My mentor worked as a contractor and Microsoft didn't have a lot of cash on hand to pay him and offered to pay him half in cash and half in stock, this was back in the mid-1980's. He took the cash of course.
USAID was horrifically corrupt
The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients
But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).
And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.
They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.
What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.
There is too much money at stake, and it seems like a lazy free speech argument would go over well if it made its way to SCOTUS.
My memories of college include feeling lucky if I had enough quarters to do laundry!
My memories of college include seeking lucky if I GOT LUCKY (ie got laid).
Oh to be a young lad chasing tail in the days when it was easy to just be boys and girls and no one had fear of false allegations, willfully fucking and no one yelling rape....or being put on blast on non-existent social media or having a fucking camera everywhere......those were the days.
But I insisted on remaining a contractor, at the time I was more into cash than into accepting hopes and dreams as payment.
Hell, I worked during the summers for money towards my college, along with parental help....and I had to do the old typical 'starving student' type thing.....save nickels and dimes for cheap beer/booze occasionally....pool funds for an occasional pizza...etc.
I didn't have money to wager.....
Is this what kids are using school loans for and racking up $100k's of debt over?
Sheesh.....and they they want a fucking bailout by the taxpayers....good luck on that.
I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.
My town runs on tourist dollars, it's all beaches and boardwalk and lots of seedy hotels. Unfortunately that makes recessions here pretty rough for the locals. (I'm in tech, so isolated in my little bubble)
The US economy is around $3.5T or so, a good year's tourist revenue might be $160B. I would say that 4-5% of GDP is nothing to sneeze at. That probably works out to about several million Americans that depend on tourism directly or indirectly for the bulk of their income.
As for the 1%, that they get the biggest cut of everything is unavoidable. The more money you control, the more money you can control. The snowball effect is real and out of reach for the vast majority of the middle class. Voting with your dollars puts most of us behind the eight ball. Plutocracy shouldn't be acceptable to the vast majority of us, but a significant portion of us keep voting for it anyways.
It's been my experience that there are like dozens of meetings between underlings before CEOs get in a room together.
Joe Biden is a far better person than Donald Trump. Mentally, emotionally, patriotically competently
LOL....you keep on smokin' whatever you're smokin'......seems to be good stuff.
You don't need more than one guy to have a corporation. I have one. But that's really a modern legal and tax thing. Corporations were invented to make it easier for groups of people to act together.
I suspect the "replace the corporation" thing is just dumbassery, but it does potentially have a real meaning as above. You're also correct, other technology has also had that effect. There are lots of one-person operations, incorporated or not, that previously would have required the pooled resources of a group. Automation of all kinds does that. We also have a tendency to just dream bigger, which I'm sure will happen this time around too. And we also have a tendency to invent more bullshit jobs to fill in too.
Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.
That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).
None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.
He who is content with his lot probably has a lot.
