Alexander Corbett @AlexanderCorbe

@romanhelmetguy If you can't field at least a fire team of trained and ready men, you shouldn't be allowed to vote

@calvinfroedge 🦧

@Will_Tanner_1 Sad facts

@Babygravy9 @ThomBrady5 Head on pike

I deal with boomers every day at work and can confirm they are the most insufferable generation to ever walk God's green earth

@RoguesPhilo "surrogate activity" 👀

@CEBKCEBKCEBK @myth_pilot You're a top 5 X account hands down never stop man

SEARCHING FOR PYRAMIDS IN THE DARIEN GAP FULL DOCUMENTARY

@0xAlaric So sick

I want to bow hunt a wooly mammoth, what lab do I fund

I am impatient for cloning technology to bring back mega fauna

Thread of some surprising things that are older than other things Notre Dame predates the Maori settlement of New Zealand

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@unusual_whales Are we counting commodities futures or nah

Sick, now do Section 8

Culture used to hate cowards, now it protects them. there used to be a price for breaking your word, for abandoning your wife. you would be named and exiled, your face would carry it. we used to put shame on the thing that deserved it. shame was the immune system of a society, it killed what would kill us

So Congress, including Republicans, passed laws allowing your car to spy on you, which is hugely unpopular, but can’t pass voter ID, which is hugely popular.

@XFreeze POV meaning lost - many such cases

@CEBKCEBKCEBK Consistent bangers chief

Before the DoGE cuts last year, Chemonics was the largest for-profit recipient of US government foreign aid; it received just over $1.5 billion from USAID per year, and this was basically all of its revenue (for example, in 1993, the New York Times reported that it got 98% of its money from USAID, and that's pretty normal for them). If you ranked contractors by revenue from the federal government, it was in the top 50. It had about 2,000 US employees (almost all based in DC) and about 5,000 foreign employees (its 2024 full-time global headcount was about 7,500). Its average US employee salary was about $100,000, and their average compensation (including benefits) was in the $140,000-$160,000 range. & its US employees were 65% female, & 40% nonwhite, so this was pretty good for them. It also spent about $50,000,000 per year on employee-related office, lodging, travel, and other such costs. Cursory googling suggests their average foreign worker got about 1/5 as much in total compensation, which in itself is pretty funny. This means that out of its $1.5 billion in grants per year from USAID, roughly (2000 + 5000/5) * (150,000) + 50,000,000 = 500,000,000—ie 1/3—was consumed on its own middleman labor costs, before passing what remained of those grants along to the programs abroad it ostensibly exists to help manage and advocate for. (It’s unclear how much profit it makes, but AI says that’s likely 3 to 7 percent of its total contract value, ie about $75 million per year). Note that even its foreign employees aren’t actually doing the actual work it contracts for: its domestic & foreign employees just procure, oversee, lobby, etc for the third world third parties it hires to handle health or edu or construction or other such initiatives for USAID, while taking 1/3 as its own cut. Consider some of the projects they've worked on. For example, USAID put them in charge of the "Promote" program in Afghanistan, which is just about finding jobs for women there; they spent nearly $90 million over three years and just placed 55 women in Afghan government jobs (& they're currently being sued for bribing the Taliban during this). In 2015, USAID gave them the largest contract that it's ever awarded, in order to supply the medicine involved in PEPFAR, the Malaria Initiative, & a major tuberculosis program for the next 8 years; in 2017, even sympathetic journalists reported that only 7% of the medicines in this program arrived "on time & in full." Chemonics was the largest single recipient of USAID funds relating to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, receiving $200 million in contracts, many of which were "no-bid." USAID audits dinged them for hiring less than 1/3 of the Haitians they said they would, & because "the performance indicators Chemonics developed were not well-defined." In 2008, another USAID audit found that another Chemonics contract (this one for $62 million in Afghanistan) "fell considerably short" of the intended impact, & buildings constructed by subcontractors had significant construction defects. Chemonics received $25 million from USAID in 2014 to improve literacy in Sindh for several years, but the literacy rate in that province of Pakistan was noticeably higher in 2010 (69%) than in 2019 (62%). Etc. It certainly seems pretty meaningless & comfortable & high-status, but there are plenty of meaningless comfortable high-status jobs that people don't seem nearly as delusional & obsessive about protecting. One possible reason is that Chemonics is employee-owned, & explicitly encourages its employees to invest in company stock as the bulk of their own retirement savings (they don’t pay meaningful dividends but promise to buy it back from you when you leave, so you’re basically on the hook for making sure they’re still profitable if you ever wanna retire). Of course, they also have intelligence connections. Chemonics was created by an agribusiness company (Erly Industries) that got about 30% of its revenue from selling rice to Iraq in the late 1980s, & then—when we switched from supporting Iraq to fighting it—Erly reorganized their operations to work through our embargo. The head of Erly said of his decision to create Chemonics: "I've always wanted a way to do two things: one, have my own CIA, & two, be helpful to people." Again: this is just the largest contractor USAID uses (usually gets about 30% of USAID prime contracts by value, & this is usually about 95% of its revenue). & yes, it’s still the largest one: it got waivers to keep what would’ve been ~$1.1B in USAID contracts going this year (absorbing many waivered projects from smaller competitors which didn’t survive the DoGE cuts), but we just announced this month imminent plans to swap those very contracts to leaner multilateral aid institutions by end of May so we can fully bypass these NGOs. In other words, the ~4,000 remaining Chemonics employees (& whatever other such remnants have clung on at smaller competitors) quite suddenly have good reason to fear losing their jobs very soon, which may be why the NYT is now giving big puff pieces to random little USAID contractors. It’s pretty bizarre to me that we give these people such nice BS jobs (with so many foreign assistants making 1/5 as much) to take such gargantuan cuts out of our foreign aid programs, before passing on the grants to third parties who actually do the real work that’s been contracted for. But whatever: if our society rewards lazy smug retards with big easy paychecks & lots of low caste help & moralizing accolades in the official media for stridently embezzling & politicizing charity, then this abuse is in some sense our fault. But it’s their faults they gambled their savings on keeping these frauds going, & it’s their faults they’re doubling-down on this in such desperate pathetic ways, by getting our official media to portray them as losers who can’t handle anything beside stealing from & ideologically corrupting our government’s donations, which were ostensibly about benevolently & productively using our soft power to help extremely needy people, but which in effect only seemed about helping comfortable people who hate us help uncomfortable people hate us. It’s our fault we let ourselves get ripped off like this, but it’s their fault—for calling us all selfish murderers for finally disrupting this preening hypocritical theft & making them find real jobs that’ll accept their fake skills—that they’re now losing all their moral, intellectual, & financial status.

Ceb K. @CEBKCEBKCEBK

2 months ago

Govt work is where competent humble people take a 10X pay cut to put themselves behind serious but “mean” stuff, & where incompetent smug people take a 10X raise to put themselves in front of unserious but “nice” stuff. These are the 2 parties, & how the latter won the deep state

1 50 596 59K 54

@escapefrommelos Excellent reference