yunyun333
1yr ago
It boiled down to arts students in departments where graduate outnumbered undergrad
is this really a thing? what could they possibly need so many grad students for?
yunyun333
7mo ago
the yom kippur war was 50 years ago to the day, and the IDF gets caught with its pants down again like this? netanyahu and his entire government's days are numbered.
yunyun333
7mo ago
For one making it back to the moon is what Musk was contracted to do. He's literally giving away tickets to the moon to youtubers, surely, if nothing else, giving away tickets for what is, charitably, a fake-it-till-you-make-it venture can be described as fraudulent?
what makes it 'fraud'? lots of space companies have sold launches for rockets that have never gone up yet.
I have to once again ask what is the marvel of engineering he created that has you so impressed? If his companies end up successful, I'll agree he's a brilliant executive, but from a tech point of view nothing he did seems all that impressive?
reusable rockets aren't impressive? even if you think the cost savings are all faked, the sheer volume of launches that they enable is an incredible achievement in their own right.
yunyun333
1yr ago
yunyun333
10mo ago
Mandela Goes From Hero to Scapegoat as South Africa Struggles
10 years after his death, attitudes have changed. The party Mr. Mandela led after his release from prison, the African National Congress, is in serious danger of losing its outright majority for the first time since he became president in 1994 in the first free election after the fall of apartheid. Corruption, ineptitude and elitism have tarnished the A.N.C... Faith in the future is collapsing. Seventy percent of South Africans said in 2021 that the country is going in the wrong direction, up from 49 percent in 2010, according to the latest survey published by the country’s Human Sciences Research Council. Only 26 percent said they trusted the government, a huge decline from 2005, when it was 64 percent... The unemployment rate is 46 percent among South Africans aged 15 to 34. Millions more are underemployed, like Mr. Thebe. He studied computer science at the university level, never receiving a degree. The best job he said he could find was selling funeral policies to the staff of the court.
While Mr. Mandela is still lionized around the world, many South Africans, especially young people, believe that he did not do enough to create structural changes that would lift the fortunes of the country’s Black majority. White South Africans still hold a disproportionate share of the nation’s land, and earn three and a half times more than Black people. Mr. Vawda, 17, belongs to a generation that knows Mr. Mandela only as a historical figure in textbooks and films. To him, Mr. Mandela’s fight to end apartheid was admirable. But the huge economic gap between Black and white South Africans will be on his mind when he votes for the first time next year, he said. "He didn’t revolt against white people,” Mr. Vawda said. “I would have taken revenge.”
the truth and reconciliation commission led by mandela chose to pardon many perpetrators of crimes related to apartheid, such as the murderers of amy biehl, an anti-apartheid activist, in order to encourage, well, truth and reconciliation. young south africaners have identified that mandela and his friends didn't go far enough with their silly restorative justice ways - perhaps a nuremberg would have been more appropriate. if you were willing to necklace traitors of your own race, why not the enemy?
yunyun333
2mo ago
international happenings:
-princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids which only fed the rumor mill. kind of a letdown from the batshit crazy conspiracies the internet was cooking up
-after vetoing a bunch of gaza ceasefire proposals at the UN, the US finally put forward one of its own, and China and Russia promptly vetoed it back.
-mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?
yunyun333
7mo ago
they could have genuinely pursued a two state solution instead of using hamas to cripple the idea of palestinian statehood.
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
yunyun333
9mo ago
apparently nobody has come to his defence
the RFEF (spanish football federation) is fully backing him. they even tried to have UEFA (governing body of european football) expel them, kicking out spanish teams from european competitions, in protest of government interference.
yunyun333
11mo ago
https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1660934240580562946
south africa is obviously not some great predictor of what will happen to the US, but it does show an extreme example of what a fanatic obsession with affirmative action and equity results in.
yunyun333
1yr ago
the handwringing over kids not caring about the holocaust is weird. anything that happened before you were born might as well be ancient history.
remember the maus drama a year or so ago where some school board decided maus was inappropriate because bad words and boobs, and the national media latched onto it as a story of how red state schools were trying to erase the holocaust. the debate was over whether that book was appropriate to use in their language arts holocaust unit. because a whole months-long unit studying the holocaust isn't enough.
yunyun333
1yr ago
the laws are written with a general assumption of people not being hyper ingroup focused. they figured out that if you outbreed everyone else, do your best to get everyone else to move out, and vote as a block in a democracy, you can live off their tax dollars. that's perfectly blameworthy.
yunyun333
1yr ago
he's basically just instituting martial law, or at least the rationale is the same: we're legally suspending your rights because you don't actually have them right now anyways. obvious parallels with duterte whom the west hated but was hugely popular in his own country.
yunyun333
10mo ago
marketing for these big companies seems like a billion dollar red queen's race. obviously some advertising needs to exist, but it feels like a massive human inefficiency that there are ads everywhere.
yunyun333
1yr ago
'rewarding' puts a moralistic spin on it, when really it's just about maximizing efficiency.
yunyun333
9mo ago
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
yunyun333
1yr ago
that one is pretty eyebrow raising as well. cops claimed that
“suspected shooter engaged in a verbal altercation with officers and emerged from a camper trailer and confronted officers. Members of the Cherokee Indian Police SWAT Team fired upon the suspect and wounded him.”
which is a very charitable framing of "guy gets woken up with bright lights and horns, mutters some profanities, opens the door, and gets shot after complying with orders to come out with his hands up".
yunyun333
7mo ago
ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
yunyun333
9mo ago
this was a meme on /tv/ (my bomb... was used on POCs?), but there's no reason that he would have been particularly aggrieved if it was used on the nazis.
yunyun333
1yr ago
the favoritism is that the older kids are being compared to their younger peers in the same group, which, for example, makes them more likely to be placed in 'gifted' programs.
yunyun333
7mo ago
no argument from me that hamas doesn't care about improving palestinian lives. just questioning the telegraph article saying european donations are being used to build qassams.
yunyun333
11mo ago
cinderella made $542 million, alice in wonderland made over a billion. were those considered unsuccessful?
lady and the tramp and pinocchio were disney+ exclusives. disney+ has kind of been a flop, so fair enough there.
the christopher robin movie was one of those 'kid character turns into jaded adult' movies like hook.
yunyun333
11mo ago
comparing two cases that are pretty different doesn't really make any point. the second case did have some hilarious reasoning from the defense:
She was "unaware of what is going on", attorney Mark Iverson told the jury, "She is moving, but without conscious thought".
the hamas leadership gives zero shits about the palestinians there and they'll never have recruitment issues. the optics of giving israel a broken nose and perhaps delaying normalization with the saudis are worth a few thousand lives.
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