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Also left out: since the 1960's we've subsidized the least accomplished people to have the most children. Idiocracy was a documentary.

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Think about how stupid the "average" American is.
Now realize that half the country is dumber than that...

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Want to play a game?

What modern gun manufacturer could mass produce Astra 400s, Lugers or Enfield No1 Mk3s?

Competency, skills, techniques, budget, etc. would make those all very complex.

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At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

moar

/media/mediaFiles/sharedAlbum/It_s_Happening_Isn_t_It-117.gif

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Welcome to Costco. I love you.

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The OG Idiocracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

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companies worry about quarter-to-quarter costs
 

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The core problem is class prejudice guised as credentialism. Where credentials are increasingly the result of expressing the "correct" opinions, not on producing results. And this a result of a fixation on being one of the "betters" in society who is deemed to be right because of position, not because of proof.

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That power line problem in California is a horrible example. It was a created problem due to government incompetence not letting the power company trim trees and brush. Notice that is not a problem in the rest of the country.

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That power line problem in California is a horrible example. It was a created problem due to government incompetence not letting the power company trim trees and brush. Notice that is not a problem in the rest of the country.

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Yeah, I don’t think the East Palestine train derailment is the best example, either.

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Part of the problem is the rest of Western Civilization is in a race to the bottom as well.

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As always, there's an xkcd for that:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency.png

(Every developer here knows how true this is )

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As always, there's an xkcd for that:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency.png

(Every developer here knows how true this is )

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It’s by design,

South Africa still runs…..kinda.

Caribbean/Central/South America still functions…..on the lower end of the bell curve.

The point is it works more or less.

But the elites get to do all this cool shit like ride around in helicopters, have giant estates, kill people for entertainment, kick peasants off their land, jet to Europe for a shopping trip, do a ton of drugs, steal elections.

And the place is one giant brothel bro. These starving bitches will do anything for some cash, food and mydol. Age, condoms and all that other shit people worry about bro is for the poors.

Americans look at that life and say this is bullshit.

Our elites look at that life and say “Jesus I NEED IN.”

It’s just that pesky middle class that keeps getting in the way.

That’s where we are at politically currently.

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Been saying that for years.

Do you like third world? Because if you survive the Great Reparations, you'll get 3rd world water, power, streets, food, and goods forever.

Only worse, because the US innovation economy won't be there to prop the world up with magic gadgets. And the UN won't be there to keep your village stocked with sorghum and rice, so even the sub-Saharan bootlegging culture will be impossible.

So yeah, the competency crisis is going to be amazing. For the Chinese, that is, given that they're bankrolling a lot of it.

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So because you got angry and bitter you decided to think the world is against you and fuck yourself?

Good job bro. You got ‘em.

You sure showed them by creating a shitty life for yourself.

Companies worry about profits?? The literal thing that they are created for? No way! Those assholes!

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When you set a quota for participation by any metric beyond skill you guarantee that you lower standards. It won't matter what the quota set aside is: Left handers, redheads, polydactyly-whatever. The higher the quota percentage, the quicker and steeper the standards fall.
And the quotas never stop at the entry level, not once you proclaim an entire tier of people a victim. The quotas apply at each step up along the way and then inevitably it echoes back down the line in a feedback loop that feeds ever less qualified people into the organization.
Eventually, you're selecting for incompetence.
In a perverse twist of human nature, the quality of those personnel not part of the quota declines too, and ironically, the  population of the set asides declines in quality, so that by de facto the most capable of that group are still discriminated against.
Even outright nepotism will yield better results overall because the subset is constrained, plus market forces and social pressures act as a mitigating effect.
"The widening gyre..."

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How does a cell phone work?

If I dropped you naked in the woods, how long before you could call someone for help?

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It's by design,

South Africa still runs ..kinda.

Caribbean/Central/South America still functions ..on the lower end of the bell curve.

The point is it works more or less.

But the elites get to do all this cool shit like ride around in helicopters, have giant estates, kill people for entertainment, kick peasants off their land, jet to Europe for a shopping trip, do a ton of drugs, steal elections.

And the place is one giant brothel bro. These starving bitches will do anything for some cash, food and mydol. Age, condoms and all that other shit people worry about bro is for the poors.

Americans look at that life and say this is bullshit.

Our elites look at that life and say "Jesus I NEED IN."

It's just that pesky middle class that keeps getting in the way.

That's where we are at politically currently.