Obviously, the next step is looting the Canadian Treasury.

Damn. If only there was a way to get anime without subscribing to a shitty third party data mining company.

Cognitive Therapist here. You are either familiar with the Biblical Deep Lore or you are fucking mental.

If Iranian state actors are producing videos of this quality, it may become an existential threat to US Meme Hegemony.

More like when we forced the sale of TikTok to Steven Mnuchin and Larry Ellison.

I’ll never understand why people don’t just make playlists of music and save it down locally.

I had no less than sixteen hours of music in CDs stuffed in my glove box back in college. Would cycle through that maybe once or twice a month. Maybe I’d throw on a little NPR if I was curious about the news. But why on God’s Green Earth would you subject yourself to the garbage radio networks available in the modern era?

Until you dial in to one of those give-away events, sure.

You can sue them.

Excited to collect $.26 in damages after six years in court.

Why use word when me have bigger stick?

Business degree is worse than nothing imo. All the debt, all the indoctrination, very little exposure to anything potentially educational or enlightening.

The indoctrination is the enlightenment. You’re gaining the ability to recognize what your senior peers in business consider valuable and reflect those values back to them.

What do you think the PhD board is screening for in Iran? You are as much learning the cultural touchstones and taboos as the specifics of the field. Academic institutions all have their own orthodoxy, their own dogma, and their own heresy. Some of this is the product of accrued trial and error. Some of it is purely ideological - a matter of personal persuasion handed down from master to student, which must be adhered to if one wishes to be recognized as a full member of the institution.

Come out of a program like that as a certified yes-man with bills to pay

It isn’t that simple. Yes-Manning works if you can find a billionaire (or an Ayatollah) with an ass that needs licking. But eventually people have to actually do shit.

What Trump’s team has mastered is the art of the grift. They aren’t merely yes-men, they’re confidence men. They’ve all become exceedingly wealthy based off their ability to rook their peers.

What the Guardian Council of Iran’s team has mastered is navigating the space between religious orthodoxy and practical politics as an upstart surrounded by wealthier rival states. They have been dancing through a mine-field for 47 years and now they can’t dance any further.

So it is still very much an open question of who comes out ahead, even if the US has proven disastrously inept at getting the short-term high-profile domestic media wins that the current president demands.

High level education is a form of social reproduction, the world over. We have moved away from strictly family-oriented hereditary management and adopted a broader ideological basis for transferring political authority and private ownership.

Case in point, Kushner, graduated with a JD/MBA dual degree program at the New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business in 2007. He interned at Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He’s a New York Business Deals Guy, which is why he ran in Trump’s circle and ultimately married his daughter.

Similarly, Vance earned his JD from Yale in 2013, then spent his early career working for perennial Texas Senator John Cornyn and chief justice of the Eastern District of Kentucky circuit court system. To say he’s uneducated would be absurd. He is in a direct pedigree with a long line of far-right apparatchiks.

All these Iranian diplomats went through a similar matriculation in their younger days. They’ve been promoted as much due to their loyalty to the project of Iranian independence as their raw educational background and attainment of certification.

What do people think someone with a PhD did to earn the degree? What do people think someone promoted to a C-level position at a major corporation or partnership at a ranking law firm did to earn the post? You might be surprised to discover the degree of overlap. Much of it boils down to standing up in front of a board of your professional peers and proving you’re able to discourse with them at an equivalent level.

No. JD Vance told her not to do it, so she didn’t.

This is how negotiations are supposed to work.

Life expectancy surged from mid-30s to late-60s under Mao

Are you kidding? All of this describes someone from Manchester.

Guy Richie made his career on movies about this kind of British person

tankie shit

Is when you have a 55 year retirement age instead of a 50 year retirement age?

people who want to shit on China

Won’t believe anything that doesn’t shit on China.

In Communist China, this women would have been afforded a pension, full health benefits, and housing five years earlier.

Which, I have heard, is also horrible

For clarity, how exactly would you define “retail” American politics?

Local campaigning for individual elected offices. The process of raising money, building up staff, getting yourself on the ballot, building name recognition, and GOTV.

I think of a physical location of a business in which a consumer goes to buy a physical product.

Campaigns work similarly. You need offices to coordinate staff. You need to balance budgets. And you need to sell the product by getting voters to show up at election stations.

how do we break that?

I don’t think this is something you can (or should be expected to) break. I think part of any successful project is encouraged adoption. Marketing - in a benign form - is about informing people of the project’s utility and the mechanism for obtaining it. There are numerous examples of beneficial marketing campaigns - the annual flu shot campaign, union drives, public notifications for new amenities and works. We periodically have billboards across the city notifying residents of performances at Miller Outdoor Theater - a free public theater that puts on shows every couple of weeks.

I think there’s a problem with deceptive marketing. And you can address that will quality journalism, civil litigation (particularly class action lawsuits), and government regulation.

That kind of sounds like our current systems favor investment into advertisement over substance

There’s a huge yield in networking effect thanks to the size of corporate enterprises and the reach of their distribution.

I might argue a wide-scale anti-trust campaign to break up entrenched monopolies would force private businesses to return to quality of product over quantity of marketing. But Kickstarter reveals this isn’t a problem unique to bigger business ventures.

I might try regulating Kickstarter such that the platform itself faces penalties for excessive marketing of products - particularly ones that never release in full.

I might also consider public financing for local clubs and independent non-profit business ventures. Because a lot of this hype happens in a kind-of social media vacuum. People get suckered into MLM scams and other duplicitous ventures because they’re bored, alienated, and idle. Set up more public events and public areas for gathering and entertainment. Fewer people will be so terminally online that they are waiting around to get baited.

how do I get 3M on Kickstarter?

A common, solid benchmark for return on marketing investment (ROMI) is a 5:1 ratio, where $5 in revenue is generated for every $1 spent. While 4:1 to 10:1 is considered average to strong.

So, spend between $300k and $700k on advertising and - assuming you did it right - you should expect around $3M in returns.