Sometimes I think the stupidity and laziness is part of the point of these things. “Look! We can do this even if it is the dumbest shit ever and we don’t have to string together anything resembling a reasonable argument for it!”

• What are their thoughts on BRICS and the move towards multipolarity? Do they believe it can successfully challenge American dominance? Do they believe it can have a positive impact on the world?
• Has the desire for Korean reunification been completely abandoned or is the recent shift in policy more a recognition of reunification being a far and distant goal rather than something that can be realised on a shorter scale?
• In the best of all possible worlds, what relations would Korea like to have to the west, both political and economic relations but also personal relations between Korean and western individuals.
• What does Koreans think of the way Korea is depicted in the west? Does it make them sad or angry or do they laugh at it?
• What jokes do Koreans tell about the west?

About the laziness and complacency, a family member just told me that the litterature programme at a Danish university had to give up teaching “Pelle The Conqueror”, a major work in Danish litterature, because students were struggling with reading an entire novel. At the economics department students are often lacking basic math skills, like the ability to work with fractions.

We have litterature students who can’t read a book and economics students who can’t do basic math.

The mismanagement our public schools has suffered at the hand of neoliberal bean counters has been criminal. A decade or so ago our leaders got the brilliant idea that special needs students should be “included” in standard classrooms, coincidentally saving a lot of money on special education in the process. Nobody bothered to give schools the extre resources needed or to give teachers the qualifications for handling these students. The result has been a total disaster for the special needs students, for the rest of the students and for the teachers. Meanwhile schools are so underfunded in many places that teachers have to waste time begging the community for donations for books and supplies.

The problem is not laziness and complacency as much as it is neoliberalism.

What happens to people who say yes?

He soon will be if the new regime gets it’s way

We used to have that too in Denmark until summer time in the 2010’s I think. Authorities could grant a so-called king’s letter to minors aged 15-17, allowing them to get married. I think it was mostly used in the case of teen pregnancies. I don’t think it was done very often towards the end though.

It was eventually abolished for racist reasons. A Liberal Party minister of integration decided to forcibly separate all refugee families where one of the spouses was ages 15-17, hinting at the Muslim brainpan predisposing Muslim men for being nonces. However, the decision was illegal, not for being racist and causing harm to people but for violating principles of administrative law.

In the ensuing scandal the chuds claimed that the minister shouldn’t get in trouble because she had saved little girls from being victimised by 50 year old dark-skinned men with huge scary beards. This led people to point out that the feigned concerns were bullshit since minors could still legally get married in Denmark. The institution of the king’s letters, mostly forgotten by most people at the time, became an embarrassment and was quietly abolished.

If you want social progress to happen in this country, your best shot is to make a racist argument for it.

Kennedy is the most popular president. The people love a leader with a bullet through the skull. If a president wants to be popular they should follow in Kennedy’s footsteps.

Yeah but can you do it in Norwegian though?

The WOKE LeFT controlling Instagram won’t even let an honest businessman do a recruitment campaign, marketing the most wanted CEOs to corporations. They cancelled headhunting.

I downloaded the app but the UI is in Chinese

Back when there was a substantial labour movement socialising was absolutely a part of their strategy. They didn’t just organise strikes or hold political meetings they also organised dances, social events for pensioners, night classes, bands, scouting associations — the works.

All of this soft cultural work was not only helping workers to make the best out of the current conditions under capitalism, it helped to build class consciousness and solidarity. I believe that a future successful proletarian movement will need to incorporate these elements as well.

The family is probably left with crippling medical debt and needs someone to sue to get out of it.

This story is not just a tragic story about allergies, it is a story about the ongoing crime that is US for-profit healthcare.

Violence works. Violence is the most efficient way of getting what you want. If you can pull it off, that is. — And the dictator in charge of the world’s most violent empire is very much able to pull it off.

But have you considered that both the Nazis and the Communists had a man with a moustache in uniform?

Nazi agrees with nazi that the world’s biggest nazi was actually part of the group most opposed to the Nazis.

This kind of response to issues affecting society is very common on the right. When a problem is brought up they don’t discuss solution, instead they go straight to finding someone who can be made personally responsible (fairly or not) and blaming them. This blame-assignment is then presented as a solution in and of itself.

The nice part about this is that blaming some guys doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t require the government to do anything (except punishing them) and it avoids discussion about structural issues that might be uncomfortable to the right and the interests they represent.

The point of the fires is not who started them. Fires start from time to time, sometimes because of arson, sometimes for other reasons. The issue is how to handle the fires through having fire brigades, through technical measures to prevent fires from starting and spreading etc.

• Ban personal car ownership unless you have a good reason to own one
• Ban air travel unless you have an extremely good reason to fly and no viable alternatives
• Massive investments in rail and other transit infrastructure
• Heavily disincentivise needless imports and stimulate much more local supply chains
• Massive investments in nuclear and sustainable energy
• Strict energy efficiency, repairability and longevity standards for consumer products
• A programme of insulation and similar improvements for all buildings
• Make the wasteful lifestyles of the rich impossible by liquidating the rich as a class and seizing their excessive assets
• Oligarchs, fascists and the like gets shot

I’m the guy on that airplane at the moment.

I get specs for an external API to use in a new major feature. I begin implementing, the specs doesn’t add up because nobody paid the eastern European gig programmers to document anything. Eventually I derive plausible specs from a frustrating process of emails and trial and error.

I implement the major feature to the specs provided by the client. The client tests in staging and requests several adjustments. I implement those, client tests again and accepts.

The feature is pushed to production. The client finds a ton of errors because of course the rudimentary specs I managed to wrestle out of the client and the big-shot corner-cutting third party API developer didn’t describe half of the ideosyncratic data structure they send. Stuff like sending completely empty posts and expecting empty rows to be inserted in the database, sending text comments in fields intended for storing numbers instead of in the dedicated comment field. That sort of bullshit. They want to pour garbage in an have garbage coming out.

So I had to do a ton of hotfixes directly to production. Everything have to be fixed yesterday because it is a business critical feature. It sucks. It’s a clusterfuck of cherry picking and it becomes impossible to do any sort of quality control.

A ton of errors got introduced because nobody explained to the Eastern Europeans what the API should do or gave them the time to do it properly. I am the lead engineer on the project and I have to rush to make emergency bug investigations all the time. Most of the things the bug is that the Eastern Europeans didn’t set up their system like they were asked to or that nobody told them how it should work and just assumed they would know. I wrote more emails than code. The client pays a ton of money for all of this and nothing gets done because they rushed into this feature without planning it properly.

Isembard

Slobodan

Ragnhild

Octavian