Quote: Leninism is, of course, applied socialism. Socialism was huge before Leninism was even a thing, and that Marxism was and is still popular is not due only to Soviet patronage. Socialism works by hacking the Social Calculus Module that humans have in our brains. Remember, humans care deeply about status. Status is what drives human behavior. Everybody works to achieve more status, and to avoid losing status. Socialism of course sells egalitarianism. It tells people with low status that they can get some more. The Industrial Revolution had forced millions of peasants into the cities, and they all felt they had lost status in the process.

Quote:So these socialists come by and tell them they have this plan to make them gain status, big time. That was huge. Yes, sure, Christianity had also started promising the meek that they were morally higher than rich people; they’d all go to heaven unlike those perfid rich guys. But that didn’t translate into actual, real-world status. Socialism was promising actual goods. And so it became huge. It’s still huge.

Quote:Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn’t have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That’s just how it works.

Quote:Socialism though promised to change that, and Marx showed they had a good plan. Lenin then put that plan to work in practice. What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party with little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families.

(Yesterday 06:59 AM)Syberpunk Wrote:  

(05-21-2019 11:33 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  It saddens me that my little sister is now a rabid leftist who has been totally brainwashed by the school system.

She was such a bubbly, happy kid and I helped my parents raise her. The worst part is how the political bullshit they teach her in school has deprived her of the wonders and innocence of being a kid. All she talks about now is “white privileged” and “the future is female”.

Yet I don’t blame her. She’s a young, impressionable mind. I blame the fuckers that put all this nonsense in her head and ruined her.

I want my little sister back. The one I used to play with and cradled in my arms when she cried. Now what I see is an angry, negative young girl with a corrupted mind.

In a just society, I should be able to sue these bastards for what they did to her.

My heart ached reading this, I'm sorry Tiger.

I have (had) a younger brother that the conversion happened to Tiger, we'd fight when younger (as brothers often do) but as I reached 18 and he was 16, we got along like a house on fire and he was always gregarious and making good conversation with you. I used to help with his homework and he struggled so hard with dyslexia, I was often nearly in tears because I couldn't help him, my parents were like saints getting him all the help that was available, now he is out of university in community work and he's bastard to everybody around him including my parents and a true blood democratic socialism kind of guy, I don't feel a flicker of pity anymore, only a remorse for what was.

The relationship went up and up in our teenage years, then plummuted head first into the dirt.

It feels like a death.

When you look into his eyes, its like there is nothing there and its eerie, sizing you up to see what he can get from you, how you may be of use. It's almost demonic, everybody tenses up when he is the room (yeah we all go beta), I shouldn't have to hold frame against the prick, what way is this to carry on with family? It's like the sympathy gene, making sure people are at ease with you gene, tuned off in university.

Then doesn't call his parents for months.

I'd have to liked to go the parallel universe where we still got along and he didn't take an interest in youth politics in school, if future him, has potential nieces and nephews of mine, we could know that we'd always be family and have each others back. But we won't. I could forgive, but how could I trust him now that I know what he is willing to do?

Silly stupid bastard.

(Yesterday 06:29 AM)Simeon_Strangelight Wrote:  Welcome to the club. My younger sister was one of those sassy funny girls - one of the few women with humor. Most of that humor left her as she entered the far-left media workforce. But since it's Europe, then a lot of society is not fully on board with cultural marxism, so she pulled back a bit from it. Still - the person that she was is gone and she is filled to the brim with automatic NPC reactions. At the worst time the family had to avoid all kinds of trigger words, but it did not help, because anything could set her off - even a sex-joke between husband and wife was a micro-triggering sexual harrassment.

(05-18-2019 04:15 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  So my wife's best friend that she had known since high school suddenly had an outburst and blocked her over Alabama's abortion law (disclaimer: neither of them are American or living in USA). It went like this:

Friend (after more than a month of not writing or calling due to being "busy"): Since you're pro-life, what do you think about the Alabama law and its ban on abortion even in cases of rape?
Wife: Hey there, I hope you've been well. I support that law because (scientific/legal reasons).
Friend: I reject your reasons because everyone has their own truth. You're brainwashed by white people. Don't you even watch NowThis videos that show how black people are being slaughtered in America?
Wife: I don't watch them, but what does that have to do with abortion?
Friend: You're so bigoted. You're a Nazi. I can't believe it.
Wife: (no response)
Friend: I can't associate with someone like you. Goodbye. I'm blocking you now.

I know that someone who is willing to attack and hate someone over something on the other side of the world that has no effect on anyone makes for a very poor friend anyway, but it's still sad. Seriously, what the fuck? It's absolutely horrifying how communism brainwashes people into lashing out even at their family and closest friends just because they politely disagree with their totalitarian views.

• Read a detailed blog about the concepts/ideas in it
• Watch a 15 min YouTube summary (free, possibly with charts, infographics)
• Watch an hour or so long YouTuber's summary (free)
• Buy and listen to a paid 'summary' style book
• Same as above but an eBook or physical book
• Buy and listen to an abridged audiobook
• Buy and listen to the original full length audiobook
• Buy and complete a paid course based on the teachings of the book (if one exists)
• Buy and read the full length eBook or physical book
  

Quote:Grubhub charging us even when our customers don’t order: restaurant owners

Restaurateurs across the country say they are waking up to a years-long, high-tech bamboozling by Grubhub involving hidden fees for orders that never happened — an allegation that could cost the company millions, The Post has learned.

Last November, a woman called Italian eatery Enoteca at 6:50 p.m. to ask if they had gluten-free pasta. The Brooklyn restaurant was charged a $9.07 fee for the call — even though no order was made — by Grubhub, America’s largest food ordering service.

More recently, an upscale Mediterranean restaurant in Manhattan, which declined to be named for this story, was charged for telling a hungry customer that it was closed for a private event.

Grubhub earned $9 on that, among other bogus orders, the owner told The Post.

A third restaurateur told The Post he is being charged an estimated $2,000 a year at just one of his five restaurants due to calls from customers with questions about menu items.

Grubhub, which owns food delivery service Seamless, tells restaurants that it will only charge them for food orders it helps to generate, documents show. But eatery owners say the Chicago company, which also owns MenuPages.com, has been quietly billing them for all kinds of calls, including calls for dinner reservations or complaints about not enough duck sauce.

The payoff to Grubhub, a publicly traded company, is hard to quantify, but a new lawsuit filed in Philadelphia federal court in December is seeking $5 million in damages, an amount that could increase if other restaurants join the litigation, which is seeking class-action status.

The suit, filed by Munish Narula, owner of Tiffin Indian Cuisine in Philadelphia, claims the charges for phantom orders have been going on “for at least seven years,” and are widespread across the company’s 115,000 restaurant partners.

Behind the hidden fees, according to the lawsuit and restaurant sources, is Grubhub’s practice of setting up brand new phone numbers for restaurants it contracts with. It displays its phone numbers on its Web site and app instead of the restaurant’s actual number.

Customers who rely on Grubhub’s numbers may never know the difference because Grubhub automatically forwards its calls to the restaurants, which then fill the orders.

Fees for non-orders have the effect of doubling Grubhub’s normal commissions of 15 percent to 20 percent of the final bill, restaurateurs say. For example, the woman who called about the gluten-free pasta placed an order on Grubhub’s app two minutes later, earning the company an additional $9.18 — or a 36.5 percent commission on the single order, documents show.

Mike Evans, one of Grubhub’s cofounders, has said that his company uses a “statistical model” to determine whether or not a phone call through its system resulted in an order or not.

“It turns out to be possible to predict with a high degree of accuracy which calls are orders or not,” Evans wrote on Web site Quora in 2013.

Narula’s lawsuit claims Grubhub’s statistical model is a mere egg timer — one that charges for any call above 45 seconds.

“We believe the Tiffin case is without merit and dispute the claims,” the company said in a statement.

Restaurants “have the ability to review and audit recordings of phone calls through their dedicated portal and can easily dispute any charges,” the company added, referring to the company’s practice of recording calls made through Grubhub lines.

But Narula’s suit claims the company refused to give him transcripts of his Grubhub-recorded calls in March 2018, when he first realized he was being charged for non-orders. He claims Grubhub only started making transcripts available to him and other eatery owners many months later, in August 2018.

Grubhub disputes this, saying it has provided the transcripts all along.

Enoteca owner Marco Chirico, 31, said he was only able to access to his transcripts for a few months when he first noticed the phantom orders last December. He estimates his losses ranged from $400 to $900 a month for the period he was able to access.

And yes, Grubhub refunded Enoteca, Chirico told The Post — but only after making him wait 45 minutes to an hour to speak to a representative.

On Friday, Eunhee Park Cohen, the owner of the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant Tabouleh, also had trouble reviewing transcripts tied to 21 questionable charges from April tallying $4.50 to $5.47 a call.

“Usually it’s older people calling. Their conversations are very lengthy,” she said of the charges before laying into Grubhub for making her work to find hidden fees.

“Do you think all the small restaurant owners in New York City … read each thing?” she asked of the call transcripts. “You don’t have time to go to the bathroom sometimes,” she said of the business.

After disputing the charges and getting a refund, Chirico alerted the New York State Restaurant Association, which immediately sent an e-mail to its 1,000 members in the city, warning them to check their accounts.

The February memo from NYSRA president Melissa Autilio Fleischut says the association heard about the problem from Chirico and a second unnamed member.

“The percentage in commission they take, and the things they take from you that you don’t notice —it hurts you. It hurts the business,” Chirico said.

Quote:"LeanIn.org and SurveyMonkey’s new #MentorHer poll reveals Friday that 60% of male managers report feeling “too nervous” about being accused of harassment to interact with women in “common workplace” activities such as mentoring, socializing and one-on-one meetings.

That’s a 32% spike from 2018, with an additional 36% of men saying they now actively avoid women in junior-level positions — effectively chopping down their shot at climbing the corporate ladder."

Quote:“The vast majority of managers and senior leaders are men,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, SurveyMonkey board member and founder of LeanIn.Org, in a statement. “If they are reluctant even to meet one-on-one with women, there’s no way women can get an equal shot at proving themselves.”

Quote:"We’re in a bad place — no one’s ever gotten promoted without a one-on-one meeting, I feel confident in saying that,” Sandberg tells “CBS This Morning” host Gayle King Friday. “Senior men right now are nine times more hesitant to travel with a woman and six times more likely to hesitate to have a work dinner.”

Quote:"Now Sandberg says it’s time for men to “step up” and “redefine what it means to be a good guy at work” — before it costs us all a whole lot of cold hard cash.

“There’s not a company in the world that can afford to leave talent on the sidelines because it’s female,” she says. “But that’s what will keep happening unless all of us — especially men — commit to doing better.”

Quote:All foreign females between the ages of 18-25 who want to live in the United States will be assigned a score of 1-100 based on her beauty, weight, fertility, weight, age, weight, and basic literacy.

Quote:Citizen men will also be scored from 1-100 based on their work ethic, employment potential, age, religious faith, and financial stability (i.e. if he’s responsible with his Roosh Bucks).

Quote:The SAT, the college entrance test taken by about two million students a year, is adding an “adversity score” to the test results that is intended to help admissions officers account for factors like educational or socioeconomic disadvantage that may depress students’ scores, the College Board, the company that administers the test, said Thursday.

Colleges have long been concerned with scoring patterns on the SAT that seem unfavorable to certain socioeconomic groups: Higher scores have been found to correlate with students coming from a higher-income families and having better-educated parents.

David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, has described a trial version of the tool, which has been field-tested by 50 colleges, in recent interviews. The plan to roll it out officially, to 150 schools this year and more broadly in 2020, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The adversity score would be a number between 1 and 100, with an average student receiving a 50. It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.

Admissions officers have struggled for years to find ways of gauging the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores.

“We’ve got to admit the truth, that wealth inequality has progressed to such a degree that it isn’t fair to look at test scores alone,” Mr. Coleman recently told The Associated Press. “You must look at them in context of the adversity students face.”

The new tool could potentially give colleges a way of doing that. But at the same time, it could invite a backlash from more affluent families and from students who do well on the test and worry that their adversity score will put them at a disadvantage.

The plan comes at a time when universities like Harvard, Yale, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin face challenges to their affirmative action policies, either in the courts or through federal investigations. Many admissions officers are preparing for the possibility that a newly conservative Supreme Court could take a hard line on the use of race in admissions decisions. The College Board says race is not factored into adversity scores.

To address concerns about the fairness of standardized tests, a growing number of colleges have made it optional rather than mandatory for applicants to submit scores from the SAT or the other main standardized entrance test, the ACT.

The reputation of the SAT has been tarnished recently by the college admissions cheating scandal, which led to criminal charges against more than 50 people, including the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Prosecutors said the defendants took part in a fraudulent scheme to get children into coveted universities like the University of Southern California, Yale and Stanford.

[A student whose father paid $400,000 to get him into Georgetown is now suing the school for threatening to expel him.]

Federal prosecutors said the scheme, led by a charismatic admissions consultant, included tactics like obtaining phony certifications of disability so that students could take the SAT alone with extra time, paying off a test proctor to change test answers afterward, and in some cases paying a ringer to take the whole test for a student.