When I was in aerospace we lost a not insignificant amount of contracts to Europeans that we had won during the RFP/requirements/evaluation phase because we did not do kickbacks (where we demonstratable win the selection process, but that be told to do a kickback scheme then lose when we said no). The Euros also spread money other ways to make us less attractive. In the US we'd win RPFs/evaluation phase only to lose out in the end due to politics. Sadly aerospace isn't a game of merit. Seemed like Australia, China, Japan, central/southern Africa didn't play games and selected on merit in the contracts we went after.
When I worked in aerospace one of the surprising things to learn was we had an unwritten 'max allowed' percentage of people hired from Boeing overall and applied to each team because we did not want to incorporate Boeing's culture. If I was still in management at a software company I'd probably apply that as a consideration with regards to FAANG. Even for those hired ex-Boeing had a much stricter vetting not on skills but personality/approach/vibe(?).
I don't know exactly I never worked there and I was IT not design/qa/factory floor. My understanding was slow, non innovative, not efficient, and prone to complain. The ex-Boeing people we had were great though. I think it's probably just normal 150k employee companies end up toxic stuff. Just know we had a quota.
Being a grey beard, white board tests were popular because we didn't have an applicant pool experienced in software development. So we gave people logic and problem solving tests to see if they had the right type of thinking/temperament to train them up to be software devs. They didn't evolve into the trash they are now until later.
It's a challenging problem. Going back to when I was in aerospace even just with the FAA we had FAA west and FAA east, and they were treated as different entities within our company because they had such different approaches/understanding and then the EASA which was from our experience a protectionist entity that would look for gotchas on American competitors and not a neutral safety focused party and refused to recognized treaty obligated acceptance of FAA certification (and it was a big issue that the US refused to step in on our behalf and require the treaty be followed because the US authorities put safety first even though the US had agreed we were safe and had demonstrated it).
If you come from a American Christian background these are really worth exploring. Being ex-catholic/ex-Christian I found that they share enough to make them more accessible (I guess) than other religions, but also different in thought from what I grew up in, and those combined really help me expand on my personal thinking. I did a study group that a Greek orthodox priest put on for non-orthodox and it was awesome. Watching him shutdown old school American Christians and their focus on decoding a few sentences in English when he pointed out 'that's not even really what the words mean in the original text' and then getting mini-lessons on old languages and meanings I felt like I was back in school and completely changed a lot of my surface level understand of Christianity (asking my family religious questions the answer was don't questions/it's this because it's this).
From the comments here I think I'm going to look into the Indian off shoots. Up until now I've mainly explored through Egyptian, Syrian, and Greek/Russian orthodox friends. I wonder if there is an Indian style church established in the US that would have literature created to be accessible to an American church centric point of view? I've always envied the deep spirituality my Indian Christian/Muslim friends have had, I wonder if exploring the Indian church could help me with that. I did a couple year long study with a Pakistani Muslim friend but I didn't really connect with it, though his beautiful spirituality/groundedness/family beleifs have been a godsend as a life mentor.
For indian you can check the st thomas christians or syrian christians or malankara nasranis from state of kerala that trace their origin to st thomas visit in the 1st century and were under the church of east. They follow the syriac based liturgies. I mentioned to specifically check with these because other christians in india are all latin rite catholic or protestant, which all started with european arrivals and so most won't be much aware of the histories outside their group. And checking with any hindu or muslim from india won't do any good because first they are not even much aware of all these different denominations, and most outside kerala won't be aware of all these since this community is historically concentrated in that specific region of the country; now the second reason is the nation is now in hinduthva peak where there is a lot of conflict from majority hindus with muslims and christians and the ideology itself say muslims and christians are internal threats and they all just dismiss everything about christianity as fake and try to always associate christianity with euorpean colonisation and hence anti national cheaters.
Now the migrants of st thomas christians or syrian christians or malankara nasranis community from the state of kerala are present in western nations, including america and have churches there. Currently, the community is split into the following different denominations:
* Syro malabar catholic church - follows a modified east syriac litrugy
* Malankara orthodox syrian/malankara jacobite syrian church - follows west syriac litrugy
* Syro malankara catholic church - follows a slightly modified west syriac litrugy
* Marthoma syrian church - follows a protestantified west syriac
"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains"
"1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"
1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial. That their wealth is growing so fast that that is fairly small to them and makes the median American income seem small doesn't sell me.
How is an untaxed benefit of 3-44X the median income insignificant? I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount. By this argument why should we not then exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation? Since it's 'insignificant'. Oh, right, because it's only insignificant in the context of 'they are so obscenely rich it's insignificant to them'.
What percentage of increased productivity has gone back to the workers as increased financial health during the last say 20 years? Not increased wages. Their increase in end of day actual financial health versus end of day increase in actual financial health of the owning class? Not some Peter/Paul highlighting Peter 'wages have gone up' while ignoring any stealing from Paul 'actual financial health' has gone down metric.
300 years of thinking has established that copyright is the best way to sustain ongoing creation of knowledge and thought, yet the same crowd seem pretty fine gutting that 300 years of understanding because of their judgement that their desired use case for today outweighs the cost to society of lost future knowledge creation, so they seem plenty happy to ignore established thought when it benefits them.
People at the bottom end of the income scale are sharply deterred from holding any meaningful amounts of savings, because this can exclude them from 'means tested' benefits. This is effectively a disguised ~100% "wealth tax" that hits many among the most heavily disadvantaged and marginalized. We're essentially telling people that they have to be living literally hand-to-mouth before they're deemed to deserve any kind of broader social support.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/airbus-agrees-pay-ov...
When I was in aerospace we lost a not insignificant amount of contracts to Europeans that we had won during the RFP/requirements/evaluation phase because we did not do kickbacks (where we demonstratable win the selection process, but that be told to do a kickback scheme then lose when we said no). The Euros also spread money other ways to make us less attractive. In the US we'd win RPFs/evaluation phase only to lose out in the end due to politics. Sadly aerospace isn't a game of merit. Seemed like Australia, China, Japan, central/southern Africa didn't play games and selected on merit in the contracts we went after.
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