It’s not an unpopular opinion but it might be a tankie shitpost. I just really fucking wish people would explain their reasoning rather than just blatting out a stupid idea. This one isn’t stupid, per se, but if you want actual feedback you should say why you hold this opinion so people can tell you where they agree and disagree and it’s not just a downvote fest.

Having said that, this is the least stupid of a series of incredibly vapid posts, so I’m writing a response.

Yes, there is a supply/demand relationship. Let’s say you make 50 widgets a year and sell them for a dollar. Then a new use comes out for them, and people are willing to pay two dollars (this is actually the story behind the kong dog toy coming from a VW part). So now you can increase production, but eventually you’ll run out of customers, so you can reduce the price to $1.50, and so on. You can see this happening in real time in commodities markets, where oil producers will cut output to drive up prices, or increase it to drive them down (eg if they want to reduce oil production in other countries).

Where you’re not wrong is that it’s a highly idealized model, like a lot of basic economics. It works best with commodities, but we’ve seen it with video cards, hard drives, cars, and so on. However, the more complex the market, the more factors beyond supply and demand are involved. There are things like sticky prices, information disparity (look up a paper called “A Market for Lemons”), and biases like those that won experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman the Nobel prize in economics.

Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.

I think they also have an EMP effect that can damage ship/sat electronics.

But, like the internet, a sub is a series of tubes. You have a big horizontal tube that the people and the engine lives in, and you have vertical ones where the things that blow up cities live.

I mean, there are optional smaller horizontal tubes, but I feel like if you’re going to launch a sub into space it really ought to be one of the big ones. Maybe it’s just a Freudian thing.

I’m going to assume that OP and most people posting here know the difference between trans and drag. Some drag queens are trans, most are LGBT, some are straight. But trans women are women.

Trans persons - at least many of them - mostly want to pass and have their identity accepted. This goes for trans men and trans women. And most people would like to be seen as attractive.

The truth is though that you might just be into trans women. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the community is generally aware of and quite wary of “chasers.” Those are people that fetishize trans persons.

The difference between being attracted to trans women and being a chaser is whether you see the person as an individual or as a class. Think about white guys who are really into Asian women or black men. On the one hand, it’s fine to have different tastes and perceptions of beauty. The fetishization occurs when the individuality of the person becomes less important than the fetishized quality.

That removed knows who’s in charge.

Edit: Hey, removed bot - that term is considered high praise in the LGBT community, and I’m about to report you for being homophobic.

Okay, I’m not going to push back on the social club aspect. That’s dead on. I’m also not going to get into what’s fashionable and how funding works. Like I said, I’m in the club. I mean, I’ve since sold out to work for a FAANG so I can have a lot of money going into retirement and run away to Europe in case the US really starts to go under.

I can go through my prejudice against MIT grads - I’ve met two whom were decent persons and one of them was from Sloan and zero were from Media Lab - and so on. The U of M folks in complexity theory, otoh, have all been wonderful.

And yes, I was talking about undergrads, but as we both know it’s easier to get into an elite grad program from an elite undergrad program. That’s the track. Plus, it’s rare to have to pay for a PhD program unless you’re coming in at baseline in an oversubscribed program.

Third party and also-rans are always a scam. You have a team of assistants, an expense account, and you can even be feted by billionaires up to and including Putin. If you’re smart, you wind up with a few million dollars, a book you had ghostwritten, and maybe a string of appearances on Fox that you can turn into a gig.

The one with the twisty cross on the cover.

I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

I appreciate the input, but I doubt Koch or Soros are making big donations to Bernie, Warren, AOC, or the other pols I send a few bucks to.

Second, I do have plenty of money in my own investments at this point. That’s part of the reason I am making donations. I do end up sending more money to organizations like Planned Parenthood, HRC, the Trevor Project, and the Matthew Shepard fund. I also send money to the ACLU and EFF, among others.

I don’t entirely disagree with your main point, but there are local and national causes and politicians that can use financial support. Ideally we wouldn’t have to do it, but as things stand it’s not a terrible idea.

No! Bad European! Bad!

Hey Bernie - the MOTs still have your back. If you put on the parka and ask for more money, I’m good for a couple hundred. I’ve got Bernie tee shirts, Bernie posters, Bernie getting arrested, Bernie sticking up for the LGBT…

And, my hand to the god that I do not believe in, if and when I adopt a sphynx cat, he or she will be named Bernie.

I will!

The arrival date is listed as “the Spring,” so I have little idea when to expect them. I’m in California and everything is in bloom already, so I can get them going whenever, and I grabbed a few so I can try them indoors and outdoors in different locations.

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.

If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.

Understood and I apologize if I violated protocol. This came up in /all and I am both an MCM owner and enthusiast, so I felt the need to say something. I’ll still stand by my observations - we tend to be Eichler folks out here but I love everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to the Starship Enterprise. I categorically withdraw the comment about it not being a McMansion, though, since that was not its intent.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.