I have noticed. Reeeeeeaaaallly noticed an intense ideology among those who graduated from top engineering schools after, say, 2004ish… they tend to really BELIEVE that ai can do everything better than humans because it won’t make mistakes like humans by, for instance, being influenced by emotions or substances…
to a degree that I would call delusional at this point but the faithful still believe I suppose. I would not be surprised if some percentage of these people truly see it all as a step on a path towards utopia and the consequences as necessary sacrifices.
I remember reading a book called Cults in America (if I remember correctly), and the author was saying that college age people are particularly vulnerable to cults, for a number of reasons. This may be the first burst of independence from their parents and the community that they grew up in, and they are looking to assert themselves as separate from those things, but they are also feeling adrift and lonely and may be subconsciously looking for connections to groups to replace their childhood peer groups. They may also be subconsciously looking for an authority figure.
We had a Korean Christian cult at my uni. On campus, they had meetings which taught Korean language and culture. They also arranged for students to travel overseas to teach English. Before they went to their teaching destination, they were trained elsewhere. In an isolated location. Housed in crowded dorms. And provided insufficient food and sleep time.
My foster niece got hired by something called a commercial cult; it’s run like a cult, but there is no religious component. They hire young kids, make them show up at a warehouse at crack-of-dawn-o’clock in the morning, no breakfast, no coffee, sing the company song, get a pep talk from the president and his team, get driven off to the back end of nowhere with no way of leaving until they are picked up at the end of the day. They go door to door with a quota of shit to sell, or charity donations to make, and they don’t get paid unless they make their quota. They get brought back to the warehouse at the end of the day and are yelled at for not making their quotas, and people are singled out for punishment.
My foster niece who was butting heads with my sister at that point, told them that she was on her own and had no family. My sister was concerned, because Krista was coming home exhausted, famished and beaten down, but would not share what was going on. I was due to take my niece out for a birthday shopping trip, and she asked if I could probe a bit to find out more. So during lunch I said “[Sister] says you have a job; how’s that going?” and it all came flooding out. I told her that this was not a normal situation, and in fact was very, very wrong, and that she really needed to talk with her my sister about it.
I should also say that Krista was model pretty and it came out that the president had singled her out for a trip to the US with him. Right.
Krista took me seriously, and talked with my sister, who went roaring in to the warehouse the next day, telling them that Krista quit, that they’d damn well better pay her or my sister’s next stop was going to be the fraud squad. She got Krista’s money, and they had disappeared from the warehouse by the next week; it was empty.
On Thursday, two sources told Ars that the science agency should expect to see steep cuts in Trump’s forthcoming budget request. In recent years, the National Science Foundation has received an annual budget of approximately $9 billion, the vast majority of which is spent on research and research-related activities. The cuts could be as deep as 66 percent, with one person indicating the top-line budget number for the National Science Foundation could start at $3 billion.
I work in this industry (but not humanitarian aid). And there is definitely fraud. That comes with the territory of working in failing and failed states. However, most of it is caught, and the government made whole.
As @OhHai mentions, the IGs detect and prosecutes most of this. As @ChickieD mentions, in food and disaster/refugee/IDP management there is often a lot of waste, fraud and abuse, though that primarily happens in war zones where US NGOs are unable to operate safely.
Recently, the biggest problems were in Syra, and perpetrated by Syrian and Turkish organizations. Again, because only they could enter those zones, and so there was little on the ground oversight.
This doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on those worst affected by disaster and war. It is both a moral imperative, but also a national security imperative. Unfortunately, what this administration has done will radicalize a large number of people against the USA, and it will take at least a generation to de-radicalize and demonstrate that the US can be a reliable partner.
It was always pretty clear that (the right-wing usage of) “DEI” was just code for “the existence of non-(white men),” but goddamn, the Trump administration is really making it obvious now:
My recollection is that a large IT consultancy did just that with its new recruits. My co-worker (who’d majored in psychology; FWIW) likened the company to a cult for precisely that reason. Another factor is that the subject is (or, will be) isolated from their family.
I bet… promises to let her stay when they’re deporting all the other brown people. She gets to be token proof that they’re not REALLY racists, see there is a brown lady right there! Also, how can they be misogynistic, WHEN THERE’S A BROWN LADY RIGHT THERE… CHECK. MATE. LIBTARDS!!!
This is fucking monstrous, especially with a sexual predator recently installed as Defense Secretary. If just one more Republican Senator had been a “no” vote Hegseth wouldn’t have got in and we should never let anyone forget how cowardly they acted.
