Not sure if it's a pattern but when I interviewed with an EU company recently, they explicitly asked if I was married and if I had kids. They explained it as they had a "European mindset towards weekends and holidays" and they expected me to NOT be online.
I was fine with the mindset but never expected to get those questions in an interview, as it'd be illegal in the States.
To be clear: the question isn't illegal. What is illegal is using it to discriminate against a protected class, so as a result, no interviewer with half a brain will ask those questions.
Whenever I call out things like this to European friends they just think I am being an overly-sensitive American. But saying that to a colleague can absolutely get you fired in the US.
you can perfectly justify whatever you want based on whatever else... will take myself for example: i just slave workers on my IT firm because there are sweatshops elsewhere /j
like there isn't a correlation on more resources being used or explored in a bigger population?
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
> ...but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
In relative terms?
So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?
I would measure by relative destruction of wealth since corruption is an inefficient destructive process that can quite often yield very little left to steal.
The US, as I noted, is the wealthiest country in the world according to numerous metrics. Yet the median savings is only $8,000, the Brookings Institute found that "the overall share of middle-class households that do not make enough to afford basic necessities where they live ranges from 23% to 57%" and so on.
It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.
That presupposes that the left in the US wants to do the right thing. Something like government run grocery stores is not clearly correct and there is very little evidence supporting that it will work well yet it is a very popular leftist policy in New York.
Based on zero evidence. It’s very easy for a government to step in as a participant, ruin the profitability of a sector in an area, and offer a worse service.
They have no profit requirement or even revenue neutral requirement. So they can just operate poorly at a loss and still wreck other businesses because people will put up with breadlines to get bread for ultra cheap.
The general thing to watch out for with all of these “surely it can’t be evil to do nice thing X” is suicidal empathy. It can seem correct to your gut on the surface while it’s extremely destructive in the long term despite participants wanting to destroy something as an explicit goal.
Bad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.
They destroy grocery stores that offer variety in every neighborhood they operate in. They offer worse service and people put up with it because the rest of New York is subsidizing them through taxes.
The margins for groceries are objectively thin. The only way to provide food at lower prices is to provide a worse good or service, eg. less variety, less quality, less availability, etc. You will see all of these outcomes in NYC, if anyone even accepts the bids to begin with.
It's harder to convince people to all agree on the same, different from the norm, thing.
If you've got 5 people in a car and you play ABBA in every road trip, then one day you suggest to change, the problem is not in being okay with "something else", but on agreeing what that other thing should be, set against the already known thing.
That's why there's so much infighting in the left.
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