakustra wrote:

...
But remember that even many of those don't really need any university education: accountancy, investment banking, arguably even law.

AUGH

fuuuuuuuuck yooooouuuuuuuuu

I really do question what people are thinking when they start arguing that properly handling large amounts of money doesn't require intelligence, training or education.

energiewende wrote:I think because the consequences of not doing those things would have been either worse or not much better, and certain, while attacking had some reasonable chance of success (at least in comparison to doing nothing).

In WWII in particularly defeating the USSR before US-Commonwealth built up an overwhelming force was the only way for the Germans to win. Even just to defeat Britain on its own, they needed to exploit the industrial potential of their new European empire and they couldn''t do this because of British blockade. So USSR was a question of when, not if, and waiting only made the situation worse. Finally you have to consider that Stalin may have simply attacked Hitler. USSR had been an army-with-a-state for decades at that point, even more extreme than Nazi Germany itself, and most of the programs that produced war-winning weapons were initiated in the late 30s. Even if the USSR never would have attacked Nazi Germany, Hitler would still have needed to commit very large forces to deter them.

For Napoleon, well, he had a better chance of just sitting on his Empire, but he was again faced with British blockade, and defeating Russia was the only way to make his position really secure. Britain had been quite happily fighting him for 20 years, and pretty much controlled all overseas trade at that point. Who's to say it wouldn't have fought him for another 20? His Empire was too precarious for that, as shown by the mass defections when Russia started overruning imperial and allied territory.

joviwan wrote:

RyanThunder wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:

evilsoup wrote:the profit motive is a fucking poison

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

If you seriously believe that greed is the only way forward and upward, you're a fucking idiot.

it's a quote from a movie

Straha wrote:This is the best thing since ever.

Straha wrote:This is the best thing since ever.

Stofsk wrote:Morgan's line is really good Oxy, but you wanna know something? Go read or listen to Lal's signature line - and keep that in mind with all the shit that's happened in the last decade and a half, and how scarily prophetic Lal's words are. SMAC was made and came out in the 90s, and yet it could have come out yesterday with the kind of insights it makes about stuff.

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

-- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"