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User ID: 1865
Forgotpassword
10d ago
And even if Jan 6th was successful in the sense that the protestors say... occupied the Capitol was it going to actually accomplish anything? It's not like there's a mystical control zone inside DC that enables full autocratic control if occupied by peasants of your affiliation
Forgotpassword
16d ago
Do they specifically need the PHD? Like I don't know details but unless they're expecting the Lawyers to have done novel research into pharmaceuticals that feels like overkill to acquaint themselves with the industry.
Forgotpassword
16d ago
Yeah but what's the cost of training them versus firing them and hiring fresh at market rate?
Forgotpassword
19d ago
True, but it doesn't really tap their welfare system and there's no longterm path to citizenship.
If the prevailing Western Democracies operated under similar principles of 'we will pay you well for your service but you cannot bring your sprawling extended family along and plonk them on pensions/medicare/welfare' the whole system would work better.
Forgotpassword
23d ago
Yeah. I was raised in a family with pleasant pet dogs and I'm broadly pro-dog, but having been to parts of the world where dogs are either working animals or mangy strays I can understand why there's an aversion.
Forgotpassword
23d ago
Honestly having run into some Persons of Public Transport who were cheerfully trying to get people to watch the youtube video or enjoy the music they were max-volume blasting I don't think they were even necessarily 'malicious'. Still doesn't stop it being annoying.
Forgotpassword
23d ago
I like dogs but I perfectly understand why people would not like dogs, and therefore my dogs remain in classically dog-appropriate spaces. Also insane when people try to equivocate this issue with children/babies when one is a stage of development that literally everybody went through.
Forgotpassword
23d ago
I think there's a difference between 'I am scandalizing the public by not wearing a hat' and 'here is a random non-human lifeform'. I grew up with dogs, I like dogs and yet the amount of random overstepping by dog owners I see these days is insane. You're injecting a potentially-dangerous animal into random situations, causing a hygiene issue and some people are allowed to just not like dogs. Plus any leeway given on this issue will just automatically trickle down into the yappiest and pitbullest of varietals.
Forgotpassword
23d ago
Also people being overly dismissive of the dogphobic. I grew up with dogs and like dogs, but I've been to countries where the norm is sketchy unwashed street dogs and thus understand why somebody from one of those regions might not like to see random dogs popping into their personal space.
Forgotpassword
24d ago
I think this is assuming a lot more development on the part of the 'average male' in history than existed. 3 and 5 both absurd when for a lot of human history the idea of a single male living space/doing meaningful household beautification chores was very rare, same going for stuff like childrearing. I've got a baby and my wife's Southeast Asian older family members are absolutely amazed that I participate in stuff like doing nappies/feeding the baby/proactively doing infant tasks, and even current generations have a greater expectation of it being women/nannywork.
4 I'd agree with, but I think digital communication changes the vibe with being 'overly persevering' since every attempt at communication gets rendered onto the permanent record, and if you've originally met through a dating app you're probably not getting the incidental contact to allow for old-fashioned prolonged pursuit. Online dating makes things way more cut-and-dry. I'd also assume 'Understand planning social events' probably code for woes in getting actual dates out of Online Dating that aren't 'meet me at 3AM', but that's its own tangled metagame of both sides being so unimaginably flaky that trying to perform great romantic gestures gets squeezed out of you pretty quick. Also the literal matchmaking of these things means that the most attractive guys (and therefore the ones that get the most mindshare) are happy to throw out the most casual non-date invitations since they've got economics on their side.
I think the main dynamic shifts are that women's liberation/financial equalization has made it less of a matter of just rolling with the above manchild since it was the only path to leaving the family home and having some independence in life, and that the mainstreaming of Online Dating has absolutely torched a bunch of key social feedback loops.
Forgotpassword
24d ago
I grew up with dogs and they're super normal to me, and yet it still confuses and dismays me how randomly entitled dog culture is now. Especially coupled with general laxness in obedience training and people having some sort of weird 'my dog is a good dog and can never potentially act out' mindset.
Forgotpassword
24d ago
Yeah but once you're in charge of such a large organism it's just as much macroeconomic trends and the work of 1000s of random cogs than it is straight up 'Guy A is a great CEO since company did well, Guy B is bad CEO since company did poorly' when they're likely unable to meaningfully steer the ship. My personal experience with Indian skilled immigrants is that the main advantage they have over other groups is being superduper willing and proficient at 'playing the corporate game'. Aggressively gaming KPIs, driving to tick every box and get every possible ingroup referral when applying for roles and generally showing a great savvy at the game of bureaucracy. I was kind of amazed in University seeing how my overseas Indian friends would go about applying for graduateships/internships versus people from other cultures, in how it was systematized and how collaborative a front there seemed to be even from Indians of vastly different geographic origins.
Like corporate entryism is mostly bullshit fugazi busywork for HR so I'm not against the hustle, but I think that relentless targeting of the rules of engagement is the main reason for Indian success as immigrants. Moreso than 'brilliance at the task at hand' and like should it particularly offend me that some person who is a 9.5/10 at leetcode and resume optimization but a 6/10 coder gets the Google graduateship over a 7/10 coder who didn't ruthlessly squeeze out every edge to get their butt on the seat when the job's likely to be pointless floundering busywork anyways?
Forgotpassword
26d ago
I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.
The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science
Forgotpassword
26d ago
I'm white and far enough off the beaten tourist track that I've literally been questioned about why I'm going where I'm going by Grab Drivers a few times. I wouldn't say I get stared at perse but have had like Mamak workers come and be very curious a few times. The family's super accommodating, which helps. Generally everybody KL-adjacent will have some English, though I'm not a huge fan of KL itself (It's fine but generic SEA capital).
Food is great, my main personal limitation is I can't really train my preferred combat sports since I'm 99th percentile for size in the West.
Forgotpassword
26d ago
My wife's originally from a part of Malaysia just outside of Kuala Lumpur (and plugging into her upper middle class Chinese family network makes the financial/cultural shift way more manageable than if I was proverbially fresh off the plane). Having spent a decent amount of time throughout SEA & other digital nomad hubs (Vietnam, Bali, Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore etc), I think Malaysia's prettymuch the perfect mid-point in terms of expenses, development and cultural vibes. Main issue I could see with Malaysia, ignoring the local economy, is the lack of a night life, which isn't really an issue for me with a young family.
My wife and I are both fortunate to have fairly niche skillsets/equity in remote-friendly companies that let us continue to earn international Western rates with reasonably strong job security, but interacting with my wife's younger siblings I can see the difficulties of being a fresh 20-something in Malaysia, especially if you are not Malay. Entry-level/customer service jobs in Selangor pay like 700-1k USD a month. My wife got out through a generous international scholarship which led her into her current role through a fairly circuitous path.
I've recently immigrated from a developed nation to Malaysia for a variety of reasons, and whilst I do agree that frequently a skilled professional is probably losing out in purchasing power by immigrating it's understating how hard it can be to get through the original junior ranks in less developed economies and how brutal the work-life expectations frequently are. It's also frequently ironic that Indians who are enthusiastically arguing for quotas in the West are also likely to be victims of a huge, messy internal Idpol system of caste-based quotas that make it difficult to get on the proverbial treadmill as an upper-middle class scion. Malaysian Chinese also find themselves in a similar spot where there's very-strong preferential hiring and university placement domestically for Malays/Muslims which makes it difficult for fresh grads to get anywhere. And if they're fortunate enough to get into the local chapter of whatever elite Consultancy there's literal 120 hour workweeks.
Not directly related, but I find the whole argument around H1B damaging 'competitiveness' to be absurd when the majority of workers even in tech are still firmly in the bullshit job sphere. I'm paid very well for my digital role, but if my company were hit by a meteor tomorrow the world would not especially notice or care. Yes H1Bs might be able to claim high salaries but having more button-maintainers for the Facebook mines doesn't strike me as particularly beneficial.
Forgotpassword
29d ago
But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).
Yeah same for me. Generations of Engineers and other such types, very easy to diagnose my dad, uncles and grandfather with it on vibes alone but I was the first generation to receive any sort of a formal diagnosis. Just used to be socially diagnosed as 'being a bit of a nerd'
Forgotpassword
1mo ago
The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.
My understanding is that a bunch of forms of mild noncompliance increased since the pandemic. Education, unregistered vehicles and the like. Polite society lost the mandate of heaven in enough eyes.
Forgotpassword
2mo ago
So long as you're not obnoxious about it there's nil incentive for them.
Forgotpassword
2mo ago
Also surely decent delta of 'significant health event which disqualifies him from the presidency without actually killing him'
Forgotpassword
2mo ago
From memory Trump got to like 60-70% chance to win in betting markets.
Forgotpassword
2mo ago
They could just have had a somewhat flawed process that happened to align with the final consensus last time. These things are such tiny sample sizes.
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
Yeah when it was genuinely an unknown and there was Fog of War I understand the first few weeks, but it being a 2-year saga (and still ongoing for some resolute bunker dwellers) is/was insane.
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
Also the rise of social casinos/sweepstakes site are an additional layer of hilarity in that they circumvent the actual laws around online gambling and they're available in far more states consequentially.
Essentially the model being that if you deposit into Chumba Casino (Billions of USD a year in revenue), you're buying coins which can then be used on slot games and then at the end of play you swap those back into real money. Which circumvents the whole structure around 'real money' gaming, which is an insane loophole even as an industry participant.
Personally I'd rather take longer on the Train (assuming no random homeless enemy encounters) than driving for a commute at a reasonable ratio, since the former means I can use my various devices and don't have to deal with parking/the continued existence of my vehicle when returning home
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