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  • in history
  • 1 min read

last enslaver in senate

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  • in law
  • 1 min read

defense is higher-prestige

defense orgs are viewed as higher-prestige than DA’s offices and so tend to hire from among the top-ranked schools. To generalize broadly: the prosecutors office being a racially diverse set of first-generation lawyers from working-class neighborhoods with intimidate connections to crime and poverty, while the defenders are privileged Main Line and Westchester Ivy Leaguers putting in their stint of playing white savior in the big bad city before moving on to more lucrative fields. All you see in defense is Harvard, Columbia, Duke; all you see in the prosecution is Cardozo, St. Johns, Hofstra. - some user on /r/TheMotte

they are talking about that big cat

A couple years back, one of the big cats at the local zoo escaped his enclosure. High on freedom, he roamed the other habitats and killed eight other animals, none of which he even partially consumed. Wildlife experts were interviewed to explain that this "surplus killing" was the result of his instincts interacting with the unnatural, constructed environment. He was overstimulated, he saw movement, he attacked. "It was completely natural behavior that is in no way reflective of a bad cat."

Not long after, my dad and I happened to be watching the local news together. The anchor reported yet another murder in a high-crime neighborhood. Disgusted, Dad changed the channel. "The way they talk about these people. It's like they're talking about that big cat loose in the zoo."

It stuck with me. I'm sympathetic to the life circumstances that make poverty or crime all but inevitable for people less fortunate than me. I want to understand these dynamics so we can fix them.

But yeah, sometimes when I'm talking to progressive friends, they use almost the exact same language about people from unfortunate backgrounds who do horrible things as the wildlife experts used about the wild animal loose in the zoo. - /u/raggedy_anthem

engineered Omicron

"I nonseriously wondered if some mad scientist engineered Omicron and released it to inoculate the world. Because, it is so mild, so much less severe on the lower respiratory system, so much more infectious, and seems to out compete all other variants of Covid while granting immunity to them as well. By everything I hear and read, yeah, it's Covid. But it's not the Covid we were taught to fear, where overnight your lungs get shredded and you drown in your own diseased fluids.

Of course, actually doing that on purpose were be insanely unethical. But I can also imagine a mad scientist so fed up with feckless bureaucrats and greedy pharma execs that he or she does it anyways, because it's what they can do and it beats leaving it to the idiots or the assholes. "

bullshit jobs

If a man calls a girl 3-5 times who doesn’t want to hear from him an tells him to fuck off everytime, its harassment and he can be charged... if a man calls 100 people a day who all tell him to fuck off and continues that everyday for 20 years... we call that a [sales] career.

...

the fact that expertise in a particular field of compliance and expertise in the government bureaucracy mandating the compliance is the exact same skillset and a common career path is jumping back and forth between the two “Sure i can help you comply with these rules! I was the one enforcing them!” “Sure i can help you write and enforce the rules! I’ve spent the past 4 years complying with them!” Does very little in my confidence for this field. - /u/KulakRevolt

a reply:

I proposed once on this forum that some value is "derivative" of other value, so that none of the people doing sales at an oil company could exist without someone manning the well. I remember being mostly told that economics isn't measured that way. (I consider that economics' problem.)

teenagers lost rights

I think it’s important to recognize that, whether his argument is sound or not, teenagers do occupy a rather historically unique position in the present. People between the ages of 12 and 18, or even 12 and 21, are probably the only group who have steadily lost rights over the last century and a half (maybe dating from 1880 in the US?) as a result of their membership in an immutable group, rather than gaining equal rights with others, as has been the trend for other such groups. Obviously age is more mutable than e.g. race in the absolute sense, but certainly it’s immutable in the sense that it’s not alterable by any human power, only by time itself.

This does seem a bit strange, considered from the perspective of an alien observer: 250 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was selling cargo at 15, publishing influential political writings while attending Columbia University in New York City at the age of 17 and serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp at 19. Now, at those ages respectively, he couldn’t work, instead being forced to be in school, he wouldn’t even be able to drive in NYC, and he couldn’t knock back eggnog with old Georgey either. And why is this? I don’t really know. - some user on /r/TheMotte

latch

the right has latched onto a boogeyman of election fraud, while the left has latched onto the idea of internal coups. Both are dangerous in the sense that they create an atmosphere of paranoia about the acts and intentions of the other side. That’s where the violence will come from. When people see the other side as untrustworthy enemies, there’s no good will. Whoever is president after Biden will be president of his own voters, not the country. And the rest, for reasons of their side’s choosing will not accept him as president. And with each claiming the republic is at stake, the risk of nut jobs getting a gun or planting a bomb or whatever else starts making sense. - /u/maiqthetrue

Looks like it was deleted. Can't find link.

microsoft acquires activision blizzard

It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. - curiousllama (HackerNews)