Week 3

The commercial cannot exist without the free. It's time this fact is acknowledged and properly rewarded, at the very least, the existing system is amended so people who create the commercial products are rewarded less (money is not an absolute value but defines distribution right?).

"The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy and is foundational for most technology we use today... We estimate.. the demand-side value [replacement value for each firm that uses the software of OSS] is.. at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist."

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Large structures defy the homogeniety principle of an expanding universe and the Big Bang. Both theories are now dead.

Phys.org: "Discovery of second ultra-large structure in distant space further challenges our understanding of the universe"

"@arnesemsrott@chaos.social

Yesterday's Bundestag debate on the AfD expulsion plans was really not a great moment.

If this is the intellectual level at which the AfD is being fought from the Bundestag, we really have even more problems"

How much tax does he pay on his wealth generated income?

And they wonder why people veer towards fascism. People like you created Hitler, Spahn.

This guy is former banker, rich, his money makes surely money while he sits on his ass - why does he care whether people work or not?

That easy eh?

CDU executive board member Jens Spahn: "People who can work and receive a job offer but do not accept it should basically no longer receive citizen’s money.. If a general deletion is not covered by the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court, we should simply change the constitution"

A better label for the complex is a "surface state", these people supported by a shady donor class can grab a political post here and there at the top, install certain people at some gov posts, but they are mostly at the outer edges albeit sometimes in powerful positions. Remember the Cheney - J. Wilson debacle. JW blew the whistle on the Iraq War evidence Saddam had WMD etc) and Cheney's people, likely directed by him, outed his wife at the CIA. Well if Cheney type people were "in the deep", as in state, couldn't they handle business other ways? In that scenario Wilson would not speak. His wife would be "taken care of". It would be a done deal. That did not happen. This is why looking for bad actors at the depths is incorrect. At lower levels there are a lot of good officials, like that Josh Paul, ppl with principles. There are many like him. The donors, "the complex" at the exec level can manuever the occasional Secretary, a VP, or sometimes a President into a position, but it is harder for them to reach the internal workings of the state. US is not an empire, nor has a deep state. Politically, it is just a concoction of short-sighted private actors that only care about immediate profits, a donor supported, partly corrupt "surface state" that unfortunately is leading everyone to ruin.

Vice, Bernstein: "Cheney’s contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency has its roots in the Ford administration. Cheney believed the agency, like Dr. Kissinger, was soft on the Soviet Union. So Cheney and Rumsfeld colluded with a clique of right-wing academics— which would grow into the neocon movement"

That doesn't mean anything. Dick Cheney did not like the CIA either, he is still alive and kicking. Some others do not like the FBI, or ICE. It doesn't immediately imply "they will kill you". JFK provided ample funding for the military, a lot of interests had reasons to keep him alive. He died because he was retarded, like everyone else in his family. These people have a genetic defect.

"But JFK did not like the CIA, that is likely why they'd want him dead"

JFK was an extremely bad president, but his image proved useful for the complex. Think about it, he was rich, then killed in a way that led many "imaginative" boomers at the time to suspect government (because gov is bad, does bad things, be scared). And what is the overriding ideology of the post-Berlin Wall neoliberal world? Pro-rich and anti-government. Boom. Enter JFK adulation.

"@eunews@mastodon.social

The European Parliament has for the first time called for a 'permanent ceasefire' in Gaza and the start of political efforts to find a solution to the war between Israel and Hamas"

Toronto Star: "Police spending has ‘no consistent correlation’ with lower crime rates, new Canadian study says"

The Lever: "Federal regulators are now investigating Boeing and its longtime subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems after a series of Lever reports revealed widespread corporate malfeasance following a terrifying plane malfunction"

404Media: "Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers... They found that, overall, 'higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality ... we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.'"

For fracture analysis dude modeled the whole object via a beam lattice, solves the system with superpositioned elements, then $Ax=b$ using conjugate gradient.. Removes pieces that have too much displacement and repeats, thanks to CG incremental recalc is very fast. The simulations look uncanny.

There are some great ways of solving $Ax=b$.

Link

Noone remembers anything anymore

Garthe Knight did not have plastic surgery to look like Michael. When Michael had the surgery he was made to look like Garthe. GK is Wilton's real son.

#Cold #BEV

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They deserve it #ICJ #ISR #US

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CNBC: "World's five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020, report finds.. 'The world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won't be eradicated for another 229 years,' Oxfam said"

According to "all money is debt to FED" viewpoint, once the debt is paid the money would be likely destroyed, poof. Then theoretically if all debt was paid back within same the period, it is possible there would be no money in the econ, zero. That would be odd.. But highly unlikely.

The Bricklayer, Kill Command, average but ok. Lift was great. The Warrior's Way, exotic, good action.

It's sort of funny but not true, likely doctored image.

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DJ Shadow - Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt #music

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Yhden suuren vedynsiirtoputken vastaa jopa 15 kantaverkon voimajohtoa.. That's right mfka.. that's what I'm talkin bout..

Energia siirty kaasuna tehokkaasti. Oh yea

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"@trochee@dair-community.social

The boom in LLMs is going to hollow out a number of knowledge-worker industries — for example, writing boilerplate code or technical documentation

Not because it does it well but because the flacks can sell upper management on the idea that it can do it at all, as @doctorow recently pointed out

This sale is a pig-in-a-poke, and the winning move is to not be holding the bag when the actual code or documentation is found to be terrible

But there isn't really a winning move if you're one of the people getting hollowed out — for us, the game is survival until the grift collapses"

Politico: "The fiercest Republican campaign isn’t taking place between the hopefuls in Iowa or New Hampshire this month, but rather in the backstage fight over who would be Donald Trump’s running mate.. 'Nikki Haley as VP would be an establishment neocon fantasy and a MAGA nightmare,' Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told me"

Iran is on a bitchslapping spree.. Idlib, Pakistan, North Syria. Pakistan hits back.. Crazy.

ArsTechnica: "Humana, one the nation's largest health insurance providers, is allegedly using an artificial intelligence model with a 90 percent error rate to override doctors' medical judgment and wrongfully deny care to elderly people on the company's Medicare Advantage plans. According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Humana's use of the AI model constitutes a 'fraudulent scheme' that leaves elderly beneficiaries with either overwhelming medical debt or without needed care that is covered by their plans. Meanwhile, the insurance behemoth reaps a 'financial windfall'"

MLK: “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power."

Aftonbladet: "The war is creeping ever closer to Sweden if the country's leadership is to be believed. It certainly worries many, but in purely economic terms, the deteriorating security situation has a clear winner: the arms industry. Swedish Saab's owners, headed by the Wallenberg family, have become SEK 60 billion richer since Russia invaded Ukraine."

TASS: "UN unable to deliver aid to Gaza due to ‘unrelenting bombardment’ — Secretary General"

Reuters: "Australian foreign minister calls for ‘sustainable ceasefire’ in Gaza"

NYT: "Israel-Hamas War: Houthis Launch More Missiles Toward U.S. Ships"

Politico: "Trump scores an early knockout"

Politico: "Trump runs away with it"

No spending cut, "thriftiness" can tame that debt. There is only one place that money can be taken from. Yeeah you know where that is. Take out the big stick.

US federal spending in 2022 was around 6 trillion, the interest payments of the debt are now a big chunk of that. Once interest payments overwhelm the annual spending itself, some people are going to start scratching their heads, and be forced to make some tough choices.

df = u.get_fred(1960, "A091RC1Q027SBEA")
df.plot(title="Federal Government Interest Payments")
plt.ylabel('Billions', fontsize = 10)

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Debt holders are not asking the 34 trillion federal debt to be paid right away but the interest of that debt due has to be paid, and every year it is growing massively along with the total debt.

Pikkety talked about a wealth tax in his Capital in the Twenty-first Century, 2014. It is doable.

Stevenson: "The tax system as it is is not really designed to tax people whose income comes from wealth.. there is huge amount of wealth in this country, not just housing but also commercial wealth, land, shopping centers, office buildings, factories.. these are owned by richer people, they generate enourmous amount of income from [it]. With the way the tax system is designed it is possible for rich people to generate huge amounts of income from wealth, and to legally avoid a lot of tax. They [certainly] don't have to pay income tax on most of wealth based income. The end result is these people in many cases pay rates as low as 10% or sometimes even lower, on the income from their wealth.

What we actually have is a tax system that is progressive for ordinary people, the rate is higher the more you earn, and once you get into the realm of.. wealthy people, the rate starts to collapse.

I think it's it's quite interesting that.. the tax system is kind of moving back towards.. Medieval Times where essentially working people pay tax to the aristocracy.. Increasingly a big chunk of the tax that you pay literally goes towards paying government debt interest to the rich. You pay your tax - a lot of that goes to the rich then you pay your rent - that goes to the rich you pay your mortgage - that goes to rich you go to buy food and that goes to the landowners, you buy energy and that goes to the energy owners.. [this] looks increasing like a very extractive system..

The lack of taxation of the rich creates a big problem with flows of wealth. Recently I've been really trying to lobby politicians, unsuccessfully, to start taxing wealth, tax working people less on their income and tax wealth more.. I've been trying to push them to tax people who have a wealth of over £10 million; 1% of their wealth, and they don't [even] want to do that. But wealthy people will make three, four, five percent income on their wealth anyway, so.. even if you were to tax them one percent they would still generate an enormous excess income that they could then use to compete with your kids to buy property...

I should probably just talk briefly about VAT & NI. [UK] National Insurance is a form of income tax that only applies to working people, only applies to work.. National Insurance [is] specifically targeted at working people, then you have VAT which is on consumption, now very rich people consume very very small percentage of their income so they pay very little VAT.. VAT is targeted at ordinary people, National Insurance targeted at working people. Income Tax [is] avoidable for the rich, Inheritance Tax [is] avoidable for the rich.. The end result is you have a tax system which looks progressive for ordinary people because you're only comparing yourself to people around you who are ordinary people at the same time you have this small group of people who are phenomenally rich who are increasingly buying everything you don't often get to see in day-to-day life that they are paying nothing, generating huge amounts of income and using that income to buy the rest of the assets. Who pays tax? If you're a working person in an ordinary financial situation - YOU! Who doesn't pay tax? Very wealthy families, the people who receive your mortgage payments your rent payments, the money you spend on food and bills. They don't pay any tax on that and they are then using that money to buy the rest of the wealth, so it creates this really bad structural problem..

If we don't take any action against that, it is inevitable that in 20 years, 30 years, ordinary families will not have any assets left basically. It will be very difficult to own property and if you do own property you'll be forced to have an enormous mortgage"

"@emilymbender@dair-community.social

It is depressing how often Bender & Koller 2020 is cited incorrectly. My best guess as to why this is is that people writing about whether or not LLMs 'understand' or 'are agents' have such strongly held beliefs about what they want to be true..

[We are cited] in this string: 'Do modern LLMs have beliefs, desires, and intentions?..'

But we are emphatically not writing about LLMs having beliefs, desires and intentions. We were debunking claims that LLMs 'understand'. Inasmuch as their apparent understanding is part of what misleads people into attributing beliefs, desires, and intentions to them"

"@angiebaby@mas.to

'Looks like you're using an ad-blocker'

Looks like you're trying to install 52 trackers on my computer"

"@jon@vivaldi.net

Lava flowing into Grindavík. First house being eaten by the lava. Hopefully the flow will stop soon..."

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"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'Every city makes mistakes. But great cities fix them! 50 years ago Utrecht constructed an urban highway here. Now they brought back the water and green to create thriving public space for people. — Catharijnesingel, Utrecht'"

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Jason Velazquez: "Where have all the websites gone?.. Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed... Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?

The rest of us, posters, amplifiers, and aggregators, traded our discovery autonomy for a chance at fame and fortune. Not all, but enough to change the social web landscape.

But that gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t for us. “Creator funds” pull from a fixed pot. It’s a line item in a budget that doesn’t change, whether one hundred or one million hands dip inside it. Executives in polished cement floor offices, who you’ll never meet, choose their winners and losers. And I’m guessing it’s not a meritocracy-based system. They pick their tokens, round up their shills, and stuff Apple Watch ads between them"

"@ids1024@fosstodon.org

All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough"

It is all disintegrating before our eyes.. Many things known as "correct", "right" in the past 40+ years is getting crushed. Truly sad.

The evidence was strong before, it is overwhelming now.

If homogeneity is gone, the Big Bang is gone. Kaput.

The Guardian: "Newly discovered cosmic megastructure challenges theories of the universe.. the size of the Big Ring appears to defy a fundamental assumption in cosmology called the cosmological principle. This states that above a certain spatial scale, the universe is homogeneous and looks identical in every direction"

WAPO: "Prominent Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan has decided to quit MSNBC rather than accept a demotion that saw him lose a regular Sunday night program... The network had announced in November that Hasan would lose his weekly show after three years but would remain as an analyst and fill-in anchor.. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar called it 'deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices'"

Tisdall, The Guardian: "Biden alienated global (and much American) opinion by rashly pledging unconditional support to Israel after the Hamas atrocities and vetoing UN ceasefire plans. His Middle East policy looks outdated and out of touch. The US, never popular in the Arab world, was tolerated as a necessary evil. No longer..

China and Russia are Iran’s new best friends. And it’s this, more than other factors, that has transformed Iran’s fortunes, making it a power to be reckoned with. The Ukraine invasion, and the prior Sino-Russian 'no limits' cooperation pact, was the catalyst for this transition"

AP News: "[2023/12] Since the war erupted on Oct. 7, at least 92 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria have been claimed by an umbrella group of Iran-backed Iraqi militants dubbed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. The militants say their attacks are in retaliation for Washington’s backing of Israel and its military presence in Iraq and Syria"

"@CriticalCupcake

70 years old, but as relevant as ever"

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