Well, I guess it’s one way in which one can have “life experience”.

Had I’ve been given a choice, I would have preferred other options.

Religion really isn’t about knowledge and Science really isn’t about personal moral and motivation, which is probably why (from what I’ve observed from the handful of Christian Scientists I’ve known), it only ever works well when they’re kept apart and neither is used in the domain of the other - it’s perfectly possible to want to “discover the wonders of God’s creation” and “be a good, moral person” at the same time as practicing Science as long as one does not believe that the words of the Bible are literal and actual “knowledge” in the Scientific sense.

“Studying” in madrasahs is literally just the rote memorization of a version of the Koran in a language that students don’t even speak and don’t get me started on just how Christian belief was so thickly weaved into medieval university teachings that being against the Aristotelian earth-centric view of the Universe was cause to be burned at the stake (the medieval times aren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing and during the time of Medival Universities Europe actually went back a lot on technology and scientific knowledge)

Having studied Physics at university level in a country which still back them had quite a bit of religiosity, I have come across a handful of people who were both true believer Christians and Physicists and the only way to manage it was basically to keep them apart except for the single point of contact which was “by discovering the wonders of the World, I’m discovering the wonders of God’s creation” which is not a logic link in any way form or shape, just an attempt at getting two very different perspectives to be side by side, never really touching.

Religion simply does not inform Science in any way form or shape (and vice-versa), not in terms of logic, not in terms of information or knowledge and not in terms of methods - at best some people manage to have personal motivations to practice Science include Religious motivations, but any actually “knowledge” they have from Religion does not feed through into their Science because it doesn’t obey even the most basic criteria to work (for starters, it’s just “belief” rather than actual measurable or at least detectable effects that could not be explained in any other way than divine intervention).

Religion is absolutely fine when it’s about how people feel, but it ain’t fine when it tries to intervene into the domain of Science: back in the Medieval times the most advance civilization was Arab and mainly Muslim (such as the Moors, who invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula) - they were the true inheritors of the knowledge of Ancient Greece and Rome - but at some point in the 15th century within Islam the idea that all that Man needed to know was contained in the Koran spread, hence why Madrasahs are “schools” were people rote learn the Koran and why those nations have been going back Scientifically and Technologically ever since.

There has been a lot of “lying” about stock princes over the last decade but quite indirectly so: for example the ultra low interest rates have allowed many companies to get loans merely to buy their own stocks, which pushes stock prices up whilst loading the company with more debt (and bad debt rather than good debt: not having been taken for investing in productive and marketing activities of the company, those loans will not lead to the increase in profitability needed to pay the debt back plus interest).

Similarly, because the wealth has been concentrating in fewer and fewer hands there has been a lot more money floating around looking for investments (every extra dollar in the hands of a poor or working class person is one extra dollar that goes into consumption, every extra dollar in the hands of a rich person is one extra dollar that’s looking for investment), which has pumped up bubbles from realestate to crypto, and that includes stocks.

It’s not “lying” in the sense that one person moved the markets by telling porkies, it’s more of a mix of economic manipulation and an emergent system (in the Mathematical sense) transforming the actions of the various agents under these manipulated financial conditions into a big picture of stocks (and other “investment” class assets) going up in price even though no real increase in their underlying value has happened (the companies aren’t really profiting so much more that it justifies their market cap increases, the houses whose prices are going up have no actual improvements to justify the higher prices - the value going up is basically justified by the value going up).

I’ve moved most of my savings to Gold since around 2010 partly because I was in the Finance Industry during the financial crash of 2008 and saw how the “fixes” done back then weren’t at all fixing the problems, just kicking the ball forward on the backs of people whose income mainly comes from work (hence the growth of inequality, slow down in social mobility and insane various bubbles including realestate that kept on getting inflated for the last decade) something which has been fueling the growth of the far right (people are feeling the pain, getting pissed of and lots of money has been put by very rich people into political entities and the newsmedia to spread the idea that it’s outsiders who are to blame for all this rather than very wealthy insiders plundering an economy which has ground down to a halt its growth, in collusion with local politicians).

I was also in the Tech Industry during the tech crash of 99, which probably made me even less trusting in the current system’s long term stability.

Gold is a pretty old fashioned way to try and retain some value on one’s savings, especially in countries where government management of the Economy and the local currency is pretty bad (in my own country of Portugal it used to be pretty popular to get it in the form of jewelry for that purpose, though not anymore, and it apparently still is in India and most of Asia including China).

(Basically, it’s the “oh shit” option for when the Economic situation gets very bad and people fear the value of state issued currencies themselves won’t hold)

I can tell you that even though Gold has been mostly just kept up with inflation for the last decade and a half (with an uptick when Russia invaded Ukrained), Donald Trump’s actions really made the value of Gold in most currencies (especially USD) take off like a rocket, or in other words, that the value of most currencies is falling hard compared to what up to 71 was treated worldwide as the reference “currency”.

IMHO, it’s a pretty fucked up sign, especially for the US Dollar (which has the extra nasty bit that it stops being the World’s Reserve Currency, all the benefits from it will unwind and if that happens fast - within a year or two - we might see shit like hyperinflation in the US).

PS: And if I may gloat a bit, I was living in Britain back when Brexit happened and did call it successfully and saved my savings by having most of them in Gold and Euros when Brexit crashed the British Pound by about 30% vs the Euro, something it never really recovered from. Maybe I was lucky but I remember that at the time and even before the Leave Referendum I felt that the Austerity in Britain was stretching the political environment in the country and that it wasn’t a safe place to hold my savings, even though back then all my income was in GBP.

Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

Modern MBA business practices just uses the easy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it then I can’t be blamed for it”.

Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.

Well, it fits the “look at how foreigners are worse than Brits” angle, which seems to often dictate which stories the BBC runs and the spin they put on reporting of events abroad (that spin is very noticeable if you read the same story from a newspaper in another country).

Mind you, Americans are maybe the only ones generally excluded from that treatment, so this is special.

Fascism is literally all about doing what’s best for the IN Crowd, in other words Cronyism, the very opposite of Merit.

If your selection criteria for people supposed to manage anything is who is mates with whom, what’s their skin color, what’s their gender and what’s their sexual orientation, rather than, you know, managerial qualities, it’s only natural that they suck at managing things.

Curiously, thanks to Trump Gold has been breaking record after record on the upside since January - you see, Gold is the ultimate “oh, shit” form of wealth storage because it’s its own “currency” (so if traditional currencies lose value gold just goes up in those currencies) so people flock to it in situations of high Economic uncertainty, and Economic uncertainty is the only achievement of Trump’s Administration.

We leave our little donkeys to graze on the fields and grow up to become big donkeys.

We certainly don’t stick them with knives and forks!

I’m sorry but you’re way overextrapolating from a sample of 1.

What the guy did was wrong (quite literally the crime of Assault). At the same time, to go all the way from that to conclude this shows a systemic problem such as “erosion of basic human rights specifically of the female nature” is you filling-in the blanks (which is is almost all of the space in “systemic erosion of female human rights” when all you have is “1 case of mild assault of a young female by a coach”) with your own pre-conceptions.

Maybe there is an “erosion of basic human rights specifically of the female nature” (above all in the US), but this one case of one guy and one girl in a country of 340 million people by itself is nowhere statistically significant enough to support a theory about a society-wide problem.

Not even disputing that ultimatelly your expectation might end up proven (hope it’s not, but Fascists will Fascist and any kind of equal rights are one of their dislikes), just disputing that this case by itself and in the absence of frequent news of such cases is in any way enough to jump to that conclusion.

He had punishment options other than Assault: for example he could have kicked her out to the showers, kicked her out of the team, possibly even all the way to getting her kicked out of the school.

You know, normal tools for coaches and teachers in highschools to deal with serious pupil misbehaviour.

This ain’t the 1920s and physical punishment isn’t acceptable in schools anymore.

Merely firing him is far too soft: he should be facing a criminal charge for Assault.

Works best if you’re with enough like minded individuals that you can all form a testudo.

(The irony of this meme is that what made the Roman military superior wasn’t as much the equipment as the group work: the meme uses a photo of somebody posing as a, judging by the uniform, member of a very specifically group highly trained in cooperative tactics - not even auxilia but actually a legionaire - to illustrate extreme individualism, hence the irony).

Palantir is pretty core to the Surveillance Society in several supposedly Democratic countries. More in general just about all companies in that space such as the NSO Group makers of the Pegasus software for remote hacking of smartphones are invariably unethical

Similarly the whole business of Investment Banking is pretty unethical, and that definitely includes most Hedge Funds, the latter never being household names.

Just thinking out loud, I’m wondering if there’s not a mix of two innovations - the big innovation such as whole new software or hardware to do something that wasn’t possible to do before or at least not in that way and small innovation, i.e. incremental improvements.

In Tech, companies usually start with one big innovation (consumer OS for Microsoft, web search with automated crawling for Google, universal discussion forum for Facebook and so on) and after that mostly do smaller innovations on it. Whilst they often have a couple more big innovations in them (for example Android OS for Google and Office for Microsoft) they seem to eventually run out of such innovations or maybe just become too much “play it safe” when it comes to them so don’t really do the break-through big innovations anymore.

I believe corporatisation destroys the environment in a company for big innovation (certainly it matches my own experience in working in all sizes of company) - it’s a lot easier, ntaural and safer for a big company with a large infrastructure, big costs and an internal preponderance of well-entrenched managers who have their own internal fiefs and spend their time on internal company politics, to keep on milking the existing cow than to try and come up with something completely different and the very mindset of the company changes from “try crazy ideas” of the small, poor and desperate startup to the relying on steady and safe income streams that more appeals to the bean counters that take over those companies when they get big enough.

Under a sales model, you need a steady stream of small innovation on the core product to keep the steady and safe income stream going - people need to be convinced to buy the latest and greatest version of the product so it general need to offer something more than the last one, and although marketting can be used to convince people to buy a new version which has little more than the last one (look at iPhones of late), as the product matures there is less and less small innovation on it that’s actually usefull so there is less and appeal for consumers to get the latest version and that income stream falls over time.

Both subscription models and paid-by-advertising upend that need for even small innovation - a company doesn’t need to regularly make a new and improved version of their original big innovation, they just need to keep on getting the steady stream of revenue from their existing product. I would say that this appeals even more to bean counters that the small innovation cycle since it’s even more predictable, hence you see big companies shifting to it even in things were it makes no sense for the product itself.

That’s why they are superior!

You’ve just explained most Tech Startup unicorns, by the way.

Politics is the ultimate grift in America.

All the rest is explained by starting from there …

The 180€ Mini PC I have as torrenting server, NAS and TV Box (and it’s overkill for just that) says otherwise.

$300 will buy you a lot of Desktop PC nowadays if all you want is to browse the web and read emails (in fact that approx. $200 mini-PC of mine is more than enough if you’re running Linux on it as I do and if you add a simple monitor, keyboard and mouse you’re about $40 shy of $300).

A $300 PC is only shit if you’re trying to run things like AAA games on it or use Windows 11.

There used to be a point back in the day when you did need a good PC for things like document edition or watching videos, but now we’re well past the point where you needed anything more than the most basic PC for everyday stuff.