Mantergeistmann
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User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
Employees have a sense of obligation to their employer, and vice versa. Fundamentally, they still perceive each other as members of the same tribe with a shared fate. They won't ignore their own self-interest, but they won't actively try to screw over the other just for some marginal short-run benefit.
That seems to be where line managers are incredibly important and influential. The differences I've seen (and felt) between "people are staying when they could leave for a slightly better offer because this manager is great to work for" and "people are leaving for a slightly worse offer because this manager is terrible" is... rather impressive.
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
I believe that clawback provisions on training costs are legal.
I work for a company that doesnt wipe its own arse without government approval signed in triplicate, as the saying goes, and we have something like this: if you get a degree with the company contributing money, you have to stay at least one year after completion, or you owe all that money back. Seems very reasonable.
I think it only applies to degrees/university courses, though, not other generic training/certificate opportunities (i.e. if I get reimbursed for getting my Project Management Professional certification, it doesnt matter if I leave the very next day after the reimbursement shows up in my account; I don't owe a dime of it back).
Mantergeistmann
8mo ago
the barrage of Harris ads around reproductive
The clever thing is, it's not a Harris ad. There's a nice little disclaimer at the end that it's not authorized by her campaign. So, of course, when anyone complains, it's not the Democratic Party or their politicians behind these ads, it's just totally unaffiliated randos!
There has to be a term for that (other than implausible deniability). I feel like I see it a lot with IdPol stuff: "Well, most Democratic politicians don't use LatinX, so you can't blame them for your workplace's employee group!"
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
There's an effortpost to be made on how the Iron Dome is, from a geopolitical standpoint, the most counterproductive technology of the past few decades.
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
I don't think that the outcome is very impressive
There's another point you brushed against, but moved past: the pagers were used as a safe alternative to cell phones. As a morale downer and paranoia increaser, this will hit Hezbollah pretty hard.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
the Beijing claimant to China
If we're going with unorthodox phrasings, I personally prefer "West/Mainland Taiwan".
Mantergeistmann
4mo ago
For that, you'd have to break HR's stranglehold on the process. Strongly in favour of, by the way.
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward.
Is it that? Or is it that for decades, there were tremendously few years where Republicans controlled the Senate, and therefore any candidates nominated by a Republican president had to be those that would appeal to the Democratic senators?
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
an anthropologist asking one of the famed "third gender" tribesmen if they consider themselves something other than a man, and hearing "are you retarded?" in response, is a thing that actually happened in real life
You can't just drop something that funny without citing your source.
Mantergeistmann
11d ago
I am once again going to plug the late, great Shamus Young's post on Story Collapse.
Mantergeistmann
26d ago
Yes. I think if Iran were preaching peace with their neighbors instead of having a countdown clock to Israel's annihilation, the world would treat Iran's nuclear program very differently.
Mantergeistmann
2mo ago
Estonia has asserted its right to inspect tankers transiting the Baltic under the international laws for maritime protection, which was also backed up by a European Commission decision requiring tankers to provide proof of insurance when transiting European waters. Last month, Estonia briefly held a tanker which it asserted was operating with a false registry and from the reports yesterday the Estonian Navy again attempted to inspect another suspicious tanker.
The crude oil tanker identifying as Jaguar (105,000 dwt) registered in Gabon was inbound for Primorsk, Russia when the Estonian Navy contacted the vessel. The Equasis database reflects the same vessel as the Argent, registered in Guinea-Bissau with unknown managers and a registered owner in Mauritius.
Yes, how dare Estonia... attempt to inspect a tanker, possibly one traveling in its territorial waters? And not even one sailing under the Russian flag. Which, yes, we all know that maritime registries are fig leafs and tax evasion, but it still counts.
"The Insider was able to confirm, using Sentinel navigation charts and data from tracking service MarineTraffic, that Jaguar was indeed located in neutral waters during its encounter with the Estonian patrol boat Kurvits.
However, the video shared by the pro-Russian Telegram channels shows coordinates on the vessel’s navigation display indicating that, at the time of filming, the ship was positioned just south of the neutral waters boundary — within Estonia’s territorial waters."
If anything, the overreaction here was by Russia:
Russian SU-35 fighter entered Estonian airspace overflying the area. The plane was reported to be in Estonian airspace for less than one minute, but the media is saying its transponder was turned off and it was not in radio contact with Estonian air traffic control. It had not filed a flight plan.
I don't see anything wrong with Estonia attempting to enforce the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia, and trusting in its alliance with the West to then back it up when it attempts to enforce them. Any policing effort is backed by the state's authority and not just the physical capabilities of the arresting officer (although it certainly helps to be a bruiser), so if you expand it up a bit to geopolitics, this is no different.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Because as soon as you declare one story to be lies, it's assumed that you confirm any story you don't explicity denounce. It's the old sitcom trope of guessing a surprise: after you've said "nope, wrong" a few times, as soon as you switch to "I'm not saying" you've given everything away.
Mantergeistmann
4mo ago
A lot of people don't understand that weapon stocks degrade and must be refreshed, and that manufacturing chains have to he kept online.
Of course, on the other side, a lot of people don't seem to understand that it's the industrial base and the size of the US military/military budget that enables it to supply Ukraine, and that a lot of the funding for Ukraine "that's being spent in America" is going straight to the Military-Industrial Complex, because that's what it's there for.
Mantergeistmann
4mo ago
Also the part where to enforce a no-fly zone, you have to be willing to enter combat. A no-fly zone means being willing to shoot at Russia and have them shoot back directly. Which is usually called "being at war".
Mantergeistmann
5mo ago
"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me."
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
One thing I don't see brought up is that maybe the best thing for Israel to do would be to sign the deal, get the hostages back, and then immediately just ignore the deal and spend the next couple of years killing every Hamas member on the face of the planet.
I mean, the current deal doesn't get all the hostages back. It merely sets up future negotiations over getting them returned. There's still several dozen (living and dead) remaining with Hamas for the near future, if not longer. Everyone calling this a "win for Israel" seems to be ignoring/accepting that.
Mantergeistmann
7mo ago
The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening.
I'd heard that there had been threats, but not threats by a member of congress.
Mantergeistmann
11d ago
Occam's Razor says that the same USN that's had multiple destroyer and carrier collisions in the past, including with merchant ships, including lethal ones, might also have another one, rather than a massive conspiracy that requires the entire crew of both ships (and any potential nearby observers) to be in on it.
Make 'em collapsible hats, and follow the rules of Naval Warfare: it's fine to be deceptive up until the final moment of the operation/arrest, at which point you must put your hat on immediately beforehand. Failure to do so will, again, automatically lead to harsh penalties so there's no "oh, well, in the heat of the moment I forgot".
Edit: Especially in a situation where they're putting on masks: if you have time to put on a mask, you have time to put on your Official Hat of Authority.
Mantergeistmann
2mo ago
even Stalin and Mao haven't been as effectively pariahed
I think those two are helped by the sheer number of intellectuals who either fell for live propaganda about how great life was in the USSR, or who are generally pro-socialist/pro-communist and would rather not draw attention to such high-profile failure states.
Mantergeistmann
2mo ago
I see no reason why they should be taught as "afflictions" any more than, say, being left-handed.
I dunno, being left-handed sounds kind of sinister to me.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
No, you'd be amazed at the number of people who think he was legally here, including a right to work.
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.
It feels remarkably similar in some ways to First Nations: whatever land a given tribe/confederation occupied at the time of contact with Europeans becomes permanently and historically theirs--like a game of Civ ending at an arbitrary cutoff year, then that save state being imported to the expansion/sequel. Doesn't matter when a people took possession of a given tract of land, or who might have been there prior.
I would say that NPR leans strongly anti-Trump, and is willing to perform standard journalism misrepresentation/spin/story selection in line with that. Outright falsehood creation using fake sources? Probably not.
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