Titus_1_16
1yr ago
The quality of the discourse here is incredibly shoddy.
Okay, let's see some evidence?
It is 95% as if Ibram Kendi were debating Ben Shapiro.
You immediately provide direct, contrary evidence with this simile. 4D chess or...?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
also pro-infanticide
I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Being a Mediterranean is even worse than being a chihuahua.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
If the boss doesn't come into the office, but instead works from his home, does that mean "the real office" is the boss's house?
Yep, higher-ups often choose to work from their home country. Check out average pay in the Paris office, or Zurich. Also both higher than Dublin. Doesn’t mean they are also headquarters.
Finally, I suspect that Dublin figure excludes equity, due to the ridiculous way it's taxed here.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
You're comparing Ireland with London though, instead of Ireland with the UK. For sure Ireland doesn't have a city to rival London; neither does any other EU country. Paris and Berlin are both a grade below it; the only Western city that genuinely rivals London is NYC. Losing the UK from the EU was whatever, but losing London was a real tragedy for us. No disagreement there.
If the comparison is nation to nation instead of nation to city though, our per capita results come out above the UK in a lot of meaningful metrics.
As for the breakdown of roles, yes, no disagreement: the "top of the pyramid" roles tend to be based in London as UK personal tax is lower (Irish tax on equities is fucking abysmal), pay for high-end roles is higher, and there are a lot more of them.
Some quibbles: quite a lot of sales roles are really based here. Speaking of Google for example, more than 50% of staff in Dublin would be in sales roles, albeit junior ones. A junior sales role at Google is still pretty good. Meta is similar, so is Salesforce, Microsoft et al.
And you'll be aware of course that, given the loyalist history of the institution, people who go to Trinity aren't really Irish. The most ambitious Irish grads go to the US, not the UK, because there are more hoops to jump through; just like the Canadians you meet in London being more impressive than those in Boston.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
We previously were kind of a tax haven, yes. That's no longer the case, and what keeps all the tech HQs here is a mixture of inertia, business-friendly climate, etc. These aren't letterbox offices: Google is the largest private employer in Dublin, tech is the largest sector of the Irish economy both in employment numbers and GDP contribution, most US tech companies you could think of (bar Amazon) have their European HQ here. When I worked in the sector it would often surpise visitors from the US that [company's] largest office and official HQ was in Dublin and not London or Paris.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Also the world bank data shows that before the whole tax haven thing, Ireland was trailing the UK with around 65% of its GDP per capita.
Small note here since I both work in finance and am Irish; this exagerrates the UK advantage since a large proportion British GDP also comes from financial/tex efficiency stuff. If you're going to strip out the Irish tech sector (which is both the largest employer and largest GDP contributing sector of the economy) on the basis that firms are only sited there for tax efficiency, then to do a fair comparison you'd need to strip out the UK financial sector too.
It's true that GDP isn't a good metric to examine Ireland; our central bank publishes a figure that tries to account for the distortionary effect of profit funnelling, and which puts us about on a par with France on a per capita basis. If we're talking salaries and cost of living, Irish salaries are higher than non-London UK ones, and slightly lower than London ones.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
The United Kingdom
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Akshually... oppression isn't a binary state, it's a scale. I'd contend that the leash on the Chinese people has been loosened gradually but meaningfully since Mao's era, very skillfully, in such a way as to uplift them and allow a more advanced society without slackening too much and causing social disharmony
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Notice that midway through my huge screed I talked about oppression of the Irish by the English, or Russians by themselves. Oppressive social structures don't need a racial dynamic (though they are still helpful colour coding who is oppressing whom).
Africans are perfectly capable of oppressing one another brutally without outside help.
This says nothing either way about my central thesis that oppressing a group while people in your society have access to books about the French Revolution is not a tenable strategy in the long term.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Re: eating well all the time, it sounds like you've accidentally reinvented French food culture. I don't think it's a problem, but it may certainly be a shock to the system if you have an Anglophone background
I won't disagree with your contention that forcefully supressing a population keeps them, you know, surpressed. But I will contend that this imprudent and short-term civilisational management, because oppression degrades a people culturally and spiritually. Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger.
I contend that there's strong empirical evidence in support of the brutalising effect of harsh oppression. If you're willing accept that premise then please skip the next two paragraphs.
Despite what a lot of activists will claim, the vast bulk of sub-Saharan Africa only experienced European colonialism for a bit less than a century: 1875 or so until 1965 or so, arguably starting later with the Berlin Conference in 1885. The obvious exception is South Africa, which had much earlier settler colonialism as opposed to the later and more popular extractive model. Looking at the societies that have emerged post-decolonisation, a really striking fact is how much more violent South Africa is than any other country in the continent, even those that have experienced recent military conflict. I'm talking specifically here about murder rates, by far the most reliable measure of violence even in extremely badly-run societies (ie most of Africa). South Africa is notably more violent than almost any other African country; in some cases up to 30× more (note that oppression is colourblind, and SA's only large competitor in the murder stakes is Nigeria, anothe country cursed with intense ethnic conflict, and jockeying, alternating subjugation of the Yoruba by the Hausa historically, and the inverse now).
This presents a serious challenge for a strictly white supremacist position; South African blacks had by far the most contact with civilising whites of any peers on the continent, and have come out of the encounter by far the most violent. This pattern shows up throughout the world; Russia is famous for tsarist oppression of its populace, and really high levels of interpersonal violence. Brazil was the largest slave nation in the world (surely an oppressive institution...) and is far more violent as a result than the vast majority of African countries. Even thinking of my own lovely nation of Ireland; historically oppressed, and authentic brutes for much of history as a result. In our case we were a big European outlier for most of the 20th century as a country with vastly higher levels of interpersonal violence than others; but the longer we went post-independence, the closer we tracker to the European norm. This was separate too and preceded our (literal) enrichment; getting richer didn't make us less violent and ignorant, it was a precondition for same.
I could go on and on but to my mind there are more than sufficient natural experiments around the world showing that, whatever the quality of the biological substratum of a people in the first place, oppression en masse tends to coarsen and degrade en masse. There are certainly very many interesting sub-mechanisms and processes behind this but, sinilar to your own big-picture view of oppression working as a large-scale system, I won't bother to speculate on them here.
Given this observation about the development of peoples, oppression as you propose it is storing up trouble for the future. In a world than has experienced the French and American revolutions, it just doesn't seem tenable to me politically that any Western society is going to have the will to keep oppressing its untermenschen forever (or at least, not in the form of coarse and ill-fitting explicit racial oppression; something a bit more subtle like a class system can of course coexist with liberal democracies forever). You can genocide them, or you can fully emancipate them, but history demonstrates that you can't keep kicking the oppression can down the road forever. And about genocide, let's be realistic; it is the civilisational equivalent of murder, the guilt of which is analogous to the guilt in a single (non-deranged) individual. It cannot have no effect. If you want to argue for the desirability of an America which had sent its formerly enslaved population to concentration camps once it was done with them... that actually would be interesting and I'd engage with it. But I doubt it's your belief.
Full legal and social emancipation, with all the calamities it entails, is a plaster (band-aid in American) that the US had to rip off sooner or later. An interesting counterfactual for you is this; what do you think would be the state of the US today if reconstruction of the slave regions had been completed in earnest and totally? This has been pulled off successfully in other societies; my understanding is that it's not a sociological impossiblitiy but rather a particular project which failed and was aabandoned in the 1870s US, only to be picked up again from the mid 20th. Really fascinating "what if?" there. And incidentally, lest you think Haiti is the only possible model of post-slavery societies in the western hemisphere: no! Look at Barbados, look at Jamaica; both pretty respectable societies that made a much better go of the same raw material, through better stewardship, institutions etc.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
No, that shit would be on /b/ all the time.
Or any, I mean, I've gleaned knowledge of tonnes of sexual shit I'm not into just from shitposting subreddits and the like. Most normal men (gay men are still men) have some level of fascination with weird gross shit, just because.
I mean I know what "docking" is, and I can tell you it's not my cup of tea. For God's sake you'd pick half this stuff up from like South Park.
How can you possibly be on an obscure message board for non-heterodox niche political/cultural stuff and then act like you've never seen weird shit online?
The expansion is that western civilisation is fucked.
To expand the expansion further: around the gay marriage debates of the 2010s, a losing rearguard argument was put forward by the anti side that I nonetheless think was sound. It goes: expanding the concept of marriage such that it could include gay couples without self-contradiction means changing what all marriages are about. Or more precisely, affirming a change which had been underway in high Western culture since the 60s/70s.
This was the change whereby marriages went from being a cradle for families and child-rearing, to being a site for self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. Marriage's telos was to be fulfilment, and a right to marriage therefore follows from enlightenment rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". No-one within the thinkable window in the 2010s was going to make the argument that gay couples couldn't pursue happiness and shared fulfilment as effectively as straight couples, so excluding them from marriage became artirary, a relic of an earlier belief system. A 1950s vision centred on nuclear families ironically began to look a bit camp (the sincere concern with flower arrangements! A man's wedding is the absolute zenith of most straight men's concern with flower arrangements).
There's a pretty direct line from no-shame divorce to gay marriage. The internal logic leads naturally there, as was pointed out many times by both pro and anti sides (Jon Stewart voice: "What sanctity?? [Republican] is already three-times divorced, and my great aunt Ethel is dancing her tuchas off at over-70s singles nights at the [conservative place]. What are gays going to do to this institution that you haven't done already?)
Anyway, back to the West being fucked: in a context where marriage is a thing that some people like to do because it's fulfilling (and self-fulfilment is high status, marriage is decreasingly for the hoi polloi, who probably are fulfilled by like nativism or something idgaf), then there's only a weak vestigial pairing between pairing and rearing. At this stage the link between the two is like having English mustard with steak; some people like it and it's a traditional combo, but others find [the continuation of the human species] a bit uncomfortable and that's okay.
This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages. "If you don't like gay marriage then don't marry someone of the same sex!"
Too late, Jon Stewart from 2010: I'm now gay-married to my straight spouse.
Hence, together with the brittle crystalising of sexuality taking place in modern culture (you may have one of several dozen/hundred sexual tastes, that's consumerist liberation, but your predilictions must be ordered and legible. Disordered, messy, dangerous sex goes back in the "problematic" box) it follows naturally that the act of sustaining the human race becomes kink #312a, and a rather outré one at that.
It's funny in a late 20th century UK sitcom way; the empire shrinks and crumbles, we are reduced, but there are bleak gags to be had.
A final note: the reason why this "kink" is a bit outré is due to demographic anxiety in whites, which by the way both isn't happening and is A Good Thing. I've never heard anyone criticise a profoundly fecund NBA player as being possessed of a breeding kink.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Twitter has an EU HQ in Dublin that runs the EU subsidiary. Post-Musk, they still have over 500 staff here. Most of those are salespeople, selling ads to EU customers.
I don't know the breakdown for Twitter specifically, but typically American MAGA/Faang/whatever firms make about 25 - 30% of their revenue in Europe. It's not nothing
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Because they do business in Europe, ie sell to advertisers here. They could of course withdraw from the EU market if they though that was in their best interest.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
it would make it very easy to tell how many people voted
I read this as "very easy to tell what number of people voted" instead of "very easy to tell many individuals' voting preferences", and was wondering what you thought the point of voting to be.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Dating is actually very similar to sales. I've bever met a successful salesperson that couldn't get a date (many that couldn't sustain a relationship, but that's a different matter). This is because sales requires you to hone skills and behaviour patterns that specifically are useful in dating, not solely because of x inherent trait that makes a person good at both sales and dating.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Minor historical point first, on your traducing of Russians' treatment of conquered peoples. It was by far the least harmful to those they conquered of any European power. The thing to remember about Russia is that it's a European country with its entire imperial possessions still 90% intact, and attached contiguously as the country streches east from its European heartlands. To see what would have befallen American indigenes under Moscow's cruel fist, look at Kamchatka today. People who are not ethnically Russian are a majority of the population east of the Urals, and their relative position to the dominant ethny is inestimably better than that of American indigenes, who are a sad and broken people.
Notably among Europeans, Germanics (of whom Anglos are a subset) have the taste for genocide in conquest. Spain, France and Russia tended to integrate conquered people to varying degrees, and the Dutch kept them entirely separate to the point of weird indifference.
Second important point: a huge tension you don't seem to have noticed here:
my attitude toward native American grievances is: "Sucks to suck, git gud, gg no re." Black and brown BIPOC bodies of color can get in line right behind every other conquered/defeated people with a sob story. This is the Law of the Jungle.
Okay, fair enough, but then:
this slimy conniving chipping away at the edges to guilt your oppressors into give you free shit is just pathetic.
"All's fair in love and war". If you're claiming groups that lost out historically should just accept it, how can you consistently criticise graft against your own group today? Either all conduct is fair or it isn't. "Oh no, using disease and a much higher population to swamp natives was great and mighty when Euro colonists did it back when, but it's pathetic and underhanded when other groups use the same techniques against us". How the hell can out-diseasing and out-breeding indigenous Americans be kosher, but non-whites doing, what, lawsuits and subversion of your institutions is verboten?
Considering you were ostensibly opposing whining, "it's not fair when they do it to us" sounds a lot like, well...
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
many indigenous /antiracist/ anticolonial movements in recent times are demanding not reconciliation but restorative justice. Never before has this been such a global and forceful phenomenon, all directed at one group: white Europeans.
Two points of contention here. First, there certain has been a strong global anticolonial movement before now: back in the 60s, when decolonisation was at its height.
Second, speaking as a right-wing European: second-wave colonialism from 1870 - 1970 in Africa was bad policy. It didn't help European imperial powers on net, and (to be generous) it helped African natives only in a very suboptimal way.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Dive
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
The author's name is the same as your username, did you write this?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Oh right, I didn't realise that was the spelling she's using herself. That's totally, totally stupid if it's actually legally spelt that way; Sadhbh is already a name you need to know how to pronounce, so why bother chsnging the vowel and not the cluster of consonants at the end? Maybe to avoid having the letters S - A - D in her name?
But if I were anglicising that name I'd just spell it "Sive".
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.
There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.
The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).
I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.
Have you talked to an Indian dairy farmer before? I know a small-scale dairy farmer here in Ireland that would be loth to eat his own cattle, even though there's no taboo on beef here.
For OP it's like growing up on a stud farm and then eating horse.
More options
Context Copy link