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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)

    Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.

    Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.

    Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.


  • Capitalist trade necessitates competition & states, even if you ignore how violent setting up that trade network was, the need for competition to push profits up means you need to put down local competition or regulations (e.g the US (where the biggest companies reside) need to coup democratic leaders that get in the way of profits, such as the Iranian coup, etc), but people don’t like that so you end up with counter revolutions which puts forces hostile to the US in power, and eager to give the US a bloody nose (but mostly through proxy wars).

    And that’s without even getting into the trade creating Cheneys who want war because it is profitable.







  • Without AA, racism in admissions is illegal.

    No positive measure to counteract systemic biases are illegal.

    Hereditary admissions when 80% of previous students were not black, is pretty explicitly racist and still very much legal

    All the implicit systemic biases in the admission system are very much legal

    The only thing you can’t do is ensure black kids get admitted.

    If you have a system and you know its giving you biases results you can compensate for the bias, without understanding every single component bias, that’s what AA was, banning it, is sticking your head in the sand and going back to faux/real Naïvity about how system racism works.

    We might as well start asking “why do black people prefer renting?”, because as a nation we are commited to pretending to not understand that there are systemic reasons for things.



  • Fine the mental gymnastics is to justify why hereditary admission criteria are more acceptable to you not “good”

    Yes the white kid does.

    • The racial biases of whoever runs the admission system
    • The racial biases of teachers at the school
    • The white kid is still more likely to benefit from hereditary admission and insider information on how to do well in admission tests/letter.

    To pretend a white kid in a predominantly black school doesn’t have an advantage in “colorblind” admissions is to deny the existence of systemic racism.


  • You can never change who your parents are, that’s some real mental gymnastics to justify how hereditary acceptance criteria is good actually, but using race to identify those underservered by k-12 education, lacking in family connections, not having knowledge of college specific tricks to getting accepted & generally having less resources available to do the extra-ciricular activity to get in, and compensate for that bias is bad.

    Affirmative action is only silly if you don’t accept that systemic racism exists.