#Crypto News Point

[heritageposts]

large zionist blocklist below

i've compiled a list of all the blogs positively interacting with the @/israel-palestine-bingo blog

there's more info about how the names were complied under the read more, but just to get an idea of how vile the blog is, i just want to quickly mention that the first prize offered in their pinned post, "eight hours of memi mamtera," is the song used in the viral israeli tiktok trend of kidnapping, humiliating, and torturing palestinians in the west bank.

and the "grand prize," which needs no explanation, is "all of palestine! for free!"

some quick info: all the names here have either approvingly replied to, reblogged from, or liked one or more of @/israel-palestine-bingo's posts. for likes, i've only gathered names that appear under their original posts; mostly ones that have not been reblogged, and some with 2-3 reblogs that have not left the immediate sphere of zionists. i've also made sure that these are blogs who have either liked more than one posts from them, or who frequently reblogs from other zionists.

you can also quickly look through the blog yourself (it doesn't have that many posts), or check out any of the names on the list with a quick 'israel' or 'palestine' in the search bar or their blogs.

there are more screenshots at the end of the posts, including ones showing who made the blog (ani-lo-daredevil / katenotbishop), and the bingo board itself (ashenpumpkin).

blocking tip: fastest way to mass block users (on desktop) is to go to settings -> the blog your blocking them from -> scroll all the way down to 'blocked tumblrs,' and then copy-paste the name your blocking

names listed below in alphabetical order reminder again, block don't engage

2peachy acleverforgery ani-lo-daredevil apollo-enthusiast ashenpumpkin <- credited for making the bingo board, reblogged/liked almost all of their posts. aureatecorvid avi-on-jumblr (main @/clear-what-i-was-seeing) awstheticshit bambahalva bleepiesheepie bluenorther blueredfetch bones-and-crows britneysmeanshirt cannibalism-is-my-love-language captain-navii casavanse celepito chubbybubba ciitrus--fruitz coffeelovinggayidiot da-socks davos-is-the-one-true-king dchan87 disregardenedgnostic elder-millennial-of-zion faggotry-enjoyer fdelopera flowercrownsandfairylights fluffel677 fluffy-art-moss george-lucas-is-god got-chavi icereader12 illegitimatetenenbaum inklingm8 its-hila jewishlivesmatter just-illegal karinhasdacookie

katenotbishop <- the main account of the person running the blog. her sideblog is @/ani-lo-daredevil

kelluinox kingofslush letaot-ze-magniv lingonberryjamistakenwhat lovelyhairedpianist magic-coffee marrymepadfoot marvel-ous-posts masters-puddle <- pornblog mixmangosmangoverse morganas-simp mossadspydolphin multifandermissesanakin nameless370 namiko026 nevleg32 notcrazyiswear oakstar519 perfectlynormalperson psychologeek queerius randomname3 redvodyanoi rhysaka sally006 sbinklebooper scp-1296 shinekocreator <- commented, 'but is this the 8 hour version?' on a post where someone ''won'' the song used in the tiktok torture videos. snakelung sort-of-a-demon soxiyy stuffandatherstuff tearsandice tedious-waffle thebejeweledwatercat the-library-alcove thirdmagic thisgingerhasnosoul timegirl tolaat-bli-toelet <- the person running the bingo blog. mainblog is @/katenotbishop transmascpetewentz tribulation-of-somnolence unexistencerpg viktorrotkiv wanderingmadscientist whiterose-blackrose whitesunlars why5x5

note: @/tolaat-bli-toelet changed her username to @/ani-lo-daredevil (her main is still @/katenotbishop)

and from the same post,

the last post was also reblogged by the creator of the israel-palestine-bingo blog

[beardedmrbean]

An international operation against a large-scale scheme for financial crimes, money laundering and violations of international sanctions against Russia is taking place in Sofia at the moment. According to BNT, it is the company NEXO.

The ownership of the company is related to a former member of parliament and the son of a former social minister from the NDSV political party.

The suspicions are that the Bulgarians behind the large company acted according to the scheme of Ruja Ignatova and the OneCoin pyramid led by her. The Bulgarian woman known as the "Queen of Cryptocurrencies" is in the top 10 most wanted persons by the FBI. Europol and Interpol are also on her trail.

Prosecutors, investigators from the National Investigation and SANS employees, together with foreign agents, have begun searches of the Bulgarian offices of the company that trades cryptocurrencies worldwide.

The company's operations were carried out from the Bulgarian capital, and depositors were invited to invest in bitcoins and other types of cryptocurrencies, with promises of high returns.

The interest rates that investors would receive were many times higher than those of classic banking institutions and various brokerage houses. There are reports that the owners of the company, who are Bulgarians, have appropriated part of the assets amounting to several billion dollars.

The investigation into the activities of the crypto company in Bulgaria began a few months ago, after foreign services detected suspicious transactions, which were reported to be aimed at circumventing the sanctions imposed by the European Union, Great Britain and the United States against Russian banks, as well as companies and citizens of the Russian Federation.

Georgi Shulev – representing Nexo, son of former Deputy Prime Minister Lidiya Shuleva;

Antoni Trenchev – co-founder and director of several Nexo companies, former MP from the DBG, Reform Bloc;

Kosta Kantchev – director of Nexo Bank;

Kalin Metodiev – co-founder and financial director of Nexo;

Sokol Yankov – representing Nexo;

The company, which Sokol Yankov currently manages, said that Yankov left Nexo in 2019 and has had nothing to do with the investigated group of companies since then.

Georgi Shulev's office stated to BNT that he participated in the founding of Nexo in 2018. A year later, however, he left the Nexo group of companies and is suing the co-founders in Great Britain.

According to the Bulgarian National Television, Georgi Shulev is currently being questioned as a witness.

The former MP from the Bulgarian political entity "Reform Bloc", Antoni Trenchev, and his partner in the cryptocurrency trading company Nexo, Kosta Kantchev, fled to Dubai already in the fall of last year, BNT reported. This came after allegations of particularly large-scale fraud were brought against Nexo by the prosecutors of eight US states.

Regulators in California, Kentucky, New York, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Vermont have announced that they are suing crypto platform Nexo over tens of thousands of cases of fraud totaling at least 0 million.

Nexo claims to manage billion in digital assets.

In recent months, the FBI has been investigating the activities of the Bulgarian crypto platform due to data on a hidden hole in the amount of over 4 billion dollars from investors, due to illegal financial activity - granting loans in exchange for collateral, as well as due to reports of abuse of the securities and goods of its customers.

The DFPI announcement revealed that Nexo offered annual interest rates of up to 36% on deposited crypto-assets to investors, significantly higher than rates on short-term investment-grade fixed income securities or bank savings accounts.

More details about the police operation read here.

[aeternusfoundation]

Crypto Tokens: The New Shade of Lifestyle

[whileiamdying]

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” Transcends the Holiday-Movie Genre

Tyler Thomas Taormina’s comedy drama about a Long Island family boasts some of the year’s sharpest characterizations and a strikingly original narrative form. By Richard Brody November 8, 2024

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form. But this paradoxical blend turns out to make perfect sense in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” a finely crafted and achingly romantic memory piece, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina. It’s set sometime in the two-thousands in the fictional Long Island town of the title, where members of a large Italian American family, the Balsanos, come together to celebrate the holiday. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, who both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since middle school, the movie checks the genre’s boxes—long-awaited reunions and poignant separations, hearty festivity and romantic intimacy—but it does so in a way that provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence.

The clan’s matriarch, Antonia (Mary Reistetter), at whose house the Balsanos have gathered, is physically and mentally deteriorating, spending most of her time parked in an easy chair, offering wan greetings. The house teems with at least twenty family members—siblings, cousins, grandkids, other halves, and in-laws, ranging from toddlers to the elderly—plus some friends. Amid the revelry, fundamental relationships are drawn with a clarity that lays bare suppressed anguish, smothered disputes, and painful secrets. Antonia’s four grown children are gradually introduced. There is the poised and pensive Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), who’s there with her husband and two kids, one of whom, a teen named Emily (Matilda Fleming), biliously resents her. Kathleen’s sister, the energetic Elyse (Maria Carucci), is married to the flamboyantly domineering Ron (Steve Alleva), who cooks up the holiday feast while inveighing against the looming prospect of “chaos and insurrection.” Their brother Matt (John J. Trischetti, Jr.) is their mother’s caregiver, living in the house with his wife, Bev (Grege Morris). Matt instigates the film’s main conflict when he proposes selling the house and moving their mother into a nearby nursing home—a plan that surprises his sisters and enrages his brother, Ray (Tony Savino), a widowed blowhard with a hidden artistic streak.

It’s a mark of Taormina’s audacious way with narrative architecture that the scene in which this conflict bursts forth—which includes the piquant detail of Ray yelling at Matt while on an exercise bike—is the movie’s only traditional scene of overt exposition and constructed argument. Mostly, Taormina proceeds in fragments and snippets, with exquisitely rapid touches of dialogue and behavior which bring to life a house that is full of stories and long-standing tensions. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of the individual and the group; it’s a coming-of-age tale about many ages but also a reckoning with the frustrations of adolescence, the many varieties of loneliness in adulthood, and the struggle to define oneself against the identity assigned by a tight-knit family.

Taormina’s idiosyncratic artistry, which was evident in his first feature, “Ham on Rye” (2019), has now, in his third, developed into uninhibited cinematic self-assertion. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” bolsters my belief that a great movie usually reveals itself quickly, in its first scenes and even in its first shots. The film’s distinctive combination of sharp, nuanced writing and enticingly original visual compositions grabs the viewer almost instantly. In moments seemingly caught on the fly, characters flit through the house and out of it, meeting and separating, sharing laughs and exchanging confidences, giving voice to dreams and troubles in casual remarks and offhand gestures. The cinematographer, Carson Lund, festively ornaments the screen with points and streaks of color and light, and his drifting camera conjures murmurs of the past, recalling shots in classic memory films by Max Ophüls and Alain Resnais.

Taormina punctuates the familial drama with several spectacular set pieces, such as a festive meal at which an elderly woman named Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati) delivers a loving litany of the departed; a scene of teary-eyed melancholy in which the family turns off the lights and watches home movies; and a Christmas Eve tradition in which the family joins neighbors to watch the local fire department’s procession of fire engines festooned with Christmas decorations. Yet even such large-scale pageantry gives rise to brisk strokes of high drama, as when Emily unleashes adolescent hostility at the dinner table or when Kathleen becomes the bearer of a burdensome secret.

Meanwhile, at the edges of the action, the movie features micro-incidents of the sort that burrow deep in the mind, a whole box of madeleine moments in the making: a bunch of kids playing video games in the basement realize that the family iguana is missing, and one goes into a dark storage room to look for it; a waggish guest finds Isabelle asleep in a stair lift and presses a button to send her gliding downstairs unawares; Ray, on the patio, talks business into a landline with a very long cord; Ron declares that society is “survival of the fists,” a malapropism that he reinforces by putting up his dukes; Kathleen tries to cheer up an ailing boy with a little dance of uninhibited joy.

The overwhelming profusion of incidents and details, of sidelong glances in crowded frames and notable actions occurring in the background, is reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s films. Taormina’s ornamental sensibility is far less artificial—he adorns a largely realistic cinematic world with seemingly spontaneous touches and serendipitous observations—but, as with Anderson’s work, the movie should be viewed at least twice to be truly seen: the action moves fast, its connections are implicit, and the talk is brilliantly epigrammatic, leaving viewers to look back and catch up while risking missing out on new pleasures as they speed along.

Taormina, like Anderson, also encourages a distinctive mode of performance. Few of the actors in the Balsano clan have long résumés—Dizzia is the most prominent, and her attentive, eloquent performance deftly meshes with Fleming’s, as Emily—but Taormina’s perceptive direction grants everyone moments in the spotlight. The movie seems to create actors along with characters.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” pivots on a twist of sorts that’s too good to mention but also too good not to. Emily and a cousin, Michelle (Francesca Scorsese), who’s a little bit older and a little bit bolder, sneak out of the house to meet their friends and take a car ride that Kathleen has forbidden. With this leap into the unknown, the movie instantly becomes a story of teen-age discovery, by turns passionate, tender, and goofy. It begins with a comedic wink at a young driver’s inexperience, and includes the motormouth intellectualism of a local boy, Craig (Leo Hervey). In an extended sequence of late-night snacks and seductions at a bagel shop, featuring a memorable cameo by Elsie Fisher, Craig’s smarty-pants riffs take on an earnest weight as Emily deems Christmas gifts “capitalist propaganda” and ponders what to do with hers. As the night progresses from jollity to intimacy, Taormina discovers wondrously discreet and delicate visual correlates for teen lust, including at its most fumbling. (The end credits give a sense of the comedy of the teens’ tussles, listing such characters as Bubble Gum Gal and Kiss-Marked Dope.)

At this point, the story brings Emily and the other teens into contact with two other groups—three postadolescent slackers who hang out at a graveyard, sullenly smoking (the most voluble of whom is played by Sawyer Spielberg), and two police officers with the misfortune of working on Christmas Eve (played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington). They provide a sense of a wider world that may look absurd to the teens—they mock yet fear the slackers and hardly notice the sad-eyed officers—but which for Taormina, older and wiser, is full of pathos. (This is perhaps laid on a bit thick, these older characters’ identities subordinated to the meaning that Taormina assigns them.)

Those streaks of exaggerated melancholy in the grubby ordinariness of suburban life don’t detract from the exalted tone of Taormina’s suburban reveries. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of gimlet-eyed nostalgia. An image of Emily taking refuge in the woods at night connects her teen life with the grandeur of classic-era melodrama, and few movies ever tap the kind of intense emotion that Taormina stirs with a bag of dumpster-dived bagels. Without losing sight of what’s banal and petty in suburban life, he imbues it with a sense of grace that emerges both from personal relationships and from the aesthetic of daily life—transcendence despite itself. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Yule Rules.”

[sutrala]

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[biznocrats]

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[jackiepham84]

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[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[mortalityplays]

Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another person, but I remember you speaking at multiple points on the unsustainability of free social media services (I think especially in response to the cohost collapse?), and I'm curious on what your thoughts on bluesky are so far. I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I've read previously it seemed like they were on track to be financially sustainable, but I don't know if the recent floods of users has thrown those projections off. Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else on my timeline, in that case just ignore me.

bluesky will almost certainly follow the same trajectory of monetisation => bloat => enshittification => decline as every other major platform built on venture capital and user hoarding. it's a terrible model that only works in the short term as a mirage for attracting funding and making founders look good for a year or two before they sell.

you can see the same effect in the decline of all the subscription box services that came into vogue just before covid: they feel great to use for as long as the initial injection of venture funding lasts, because the purpose of that funding at that stage is to attract users and impress the next round of funders with how pleasant/intuitive/efficient/ethical/good value the service is. that's the stage where they're handing out freebies and bowling over influencers, and every ingredient in the box is fresh and high quality and locally sourced. wow what a good deal, what a great system!!! why hasn't anyone done this before? the answer is because it's unsustainable by design. they rack up good reviews, sign on a billion new users, attract new funding from a bunch of much more credulous investors, and then gut all of the expensive parts. portions get smaller, ingredients get worse, packaging gets flimsier, prices go up, freebies turn into "5% off your first 9 boxes when you invite 3 friends", and customer service vanishes.

with social media (and platforms like discord) the logic is the same, it's just a little less glaringly obvious to the end user because they're not coming home to leaking packages of rancid chicken on the doorstep. bluesky has an advantage over tiny operations like cohost because it was founded by a billionaire making a point for the sake of his own image. it got a really significant chunk of startup funding, and the owner had existing connections and rep in the space to attract more. That's why it has survived the goldrush period, why it still feels good to use, and why users who have been burned so many times before are finally accepting it as a stable, reliable option. It's still in its venture capital honeymoon phase where the only thing worth spending money on is making the service attractive to users.

What I expect we will see next, with another mass influx of users from twitter and new funding from a rogue's gallery of tech venture sickos led by Blockchain Capital is a strong ramp up into monetising that userbase. They've already been pretty forthright about how they plan to do this, and I think it's a solid roadmap of how Bluesky will bloat and decay over the next few years:

this is a huge lol. don't worry, we're not going to hyperfinancialize the social experience through NFTs. the thing even crypto freaks started feigning amnesia about a year ago. real "our health conscious sodas are 100% arsenic free" messaging here. They know perfectly well that rubes users are suspicious of their typical 5 dimensional tech finance chess games and are patting our hands about last week's bogeymen so nobody worries too hard about whatever 'decentralised developer ecosystem' just happens to be helmed by a bunch of crypto guys. this definitely means something good and based and not a google-like single sign on user data harvesting operation.

This is the same shit that's currently rotting the floorboards of discord. Bluntly, there is no way to run a platform on this scale without gating functionality behind paid services. Discord has been squeezing free-tier file uploads and call quality etc. down steadily and cranking up subscription costs over the last year or two, throwing in chaff like animated avatar frames to try and justify the user cost. They're also doing the same misdirection thing again here, pointing to Thing We All Hate to deflect from thing we might not like very much when they do it. Booo elon booo we all hate elon!!! wait how do we feel about subscription models again,

watch out for this to kill porn on bsky like it has killed porn on every other social platform 👍 boooo we hate elon boooo stupid idiot and his 'everything app' booooo wait why do you need my tax information, what's that about mastercard,

Look, we are all aware social media is a money pit. Let's not forget dorsey was looking to sell twitter in the first place, long before elon's very public plunge into total online derangement. Subscription services are not going to plug the hole, so we are gradually going to see more and more spaghetti thrown at the wall while early funders shuffle cards and do their pyramid scheme bit bringing in stupider and stupider investments. this is the window in which bluesky will be temporarily worth using for us, for the idiot public, the poorly rendered crowd jpegs in the background of their venture capital MOBA. it's in their interests to slow and pad the decline as much as possible, because that is how they get maximally paid.

Given the scale of the money involved, and dorsey's weird ego investment, I think bluesky will probably manage a controlled drift for a good few years before it gets really bloated and painful. and by then we will all be so used to the *checks notes* decentralised developer ecosystem that we'll just be posting through it, watching another generation of columnists call another collapsing platform 'their beloved hellsite' and passing around that meme about not getting out of our chairs no sir until idk we all get on a fediverse neurolink alternative to stick it to the elongated muskrat and our brains pop peacefully in our sleep. which I guess is the closest thing to viability any social media platform can achieve.

anyway diogenes the cynic is also on bluesky

[rxmxa]

uranus through the houses + the future <3

I saw this video the other day of this girl (colette bernard) who became a millionaire selling claw clips designed to look like teeth (her audience was dentists) but then she expanded when they were a hit so she has like cute claw clips designs for a dozen of professions. BUT all i remember thinking that stuff like this is so pluto in aquarius coded and we’re going to keep seeing people become successful more and more through their specific interests and hobbies.

she was truly self made and her passion for art changed her ENTIRE life (even though people told her it was a dumb idea). Pluto is gonna be in Aquarius for a long ass time and we know the significance it has on social changes, the collective, the government, community etc etc. This is a time for innovation and transformation, and with Uranus’s energy on your side, you can truly step into a future where you lead the charge in creating something new and lasting ⚡️

the point is your weirdness, your out of the box ideas, the shit you think is straight up weird or maybe mee maw and pee paw call “useless” IS GONNA COME IN FUCKING HANDY!!! people are changing their entire lives everyday online and/or by finding their niche. so whatever “weird” idea or hobby you have, keep investing in it !! im not saying bc it will bring u money instantly (although thats always a plus) but bc it will bring you OPPORTUNITIES.

we all have our own claw clip tooth idea and we can look at uranus to show us the forward thinking/ innovative energy that can help us during pluto in Aquarius :) 💙🦋✨✨🪩✨✨💙💙

uranus in the 1st house: moving forward by embracing your quirks and letting the world see the real you. dont ever ever ever try to dull yourself down. the right people will find you. dont shy away from shaking things up with how you present yourself or how you lead others. the visionary is YOU and during pluto in aqua you can inspire others to embrace their authenticity the way you do. in a way YOU are the “unique idea” so take full ownership. Dont be afraid to experiment with your style and image, especially in the moments where you are feeling the urge to try something different! Step into leadership roles that call to you! Volunteer for projects that require someone open-minded or that align with innovative (like new companies, organizations or small owned businesses that are producing/ delivering new kinds of products or services).

uranus in the 2nd house: think of unique ways to invest your money (ik theres a lot of debate with crypto) but anything thats outside the box could be a worthy venture. think about you can use tech to help you streamline your finances or organize your budget! just be open to trying new financial systems. this placement gives me the energy of investing something that others might see as SUPER random or specific but then it takes off years later. this is not me telling u to put ur savings in electric scooter stocks or something but to just be OPEN to sustainable investments that catch your attention that can help u and even ur community!! this also reminds me of tech inventors or investing in tech or USING technology as a way to help you determine the kinds of values you want to have and/or what you actually wanna stand up for.

uranus in the 3rd house: moving forward by shaking up how you show up in your online communities, or your social media presence. have you ever been interested in starting a podcasts or blogging more? (like those conversations you have with your friends about your interests or hobbies can go far or even commentary on the way media looks like and is being used now. Invest in learning new methods of communication you have been interested in (like buying that new camera or learning how to code or finally starting that youtube channel). Use your platform to reach more people!! This also reminds me of someone who disrupts the status quo with innovation in education like maybe writing new curriculum thats more aligned to our modern generation or any other platforms/ media that are up and coming and useful to students??

uranus in the 4th house: focusing on moving forward with your ideal home environment in mind. visualize it and focus on the ways you can start putting in into action! dont be afraid to start over and re-design! think about the ways you want your environment to be emotionally and physically stable for you and what its gonna look like (eco-living? smart homes? communal living?) this placement reminds me of those people that buy mansions or plots of lands with a group of friends and put their money together to help grow and live together! Don't beat yourself up if your idea of home or family doesnt fit the cookie cutter image (which is honestly going away now slowly and will def shift with pluto in aqua). YOU get to decide what home and family is and you can inspire others to do the same. Your idea of family has to align with your desire for freedom and emotional growth.

uranus in the 5th house: going all out in the ways you experiment with your art and creativity. You could be great at creating "futuristic" type of art haha (or investing in art forms that arent super popular or well known rn but you're ahead of the game and they could be popular in the future). Be bold in all areas that have to do with the 5h (think outside the box with how you express yourself artistically and romantically). Pluto in aqua will support you in u turning your creative work and forms of self expression into something that inspires people and gauges strong emotions from them! that claw clip idea was def giving uranus in the 5h energy. She was HAPPY creating it, it was a hobby first (5h) and then people told her it was useless or strange and she kept going anyway and she got to profit it from it, especially through social media (the 5h-11h axis). trust me when I say there is something out there for everybody. EVERYBODY.

uranus in the 6th house: pluto in aqua will urge you to break free from outdated systems and explore new ways to stay productive and healthy!! The traditional 9-5 might not appeal to you and thats okay because it doesnt to a lot of people and they have created their own way. Think about the tech-driven approaches you want to explore in your daily life (apps, the media you use, how you use tech in regards to your health). Think about how tech can help your productivity and your health!! This reminds me of my coworker who bought like this ultraface ring (I think thats what its called) but she loves it and its super high tech and fancy and shit and it monitors a lot of her health and its motivated her in her routines! The way we motivate ourselves looks different! You can move forward by exploring the most flexible options for you.

uranus in the 7th house: you can move forward by redefining what partnership + relationships actually mean to you. now more than ever its time to focus on partnerships where there is a sense of independence and equality. ESPECIALLY bc pluto in aqua is going to redefine and TRANSFORM (pluto) what community and friendships and relationships (aqua) look like in the first place. so be ahead of the game by surrounding yourself and nuturing your relationships with people that are not scared to break away from the norm and actually want to work together and are built to support mutual growth and freedom. dont stress trying to confine yourself to keep someone who is not open minded enough for you! find your person/ people.

part 2 coming soon!! 🪩✨🦋

[lizardsfromspace]

Why would anyone want to block Youtube ads when they have such hits as

anti-trans documentary

a second anti-trans documentary

Messianic Judaism

The newspaper run by the cult that does Shen Yun

alternative medicine scam

crypto scam

NFT scam

AI scam

That PSA for Sandy Hook Promise that only runs when a new mass shooting happened

a third anti-trans documentary

I stg at one point Youtube ads were primarily like, there's a sale down at the Office Depot! And not...this

[furryrun]

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[its-avalon-08]

can you write for max or carlos a fic where the reader is a billionaire and max or carlos is just a normal person with a 9-5 except that they don’t know reader is rich until she leaves her bank account open on her laptop or something similar? ❤️

money money money must be funny (cs55)

✦ pairing - carlos sainz x female!reader

✦ genre - carlos!not a driver, romance

Carlos Sainz wasn’t the type to snoop. He respected Y/N’s space—her home, her things, her boundaries. But today, as he casually walked into her apartment after work to wait for her, something caught his eye. Her laptop was on the kitchen counter, lid slightly ajar, and the screen had gone dark, but the faint hum of the device meant it was still on.

He didn’t mean to look. He really didn’t. But as he reached over to close it, a notification pinged, revealing her bank account summary. The number on the screen wasn’t just large—it was staggering. It looked more like a jackpot figure than an average person’s savings account.

Carlos froze. His thoughts swirled like a whirlwind. Was this even real? Had she won the lottery? Was Y/N secretly a crypto genius?

A loud buzz from his phone brought him back to reality—Y/N had texted that she’d be back in an hour. His first instinct was to laugh it off. She was probably just babysitting some wealthy CEO’s account or something. But the more he thought about it, the more the pieces started to fit.

That expensive bag she’d said was “on sale”? The first-edition watch she gave him for his birthday? And the sleek new car she drove, claiming it was a "company lease"?

He shut the laptop and paced around the apartment, fighting the urge to overthink. Why hadn’t she told him? Did she not trust him? Was she afraid of how he’d react?

When Y/N walked in, all smiles and carrying takeout, Carlos decided to play it cool.

“Hey, cariño,” she greeted, setting the bags down on the counter. “Hope you weren’t bored waiting for me.”

“Not at all,” he said, forcing a smile. “How was your day?”

“The usual. Meetings, emails, surviving on coffee. Yours?”

Carlos shrugged. “Not bad. I ran into something interesting, though.”

“Oh?” she asked, unpacking the food.

“Yeah,” he said nonchalantly, leaning against the counter. “I was browsing online earlier. You know, just random stuff. Came across this site that sells luxury bags. That brand you have—you said it was on sale, right?”

Y/N’s hands froze for a millisecond before she quickly recovered. “Uh, yeah. Got lucky, I guess. Why?”

Carlos tilted his head, pretending to think. “Just curious. Even on sale, they’re pretty pricey. Like… really pricey.”

She chuckled nervously. “Well, it was a one-time splurge. A treat-yourself moment.”

“Hmm,” he said, letting it drop—for now.

Later, while they were eating, he casually gestured to his watch. “You know, my coworkers keep asking me where I got this. I mean, it’s not every day you see something like this.”

Her cheeks flushed slightly. “Really? Well, you deserve nice things.”

“True,” he said with a small smirk. “But I don’t think I could ever afford something like this on my own.”

She looked down at her food, her fork hovering mid-air. “Carlos, I—”

“You know,” he interrupted, trying to sound playful, “you never told me how you got it. Or that car. Or… well, a lot of things, actually.”

Y/N’s eyes darted up to meet his. “What are you trying to say?”

Carlos leaned back, giving her a pointed look. “Nothing. Just making conversation.”

She laughed nervously, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Well, I guess I’m just good at finding deals.”

“Right,” he said, dragging out the word. “Must be a talent of yours.”

The rest of the evening passed in a strange tension. Carlos didn’t push further, but the weight of unspoken questions lingered between them. Every now and then, he’d make an offhand comment—about the high-tech gadgets in her apartment or the exclusive restaurants she “managed to snag reservations for.”

By the time Y/N excused herself to shower, Carlos was left alone with his thoughts again. He wasn’t angry, not really. But he was confused. Why hide something like this? Did she think he’d judge her?

As the sound of running water filled the apartment, Carlos sat on the couch, staring at his watch. He traced the edges of it with his thumb, his mind racing.

He loved her—he truly did. But for the first time since they’d been together, he wasn’t sure he fully knew her.

--

Carlos’s birthday started like any other day—quiet, unassuming, and, as far as he was concerned, just another regular weekday. But when he walked into Y/N’s apartment that evening, he realized how wrong he’d been.

The entire living room was transformed. Gold and black balloons floated in clusters, streamers lined the walls, and a massive “Happy Birthday, Carlos” banner stretched across the ceiling. The dining table was set with a feast fit for a Michelin-starred restaurant—complete with candles, a perfectly plated cake, and his favorite wine.

“You did all this?” Carlos asked, his eyes wide as he took it all in.

Y/N emerged from the kitchen, beaming, wearing a sleek dress that looked straight out of a fashion magazine. “Surprise!”

Carlos couldn’t help but smile. “You didn’t have to go this far, cariño.”

“Of course, I did,” she said, walking over to him and planting a kiss on his cheek. “You deserve the best.”

He took a deep breath, overwhelmed by the effort she’d gone to. But the gifts sitting on the table caught his attention—each one wrapped immaculately in expensive-looking paper.

“Are those… all for me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

She grinned. “Open them and see.”

He started unwrapping them one by one. First, a designer leather jacket. Then, a limited-edition pair of sneakers he’d mentioned in passing months ago. And finally, a watch—sleek, elegant, and undoubtedly expensive.

Carlos held it up, speechless. “Y/N… this is—”

“Do you like it?” she asked, her voice hopeful.

“Like it?” he said, shaking his head. “This must’ve cost a fortune.”

“It’s worth it,” she said softly. “You’re worth it.”

Carlos pulled her into a hug, his mind racing. As they swayed gently, his voice was low but teasing. “You know, between the jacket, the sneakers, and this watch… you’re starting to spoil me. I might get used to it.”

She laughed nervously, her face buried in his chest. “Well, it’s your birthday. You deserve to be spoiled.”

He pulled back just enough to look at her, his hands still resting on her waist. “Y/N,” he said, his tone light but inquisitive, “how do you afford all this? I mean, between the car, the gifts, and—well, everything. It doesn’t exactly scream ‘9-to-5.’”

Her smile faltered for a second. “I… budget well,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

Carlos tilted his head, his eyes narrowing slightly but still kind. “Budget well? You’re buying things most people would save for years to afford. That’s some serious budgeting.”

“I just… know how to find deals,” she said quickly.

“Deals, huh?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Like the kind that let you buy a car worth more than most people’s houses?”

Her laugh was more forced this time. “Carlos, come on, it’s not like that.”

He didn’t push, not yet. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her again, holding her close. “You know,” he said softly, his chin resting on her head, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. About how generous you are. How thoughtful. How you somehow always manage to outdo yourself.”

“That’s just because I love you,” she murmured.

“And I love you too,” he said, his voice warm. “But you don’t have to go overboard, you know. I’d still love you if you didn’t get me a watch that probably costs more than my rent.”

She tensed slightly in his arms, and he felt it.

“It’s just…” he continued, his tone deliberately casual, “I can’t help but wonder. You must have some serious savings to pull all this off.”

“Well, I—”

“Or maybe,” he said, a hint of playfulness in his voice, “you’re secretly a illionaire.”

Relaxed she went, “Yeah, exactly.”

The words slipped out before she could stop them. Her body went rigid, and she immediately pulled back, her eyes wide with panic. “I mean—wait—no—”

Carlos’s brows shot up. “Oh.”

“Carlos, I didn’t mean—”

“Y/N,” he said gently, placing his hands on her shoulders. “It’s okay. Just… take a deep breath.”

She did, her hands trembling slightly. “I-I didn’t mean for you to find out like this.”

“So it’s true?” he asked softly. “You’re… rich?”

She hesitated, then nodded, her eyes brimming with uncertainty. “Yes. But it’s not like you think. I didn’t want it to change how you see me.”

Carlos’s expression softened. “Cariño, why would it change how I see you?”

“Because… people treat me differently when they know,” she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper. “I wanted you to love me for me, not for my money.”

He cupped her face, his thumbs brushing her cheeks. “Y/N, I fell in love with the woman who makes me laugh until my stomach hurts. The one who listens to me ramble about football and surprises me with my favorite snacks. Not the size of your bank account.”

Her eyes searched his, still uncertain. “You’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad,” he assured her. “A little surprised, sure. Maybe a bit hurt you didn’t tell me sooner. But I get it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking. “I should’ve told you.”

He smiled, pulling her back into his arms. “Just promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“No more pretending your gifts are ‘on sale.’ You’re a terrible liar.”

She laughed, the tension finally breaking. “Deal.”

--

The living room was bathed in a warm, golden glow from the lamps as Carlos and Y/N cuddled on the couch. Her head rested against his chest, and his arm was wrapped securely around her shoulders. The cake sat half-eaten on the coffee table, alongside empty plates and glasses.

Carlos pressed a kiss to the top of her head, his voice soft as he broke the comfortable silence. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Y/N murmured, tracing patterns on his shirt with her fingers.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked, his tone gentle but curious. “About… everything?”

Y/N stiffened slightly in his arms but relaxed when he gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. She sighed, her breath warm against his chest.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to,” she began quietly. “I just… I’ve had bad experiences before.”

Carlos frowned, his hand moving in soothing circles on her back. “What kind of experiences?”

She pulled back slightly to look at him, her eyes filled with a mix of vulnerability and sadness. “People have used me for my money, Carlos. Pretended to care about me just because they wanted access to my lifestyle, my connections. It’s happened more times than I’d like to admit.”

Carlos’s expression softened, his heart aching for her. “Y/N…”

“It’s not just romantic relationships,” she continued, her voice trembling slightly. “Friends, too. People I thought I could trust would suddenly start asking for favors, for loans they never intended to repay. Or they’d make comments, subtle digs, like I didn’t deserve what I had because I was born into it.”

Carlos tightened his hold on her, resting his chin on her head. “I’m so sorry you went through that. You didn’t deserve it.”

“I started to feel like no one saw me, you know?” she said, her voice breaking slightly. “It was always about what I could give them, not who I was. So, when I met you, I just… I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t want you to see me differently.”

Carlos was silent for a moment, his thoughts swirling. Finally, he tilted her chin up so she could meet his eyes. “Y/N, I’m not those people. I don’t care about your money, or what you can buy, or any of that. I care about you. The person who makes me laugh, who’s always there for me, who’s just… you.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she gave him a small, shaky smile. “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

He wiped away a stray tear with his thumb, his gaze unwavering. “I know it’s hard, letting someone in. But I want you to know, you don’t have to hide anything from me. Okay?”

She nodded, her smile growing a little stronger. “Okay.”

Carlos leaned down and kissed her gently, pouring all his love and reassurance into the moment. When they pulled apart, he gave her a teasing grin.

“Although, I do have to say, I feel a little cheated. All this time, I’ve been paying for dinner when you could’ve been spoiling me instead.”

Y/N burst out laughing, swatting his chest. “Oh, so now you want to be spoiled?”

He chuckled, pulling her closer. “I mean, I wouldn’t say no to the occasional fancy dinner. But honestly? I’d take ramen with you on the couch over anything else.”

She smiled, her heart swelling with gratitude and love. “You’re too good to be true, Carlos.”

He kissed her forehead, his voice soft. “So are you, cariño. So are you.”

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

128 of the angst prompts for the pAInter?

128) '"I need you, why do you always leave me?"

......

"Heyyyy."

"......."

"Suddenly you don't wanna talk? That's rude."

"Well so is turning my body into swiss cheese when you promised you wouldn't do that anymore." You huffed, sending a pointed glare at the sentient computer that sat behind a locked cage, before going back to checking the nearby drawers for data.

"Oh right.." Painter muttered awkwardly. "I was actually aiming for the Wall Dweller behind you, but the turrets like to pick and choose their targets sometimes...heheh."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Well..do ya feel better?"

"Hm..I guess it beats being eaten alive by one of those things. So...sure." You glanced back at him, giving him a tiny smile. "Thanks for trying."

"You're welcome."

Of course, you still had your..issues with the computer, considering that ever since he gained access to the Internal Defense System, your runs to the crystal have become more treacherous than ever before.

It was bad enough that you had to worry about wandering towards the wrong door, with him using HQ's voice to misguide you.

But now at any given moment, you could walking into a room with turrets sweeping the area, red lasers waiting to catch you in their line of sight before spraying you with bullets--while he taunted you over the speakers and whined whenever you managed to find the lever to shut them down.

You hated him at first, but after coming across his containment room, where his main body was hosted on an old computer, he swore that none of it was personal. He blamed Sebastian for hooking him up to the Navi-Path system and asking him to delay your mission for as long as possible, convinced that he could find another way out of this place.

Of course, you were still upset, and believed his actions were very much personal, especially when you've come so close to escaping with the crystal....only for music, of all things, to cause your gear to detonate.

Maybe he was a reluctant accomplice of his, but why should you care?

Why waste time talking to someone who stopped at nothing to kill you? He wasn't a mindless animal like Pandemonium or the Wall Dwellers, but had total awareness that you could come back after death.

And he knew how to take advantage of that.

You used to roll your eyes at the news channels declaring that AI would be the death of humanity.

Now? This AI sure as hell was going to be the death of you.

But sometime ago, you acquired his document and had Sebastian show it to you, and you learned some rather...tragic things about him.

He was built and programmed with love, by his human creator who taught him how to paint and appreciate the beauty of the natural world. All he wanted to do was create things, and now he was being used as a tool for destruction.

It was all because of Urbanshade.

They killed the only person he ever cared about, tore him apart and put him back together to see how he "worked", and when they couldn't figure it out, they forced him into crypto mining, only giving him the promise of letting him paint every once in a while.

He might be a machine, but the pain he felt was real--so real that he'd rather die than continue existing.

Of course, it doesn't justify him killing you over and over, and making your runs through the blacksite a living hell, but you could understand why he's so bitter towards humans now.

If you were him, you'd definitely have a lot of resentment and built-up anger.

After reading that document, you had a little more sympathy for Painter, and eventually you two managed to work out a deal: if you found his room, you'd stop by to draw a small landscape for him, and he was free to replicate it on his program. In exchange, he promised to keep all turrets in further rooms disabled and not lock you in a "gauntlet" with Eyefestation anymore.

He still works together with Z-96, but at this point you've learned how to avoid the flesh creature at all costs. So that was the least of your worries.

"Anyways, what have you drawn for me today, hm?" He spoke up, growing a little impatient.

You took a few moments to open the notepad you had, grateful that the security cameras in this room were under his control, so HQ won't detonate your gear for talking to him.

You've overheard the higher ups mention something about Painter becoming a pain in the ass for expendables and operatives, losing a lot of them to the IDS and Z-96 attacks, and he was to be marked for destruction before he could take 100% control of the blacksite.

Whether they were going to declare that as an order in the near future or not remains to be seen, but...you didn't want to do that.

Did Sebastian know?

Does he know-?

"Welllll?"

"Oh. Right. I have this here." You showed him the sketch of a mountain range, trying to get as close as the chain-linked wall would allow you to. "This is the Himalayas, where Earth's highest mountains are located."

"Oooooh, yes I recognize it."

"You do?"

"Of course. Over a hundred bodies are still up there, most unrecoverable due to the conditions." Painter sneered. "It should have been left untouched. Why do you humans always wanna ruin nature with you stupid hikes and big egos?"

"...well if you don't want this one-"

"Never said I didn't. Show it to me again. And hold it steady."

You blinked in surprise, before turning the notepad back over so he could see the landscape, and you saw the MS Paint program on his screen going right to work.

While you could only draw it from memory and with the pencils you found in a random drawer, he managed to bring it to life--using vivid colors and beautiful shading to really capture the scenery. Almost as though a professional artist went to those mountains and studied them for hours.

With Painter's AI, it didn't take hours, but mere minutes for him to create a masterpiece.

And it was beautiful.

As soon as he finished, you put the notepad down and grinned. "It's amazing, Painter. It's like..I could walk into it and be there."

"Thanks. I also wish I could walk into it and just...escape all of this." He saved the artwork to his files, before his usual scribbled face appeared once again, but this time it looked rather...sad. "I'll..make sure the turrets don't turn you into swiss cheese."

"I appreciate it, buddy." Smiling, you grabbed the keycard that you needed to exit the room, but right as you walked over to it...he spoke again.

"Do you have to leave right now?"

"...pardon?" Turning back around, you could see him staring at you, looking utterly despondent. "You..want me to stay?"

"You're..the first positive human interaction I've had in a long time. I feel bad for all the deaths and inconveniences I've caused you. Seriously, I do. But...if you reach the crystal, you won't ever see me again.." He muttered.

"Painter." You walked over to him, frowning. "That's the point. I'm only here to get that crystal. We agreed that you'd turn off the turrets so that-"

"I didn't do it to make your life easier." He snapped, growing hostile. "I did it because I don't wanna be the one who causes your death. I'll leave that to somebody else...eventually they'll get you. And you'll come back-"

"No."

He went dead silent for a moment. "..no?"

"This time, I'm getting that crystal. I can't stay here with you forever, Painter. I'm sorry about everything you've been through, but in the end..you're still a threat in Urbanshade's eyes. They could kill me just for talking to you. I need to leave now before-"

As if right on cue, the lights in the room began to flicker, and somewhere in the far distance...you could hear the familiar shrieking and howling of Pandemonium hunting for its next prey.

"You better go to that door over on the right." Painter advised, his voice uncharacteristically monotone.

You failed to pay attention to that and rushed to the door, quickly inserting the keycard-

Only to come face to face with Z-96, whose long claws reached out to slash you across the face. You fell backwards as the door slammed shut, the creature barely managing to drag its arm back inside, with a message in red appearing on the screen beside it.

I need you. Why do you always leave me?

'Bastard. He tricked me-'

Then you heard one final loud scream, and turned around..

Seeing nothing but a gaping maw with crooked rotting teeth and dozens of eyes closing in on you.

You should have known better. You should have just focused on the mission and ignored him from the start.

Now he'll never let you leave, and he'll find other ways to make sure of that.

[would-you-punt-them]

Anyway some new updates on the Beast situation were made. Not going into specifics but a few of the things Dogpack was going into were either fabricated or slightly manipulated. Obviously this doesn't change what Jimmy did is still shady

Yeah, I've been seeing people saying that, so I'm guessing this is about SoggyCereal's 90-minute video "exposing" DogPack from 4 days ago.

But having seen the video, I think it is itself ridiculously manipulative in a lot of ways, and as of right now I'm hesitant to consider the source trustworthy.

In the final third of the video Soggy flies out to America and goes to MrBeast HQ in North Carolina to conduct some interviews with current employees who used to work with DogPack. He also later admitted that a MrBeast employee paid for his international flight.

These interviews take place in a room at MrBeast HQ, with people who are currently working for the company.

In other words, SoggyCereal contacted MrBeast and requested an interview with employees who worked with DogPack for his YouTube video responding to DogPack's specific talking points and calling him a liar for an hour and a half.

So, MrBeast prepared an interview space in their headquarters (with professional lighting, sound, and cameras all set up) and hand-picked some of their current employees to give pre-prepared anecdotal evidence that they thought DogPack was a douche who made them uncomfortable, and then heavily-edited snippets of these interviews featured in the video.

Soggy did an interview himself the next day (it's also where he revealed his flight was paid for) where he insisted that these employees weren't selected and the interviews were fully unbiased and unprepared, but that is impossible to believe. As far as I'm concerned, this entire portion of the video can't be trusted.

But unsurprisingly, MrBeast has been pushing this video like crazy. Multiple drama YouTubers (including Pyrocynical and Spill Sesh) have revealed that Jimmy had personally messaged them with a link to the video, and encouraged them to cover it.

People have been theorising that this whole thing is part of a ploy by the MrBeast company, who knew that this positive video was being made. The suspicion is that the MrBeast company had employees reach out to SoggyCereal and supply him with "evidence" that discredits and slanders DogPack.

He even managed to get a hold of the full audio recording of DogPack being fired, where he begs for his job back. He presents this as proof that DogPack is a disgruntled employee, like what MrBeast's PR team have been implying.

Okay, but like... how in the hell would he gain access to that kind of sensitive information? He doesn't cite any kind of source, he doesn't even claim it was an anonymous leak. He also gives a lot of other very specific behind-the-scenes information that disprove various individual claims made by DogPack, even claims that were mentioned for like five seconds in DogPack's original video.

In contrast, Coffeezilla, who was making a video on the allegation that Jimmy has been conducting fraudulent crypto scams (it came out 5 days ago), reached out to MrBeast repeatedly to fact-check, and MrBeast refused to reply, other than with a single statement from their legal team. MrBeast hasn't responded to any other allegation publicly. And yet SoggyCereal suddenly has access to a mountain of insider information and full cooperation from MrBeast. It seems likely they're using SoggyCereal as a mouthpiece to slander DogPack while avoiding making any kind of statement themselves.

Jimmy also commented on SoggyCereal's video itself on the day it was first posted, even though it still only had a couple thousand views at the time.

He later deleted that comment, because it's just a terrible look, and supports what we already knew: that Jimmy was well-aware that this video was about to come out.

There are legitimate reasons to criticise DogPack, as he has made serious errors over the course of this drama, a lot of which he has acknowledged (including the James Warren thing, which he was rightfully criticised for heavily).

And this video shouldn't be discounted in its entirety, as it has raised some questions about DogPack. It does expose some worrying factual inaccuracies in the major accusations, and does seemingly expose some shady behaviour on his part. So, those points are valid (although I do consider the way Soggy presents them as manipulative).

But people have been saying (mostly in clickbait titles) that this somehow exonerates MrBeast, when that couldn't be further from the truth. That's just how drama YouTube works. To get people's attention, there has to be a hero and a villain. Either everything DogPack and Rosanna say is true, or nothing is and they should burn in hell. There is no middle ground.

As it stands, take any of the clickbait tweets, videos and articles saying anything has changed with a grain of salt.

That's all this is: clickbait.

In my opinion, the situation hasn't changed significantly. The main takeaway is that MrBeast is even more desparate than we thought.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon