• 0 Posts
  • 134 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 1st, 2023

help-circle



  • That’s an interesting subject, I sometimes wonder “is our fascism progressing faster than the Nazis?”, but I haven’t really come up with a good answer.

    I’ll stick with my “2 years” prediction though. I think a Reichstag fire moment is most likely when political tension is high, and political tension naturally peaks in the lead up to a presidential election.


  • The number of similarities between modern America and 1930s Germany is shocking.

    I believe the assassination of Kirk is highly analogous to the killing of Horst Wessel. Both Wessel and Kirk were far right nationalists who were killed and subsequently hailed as martyrs by their fascist movements.

    Hitler brought up Wessel in all of his early speeches. The Nazis wrote songs and bullt statues of Wessel. And today we can already hear the songs about Kirk. Congressmen are passing around a bill to erect a statue of Kirk in the Capitol.

    If we continue to follow this timeline closely, we are about 2 years away from our own Reichstag fire moment.




  • I think you don’t understand how broken American democracy is. I would suggest you look into Princeton’s study on Democracy, the largest ever study of electoral inputs and outcomes.

    Their results are rather shocking, including one of the most haunting charts I have ever seen:

    This gigantic, years-long study shows that if 10% of Americans support a bill it has a 30% chance to pass, and if 90% of Americans support a bill, it still has that same 30% chance to pass.

    Tldr: the opinion of the voters in America have no influence on its government. Votes don’t matter, only money counts. Your civic duties go much further than a mere vote.





  • Over the years I have tried a handful of subfields.

    I always felt particularly adept at assembly language programming, so I had a couple projects doing that, and applied to every relevent job I could find.

    As a math nerd I enjoyed data science and machine learning, I had quite a few projects like a neutral network from scratch in Matlab, and many data analysis and computer vision projects in R. I was always aware this field is very competitive and my chances were low here.

    I had a friend get a job in the biomedical field, so I tried to follow that, I have Python projects doing basic gene sequencing and analysis, even a really cool project that replicated evolution.

    Another friend landed a government job, so I followed his advice and got some security certs.

    I also had smaller projects and attempts at databases, finance programming, and video games.




  • You’re right that my time was wasted, and knowing the outcome, I wish I could go back and do more project work before trying to enter the job market.

    But I don’t think that is a financial possibility for most Americans. Going to school drained my savings, when I graduated I had almost nothing except for school debt, medical debt, and high rent. Saying “I’m gonna take off and work for free for a year” never really seemed like a possibility.

    And as for my apps, the 3000 were not shotgun, they were all personalized, custom cover letters, keywords, etc. It only averaged out to 3/day. I did not track the apps where I used AI to submit them- the AI ones were definitely shotgun.



  • No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.

    When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.

    I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.

    Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.



  • I think the strongest argument is this:

    Before Oct 7, Gazans had been living in a concentration camp for 17 years. Israel regularly bombed, cut off food/water/medical supplies, prevented the Palestinians from fishing or having an airport, tortured prisoners, killed hundreds of peaceful protesters, etc etc. While Gazans endured these 17 years of horror, Israelis normalized it. The world was ok with it. While the Arab populations stand with Palestine, Arab governments were making deals with Israel, normalizing the slow genocide of Gaza.

    There was no future for Gaza, no hope for Gaza, only slow genocide.

    By taking hostages, the slow genocide has become a quick one. But now, at least, the eyes of the world are on Palestine. Instead of dying quietly, their deaths are headline news around the world. When fighting for their freedom and humanity, Gazans had 0 bargaining chips. Now with the hostages, they have 1.