#Data Historian Market

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[rjzimmerman]

Frontier myth vilified the California grizzly. Science tells a new story. (Washington Post)

The grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American myth as a dangerous, even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Ursus arctos horribilis, means “the horrible bear.” But that image is being challenged by a new set of studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Indigenous knowledge to bring the story of the California grizzly from fiction to fact.

In January, a team of experts led by University of California at Santa Barbara ecologist Alexis Mychajliw published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of the California grizzly bear and how that influenced its extinction. The results challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.

“Pretty much everything that I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,” said Peter Alagona, an ecologist and historian at UCSB and co-author of the study.

Much of the grizzly bear’s long-standing narrative comes from stories, artwork and early photographs depicting California grizzlies as huge in size and aggressive in nature. Many of these reports, which found wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in the cities back East, were written by what Alagona calls the Californian influencers of their time.

“They were trying to get rich and famous by marketing themselves as these icons of the fading frontier,” Alagona said. “A lot of the historical sources that we have about grizzlies are actually not about grizzlies. They’re about this weird Victorian 19th-century celebrity culture.”

The team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the image of California grizzlies from these frontier reports to harder data in the form of bear bones from museum collections all over the state.

The frontier myth had painted the California bears as larger than grizzlies elsewhere in the country, but the bone analysis revealed that they were the same size and weight, about 6 feet long and 440 pounds for the average adult.

In an even larger blow to the popular story of the vicious grizzly, the bones showed that before 1542, when the first Europeans arrived, the bears were only getting about 10 percent of their diet from preying on land animals. They were primarily herbivores, surviving on a varied diet of acorns, roots, berries, fish and occasionally larger prey such as deer.

As European-style farming and ranching began to dominate the landscape, grizzlies became more like the stories those frontier influencers were telling about them. The percentage of meat in their diet rose to about 25 percent, probably in large part because of the relative ease of catching a fenced-in cow or sheep compared to a wild elk.

Colonialism forced so many changes on the California landscape so quickly, affecting every species that the bears ate and interacted with, that the exact cause of this change will be difficult to ever fully understand.

Still, grizzlies were never as vicious or purely predatory as the stories made them out to be. The narrative of the huge killer bear instead fed a larger settler story of a landscape — and a people — that could not coexist with the settlers themselves. And that story became a disaster for more than just bears.

Although we will never have exact numbers, experts agree that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people were living in what is now California before White settlers arrived. One frequently cited estimate puts the population at 340,000.

By 1900, that number had been slashed by more than 95 percent to around 16,000 surviving tribal members throughout the state. Eliminating the bear and the vast majority of California’s Indigenous people can be seen as parts of the same concerted effort to replace one landscape — and one set of stories — with another.

“The annihilation of the California grizzly bear was part of a much larger campaign of annihilation,” Alagona said. “I think it’s clear that what happened in California meets the legal definition of a genocide. But in a way, it was even more than that, because these were not just attempts to eliminate groups of people. These were attempts to destroy an entire world.”

[itsbansheebitch]

More thoughts

I get both sides, but I feel a little confused they couldn't find four people in their +25 employees

Data analyst (Are you seriously telling me you couldn't personally email or even just HIRE matpat's team who do data analytics as part of Theorist Media to help??? The man would be overjoyed to help???)

Editor (Put the first $6 towards a can of coffee grounds, dude)

PR Team (Even, like, a single person, please, for the love of god)

Business Major (Or literally anyone that has taken a home ec/budgeting/personal finance class)

First, the Dish Granted series was started when gold leaf burgers were novel, now it's seen as tone deaf (for obvious reasons) it should have shifted to something like interviews with people who make that kind of food or local businesses (like parmesan cheese shops in Parma, Italy) or the history of food (like talking about the history of modern Native American slavery on Californian wine vinyards). Not to mention the untapped potential of Food Fraud topics. Either shift it, or scrap it. Any data analyst or chronically online person could tell you that.

Second, why did you keep "anyone can afford $6 a month" in? Are the editors asleep at the wheel? Are they overworked? What is going on? You know damn well to not make generalizations about what people can afford. That's NEVER a good idea, especially when you KNOW (because YT gives you analytics) that most of your viewers are young (16/18-30/35 range, I'd guess) who probably, either 1, are still in school and either arent paid well/dont have jobs OR 2, arent paid well and tired of people's shit, like people who own businesses talking about "tough financial decisions." To them, Watcher isn't going to look different from the other people talking like that, because this was so sudden, with no input from fans, and in the video you hear shit like "anyone can afford [X]." To be frank, it wouldn't really matter what the amount is, because that generalization goes against the message they have stood by for years. THAT is a slap in the face.

Third, what are yall doing with the budgeting? Every artist has a right to make art that they are proud of. Every artist deserves to have their work seen if they so choose. Every artist deserves to make a living. HOWEVER, there are MANY options online when it comes to making money, especially on YT. You could get into marketing, data analysis, expanding your demographic, looking at what people are interested in right now VS what will stand the test of time (not gold leaf burgers), etc.

You have to either have these skills, develop these skills, or hire someone to do it for you. It's understandable that you would want a team behind the production, but I find +25 employees to be WAY too many people, especially in LA. Bailey Sarian has a Dark History section on her YT (and Spotify podcast) where she has hired historians to help make sure her episodes are as accurate as possible. You've caught heat before from Puppet History's missing & incorrect info, you should do the same. She has about three (3) "intermissions" per episode for ad breaks. I never see anyone complain. People WOULD listen to yall talk for that long (+1 hour videos), tbh, though that's not necessary.

Why are yall out here with Teslas, expensive food, new gear, scripts (where there weren't scripts before, PH is different, that makes sense), and "better than TV" level sets??? I need to put your accountant in this week's church prayer list what the actual hell??? Ya'll, this video is literally the meme:

Guys help me budget:

LA Rent: 2K per month

Videos: 100K per vid

+25 Employees: God only knows

New stuff for videos: Don't get me started

Like, are you serious?

You have a right to do whatever you want with your art. You have a right to charge whatever you'd like for that art. You have a right to make a living from your art and you have a right to ask your fans for money.

Your fans have a right to be angry when they've been supporting yall for, what, almost 10 years? They have a right to choose when and where to spend their money even when you've made an impact. They have a right to feel betrayed, especially when there are better options (like Nebula or consulting with Theorist Media).

Fans DO NOT have a right to be racist to any members of Watcher, now that they have made a decision they do not agree with.

I personally, think this is a really silly decision and could have been solved (haha solved) with a simple YT poll, but apparently we had to get... this. I respect their decision, I just don't think it was a smart one. I wish them the best, and I hope they find a better solution. Any further comment from me will depend on what steps they take next.

[transmutationisms]

How do you find the time to read all your book recs?? Also would you mind talking about your process for researching specific topics :)

i generally only make rec lists for things i have enough familiarity with to navigate the literature so, you have to keep in mind those lists are sometimes literally a decade+ of cumulative reading on my end. i do also sometimes include texts i haven't read in their entirety, or occasionally even ones i've only come across in footnotes but still think are foundational or relevant enough to warrant a rec.

as to my research process: there's no single answer here because the sort of research i do will depend on what questions i'm trying to answer. usually if i'm starting to look at a topic completely from scratch, i'll ask someone who publishes in that area what the major recent works are, then scan a few of them. i might 'snowball' those texts (read the works they cite in their footnotes) but, that strategy has limited utility because it only goes backward in time and sometimes a recent or uncited text can be incredibly valuable. so there's a fair amount of bumbling around in the secondary literature at this point. some academic journals maintain bibliographies for their subfields, which are not comprehensive but can be useful; i usually also do a certain amount of keyword fuckery in my library's database. sometimes i waste a lot of time at this point chasing leads that turn out to be irrelevant, or i discover that a question i was chasing is really better tackled from an entirely different direction. shit happens.

at some point i usually reach a stage where i need to look at some primary sources, because i'm oriented enough in the major issues to identify spots where previous researchers haven't made full use of historical records, or may be interpreting them in a way i disagree with. so, what exactly i'm looking for now really varies. sometimes i just want to read the primary texts that another historian is commenting on: for example, the last few months i was trawling through the french national library's archives to see what people were saying in print about a specific historical figure between about 1778 and 1862. other times i might want population data or land records: births, deaths, cholera infections, records of church property sales, &c. depending on, again, what sorts of questions you're asking, anything might have useful information to you: postmortem personal auction catalogues have given me some mileage, along with wills and personal correspondance. i have a committee member who collects and analyses postcards often being sold for pennies at flea markets out of people's grandparents' attics, and another who has an ongoing project looking at a zillion editions of a specific children's book printed in the late 19th century. along the way, as i look at primary sources, i will typically go back and forth to more secondary literature, as i find new topics that might be relevant or help me contextualise what i'm looking at. i can't ever really plan these things out systematically; i just follow what looks promising and interesting and see where it leads me.

another thing to consider is that the primary sources sometimes tell me useful information directly in their capacity as material objects. what type of paper is used, what personal or library stamps appear on the cover, who's the publisher, how many editions did it go through, are the print and typeset jobs sloppy, where was this copy found or preserved? these sorts of details tell me about how people reacted to the text, its author, and the ideas within, which can be a valuable part of whatever investigation i'm trying to conduct. sometimes i end up chasing down information on a publisher or the owner whose personal library a book or piece of ephemera came out of; there are people who research processes of preservation, printing, &c in themselves, which has yielded some fascinating studies in recent decades.

at some point, if it's a research project i'm trying to communicate to other people, i will switch to writing mode, where i try to organise ^^ all of that in my head, and form a coherent narrative or argument that i think is worth making. this might be revisionist in nature ('people have argued before that such and such was x way or historical actors thought about it like y, but what i have here indicates we should actually understand it in the context of z') or it might be more like, "hey, i found this thing i don't think anyone knows about!" or anything else. again, the way you put together a research project will vary so widely depending on what you're researching, and why, and why you think it matters and to whom.

also, i should emphasise that what i've written here isn't necessarily something that happens on a strict or compressed timeline. i'm working on a dissertation, so for that topic, i do have reasons i want to complete parts at certain times, unfortunately. but i also have research projects that i just chip away at for fun, that i've had on various backburners for literally years, that i might sometimes write about (eg, on here) without necessarily ever planning to subject them to the hegemon of academic publishing. i think knowledge dissemination is great and to that end i love to talk to people about what i'm researching and hear about their stuff as well. but, i also think research projects can be fun / rewarding / &c when they're completely for your own purposes, untimed, unpublished, &c &c. i guess i'm just saying, publishing and research conventions and rules sometimes have purposes (like "make it possible to publish this as a book in the next 5 years") but don't get so hung up on those rules that they prevent you from just researching something for any number of other reasons. there are so many ways to skin a cat 📝

[dystopicjumpsuit]

Martyrs and Kings - Chapter 10

Do I Know You?

Rating: Mature/18+/Minors DNI

Pairing: Kix x archivist/historian OFC

Wordcount: 3.8k

Warnings: fluff; suggestive dialogue; angst; Star Wars politics; Bad Batch Season 2 spoilers

Start here | Previous chapter | Next chapter | Masterlist | Sign up for my tag list

Maree was profoundly grateful for her high neckline the next morning. Kix had been thorough in his attentions, with the result that her chest, shoulders, and thighs were covered with small marks and bruises. In fairness, Maree had given as good as she’d gotten, and Kix’s torso was similarly adorned. Luckily, all evidence of their rough night was hidden from the disapproving eyes of the Neimoidian administrator who checked them into the Imperial Military Records Archive.

“We don’t often receive visitors from the general population,” he said. “This is highly irregular.”

“Uncommon, perhaps, but hardly irregular,” Maree replied. “You’ll find that the paperwork is all in order. My assistant is extremely conscientious.”

“Hmmph,” said the Neimoidian, shooting a suspicious glare at Kix. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”

“I doubt it,” Kix said mildly. 

Whatever darkness had plagued him the night before seemed to have receded for the moment, and Kix was in notably better spirits today. This was possibly due to the three more times they’d had sex after reaching her hotel room. Maree, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of the lack of sleep, and her patience was dangling by its final thread.

“Is there a problem with our credentials?” Maree asked. “I’m sure the NRGL Archive would be happy to corroborate my identity.”

“That won’t be necessary,” the administrator sniffed. “You are quite well-known to us, Dr. Finnall. It’s your guest whose credentials are in question.”

Maree suppressed her irritation. “I understood that he had already passed the mandatory background check when we received approval for his visit. Is there some further requirement that we were not informed of?”

“No,” the Neimoidian said begrudgingly. “But you will need to sign this waiver accepting full responsibility for any damage or wrongdoing he may perpetrate in the IMRA.”

Maree signed the document without hesitation, and at last, the administrator waved them through. Next, they were scanned for weapons and other contraband, and finally, they passed through a row of New Republic Defense Force peacekeepers.

“Heavy security for a bunch of dusty old relics,” Kix commented.

Maree nodded cordially at the guards. “There’s more in the IMRA than just personnel files. This archive contains weapons schematics, documentation on banned research, and other sensitive information that is in high demand on the black market. I have security clearance for my work, but even I can’t access some of the classified records.”

They passed through the entrance into a vast chamber with towering ceilings. Data terminals lined the walls, and numerous researchers milled about. This section of the IMRA was accessible to researchers and students without security clearance, but in order to access the restricted records, Maree had reserved a private office for their work, and she led Kix quickly through the echoing hall.

“Why do you need security clearance?” Kix asked curiously.

“I am a senior research faculty member, so the scope of my responsibilities is quite extensive. While I am available to assist individual citizens like you, I spend a significant amount of my time supporting the New Republic Judiciary in their efforts to prosecute Imperial war criminals.”

Kix looked surprised. “I had no idea. Are there many war criminals left from the early Empire?”

“Not so many. Most of them have died of old age, if they haven’t already been apprehended. But it’s often helpful to have a team of researchers whose specialties span the full history of the Empire. It provides important context, and given the Empire’s penchant for nepotism, it can help us trace connections between early Imperials and those who came later.”

“That sounds like important work,” Kix said thoughtfully.

“It is,” Maree said. “Though I sometimes am frustrated to see all of our effort go to waste when the New Republic offers an Imperial amnesty in exchange for giving up a few secrets.”

Kix drew a breath to respond, but before he could, a voice called, “Dr. Finnall!” 

She turned to see an unfamiliar young Mirialan man hurrying towards them. 

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“It is you!” he puffed. “I recognized you from your keynote address at the Galactic Military History conference last cycle. My name is Orys Brenko. I’m a graduate student at the University of Coruscant.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Brenko,” Maree replied mechanically. Could the man not see that she was occupied?

“The honor is mine, Dr. Finnall,” he said. “Your book on the battle of Scipio inspired me to study military history. The description of Commander Thorn’s last stand was so vivid. Before I read it, I never knew how compelling history could be. I was reading it on the hovertrain, and I was so caught up that I actually missed my stop!”

Kix merely stood and observed in impassive silence, his gaze flicking between Maree and Brenko.

“That is very kind of you to say, Mr. Brenko,” Maree said with a geniality she was far from feeling. She itched to get started on Kix’s project, but she couldn’t bring herself to snub the enthusiastic young man. “Are you studying the Clone Wars?”

“Er, no,” Brenko said, abashed. “My focus is the High Republic era.”

Of course. She didn’t roll her eyes, but it was a near miss.

“A fascinating period,” she said diplomatically. “I would love to stay and chat, but I’m afraid I have a prior engagement. Good luck in your studies.”

“Oh, yes, of course!” Brenko stammered. “B-but, before you go, would you mind signing my datapad? I have it loaded with all of your publications, and it would mean so much to me.”

Maree blinked. This was a first. She’d never been asked for an autograph before. In spite of the gaucheness of Brenko’s request, Maree was impressed with the young man’s dedication to the pursuit of knowledge. When she’d been a graduate student, she hadn’t had the bandwidth to read anything other than her assigned coursework. She was surprised Brenko had made time in between his studies to read her extensive body of work, especially since their areas of study had very little overlap.

“I don’t have a stylus, sorry,” she said. “Out of curiosity, why did you choose to concentrate on the High Republic era when you are so obviously interested in the Clone Wars? We could use more passionate researchers who focus on that era.”

The young man’s face flushed a dark green under his tattoos. “My parents would only agree to pay for my schooling if I chose a marketable course of study. As you know, the Clone Wars are…”

“Not exactly marketable,” Maree finished. “A pity. Well, if you ever happen to be on Hosnian Prime, please feel free to stop by my office at the Archive, and I’ll sign your datapad. But be warned, I’ll probably try to poach you for my own research team.”

Brenko’s mouth dropped open and his datapad clattered to the floor. “Th-thank you, Dr. Finnall! I will!”

Maree excused herself as Brenko stooped to retrieve the pad, and she and Kix resumed their walk. Brenko stood back and watched them with an awestruck expression.

“I had no idea I was sleeping with a celebrity,” Kix murmured under his breath. 

“Shove it,” she whispered. “It was much more awkward for me than it was for you.”

“Do you have an official fan club I can join?” he asked with a perfectly straight face.

“Maybe you should talk to Brenko about setting one up. You’d have two whole members,” she retorted.

They reached the office and closed the door behind them. Kix immediately crowded Maree up against the desk, burying his face against her neck and trailing kisses toward her ear.

“Dr. Finnall, would you sign my ass? I was so inspired by the way you wrapped your legs around it while I was pounding into you last night,” he teased.

“Dick,” she laughed, swatting the back of his head.

“You’d rather sign my dick? That’s fine, too.”

“Mmm, there’s certainly enough room,” she said, stroking him through his trousers with a languid sigh. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a small blinking red dot. “Dank farrik, Kix, there are security holocams in here. Behave yourself.”

“Sorry, Doc, I couldn’t help myself,” he said, fluttering his eyelashes. “You’re just so inspiring.”

She laughed again, pressed her lips against his and dipped her tongue into his mouth, then pushed him firmly away. They had work to do, and she had a sinking feeling that Kix’s cheerful mood wouldn’t last long once they got started.

“Stop distracting me,” she said as she powered up the holoprojector.

Kix frowned. “Wait, I thought these records are classified. What about the security holocams? Do the guards have clearance?”

“The system has an override built in. If a classified record is being displayed, the holocam feeds are turned off automatically.”

“Good to know,” Kix said with a smirk. “Just in case I’m feeling inspired later.”

“Incorrigible,” Maree muttered.

She spent some time searching the archive inventory for the troopers on Kix’s list. It took longer than she expected, but at last she crowed in victory as she located the records for the Republic Star Destroyer Tribunal. As they waited for an IMRA droid to retrieve and deliver the data chips Maree requested, Kix’s stomach rumbled. Maree checked the chronometer on the wall and realized it was already mid-afternoon.

“Should I order lunch to be delivered from the cafeteria?” she offered. “Or if you’d prefer, we can walk over. It’s inside the Archive, so we won’t have to go through security again.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being mobbed by your legions of adoring fans?” he asked.

“I think you mean ‘fan,’ singular,” she said. “But that is a fair point. We’ll get delivery.”

She pulled up the menu on the holoprojector, and they made their selections. When Maree apologized that she couldn’t offer him anything better than cafeteria food, Kix merely shrugged.

“I’m used to it. It’s probably better than what I’m used to, actually.”

He shifted and put his feet up on the chair across from him. The office was austere, and it lacked any of the comforts with which she had filled her own workspace. The hard plastech chairs were making Maree’s legs fall asleep, so she stood up to stretch and walk around the joyless room. Kix watched from his own seat.

“So,” he said conversationally, “come here often?”

She snorted. “More often than I’d like.”

“Not a fan of Coruscant?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I went to university here. That was long enough for a lifetime.”

“So not your vacation destination of choice, then.”

She shook her head. “Work. Always work. It seems like that’s all I ever do lately.”

“Doesn’t the New Republic offer vacation leave?” Kix asked.

“Who has the time for that?”

“Too busy saving the galaxy from war criminals?”

“Ah yes, the glamorous, exciting life of a professional nerd,” she said. “How could anything else compare?”

“You could always run away and become a pirate,” Kix joked.

Maree laughed. “My mother would kill me.”

“The Ranger?” he asked. 

“She retired last year,” Maree said. “Spends all her time tormenting Eema. Honestly, Baba might enjoy the challenge of hunting down my hypothetical pirate crew. I think she misses the action.”

The door chimed, and a service droid entered with their food delivery. They divvied up the food and started to eat.

“It must be hard to transition to civilian life after she spent so many years fighting,” Kix said.

“Was the transition hard for you?” Maree asked.

“I suppose you could say that,” Kix said quietly.

“I bet you’d get along well with Baba,” Maree said. Kix looked startled, and Maree cursed her clumsiness. “If you ever met, I mean. Which you probably wouldn’t. Because she and Eema live on Adelphi, and I’m guessing you don’t get out that way much. But if you did, I bet they’d like you.”

Ugh. Stop talking, you idiot!

Kix blinked, and a slow smile crept across his face. “You want me to meet your moms?”

“No!” Maree said, feeling the heat rush to her cheeks. “Not unless you wanted to.”

He poked around in his food, probably hoping to find a bite with flavor. “I never had a mother,” he mused. “It must have been nice to have two.”

His voice was stark with longing, and Maree’s heart twisted.

“It was,” Maree said softly. “It is. They’re pretty amazing.”

“They sound pretty amazing. No surprise they raised an amazing daughter,” Kix said. “I hope I do get to meet them someday. If I ever make it to Adelphi.”

Oh. This man is dangerous, Maree realized. 

The data chips were delivered just after Kix and Maree finished eating lunch, and they got to work immediately. Maree loaded the chips into the holoprojector and began sorting through them, organizing the information in some way that made the most sense to her. Kix took a moment to admire her focus, even as he braced himself to uncover the final few pieces of the puzzle they’d been constructing over the past weeks. She was supremely competent, and he felt a stab of guilt that he’d monopolized so much of her time when she was accustomed to doing far more valuable work for the New Republic. She hadn’t said a word of complaint; in fact, he suspected she never would have mentioned her service to the Judiciary if he hadn’t asked.

Once she had the information laid out to her satisfaction, she began reviewing the files with him. They worked through several individual troopers and units—Kix’s closest brothers; members of the 501st, the 212th, the 104th. Many of them survived into the Imperial era. A surprising number went AWOL after Order 66. Kix was horrified to learn that one of his close friends had had a mental breakdown and executed his entire squad within days of the order. After that, he requested a short break, ostensibly to stretch his legs.

He went into the refresher and splashed his face with cold water, then dried himself carefully, making sure no telltale droplets remained in his hair or beard. When he looked in the mirror, every one of his brothers stared back at him. Kix could feel the tide of panic rising in his chest. He closed his eyes and stood silently for a few moments, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth until his heart rate stabilized.

When he returned to the office, Maree was waiting with two bottles of water she’d procured from some unknown source. He smiled, remembering the other times she had offered him water when he was clinging to the ragged edges of his control. She seemed to sense his distress even when he thought he was hiding it well, and he felt a small pang in his chest as he realized that her first instinct was always to take care of him. It was an unfamiliar experience, and it made him want to curl up in her lap and bask in the attention like a pampered tooka. She watched to make sure he drank some of the water, and then she rubbed her hand between his shoulders comfortingly. He leaned into the contact with a sigh.

“I’m ready to keep going, if you are,” he said.

“I’m not in a hurry,” she said. “We can take as long as you need.”

“Thanks, but I can handle it,” he replied.

“All right." She patted his back one last time and returned to her seat at the desk. "In that case, the next entry on the list is the experimental unit you requested, Clone Force 99. It looks as though four of the members defected immediately after Order 66.” She paused, and her eyebrows snapped together in surprise. “That’s unusual. Most of the mass clone defections didn’t happen for some time after the Empire took power. Scholars have theorized that the inhibitor chips were either designed to have a limited duration, or that the energy required to control the clones’ actions simply fried the chips over time.”

“Why do you suppose these clones defected so early?” Kix asked.

“It’s difficult to say. They were experimental, so it’s possible that their physiology was different enough from regular clones that the chips were incompatible with them. Though at least one of the squad members seems to have been affected. CT-9904, Crosshair, did not defect with the rest of his squad.”

“Is there any record of them afterward?”

Maree frowned. “Yes. The four squad members who defected were taken into custody on Kamino several months later. They were reported to have been killed when Tipoca City was destroyed.”

Kix’s mouth went dry. What the kriff? When did that happen? How had he not known about Tipoca City?

Maree was still speaking. “... unconfirmed accounts that the team was still active for some time after. At least one member was claimed to have been killed on Eriadu, which certainly throws doubt on the validity of the original report.”

Licking his lips, he tried to keep his voice steady as he asked, “What—what about Crosshair?”

Maree scrolled further. “Ah, here it is. Crosshair was promoted to the rank of Commander and continued to serve the Empire until—oh.”

Kix leaned forward. “What is it?”

“He killed his commanding officer on a mission,” she said. “He was arrested and sent to a military prison compound. That’s the end of his file, I’m afraid.”

Kix nodded absently, his eyes unfocused. Truth be told, he hadn’t much cared for the churlish sniper, but Kix knew what a military prison compound meant for clones, and he would not wish such a fate on any of his brothers. Something she’d said nagged at him.

“Did you say four squad members defected?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Hunter, Tech, Wrecker, and Echo fled Kamino after kidnapping a young child. My gods, this squad is incredible! How have I never heard of them before now?”

So Echo stayed with the Bad Batch even after the war. Kix was glad to know the ARC trooper had found a place to belong after everything he’d been through. It was a strange detail about the child, though.

“What child?” he asked.

“It doesn’t say,” Maree said. “But at least I know what thread my research is going to follow for the next few months.”

Her eyes were sparkling with curiosity and excitement, and for a moment, Kix simply watched her work. She tapped a few quick notes into her datapad before returning her attention to the holorecord and scrolling a little further. Her nose scrunched up slightly as she read.

“Fascinating,” she whispered.

Exactly the word I was searching for, he thought. Fascinating. Enchanting. Bewitching. Enticing. Adorable. Irresistible.

She noticed him staring and abruptly stopped scrolling with a self-deprecating laugh.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I get lost in the zone.”

“Not at all,” he said. “You really care about all this, don’t you?”

“I do,” she replied simply. 

Kix glanced at the security holocam and noted that the red light was no longer blinking. Impulsively, he stood and strode around the desk. Maree automatically rose out of her chair as he approached, and he reached for her, drawing her close to him as his lips crashed down on hers. He kissed her deeply, holding her face in his hands. He never wanted this moment to end. At last, their lips parted, and he rested his forehead against hers as she took a deep, stuttering inhale. She looked at him with dazed eyes.

“What was that for?” she whispered.

“I felt inspired,” he said, hiding the truth behind a cocky grin.

Her eyes crinkled as she laughed quietly. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know anything else. He didn’t want to be in this stuffy, miserable hole of an office learning about tragedies that unfolded half a century before. He just wanted to take Maree back to her hotel room and spend the rest of his artificially shortened life making love to her. She smelled like tea and honey and spiced biscuits and home, and he wanted to sink into her and disappear forever.

“Only one more data chip to go,” she said. “Shall we finish up and head back to the hotel?”

Kix buried his face in her hair and breathed deeply. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

He pressed one more kiss onto the top of her head, then returned to his seat as Maree pulled up the contents of the remaining data chip. Unfortunately, Maree had unknowingly saved the worst for the last: the final report of the 332nd Division.

“The 332nd never completed their mission to deliver Maul to Coruscant after the siege of Mandalore,” Maree said. 

Kix gritted his teeth, and his fingernails bit painfully into his palms. “What happened?”

“Several years after the end of the war, Imperial forces located the wreckage of the Star Destroyer Tribunal on a remote moon,” Maree said. “Most on board were killed; however, military records indicate that there must have been some survivors, as the clones had been given proper burials. As we know from our earlier research, Commander Rex survived, and it seems likely that he was the one who buried the fallen. We also know from later history that Maul survived. Given his track record, it is probable that he was responsible for the crash.”

“Is there a list of those who were killed?” he asked.

“Due to the amount of time that had passed by the time the crash was discovered, and the impossibility of genetic testing to tell the clones apart, all aboard were listed as killed in action.”

He felt sick. He nodded his acknowledgement, unable to speak. Jesse really was gone. He’d known it was true, of course. Jesse would have died decades earlier, even if he’d survived the war. The clones’ accelerated aging would have seen to that. But somehow, knowing exactly how his brother had died made it so much worse, so much more real. Once again, the crushing weight of helplessness and grief smothered him. He was only dimly aware of Maree loading the data chips into a secure case to be returned to the archive. 

Soon, he felt the pressure of her hand on his as she guided him out of the building and into the half-light of a Coruscant dusk. Maree hailed an air taxi and nudged him into it, sliding in beside him. She murmured directions to the driver—Kix didn’t hear what she said. The lights of Coruscant rushed by in dizzying streaks as they flew toward their destination. Maree was silent next to him, but she slipped her hand into his and interlaced their fingers comfortingly. Kix tightened his grip on her, clinging desperately to the steady contact that felt like the only solid thing in the chaotic galaxy around him.

---

Chapter 11

Tagging: @blueink-bluesoul @secondaryrealm @spicy-clones @wings-and-beskar @523rdrebel @goblininawig @merkitty49 @anxiouspineapple99 @sinfulsalutations @arcsimper5 @starrylothcat @clio3kantarella

[nicklloydnow]

“‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch’s pessimistic prognosis of the shifting relationship of individuals to society and to each other in The Minimal Self was published 40 years ago. It might have been written yesterday.

From the late 1970s, Lasch published a series of books, most notably The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self and The Revolt of the Elites, that prefigured many contemporary debates, about culture wars, the rise of a “liberal elite”, the corrosiveness of individualism, the encroachment of the market into social life, the creation of a celebrity culture, the rise of a “therapeutic” mindset.

(…)

For Lasch, the combination of consumer capitalism, competitive individualism and the abandonment by radicals of campaigns for material change in favour of demands for cultural transformation, had led to the emergence of a new narcissistic personality type. Lasch did not mean narcissism in the colloquial sense, such as a Trump-like figure, bursting with “self-centredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration”, as one profile put it. Rather, drawing on psychoanalysis, Lasch was describing an individual who could not distinguish between themselves and the world beyond and so came to “see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires”.

It was a beleaguered self rather than an overbearing one. “The new Narcissus,” Lasch wrote, “gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay”, seeking “relief from the burden of selfhood”. He described people as increasingly yearning for contact and intimacy with others, yet fearful of the pain of engagement.

(…)

Perhaps the current theme that speaks most to Laschian fears is the growing concern about what a report last year from the US surgeon general called “an epidemic of loneliness”, an alarming rise in the social disconnectedness of people. In Britain, Tracey Crouch was in 2018 appointed as Britain’s first minister for loneliness following a report from the Jo Cox commission on loneliness.

Against this background came a study last week that compared perceptions of loneliness among middle-aged people in the US and 13 European nations, examining data over the past two decades from surveys. It found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Americans seemed the loneliest, followed by Britons. It is a finding that fits in with the general perception of Britain and the US as societies with the greatest stress on individualism and therefore more likely to nurture a sense of loneliness.

(…)

There is a deeper issue, too: the tendency to individualise social issues, whether poverty or unemployment, to view them as psychological dispositions or even as moral failure. Loneliness, too, is frequently framed as a psychological condition, or mental health problem, the product of narcissism or self-obsession.

Forty years ago, Lasch was trying to show how social changes were distorting relationships, and to describe people’s attempts to negotiate a new world. But his psychoanalytical eye often overwhelmed his social vision and what many took from his work was less his social critique than his delineation of a new, narcissistic personality type. The end point of his analysis (the emergence of a public disconnected from one another and so more self-centred) became, instead, the starting point for explanation – that people’s narcissism and self-obsession explained their disconnectedness and the erosion of communal bonds.

This is even more true today. Too much of contemporary discussion about the impact of social and technological changes on people’s psychology – from the influence of social media on the wellbeing of the young to the effect of hyper-individualism on our sense of self – fetishises the psychology at the expense of social analysis. We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces. We could do with obsessing less about personality types than about the obsession with the psychological at the expense of the social.”

[fatehbaz]

In other words, the planetary evokes what we call in French le vivant, which in English is something like “the living world.”

Le vivant is, for me, the planetary in its multiplicity [...]. It is true that a key driver of the process of planetarization is capitalism. [...] To some extent, the market has become a totality, or in any case our core moral experience. [...] Can we rely on infrastructures that have, to some extent, contributed to turning the world into a burning house? [...]

We need to begin by agreeing on what is at stake. From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. [...] When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe [...]. We also share the vital breath. [...] In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it [...]. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. [...]

---

[W]e are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding forms of calculation [...] . The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere is not only bringing with it a greater belief in techno-positivism, in modes of statistical thought, it’s also paving the way for regimes of assessment of the natural world, modes of prediction and analysis that are treating life itself as a computable object. This is [...] affecting not only our political imagination, but also the ways in which we understand what knowledge stands for, and what is it is all about. [...]

[W]e are experiencing a clash of temporalities: geological time, the deep time of those processes that fashioned our terrestrial home; historical time; and experiential time. All these times now fold in on one another. We are not used to thinking of time as simultaneous. We think of time as linear: past, present, future. So how do we begin to think about time in a way that takes these concatenations seriously? [...]

[T]hat’s what the Anthropocene shows us. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, there’s no longer a social history separate from natural history. That is over. Human history and Earth history are now indivisible. The epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations. [...]

---

And also, speaking for the planet and listening to the planet are not exactly the same things. Maybe the first step is to listen. The question then becomes, how do we listen to the planet? Does the planet speak for itself? [...] [W]e have to get out of a certain epistemology that has been premised on the fact that humans are the only speaking entity, that what distinguishes us is that we mastered language and the others didn’t. But we now have studies showing that plants speak, that forests speak: a de-monopolization of the faculty of speech, of language.

When we look into the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West, broadly speaking we find knowledges of how other-than-humans speak — and how humans, or some humans, have learned to listen to those languages. This requires a radical decentering, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together.

The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.”

---

Text by: Achille Mbembe. As interviewed by Nils Gilman. “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.” Noema (Noema Magazine). 11 January 2022. [Some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

If I had practically endless money, one of my pet projects would be to make a network of long term libraries. Develop long term data storage technology, and then archive all sorts of information in these geologically secure facilities.

Specifically I would want to store information on our technology and tools. If possible, even store some tools and machinery in these libraries.

Sure they would almost certainly become known and marketed as apocalypse libraries to help jump start human civilization, and they very well could be used that way. But I think it also just be a very useful archive in general. Both for future historians and for current people as you would now have an institution trying to preserve technical info that we are always losing.

[adamsvanrhijn]

I'm sorry nobody knows what a tumblr job is

if you aren't missing a comma or a "but" there. thank u i love u

if i had unlimited characters and thought people would bother reading context associated with a poll, (i am pretty sure they usually do not) and also had some foresight about some of the specific things people would interpret differently than i intended, here's what this would have looked like:

[begin post]

[begin poll]

which of these listed tumblr job types is yours?

retail, grocery, consumer-facing service and sales (excludes call centers and food service)

food service (includes restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, bars, cafeterias, food trucks, commercial kitchens, food kitchens, etc; cooking + serving + hosting)

teacher, professor, tutor, teaching assistant, childcare provider, but not educational administrator, if you do another kind of education read the rest of the options first because one of them might be a better fit

engineer, developer, technical designer, data or computer scientist, not including technical writers

parks and wildlife, outdoor research, animal care (including animal boarding and veterinary care), animal keeping (such as zoos or aquariums), animal husbandry, farming, ranching, environmental conservation, gardener or plant nursery worker (but not florist), field archaelogist, equine therapist, outdoor camp counselor if you work with and have knowledge around plants and/or animals

librarian, archivist, docent, tour guide, curator, patron-facing researcher, consultant historian or sociologist, community educator at a cultural or knowledge (probably nonprofit) institution (including but not limited to historical reenactors); reception or guest services related to any of the previous, excepting food service, which is the food service option

writer - content, technical, proposal, marketing, fiction, nonfiction, educational, research, including editing, but has to be actively working and receiving pay from a company, an organization, and/or clients/commissioners including publications/publishers, even if income is inconsistent or not received at regular intervals. does not include captioning or transcription. translators use your best judgment

artist, illustrator, graphic designer, but has to be actively working and receiving pay from a company, an organization, clients/commissioners including publications and galleries, may include visual marketing but does NOT include ad sales, also does not include video editing unless you do like, speed paints or show off your art in videos

patient healthcare, caregiving, and advocacy. does not include animal care, pharmaceutical research or dispensing, or medical coding/billing

you are not currently working as / do not currently have any of the Tumblr Jobs listed above

[end poll]

a "Tumblr Job" is decided based on the following criteria, which is based on my own dashboard/Tumblr experiences, and tumblr searches:

either many Tumblr users have or have had that job, OR, one to a few high-profile Tumblr users have or have had that job

posts are made about that job, either about the day-to-day work itself (positive or negative), as an appeal to authority ("librarian here!"), or about the concept and/or vibes of the job or having that job

posts are reblogged about that job, and reach an audience of people who do not have that job; posts go viral about that job, even

Tumblr users might aspire to have that job, or be studying toward it

it might require a high level of interest and/or personal investment with limited positions available, OR, it might be a very common job in the world

the job is NOT one that many Tumblr users would perhaps complain and/or rant and/or criticize about other people having

the job is NOT one commonly associated with things Tumblr tends to skew away from, like industries known to contribute to climate change or jobs that tend to be associated with ultra high earners with wealth inequality in the same industry (editing to plug my other poll that 6 & 7 apply to that nobody is taking)

a "Tumblr Job" is NOT just a job anybody on tumblr might have or even a job most people or many people on tumblr might have. it's not even a job that is necessarily common on tumblr (common on tumblr != common tumblr job), that's something i am interested in finding out via the poll.

just because tumblr users you know also have your job doesn't mean it Is a tumblr job. and just because your job type isn't listed doesn't mean it is Not a tumblr job. there are only 9 job hodgepodge types here. there are more jobs in the world than this and there are more tumblr jobs on tumblr than this. these are also not and are not intended to be standard industry classifications. they are grouped by tumblr vibes, not necessarily by job role or duties.

if you do not have a job at this time, you do not currently right now have one of the listed tumblr jobs. being unemployed or being a student, even if you once had one of these jobs or are studying to obtain one of these jobs, are not jobs for the purpose of this poll.

the purpose of the poll is to see how many respondents actually have and are doing these specific jobs that i have identified as "tumblr jobs". nothing more and nothing less!

[end post]

but nobody is gonna fucking read all that & tumblr polls have character limits. if the poll was as specific as i wanted it to be it would not have however many thousands of votes it currently has. curse of my autisms <3

[yournightowl]

Your NightOwl #042

If you were to plot the prevalance of organized crime across history, what would that graph look like?

My first instinct is to say that it should go from bottom left to top right- Pweople getting more crooked, more corrupt, everything going down the can as time goes on.(＃`Д´)

But after giving it a little more thought, (and after having eaten lunch,)amidst my newfound positivity i thought, "Couldn't it be just the opposite?" ♡( ◡‿◡ )

Crime gets harder and harder to get away with as technology improves- and improvements in how fast goods and information can travel helps make the global playing field getting more equal, if not less psychotically competitive.

And now, after having taken a nap

i realize neither are even close to correct. (￣□￣」)

Because crime, especially the large scale organized type, isn't influenced by technology or the progression of society- it's really only ever been dependent on economics.

The heyday, as it were, for organized crime came in the early 20th century- between wars and depressions and plagues and the stock market - we saw higher highs and lower lows than ever thought possible.

There were other blips on the radar after that of course- regime changes, speculative bubbles, empires falling and unions collapsing- but through it all, wherever the money went, crime followed soon after.

And it's no different in the 21st century.

Because even more important than the stock market or the price of grain in this conversation is the level of unemployment- which spiked massively in the 30's and 40's as early automated systems wiped out entire sectors.

The language models that passed for ear-tifical antelly-gents back then drove a spike between the haves and the have nots; paying one guy to scrape data from another guy's life's work, then training a bot on that data and firing the first two guys anyway. It was a shortsighted fool's goldrush where every middle manager on earth raced against each other to disprove their own relevance as fast as possible. (°ロ°) ! The global economy remodeled itself into a system based mostly on theft. So for your average unemployed joe shmoe, reselling tech that fell off the back of a truck must've seemed like the most honest work in the world. (^_<)〜☆

The inverted bubble didn't last. ヾ(￣◇￣)ノ〃 llms were eventually recognized as the technological dead end they always were, and "automatically generated" went from impressive to trendy to tacky to gross in just a few short years-

But the damage was done- the social contract between "job creators" and real human beings now had a big gash torn through it- and ever since, mom and pop mafias and grassroots mobsters have fiercely guarded the niche of the economy they tore out for themselves.

If you don't believe organized crime is just as real as ever, just try and introduce androids to a "close-knit" industry like shipping. They'll send your free trial bots back to you in a compact, melted-down cube of slag before the first shift even ends.

Now i don't condone that kind of thing. It's violent and immature, and they should take their frustration out on the people trying to replace them, not the bots they bring in to do the replacing.

But as somewhat of a historian, i can see the appeal.

friend of the family, your nightowl

[ausetkmt]

TIME: Racism Is Not a Mental Illness—But It's Complicated | Time

Everyone knows that Law & Order plotlines are often, as they say, ripped from the headlines.

But Dr. Alvin Poussaint, 88, knows this on another level: An emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he has had the unusual experience of seeing his ideas incorporated into a season 12 episode of the long-running show. In it, a white working stiff murders a Black CEO in a dispute over a New York City taxicab. When the trial begins, a respected Black psychiatrist takes the stand to present his idea that the defendant suffers from “extreme racism,” a mental illness. His lawyers argue that extreme racism has such a complete hold on the defendant that it mitigates their client’s legal responsibility for the murder. In the final moments, the audience is encouraged to feel that it’s a victory for justice, for law and order, when the jury rejects the psychiatrist’s ideas, Poussaint tells me with a tinge of disdain.

In the real world, Poussaint was that psychiatrist. Sort of.

While he never brought his ideas to the witness stand inside the New York City courthouse behind those massive stone steps that Law & Order made famous, in 1999 he shared his theories on the link between mental health and extreme forms of bigotry on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. In doing so, he helped set off a debate that ended with the American psychiatric establishment publicly rejecting the concept—partly on the grounds that so many people are racists.

But even now, after nearly a decade during which the number of hate crimes has steadily increased, the question of the relationship between bigotry and mental illness has never fully been resolved. In fact, recent high-profile incidents have made public perception of that dynamic perhaps as muddled as ever. The issue comes up in relation to everything from major mass shootings to pop-culture discourse. The racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, for which the gunman pleaded guilty this week to state murder and domestic terrorism charges, prompted calls for the country to “get serious about mental health” as well as pleas not to talk about the shooting as a matter of psychiatric illness rather than a racist hate crime.

Read more: Anti-Black Violence Has Long Been the Most Common American Hate Crime—And We Still Don’t Know the Full Extent

A memorial outside the Tops Friendly Market after a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., is seen July 14, 2022.

Joshua Bessex—AP

Though the FBI typically releases data each fall detailing the prior year’s hate-crimes statistics, the agency has not yet done so in 2022. But social conditions are rife, experts say, for the increase to continue. (In 2020, the most recent year for which FBI data is available, the agency reported 8,263 incidents—an increase of nearly a thousand over the prior year, despite 452 fewer agencies reporting—and most experts believe the real number is higher.) Police have noted that 47 out of 100 people arrested for hate crimes in New York City in early 2022 “have prior documentation of an [emotionally disturbed person] incident.” So the stakes are high for the nation’s courtrooms to respond to the trauma unleashed by that dynamic—and for Americans to decide what constitutes a just outcome.

“It’s complicated,” says Sander Gilman, a historian at Emory University who researches the relationship between health, science, law, and society, and who has long taught a course on extremism. “But I’m going to start with two things that I call Gilman’s Law: not all racists are crazy, but crazy people can be racists.”

Thanks in part to the influence of pop culture—not least those TV police procedurals—many assume that insanity pleas are common. In reality, mental-health defenses are rare, and even more rarely lead to reduced punishment. Mounting that kind of defense requires time and significant resources to gather evidence and expert testimony, so in practice it is not an avenue available to all defendants.

In England and the U.S., courts began to reliably consider the mental health of defendants only in the 19th century. The M’Naghten rule, a standard for determining a defendant’s sanity at the time of a crime, was established in 1840s England. It holds that only the sane can be held responsible for their actions. As a result, the question of mental fitness—sufficient sanity to participate meaningfully in one’s own defense—is sometimes evaluated before a trial. (Whether the state has an obligation or right to treat such an illness in order for the person to then stand trial is, Gilman says, a question that goes back as far as the idea of such a defense.) Once a competency decision has been made, the accused who do go to trial have the right to a defense. In some cases, that may include an option for a jury to find the defendant not guilty by reason of mental disorder. In others, ideas about the mental health of the defendant may more informally shape what evidence is presented.

But so-called “mental disease or defect” defenses are used in only about 1% of cases, says Michael Boucai, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law and an expert on mental health and other social issues in courtrooms. Those defenses are successful in even fewer cases; in fact, such a tactic often backfires or results in a defendant confined for a longer term inside a hospital than that person would have spent in prison, sometimes with no end date. And even rarer—though not unheard of—is an attempt to use racism or other bigotry as an indicator of mental-health challenges, he says.

A crowd prays outside the Emanuel AME Church after a memorial service for the nine people killed in a racist attack at the church in Charleston, S.C., June 19, 2015.

Stephen B. Morton—AP

Some fear that raising mental-health issues in court runs the risk of bolstering inaccurate myths about the mentally ill. In reality, mentally ill people are disproportionately more likely to become the victims of crime, and most do nothing to victimize others. And, as has been observed after so many headlinemaking crimes, suspects from privileged groups are more likely to have their actions described as illness in need of treatment instead of criminal evil meriting punishment. Some experts fear that shifting the conversation to questions of mental health can also draw attention away from hateful ideas embraced by the person accused of the crime—ideas that are today often shared by people, including public figures, whose mental health is not questioned. That’s how important social problems that require the nation’s attention are transformed into one individual’s medical problems, says W. Carson Byrd, a sociologist at the University of Michigan.

Column: We Need to Take Action to Address the Mental Health Crisis in This Pandemic

That line of thinking is particularly problematic in a culture prone to dismiss the need for systemwide reforms to address inequality, Byrd says. It can foster an emphasis on quick fixes for the world’s long-standing problems with bigotry. (In 2012, for example, a team of British researchers announced that an existing heart and blood-pressure drug appeared to reduce implicit bias after a study involving just 36 subjects.)

“White supremacy is a very normal part of society,” says Byrd, who is also the faculty director of research initiatives at his university’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. It is not a good or productive part of society, he points out, but a deeply entrenched one. “One of the detriments of trying to look at racism as a form of psychopathology or mental illness is that it makes that [illness] abhorrent, as if everything else is working in a certain [non-racist] way.”

Research has also long shown that bigotry is not an inborn human trait, but rather something learned from our environments, Byrd says. While racism can influence one’s mental health, describing racism itself—even “extreme racism”—as a mental illness implies that bigotry exists beyond our individual and collective control.

“By medicalizing [extreme racism], making it something curable, a mental-health disorder, it pulls away from having those broader conversations about how society is impacting people,” he says. “We just try to figure out, ‘How do we fix this one person?’”

This problem, Boucai notes, can already be clearly seen in discussions about gun crime, and mass shootings in particular: “It’s very hard to understand these crimes and the discourse of insanity provides one way to do it,” says Boucai. “But I think we can see where that sort of language is irresponsible and potentially undermines a just result.”

In other words, if a mass shooter is simply insane, then wholesale gun-law reform can, to some, seem unnecessary, even unwise. When bigotry is involved, that supposed insanity might, some who oppose Poussaint’s ideas believe, undermine systemwide efforts toward equity—or at least toward greater safety for those most likely to be targeted.

In 1999, when Poussaint wrote his op-ed advocating for increased research into possible psychiatric treatments for extreme racism, he was the author of acclaimed books about the effects of racism on Black mental health and a veteran of public controversy. Years earlier he’d argued publicly that racial pride among Black Americans could be taken to an unhealthy extreme. By the 1990s, he may have been best known for his work with Bill Cosby, consulting on scripts for The Cosby Show in a massively popular effort to disrupt stereotypes.

Poussaint first published his ideas about extreme racism weeks after a man named Buford O. Furrow Jr. shot and seriously injured four children and an adult inside a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, then shot and killed a nearby Asian-American postal worker. When captured and ultimately convicted, Furrow told investigators his actions had been motivated by hate. Reporters unearthed information indicating that Furrow had close relationships with known white nationalists, and also that he had been evaluated by Washington State’s mental-health system only months before the attack. He’d even told officials after a previous arrest for assault that he’d “fantasized,” about mass murder. To Poussaint, this story signaled a growing threat posed by a failure to recognize that, while highlighting and combating systemic racism is important in preventing discrimination, so is identifying and helping individuals motivated by bigotry who might go so far as to injure or kill others.

Read more: 11 People Were Killed in 48 Hours in Mass Shootings Across America. It’s Likely to Get Worse

Train passengers are treated on the platform after Colin Ferguson opened fire on the train as it arrived at Garden City, N.Y., on December 7, 1993.

Alan Raia—Newsday RM/Getty Images

“Extreme racism crosses the line and is out of control,” he explains. “Just like somebody can have a little bit of anxiety, but if they have anxiety to the point that it is immobilizing, then it is a mental disorder.” Mass shooters behind hate crimes are, as he sees it, in a similar state: “[They] weren’t functioning individuals. They were impaired by their mental pathology.”

When the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide that mental-health professionals use to make their diagnoses, was published in 1980, clinicians like Poussaint considered racism—not extreme racism, but what he calls everyday racism—a potential symptom of several conditions, from paranoid personality disorder to generalized anxiety disorder. Racism alone is not sufficient to diagnose a patient with one of those conditions, but an extreme racist, Poussaint says, likely suffers from delusions. Such people live with multiple symptoms including paranoia; they are likely to project negative traits or outcomes onto entire groups and sustain those beliefs even in the face of strong countervailing evidence. Many embrace conspiracy theories. Some may grow violent. In fact, Poussaint argued in a 2002 Western Journal of Medicine article, the extreme racist often begins with “verbal expression of antagonism, progresses to avoidance of members of disliked groups, then to active discrimination against them, to physical attack, and finally to extermination (lynchings, massacres, genocide). That fifth point on the scale, the acting out of extermination fantasies, is readily classifiable as delusional behavior.”

Poussaint was not the first person to raise the idea that extreme racism is itself a mental illness. But he was among those leading the call for the American Psychiatric Association, publishers of the DSM, to consider putting it in subsequent editions of the manual, which has a long history of evolving, often slowly, in response to research and norms. When his op-ed ran, it seemed to Poussaint, people pounced.

Some of his fellow Black psychiatrists argued that such a diagnosis would unleash a wave of legal excuse-making, helping no one but the violent racists themselves. Poussaint counters that other health diagnoses have yet—nearly 200 years after psychological concerns officially entered American courtrooms—to produce rafts of acquittals. And some clinicians and researchers argued that there are other ways of attacking racism besides treating it as an illness—educational programs, diversity initiatives, policy changes. That’s a point Poussaint says he doesn’t oppose, at least when it comes to everyday racism. Those steps can help racists who embrace repugnant ideas while remaining functional parts of society. But those aren’t the people he’s talking about.

“Racism negatively impacts public health,” the American Psychiatric Association told TIME in a statement. “The American Psychiatric Association has been focusing on this in the DSM by identifying and addressing the impact of structural racism on the over- or underdiagnosis of mental disorders in certain ethno-racial groups. From time to time we have received proposals to create a diagnosis of extreme racism but they have not met the criteria identified for creating new disorders.”

To this day, Poussaint believes that extreme racism is very likely its own disorder in need of study, possible diagnostic criteria, and evidence-based treatment, he told me in September from his home in Massachusetts. But after retiring about 2½ years ago at the age of 86, he says he’s too far out of the professional mix to continue to push for an extreme racism diagnosis.

I ask Poussaint what he thinks might have happened if extreme racism had become its own diagnosable condition listed in the DSM. Extreme racism might have been a topic on talk shows and a more frequent topic of news coverage, he says. With research and public information campaigns, the need for intervention could have been as clear as it is for heart attacks; the steps to do so as well-known as CPR.

“We’d get away from treating it as if [extreme racism] is normative,” Poussaint says, “like a cultural difference because America is a racist country. We have made it normative by not calling it what it is. Even people in general society, friends and relatives and even the afflicted individual, would recognize it as a disorder and say, ‘I’m not alright.’ People who get swept up by anxiety and can’t function, they don’t think they are normal. They say, ‘This is taking over my life. I need some help.’ [A diagnosis] clues the family to say, ‘This person is really troubled and we have to get them some help.’”

[mundus2035]

When Toothpaste Was Invented?

When Toothpaste Was Invented?

History of Toothpaste

What do you think when toothpaste was first invented?

So, let me inform you our ancestors are really brilliant. They are very health conscious and know how to take care of their teeth. You must be surprised by knowing that Egyptians started using powder to clean their teeth in 5000BC. They used powdered ashes of ox hooves, powdered and burnt eggshells, and pumice. Further, in addition to the Egyptian recipe, Greeks and Romans added some abrasives like crushed bone and oyster shells to remove the plaque more efficiently. Chinese and Indians are also graded using natural ingredients like ginseng, miswak, and neem sticks. Toothpaste was introduced in China and India around 500BC.

China is always ahead in modifications; it developed chewing sticks of some aromatic tree twinges to freshen breath. The first form of dental care product is powder. Till the 1850s, toothpaste was usually powdered. These toothpowders for use with toothbrushes came during the 19th century in Britain. That is mostly homemade with chalk, charcoal, and pulverized brick. The premixed toothpaste was marketed in the 19th century only but could not hold the market till World War I. The first toothpaste, including disinfectants, was Kalymnos.

According to many historians, the oldest formula for toothpaste is a mixture of crushed rocks, salt, dried iris flowers, mint, and pepper to create an abrasive powder used by the Egyptians in 4 AD. As we can see from the ingredients, it leads to an excessive burning sensation in the mouth or can cause mouth ulcers. It can also lead to gum injuries; henceforth, the formula was updated in upcoming years.

The Invention Year of Toothpaste

There are many conflicts between the exact year and date of invention. But according to data, the first toothpaste resembling what we use today is prepared in the 1850s by the American dental surgeon Washington Wentworth Sheffield. Dr. Sheffield created a ready tooth cream with the mint flavor for his patients. On the other hand, William Nebargall, an inorganic chemist, and Joseph Muhler, a dentist, developed a cavity-preventing product using stannous fluoride. The research was started in 1940 at Indiana University. Still, it became the first toothpaste recognized by the American dental association (ADA) as an effective decay preventing agent after four years.

The Rise of Modern Toothpaste

Read more at-

Also Read-

[hydralisk98]

"Improve the World" editorial, through the lens of Angora worldbuilding (16^12 thread - article 0x24/? )

Follow-up to this article:

You see, as I became a grounded optimist as of the last few years as a individual (essentially went from Zeitgeist 2 Venus Project mindset to historically-informed context acceptance [YMCA Summer Exchange Program 2015] and then into cautious optimism), I can't help but iterate on the ways the world could grow better than the cyberpunk bubblegum dystopia it is right now (felt it even in primary if that gives any clues on who I am on such matters).

And amongst the ways I have recently chosen to express such means of improving our common world-scape beyond merely manifesting it blindly into being was to construct a speculative world of my own to see how could have things went differently in such way as to experience such empowering progress & what we can learn from such a thoughtful experimentation sandbox to improve the lively-hoods of many with the open liberties that accompany it.

While I am by no means a complete expert of such topics (only a autistic hobby researcher/historian), I do think I recommend sensible enough avenues where we (as a globalized society) could be better and what to aim forth towards. Feel free to suggest other topics, queries or into the blog inbox. It would make me proud to receive any number of them.

Either way, to best persuade, justify & motivate you all on our collective power for constructive change (as something I have been working on for years but intensified work forth in the last few months since ~5-6 months) and how we can propel ourselves into such, let me show you my world some with scenic vignettes, shall we?

Topical scenes for Blackhand / Blackbear / Servitor narrative

Undoing the whole of Wilsonism in politics overall (Progressives bloc with Greens [Geocenter/Geoism], Syndicalists & Harmonists [Harmonious Society/Community/World] together)

Integrating better history / ancestry classes with mandatory native language classes + varied perspectives & project-based? learning humane reform for the public education system

Improving or resolving major systemic issues with fine-tuned empowerment tools (reject copyright & spyware, embrace copyleft & public domain)

Major grammatical & orthographic reforms for a fairer & more inclusive "lingua franca"

Better social welfare, accessibility tools & workplace unionization policies

Enacting better justice for the native peoples, migrants and to ourselves

Improving copyleft, libreware & GLOSS technologies & accessibility of development tools as to go the extra mile into wider-scale useful software

Morphological Freedoms

Sapience Rights Charter

Stopping Tax Evasion & minimize Tax Farming / Revenue Leasing

Universal Basic Income

Enforce regulations, tariffs and taxes on large corporations & encourage small businesses properly

Data privacy & equity laws

Improving onto (LPS modular) construction market & overall regional infrastructure

Ecological meltdown prevention & mitigation measures

Decentralize power through the redistribution of the means of production (Communes, Monero blockchain & DAOs?)

Writing more content soon for '(thread 16^12 (article 0x25)), I need to focus upon my personal bundle this weekend before I go move out to a new appartment (for a month); Cya soon!