#The Fed To Get US Economy We Work Know How

[inexable]

The Fed's Game-Changer Speech!

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has just announced a significant shift in economic policy from Jackson Hole, signaling that the long battle with inflation is nearing its end. With inflation now below 3% and unemployment slightly rising from historic lows, the Fed is looking to cut interest rates to help stabilize the job market.

What are your thoughts on this move? Can the lowering of interest rates bolster the economy without leading to negative repercussions? How do you think this decision might influence the upcoming presidential election? Let’s discuss the potential impacts and implications of Powell’s striking new direction!

[oinonsana]

On Posture In Gubat Banwa

So the sixth version of Gubat Banwa's First Edition "returns" to the ideal that HP as a pacing mechanic, an Action Economy limiter, and a resource pressure. As always, in Tactical Combat games, resource management is a major aspect of the gameplay. Management of action economy, management of distance, management of other currency (such as Class-specific Resources). Most of a Tactical Combat Grid game revolves around the manipulation of these mechanics: reducing, regaining, adding, changing, force multiplication/division of these resources, and more. In Tomian Design (that is, Tom of LANCER RPG and ICON RPG), costing.

For the first 5 versions of Gubat Banwa's design, we worked with lower HP values (across the board) and with Dice Pools. The idea was that each dice in a dice pool was an attack launched, or a moment of concentration. Every die in the defense pool was a parry or evasion attempted. While the fantasy of that worked pretty great, the maths on the other hand did not. It worked almost counter-intuitively against the high-flying martial arts x deliberate tactical combat that I was trying to strike a balance for. My white elephant, my Shambhala, was to strike a good balance between that.

The Change

In 1.6, while the Dice Pool didn't entirely go away--much of the game is built around getting tactically advantageous positions so that you can get more dice and a higher chance of dealing greater damage on the target--it went for a more linearly scaling game with the result on the die reducing the target's Health.

It was a hit, mostly, among the inner circle (that is to say, my friends that I run the newer version for). There was an immediate sense of "we know how this game works" now.

On Tactical Video Games

It was more transparent--this information was crucial to making a tactical game work and sing. This is why in video games, almost every tactical game has the "Combat Forecast", like in Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, that showcased the expected Hit Rate and the Damage Output.

This is absolutely integral: tactical games are decision point games. Without the proper information (doesn't need to be complete information), no decision can be done satisfyingly. This isn't to say that dice pools can't be used for a tactical game of course--I've done it. But it requires a different kind of design principle and design goal that Gubat Banwa wasn't going for. That sense of martial progression, of spiritual strength and eventual enlightenment.

From HP to POS

During the initial playtests, we were still working with HP. Hit Pearls. The idea was that every hit "shattered" a Hit Pearl. This worked with the Dice Pools, because the fiction was that every attack could be parried with Defense Dice.

What was the problem with this? Firstly, the math of this was inherently fraught, unfortunately: on higher levels, Defense Dice were either horribly impenetrable or did absolutely nothing to defend you. It became a binary thing. That was not the goal: for the martial fantasy to come to life, much of the decisions should not binary but rather, on a gradient spectrum.

To me, the destroyer of tactical grid games is when there's a single best strategy that shatters the tension of the game. My favorite parts of Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre were early game moments where the output randomness could make every fight go completely different, even if you redid the same stage more than once.

Secondly, when the outcome of an action is that, really, nothing happened, you used an attack (even worse, the attack was buffed by yourself, an ally, and tactical modifiers) and then the target was able to parry all your hits. The fiction is exciting for a second, but then when you return to the battle grid, nothing changed. The mechanics fed into the fiction, but the fiction didn't feed into the mechanics.

With the math change, the fiction of the Hit Pearls wasn't working because HP values were higher to compensate for the changed math. 12 Hit Pearls could feasibly be visualized as Link's Hearts, for example. But at 48 HP, that didn't work anymore.

Hearkening to the Ancients

So I actually went on a trip to older versions of Gubat Banwa, and found I'd solved that particular problem. Older versions of Gubat Banwa had HP as "Mettle", their ability to stay in the fight. Turning to the game's current version, I realized the Physical Defense stat was perfect: POSTURE. The stance, the guard, the ability to keep fighting, the ability to turn mortal wounds into grazing hits, the ability to ignore the effects of bleeding wounds, of burning pyres, of seeping poison.

Every attack was inflicting damage by chipping away at the target's guard, or forcing their stance into more compromised positions so that they would be open to an actual mortally wounding strike. They were still real hits that the defender was actively still guarding against. And with every attack defended, their guard wore down.

This hit me after watching Donnie Yen's SAKRA (2023) the other day. Reaching back into the high-flying wuxia roots, Donnie Yen's character doesn't even take real hits until after he's overwhelmed because he is such a martial superior against the rest of the Beggar Clan. Because his Posture was so high.

Ten Thousand Earth Shattering Blows

It worked great. Not to mention that it's a great reference to Sekiro, another huge inspiration to the games's intended fiction, which also had a Posture break. Now Staggered for half Posture or lower made sense: your guard is brittle! You court death! Now the Wide Open affliction felt more in genre: your guard is wide open, so you're suffering more!

The Physical Defense stat was renamed into PARRY, while the Magical Defense stat was kept as RESILIENCE (itself a reference to Final Fantasy Tactics A2!) The defenses were there to keep the mechanical bite of an Attack vs Defense interaction, to provide an avenue for another mechanical design space, as well as to shoe in the fact that when an attack targets your Parry you're physically blocking while an attack against your Resilience requires your fortitude and concentration to block against: when your Posture is reduced, when you guard is worn down by these attacks, you know how you were defending.

When enemies hit 0 POS, that attack is the one that gets through their Defenses and kills them outright. When a Kadungganan falls to 0 POS they're not dead, but they suffer a WOUND, which only heals on Downtime (as opposed to POS healing on Repose, ie., short rest).

On Defeat and Victory

While you're Defeated, you suffer the same effects of Stun, but you can still act and do things, even make attacks at full power: you're Kadungganan after all. But every attack against you, despite your PARRY or your RESILIENCE is not met with a stance ready to block. Thus, every instance of damage you suffer, no matter how much, inflicts another Wound. When you eat 5 Wounds, you can pull on your Conviction to stay alive. Otherwise, you are tossed back into the cycle of reincarnation, or into the river to Sulad, or to Lunar Heaven, or to whatever next life your Kadungganan has chosen to ascribe to.

Status Effects

Statuses such as Poisoned, Bleeding, or Aflame, don't break you yet because they must eat through your bodily resistance. But they are still real: an aflame Kadungganan fights on even as flames swathe their body.

They can die later, when they feel the effects of the burn when their POS falls to 0. They can die later, when the Poison finally seeps through and enervates them and destroys their defensive capability. They can die later, when the bleeding takes its toll and they can no longer keep their stance up.

Martial Glossolalia

With a simple terminology change, the fiction changed entirely. Now everyone knew it was their defenses wearing down. Swords didn't cut off their fingers, flames didn't burn through their skin. They know that defenses are a holistic thing: your stamina, your constitution, your composure, your reactive ability, your dexterity, your presence of mind, your focus.

"It's not realistic!" The game is not meant to be realistic, and realism is not an inherent ontological good nor is it a goal for most TTRPGs, you will notice. Experiences, feelings. The fiction Gubat Banwa draws upon--SEAsian Folk Epics, Asian Martial Arts Cinema--is filled to the brim with the CLANG CLANG CLANG of sword-on-sword action. Often these clangs happen so quickly that you cannot process them, they are abstracted to you when it resolves in your brain--so is it abstracted by Gubat Banwa. Posture going down is the CLANG CLANG CLANG that resonates across a fight scene. It's not realistic because it's not meant to be, and even then, we must argue what your conception of reality is!

I could be argued that much of Tabletop RPGs (and, I would argue, most of games in general) is an exercise of language. Exploiting its vagaries, its ability to connect. When you go into Gubat Banwa, learning the mechanics of the game is learning a new language. And what is language but the foundation of culture?

[neil-gaiman]

Honestly, the main reason I sent that ask is because I was up all night freezing in my own home, as you so eloquently put it, so I can get to winter only £400 in debt to the energy company instead of £500.

Unfortunately, I’m not a retired author. Like most people in my situation, I work full time.

So when you use quaint euphemisms like fed or comfortable to mean very wealthy it’s callously insulting.

I know what comfortable money is and if you were getting that from Netflix they’d be paying you less than a customer service supervisor.

Most of the authors who we support at the Authors League Fund don't consider themselves retired, even in their 70s and 80s. They can't afford to retire, and because an author's life is a precarious one, few of them have pensions or savings enough -- and those who do have savings often find that one medical emergency can wipe them out. They'd love to be writing if anyone would publish them, or be teaching, and almost all of them are working however they can to make whatever money they can. And the Fund helps them with the money to eat, to pay dental or medical bills, to get cars back on the road, to pay rent, or pay energy bills. So when I'm talking about copyright feeding authors, I'm not talking about me, specifically, I'm talking about most authors (only 2% of whom can support themselves through their writing alone, per the last statistics I saw, but it may have dropped since then). These aren't "quaint euphemisms". When I say "fed" and "comfortable" I'm talking about survival. (And yes, some of these authors are people you've heard of and whose books you probably love.)

Here's the Author's League Fund link -- please read the link on what we do and how it works, and donations are always very welcome:

And, yes, I'm an international best-selling author: I actually take a pay-cut to work on Good Omens, Anansi Boys and Sandman, because I'd be making vastly more writing new books, instead of showrunning. I'm an outlier in all this, and I'm not pretending I'm not. (I know it's not usual to be making things that have an affect on a whole country's economy, as in https://deadline.com/2022/06/screen-scotland-report-half-billion-dollars-scotland-economy-good-omens-1235051307/.)

But...

If I'd died in my late thirties, back when I wasn't an outlier, with three children under the age of 18, and all my copyrights and royalties had terminated at my death, my kids would have been watching the Sandman and Good Omens TV adaptations, or the Stardust movie, and seeing the books and comics on sale and wondering why it was fair that huge corporations were making enormous amounts of money on their dad's creations, and reprinting his books and comics, while they, too, were struggling to pay for food or heat.

All over the UK people are struggling to pay energy bills. It's obscene. In your part of the world I'm supporting local foodbanks, and several local school "breakfast clubs" and after school groups, because I can afford to and a tiny amount of food makes a huge difference to kids (and to the people who need the foodbank assistance). But I'm not seeing that the awfulness of UK energy policy would be improved by a shorter period of copyright, and if I didn't have the copyright and royalties on things I'd created over 30 years ago, I might not be in a position to help feed people.

Does that help?

[alpaca-clouds]

Why AI sucks so much

(And why it doesn't have to.)

AI sucks right now. Because it was never to be used, like it is used right now. Because the way AI is currently employed, it does the one thing, that was always meant to be human.

Look. AI has a ton of technological problems. I wrote about it before. Whenever you have some "AI Writer" or "AI Art", there is no intelligence there. There is only a probability algorithm that does some math. It is like the auto-complete on your phone, just a bit more complex, because it has been fed with basically the entire internet's worth of words and pictures. So, when the AI writes a story, it just knows that there is a high likelyhood that if it has been asked to write a fantasy story it might feature swords, magic and dragons. And then puts out a collection of words that is basically every fantasy story ever thrown into a blender. Same when it "draws". Why does it struggle so much with teeth and fingers? Well, because it just goes by likelihood. If it has drawn a finger, it knows there is a high likelihood that next to the finger is going to be another finger. So it draws one. Simple as that. Because it does not know, what a finger is. Only what it looks like.

And of course it does not fact check.

But all of that is not really the main problem. Because the main culture actually just is the general work culture, the capitalist economy and how we modelled it.

See, once upon a time there was this economist named Kaynes. And while he was a capitalist, he did in fact have quite a few good ideas and understood some things very well - like the fact that people are actually working better, if their basic needs have been taken care for. And he was very certain that in the future (he lived a hundred years ago) a lot of work could be done by automation, with the people still being paid for what the machines were doing. Hence having the people work for like 15 hours a week, but getting paid for a fulltime job - or even more.

And here is the thing: We could have that. Right now. Because we did in fact automate a lot of jobs and really a ton of jobs we have right now are just endless busywork. Instead of actually being productive, it only exists to keep up the appearance of productivity.

We already know that reducing the workdays to four a week or the workload to 30 or even 25 hours a week does not really decrease productivity. Especially with office jobs. Because the fact is that many, many jobs are not that much work and rather just involve people sitting in an office working like two hours a day and spending the rest with coffee kitchen talk or surfing the internet.

And there are tons of boring jobs we can already automate. I mean, with what I am working right now - analyzing surveying data - most I do is just put some parameters into an algorith and let the algorith do the work. While also part time training another algorithm, that basically automatically reads contracts to make notes what data a certain contract involves. (And contrary to what you might believe: No, it is not complicated. Especially those text analysis tasks are actually super simple to construct, once you get the hang of it.)

Which also means, that half of my workday usually is spend of just sitting here and watching a bar fill up. Especially with the surveying data, because it is large, large image files that at times take six to ten hours to process. And hint: Often I will end up letting the computer run over night to finish the task.

But that brings me to the question: What am I even doing here? Most of the time it takes like two hours to put the data in, run a small sample size for checking it and then letting it run afterwards. I do not need to be here for that. Yet, I do have to sit down for my seven and a half hours a day to collect my paycheck. And... It is kinda silly, right?

And of course there is the fact that we technically do have the technology to automate more and more menial tasks. Which would make a lot of sense, especially with the very dangerous kinda tasks, like within mining operations. Like, sure, that is a lot more work to automate, given that we would need robots that are actually able to navigate over all sorts of terrain, but... You know, it would probably save countless lives.

Same goes for many, many other areas. We could in fact automate a lot. Not everything (for example fruit picking is surprisingly hard to automate, it turns out), but a lot. Like a real lot.

And instead... they decided to automate art. One of the things that is the most human, because art for the most part depends on emotions and experience. Art is individual for the most part. It is formed by experience and reflection of the experience. And instead of seeing that, they decided to... create a probability generator for words and pixels.

So, why?

Well, first and foremost, because they (= the owner class) do want to keep us working. And with that I mean those menial, exhausting, mind-numbing jobs that we are forced to have right now. And they want us to keep working, because the more free time we have, the more time we have to organize and, well, rise up against the system, upon realizing how we are exploited. Work itself is used as a tool of oppression. Which is why, no matter how many studies show that the 30 hour week or 4 day week is actually good, that UBI actually helps people and what not, the companies are so against it. It is also why in some countries, like the US, the companies are so against paid sick leave, something that is scientifically speaking bonkers, because it actually harms the productivity of the company. And yes, it is also why still in the midth of a pandemic, we act as if everything is normal, because they found out that in the early pandemic under lock down and less people working, people actually fucking organized.

And that... also kinda is, why they hate art. Because art is something that is a reflection upon a world - and it can be an inspiration for people, something that gives them hope and something worth working towards to. So, artists are kinda dangerous. Hence something has to be done to keep them from working. In this case: Devaluing their work.

And no, I do not even think that the people programming those original algorithms were thinking this. They were not like "Yes, we need to do this to uphold the capitalist systems", nor do most of the AI bros, who are hyping it right now. But there are some people in there, who see it just like that. Who know the dangers of actual art and what it can mean for the system that keeps them powerful.

So, yeah... We could have some great stuff with AI and automation... If used in other areas.

I mean, just imagine what AIs could do under communism...

[hulahoopsoupgroup]

ive ranted about this to my friend like 3 times this week but ill rant again because im just so fed up and angry.

21st century american capitalism is so dismal. we put everything behind a paywall. you cant exist without paying money and you cant go anywhere or do anything without paying.

you have to pay to be born and you have to pay to survive. if you cant pay to survive, you have to pay to die. theres no escaping it.

most jobs in the usa require a college degree, but a lot of people cant afford to go to college. its honestly infuriating that people cant get the jobs they want because the education is so expensive. why do i have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the government so i can get a job that will probably only barely keep me afloat in todays economy?

why do we pay writers and artists so little when they are one of the most vital parts of society. where would we be without the painters and authors who create beautiful scenes and impactful stories?

weve overcomplicated society so much that you have to jump through so many financial hoops to just, exist. you have to have insurance for everything. everything costs so much. why do i have to pay over 2 dollars for a bottle of water at work? why are the bags of candy 5 dollars?

all of this just makes everyone miserable, no doubt. i had a conversation with 5 other people and all of us have had severe depression/anxiety, had to be medicated, or needed a lot of therapy/not been able to afford it. and im not stigmatizing therapy in any way. if i could afford it, i would absolutely go, but my job doesnt pay much, so even one session would set me back so far regarding money.

the fact that its so normal for 11-13 year olds to start experiencing severe depression is so concerning. its almost like a rite of passage. ask anyone in gen z if they were depressed in middle school and theyll probably say "yeah." thats concerning.

young people's suicide rates have risen over 50% in the past 10 years. 42% of gen z considered suicide in 2021-22. the fact that i know 3 or 4 people (myself included) who have attempted suicide before age 16 or 17 is insane.

we're so depressed about the future and reasonably so. its so bleak. the world is burning, people are killing each other over such trivial things, nobody listens to each other, and the government is just going insane. how badly do you have to screw up to make a 13 year old want to kill themself because they feel like the future is so bleak?

how badly do you have to screw up to prevent so many people from going to college and getting jobs to support themselves?

how badly do you have to screw up to bar people from something as simple as going to the doctor and earning a basic living wage?

and to think that there are still people who think this is fine. there are some people who sit back and say this all makes sense, that it makes sense that you have to pay thousands of dollars for a few stitches in your hand if you have a cooking accident, that you have to insure every last bit of your life, that people killing each other over ideological differences is natural and cant be helped.

america needs to wake the fuck up and get shit done. its destroying its own future. its making the future generation kill itself because of how miserable it is. fucking do better and maybe you wouldnt burn to the ground in a dumpster fire

[fantasyinvader]

I was watching a video on why Japanese media is so focused on youth, especially high school. The TLDR is that for the Japanese, high school is romanticized as their last experience with freedom before they enter adulthood. The last time they can just hang with their friends at their own leisure, back before they enter a career and the dreaded Japanese work environment. Rather than looking back at high school as a sucky place, it's viewed as something to long for afterwards resulting in a lot of media romanticizing it in order to cash in on the appeal.

But this just ignores the fact that Japan is a meritocracy, and even during high school there's focus on studying in order to get into a good school, because getting into a good school can result in getting a good job and enjoying financial success. But that's not really the case of what's going on in Japan, as those high paying positions are already filled by people who got to them first. Likewise, in companies people are expected to work not for their own sake but the sake of the company, which can be abused in people required to work unpaid overtime, go to afterhours parties, hell people are criticized for being the first person to leave at the end of their shift while others are doing that unpaid overtime in order to look good. People are meant to follow their elders/superiors, even if those leaders have made mistakes and problems worse, because that's how Japan follows tradition. It's led to problems like Japan's missing generation, how the Japanese economy burst in the late 80's and still really hasn't recovered, and the infamous black companies.

In terms of anime and manga, people just want to escape from modern Japanese society. Not just in using stories set in a high school as a form of escapism, but isekai stories or stuff like Zom 100 where Japanese society collapses and rather than viewing it as hell the protagonists view it as a means to be free and pursue the dreams they've given up on. Or you get slow life stories about people moving from the city to a more relaxing life in the country, as well as all manner of power fantasies where you can just brute force the world into making sense.

In modern Japanese, the word hadou is used to refer to bosses who abuse their power. And at the same time, the devs of Houses believed that people would focus more on the school section of the story. And this got me thinking.

Think about it like this, Edelgard is supposed to represent hadou. She talks a lot about merit, and like a significant proportion of Japanese society doesn't believe in social safety nets. The Japanese text has her state that she's going to put the world back to the way it was, a return to tradition. Likewise, like Japanese society she also believes that change has to come from the top, namely her remaking society the way she believes it should be run. She's also an Imperialist who has been fed historical revisionism, which she never questions despite knowing her real source and their intentions.

Edelgard represents the worst aspects of Japanese society.

Now, go back to that romanticization of the high school experience and how the devs thought people would focus more on the Academy portion of the game. Time passing is a motif of the game, with the Japanese name for the game invoking the passage of the seasons. Time is always going forward (minus the odd divine pulse), it waits for no man and once passed you can't go back. Mechanically, we get the game's calendar system limiting how much grinding we can do in contrast to past FE games with grinding. The story isn't going to stop just because you want to grind EXP or supports. And with the passage of time comes maturity.

Going back to what the devs have said, Edelgard being a villain is meant to be a twist. Supporting her means cementing Fodlan as a meritocracy, a place where people are expected to look after themselves and not rely on others according to her solo ending which shows that her big speech against Rhea was just BS. She'll even admit to walking the path of hadou up until that point, and despite her words that's not longer the case her victory is still supposed to lead to hadou. All this happens because when her mask came off and she was revealed as the Flame Emperor, the player didn't see her for what she was. They saw her as the romanticized school girl she had pretended to be up until that point.

Supporting the system that is most like Japanese society leads to tyranny.

The flipside is oudou. Dimitri's ending was written in direct opposition to Edelgard's and is seen as radical in Japan. Rather than consolidating power on himself, he gives it to the masses so that societal change comes from them, all while he also works to support those in need rather than leaving them to fend for themselves. It's also present in Claude's ending, as he makes a point to bring up stopping Edelgard's hadou. His route sees him mature, realize he was wrong about things, and as a result changes his stance. He also opens up, working with others to accomplish his goals while also realizing that simply erasing lines won't bring people together. His ending sees Fodlan reset and rebuilt in contrast to Edelgard's restoration of the Empire. Finally, it's also present in SS (through the Japanese name for the Sword of the Creator invoking Heaven's Mandate) where Byleth and the Black Eagles don't side with Edelgard after all she's done. Doing the right thing is not always easy, and SS is meant to be the hardest route simply because it means fighting someone that you may been close with. But the alternative is just blindly following your house leader, whose route repeatedly makes her out to be a liar manipulating others for her own gain and again it leads to tyranny. Instead, Byleth takes over as the leader of the Church and their former students.

SS, AM and VW are all supposed to lead to better societies. Lessons that could lead to better a Japan, all tied to the idea of growing up into being a responsible adult rather than expecting the person on top to magically solve everything. If anything, it makes this obsession with the freedom of youth and high school Japan out to be an issue holding it back. Japanese society has plenty of problems and whatever your poison escapism isn't going to solve them. People stepping up and taking control of their own lives rather than just having blind faith in their leaders, supporting and empowering each other rather than believing that people only get what they earn, adopting new points of view rather than regressing to tradition, even taking in the perspective of outsiders, all of those things can help make things better. This longing for high school, conversely, only leads to how Hideaki Anno once described Japan: A nation of children.

And, really, the fact people make up elaborate headcanons in order to say Edelgard is the real hero despite what the game's creators say? That's just people revealing how childish they really are. After all, Houses had a CERO rating of B, rated ages 12 and up. This game is something that is supposed to be understood by middle-schoolers, yet some folks can't accept that their favorite is a villain who does bad things

[fenmere]

Kepekape, the home world of the Ktletaccete

(this was originally posted in a world building facebook group, but we think you might love reading about it here, too - and have feedback) OK, so. We're working on some world building that's a bit of a challenge for us.

It needs to fit some history we've already written into a series of nine novels. And it needs to serve the story we think we want to write.

We're going to ramble at you here and see if anyone likes our ideas, or has any suggestions or brainstorming to add. But also, we just want a place to write some of this down where someone can read it.

What we've got:

A fairly Earth-like world with life based on two kinds of XNA (it's not compatible with DNA, but works similarly to it). At some point in its past, there was alien contact with life that eventually evolved to be reasonably compatible with the indigenous life. So there are some surprising mixes of lifeforms.

There's been a lot of parallel evolution, so if humans were to visit, they'd see some understandable fundamentals, like vertebrates, arthropods, fish, etc.

The people are evolved from an amphibian-like ambush predator turned omnivorous. They still lay eggs and have a larval form (that looks a lot like a tadpole while still in the egg), and nymph form and adult forms after they hatch. When they reach adolescence, they go through a metamorphosis that is highly adaptable for their environment. To the point where they often look like multiple completely different species as adults.

Now that they've developed a civilization capable of creating a generational starship, their adolescent metamorphosis has become something they can sort of personally control, and neighboring children may grow up to be very different from each other. Personal special interests, economic status, gender roles, family dynamics, and all sorts of other factors of modern stress go into shaping their bodies. And medicine has reached a point where those that can afford it can purposefully induce desired traits.

Also, they're what we think of as hermaphroditic. They can change their functional sex at will, or sometimes the change is induced by stress. Occasionally, someone will end up with one set of dominant sex traits at adolescence and never change after that, even if they want to, but it's rare.

Their family structures are really different from humans, too. But we haven't quite nailed down HOW, yet. We just know that they're not what we think of as nuclear families. Child rearing is very different and fairly hands off. Adults make sure children are fed, but teaching and learning happens much more organically and communally. At least, for most of the countries on the planet. There are, of course, some outlying cultures that have different structures.

Something we want is no capitalism, in the strictest sense of the term, if we can get away with it. Basically, nothing like a stock market.

There are still big social and economic divides, including forms of exploitation. There is, after all, a global government at this point that has the power to focus a great deal of the planet's resources into making a truly huge spaceship for SOME reason. And not everyone is going to agree to that.

So, first big set of questions:

Do we go with some form of communism for the dominant economic structure?

Or is it really a dichotomy like that?

Could there be other forms of major economy besides these two axes that humans have been struggling with for the past couple hundred years?

There are fascism and dictatorship, of course, both of which can use either communism or capitalism for their economic structures. And certainly, there have been that kind of government on this planet, and likely still are. But we kind of want the dominant government to at least SEEM more egalitarian.

These people tend to highly value personal expression and the exploration of skills and arts, almost above all else. It's sort of an instinctual level drive. So whatever social structures they create, they'll at least cater to that drive, if not outright exploit it.

Cooperation and community are obviously important. Partly because we're limited enough that we can't imagine a starship building civilization without it. But also because we LIKE those traits.

One idea that comes to mind is to have an economy that is built on gifting. Where the person who gives the most away gets the most social power. This is not an original thought, though, and is based on what we learned about Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures in college, so we're feeling a little cautious about that (both because we learned it from anthropologists not the people who've practiced it and because it's not our own culture).

Our goal is to show something that is different and alien SEEMING to most people who've grown up under capitalism or communism, to show that other models can be viable. But we're also very definitely showing that even when you're talking about aliens and other models of social structures, there can be major flaws such as exploitation and oppression.

But, we don't want to say, "See this idea here? This is worse than what we've got now."

We do think the rest of the series of novels does put it into a context that avoids that. But we're hesitant to use a model that's too close to something that's been oppressed here on Earth.

Anyway.

Maybe we could personalize it a bit more? Not gifts, so much as discoveries? The more that someone discovers, the more political, social, and economic power they're awarded?

So, you end up with a whole civilization of people who are trying to one up each other in their respective fields of study and craft.

Now.

Does this society need money?

It could certainly work by using something that is basically money. A note of genius, so to speak. But could it work without it?

Because money does seem to lend itself to stock markets, after all. And if we avoid money, then we avoid the stock market. Maybe we can lampshade it and just say there's no money, that's the way it is, and make it work regardless.

Though, we could just as easily say that there's money but no stock market.

Maybe the idea of a stock market is absolutely repugnant to these people. Basically, "You can't gamble with SCIENCE! And investing introduces bias!"

Hailing Scales. This implies their global government resembles the editorial review board of a scientific journal.

What think you?

[msfbgraves]

Is it me or is the enshittification machine working very fast these days? You used to get years out of a service before they fucked it up too much to be of use to anyone but the shareholders. Now, they barely can build alternative services fast enough before big money comes in and renders any service or product functionally unusable. I'm feeling myself move further and further away from mainstream anything purely because I'm a snob that likes things to be, well, not utter crap. And increasingly, that means you have to make and own everything yourself again, or at least be part of the avant garde of whatever interests you, before the mainstream invariably fucks it up. I had not the slighest interest in learning how to program a computer but I'll have to know, now, to get all the crapware off my pc. I pirate because my smart tv will no longer update. I lament my non existent fine motor skills more and more each day because I cannot fix terribly made clothes. I ditch subscriptions because they only get more expensive and worse over time. I pay for upgrades on public transport because the economy version has become functionally unusable with my level of disability - and I have not declined as hard as their level of service.

I went to an amusement park I've been to since I was a toddler and got sensory overload, not because any of the rides - they were virtually unchanged - because on every corner, some stall was blaring at me to buy an overpriced trinket. Again, the things in there built to provide you with amusement had not increased. There were no more places to catch your breath.

I mean, I am "voting with my feet", I already am refusing to pay for bad quality but there are no socially approved alternatives.

And sure, that leads to some original experiences. But most of the time it has meant going backwards, using older things that were made to last, or simply refusing to opt in to new technology and I feel that this is the best way of going completely out of touch. The only thing that consoles me about that is that people who work in cybersecurity are completely offline in their own homes. So here I am using pirating and paywall hacks and cooking from scratch and making my own bath oil and taking my nieces to the beach without music because I can't stand the noise and thrift shopping and reviving ten year old machines and finding trials for Spotify to get out of the frickin price hikes and paying for organic food because that is the only way to get some actual nutrition out of supermarket food and somehow failing to see this all as progress.

And now we even have to keep the Republicans out of Ao3. All the while knowing I fed that AI beast.

I'm not even outraged, just annoyed. It's so much effort that somehow wasn't in 2012. I can't think of a single thing that we have now and didn't have then that I couldn't do without gladly - except some music and movies, and using your creditcard to get into the bus.

[acgames]

Political rant incoming, so I am putting it under "read more"

Lately I have been sucked into wormhole of American politics, with whole Trump assassination attempt and Kamala being put as still non-official democrat candidate after Biden pulled out, y'know same old, but I also cannot help but notice how these events made some americans finally snap and pull off the "perfect america" veil off their lives and just show gritty and shitty reality online: delusional democrats, drug pandemic, housing crisis, economical collapse, their healthcare system being corrupt to hell and such and as Eastern European I am actually kinda disturbed by all this shit and while I could draw comparisons between americans and people in post-USSR countries, I won't. Not this time.

I had spoken few times already that I hate libtard democrats, because most insane ones really turned the whole american left movement into insane tiktok zombies. Still I bet some democrats with not dead IQ exist who want their country to return to normalcy without woke agenda, and without new generation of citizens having mouth foaming epilepsy-like induced shock everytime they hear Trump's name, but they also can't admit they are afraid, because how wokeness cult works.

Also as European from east, with Russia's aggressive acts and constant gaslighting due to Ukraine conflict in our region, I should care who is at the helm of one of the most powerful countries around the world, because, agree or not, European Union specialises in following command of USA and if Biden administration decides to give billions to Zelensky to steal for Ukraininian rich and his own personal needs, oops my bad, I mean to buy weapons to fight for freedom against evil Russia. Have you ever questioned why exactly everyone gives billions to Ukraine to fight for freedom, but not a dime for Palestine? Political gain and corruption is your answer, because on Gaza conflict, Biden administration already have ball on winning side, while in Ukraine conflict they don't - that's why your American Billions are filling pockets of neoN*zi skum like that Ukrainian dwarf.

Returning to USA politics and my rant you probs think I am a Republican Trump supporter, but no I am not, the thing is, I prefer the man who is not yet a senile puddle with human goo in place of brains or his VP who changes her racial background from Indian to African-American once it's convenient for plot and can't make a single sentence make sense.

I don't know: I would like to ask my fellow americans what good Biden administration did for you people over 4 years, well apart allowing to drug and castrate underage kids just because they parents are narcissists with Munchauzen's by proxy and setting apart POC and white communities than ever before pushing whole country to next civil war? Did Biden administration fix your country's inner problems, like rotten healthcare system? Did they do something for your declining economy? Did they attempt to regulate housing crisis? I haven't seen any americans talk about that at least being attempted to be fixed online.

But yeah sure, what do I know? I am from Eastern Europe, my parents were born in USSR, my grandparents saw horrors of WW2 and N*zi occupation and my great-grandparents lived fearing banishment to Siberia at hands of Lenin Communist Party. Maybe that's why we value what we have: our lands, our language and our culture, even so it's slowly being americanized here too. The saving grace is that some of us have been through heaps of generational shit and we are too fed up with weakness and fluffyness american wokeness are trying to imply on us, and as ex-woke myself, I say good riddance. We do not need to exist in a fluffy self-centered "Me, me, me" bubble: we need to exist in gritty reality, so we could try to fix it for better.

Or maybe I am just getting too old and I have no more fucks left to give in being polite and politically correct so not to offend the snowflakes... Because God sees me, being woke is leading us straight to dystopian future, Biden administration and every of their cult followers are trying to desperately paint as perfect utopia.

[c0ck-slapper]

Despite your rough exterior, you had one weakness - Stella and Thunderbolt Murderface.

Your grandmother wasn't always the woman stuck in a mobility scooter or your grandpa the old husk he was now. Your grandpa has Native ancestry and made sure you connected to it - he took you fishing, exploring, hunting. It's how your fascination with weaponry started.

Your first gun was his old rifle he used, an old antique you took the most care with in your collection of weaponry and torture devices. You had your first hunt with him and took out a large buck - the pride on his face when you brought it home and Stella's face as she saw all the venison she could cook with made you thrist for more.

Stella was a brilliant cook and even better teacher. She made sure you were clean, tidy, cared for. On the outside, it was an older couple taking care of their grandchild, and doing a good job of it too. But you can't help but hate the people they became in their old age, holding on to old people values and expecting everyone to be cookie cutter versions of an era that has long since passed.

That included you. Calling and sending money, making sure they were cared for and fed, helping with their medical needs - if you weren't richer than most world economies you would have been bankrupt after your first album. All because she expected that her only surviving descendant take care of her and her husband.

Your closet door is open and immediately the first thing you do is bolt. Bad enough she found you, but by the sounds of her scooter revving up she began chasing you.

If you were lucky you might find a new place to hide before she caught up. But your not the most fit, not like Nathan was with his hulking body, or like Pickles with his powerful legs. You lacked basic restraint around food andhad no self care like Skwisgaar and you definitely didn't have a body built like Toki. (Now that you think about it, has the rhythm guitarist ever exercised?)

"William, why don't you answer me? WILLIAM!"

You scramble to leave her sight around a corner, but she catches up to you as you try to catch your breath and she uses her purse filled with god-knows-what to smack you in the back. You think you hear Toki make a run for it from the closet you both were tucked away with, but the sound of the scooter whirring and groaning to a stop as she readjusted herself made it hard to find out.

"How dare you run from me!"

"Ow! Schit, why-! OW!" She smacks you again this time for cursing, and it takes every cell in your body to keep your mouth shut. Besides, Stella didn't raise no bitch, so you took it like a man and bit your tongue.

"You stupid boy! I was worried sick and here you are trying to run from me!" She pulls up on her scooter, and takes you into her arms in a heavy embrace. Fleeting as it was, the warm tightness gave you comfort and she always made sure no one saw you get hugged by her. She had a weird thing about public displays, which made it all the more easier for you to keep up appearances.

You are William Murderface, the most brutal and bestest bassist alive (according to drunk Skwisgaar, who behemently denied ever saying it the one time you and him recorded some tracks while he was shitfaced).

"And none of that 'Planet Piss' work! You could at least pick up the phone!" She grabs you again in a tight embrace, and for a second you think perhaps maybe she is worried.

"At least do it for your grandpa? You could do with some bonding time..." You did not want to tell her that she must be senile because the man she kept alive through sheer force of will was just a husk at that point, but you bit your tongue.

Talking back was always a hard smack, and she didn't raise no hooligan.

"... and think about how stressed we all are! We can't keep hounding our boys ..." Oh God, she was talking about the other moms now - and once she started, she never shut up.

Murderface stares back at his grandma, unsure of what to say. Its been a while seen he had seen his grandmother in this kind of state.

He feels a small pang of guilt and looks down at his feet, unable to muster up anything.

"Grandma..."

He takes one deep breath.

"Im schorry."

[workersolidarity]

Something about the Liberal mind is broken by Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Trump.

Trump is right when he says we need to bring this war to an end. It's not about winning or losing, it's about bringing an end to the bloodshed.

Something Liberals and their Neocon allies don't seem to be able to comprehend: you get rid of Putin, and you're virtually certain to bring a bigger hardliner to power on Ukraine and NATO than Putin ever was.

Has anyone been listening to some of the shit Medvedev has been saying??? About Nukes?

The idea that Liberals would think it's okay to try to take out Putin and this is somehow magically going to mean a Ukrainian victory marching into Crimea.

It's a complete fucking fantasy!

What you're more likely to get is the rise to power of a Medvedev, chomping at the bit to let loose the Russian military on NATO assets they know are just sitting on the other side of the border with Ukraine in Poland.

I mean, let's be clear. When we're talking about overthrowing Putin, we're talking about the unleashing of what will likely be a series of events that lead straight to WWIII and Nuclear Holocaust.

And some of the people openly discussing these kind of ideas, ideas we know will lead to disaster, are people with major influence in the halls of power. People in organizations like the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institute, all openly calling for the US to do MORE for Ukraine, and NOT to find a way to end the bloodshed.

These people are quick to call you a Putin apologist, a Russian puppet, all these cliché gotcha names that allow Liberals and other supporters of the Ukraine Proxy-war to completely ignore facts about the war and dismiss any news they don't like (such as pointing out the very obvious heavy losses Ukraine is sustaining, and their inability to continue to suffer losses at these rates for much longer) as Putin's propaganda.

While these internet "soldiers" enjoy the moral high ground (or so they imagine) online, and truly the largely Western online audiences applaud them and cheer them on, rewarding them with likes and shares and pats on the back.(Good work!)

Meanwhile Ukraine is suffering unimaginable loss: hundreds upon hundreds of casualties every day, expending far more manpower and ammunition than is capable of being replaced by Ukraine and the West. And the Ukrainian economy is barely treading water despite Billions in Western aid, the US even going so far as to fully fund Ukraine's Public Pension system. (Even while our own citizens remain homeless by the tens of thousands and most Americans are struggling without the benefit of a public pension system.)

But point any of this out, easily provable information if you're willing to spend a little while sifting through the propaganda... and you're a Putin puppet, because apparently Americans cannot think beyond the Democrat talking points being spoon-fed to them on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and in the pages of the NY Times and Washington Post.

What exactly are all these Liberals and Neocons going to do when Trump wins the election and Ukraine collapses??? I mean, this is looking more and more likely to happen in less than two years.

I mean, how do you reckon with all the Russiagate garbage, the censorship, the Jan 6th obsession, the lies to make it look like Ukraine ever had even the slimmest of chances against the Russian Federation, the absolutely UNBELIEVABLE turnaround in the media on the existence of Nazi paramilitary forces in Ukraine, all the fake investigations and nonsense around Trump over the last too many years, as though any of it was going to stop him from running for, and winning, the next Presidential election, it's all going to collapse like a ton of bricks in their faces.

But the saddest part of it all is that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians will have to die because of the sheer HUBRIS of Liberals and Neocons in the US and Europe.

And THAT is a War Crime that should always be remembered.

[dr-mechano]

The time IDW Sonic missed the mark with Eggman

You know, many critics of the IDW Sonic comic will cite characters acting inconsistent with their game counterparts as a point of contention with the series. And while I think the comic is generally fine about this, I do think there’s one arc where this criticism is fair: The Metal Virus saga.

The problem with these “Zombots” is that they’re incapable of any sort of complex thinking or personality. They’re - true to their name - mindless robot zombies.

Now here’s what I know about Eggman: He likes attention. He wants not just power, but also glory. We see time and time again that he wants to be revered by the people he conquers:

He wants to go down in history as the ultimate genius - to be remembered and respected. And that’s something that a planet of zombified staggering idiots could never properly give him. The entire idea of the zombots - of SatAM-style roboticization in general - is so thoroughly antithetical to Eggman’s modus operandi.

He needs living citizens of his Empire to behold his genius, to praise his very existence, to worship their almighty emperor day and night. This is what separates Eggman from his lesser derivatives, like SatAM’s Julian, who was content to rule over a lifeless junkyard (and rarely ever left his chair, unlike his far more proactive video game counterpart).

I like a lot of the stories before and after Metal Virus, mind you. Eggman beating the shit out of Starline was awesome. Eggman tossing Surge around was awesome. “Dr. Eggman’s Birthday” from the 30th anniversary special, which shows him caring about his Badniks, was cute and awesome. So I don’t dislike IDW by any means, but I do think I ought to be fair and not act as though it’s done no wrong by Eggman’s character.

I think Sonic Prime - while not perfect either - has a far better depiction of what a society ruled by Eggman should look like. Living citizens being fed constant propaganda about how great and amazing their fearless leader is. Being encouraged to “be a good egg” by cooperating with his rule. Reserving total roboticization (as in the case of Rusty Rose) for special cases - though it should be noted that even Rusty still seems to retain some personality and dry wit, so she’s not utterly mindless or feral like the Zombots or SatAM’s roboticized citizens were.

There’s also Forces, which unfortunately didn’t really show us much of society. But we also know people weren’t forcibly turned into robots there either. Sonic comments that people are forced to “work like robots” in Eggman’s factories, but we can surmise from that they’re still very much organic. ...Plus, they must be getting paid (even if it’s a paltry sum) for their hard labor, since gambling still exists (see Casino Forest) and therefore money and an economy must logically still exist as well.

There is the mind-control ray from Colors, but we really didn’t get a long enough look at how that worked to gleam much from it. Could Tails still think under its control, even if he was brainwashed into being loyal to Eggman? Or was he essentially reduced to something similar to the Zombots? I think the former is a lot more interesting, but I’ll admit we don’t have enough to go on.

...Unless we bring in that other time Eggman used mind control: Sonic Pinball Party. And what do you know, in that game, Sonic’s brainwashed friends could still talk and still had personalities - they were just made to be loyal to Eggman.

I think it makes the most sense to presume that the mind-control beam from Colors would have worked similarly. Either way, removing peoples’ free will isn’t unlike Eggman - removing their personality and capacity to properly appreciate him is. That’s the nuance here that I think the Metal Virus arc didn’t quite get right.

At this point, I’m rambling. But the bottom line is: Yes, Eggman would be a pretty awful dictator to live under, but he’d still want most of his populace alive and capable of revering him. Turning all his subjects into an unthinking horde of zombies would never satisfy Eggman’s ego the same way ruling over actual thinking beings would. I don’t think IDW Sonic is bad overall by any means, but this is one story where I don’t think they quite got Eggman.

[nicklloydnow]

“It’s easy for us to forget that it oftentimes goes on behind the scenes. But we have been in a very distorted economy, and we are in very distorted markets that have been manipulated by central banks. I have a strong opinion I’ve been expressing for a very long time that the Federal Reserve — and really, global central banks in general — will never be able to back out of what they’ve done over the past 15 years. They’ve gotten us in a place now where there’s no turning back. I have this metaphor I think is perfect, of forest fires and interventions in suppressing wildfires. Wildfires are an important, healthy part of the natural turnover in a forest ecosystem. They are essential. And forest rangers suppress them, thinking that a wildfire is bad. Well, when you suppress it enough, it gets to a point where you can no longer afford to have any fires burn because they would be too big and too intense. And that’s kind of where we are: Previously, recessions or crashes in the markets were a healthy thing, a healthy, natural turnover in our market ecosystem. But now, things have gone so far that I feel like if the Fed were just to sort of give up on what they’re doing and try to let things go back to normal, there’s this real risk that now the fire destroys the entire forest, the entire ecosystem.

I think the Fed can never truly let fires burn again, even though the last year of raising rates was something like a controlled burn. But there’s a limit to how much you can do that when you’re in this sort of tinderbox. I think they’re going to have to do an about-face and begin suppressing again. Right now, they are spinning the story that they’re going to be hawkish and that they care about inflation, but they’re not going to have that luxury when the fire starts burning out of control. So much of this is the Fed just trying to talk its way out of this, but I think they all realize, and we should all realize, that there’s no real good end to any of this.

(…)

I’m of the opinion that had they done far less than they did in 2008 and ’09, we would be in a better place today. I feel very strongly about that. Yes, there would have been bankruptcies, but bankruptcies are important. Bankruptcy and failure are really the key part of capitalism, what makes it work. And, you know, in many ways we’ve taken away that sort of homeostatic function of capitalism and markets. But it’s not going to be gone; you’re just going to see it impose itself later. That’s really what these terrible crashes are.

(…)

We are in the greatest credit bubble of human history. That’s the real problem. It’s entirely because of artificially low interest rates, artificial liquidity in the economy that has really happened in a big way since the great financial crisis. And credit bubbles end. They pop. There’s no way to stop them from popping. Debts need to get paid or they end in default. And of course, the debt burden today is at a level that cannot be repaid. You can just look at total debt as a function of the economy; it’s never been greater. I don’t think there’s really any way to objectively argue against these points. So it’s the greatest credit-market bubble we’ve ever seen. I have no confidence in how it’s going to end or when. I think we’re going to see very, very low interest rates again in the next year or two. Yes, we’re seeing a spike in rates right now. I’m of a strong opinion that they’re going to have to go back down again when we see another crisis that’s pretty much inevitable.

(…)

This is the most dangerous time in the markets ever. It has nothing to do with what’s going on in the Middle East, though. It has everything to do with what’s going on in Washington, D.C. The Fed has created a tinderbox time bomb and the greatest credit bubble in human history. And I do not think anybody would disagree with what I just said. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be long on the market; it doesn’t mean everybody should be bearish. I would argue that 20 years from now, risk assets — let’s say the S&P 500 — will be higher. If I can do only one trade right now, one 20-year trade, maybe it would be to buy something like the S&P. Investors are probably gonna beat all hedge funds on a 20-year horizon just by buying the S&P — in fact, I can almost guarantee they will. Maybe I buy Berkshire Hathaway if I could own only one stock. I sure as hell wouldn’t be short if I could do only one trade over a 20-year time frame.

(…)

The good news is the economy is growing. That’s good news. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Almost all the good news with historic Fed intervention or monetary interventionism behind it is a Pyrrhic victory. You take a victory now for suffering later. That’s exactly what monetary interventionism does: It’s giving you something now, and you have to pay for it with a lot of interest later. And of course, that’s what federal debt is too — it’s our grandchildren’s problem.

(…)

That’s the unfair thing. I would never have gotten us into this situation in the first place, so don’t ask me to fix it. I have no idea. I’m sorry, I’m just being honest. Look, the only way to get us out of this is to tear the Band-Aid off. You know, it’s cold turkey. But of course, that’s a big, big problem, and I do not think we have the societal temperament for that. So who knows? Who the hell knows? I wish I could give you something, but I can’t give anything. And I don’t think there is anything, frankly. I think it’s a moot point anyway because they’re just going to have to do more and more and more. Powell has been talking a big game the past year or so, but it’s all a big bluff.”

“America’s welfare state way of life is based on the notion that, since the capitalist state redistributes massive amounts of income and wealth upwards from producers to rentiers as profit, rent, and interest, compensatory state action — namely, returning a tiny fraction of that income to the neediest — is necessary to preventing capitalism from collapsing from social disorder or insufficient aggregate demand.

(…)

Ironically, no one understands the need for a powerful interventionist regulatory and welfare state better than capitalists. And nothing would destroy capitalism faster than right-libertarians who, if given free rein, would balance the federal budget, pay off the debt, and eliminate the welfare state.

(…)

The smarter capitalists, similarly, support a welfare state for two main reasons. First, the capitalist state’s upward distribution of income in the form of economic rents creates a maldistribution of purchasing power, which in turn results in chronic tendencies toward underconsumption and idle production capacity — tendencies which periodically almost destroyed capitalism (most notably in the Great Depression of the 1930s). Redistributing a small portion of this income to at least the poorest part of the population, and otherwise bolstering aggregate demand, is necessary in order to prevent depression.

Second, if the worst forms of destitution are not addressed, starvation and homelessness will reach levels that threaten political radicalization, disorder, and violence.

(…)

If anything destroys the average person’s faith in freedom, it is the pretense of people like Hornberger that the capitalist system they defend is the product of freedom rather than of massive state violence, and the association in the popular mind of the language of “freedom” with the system they experience daily as a boot on their neck.”

[mariacallous]

Wearing a baseball cap and thick, black-rimmed glasses, Cameron Chell is part defense contractor, part tech executive. His company, Draganfly, used to mainly work with emergency services in North America, selling drones and the accompanying software that could deliver medical equipment, or film traffic accidents from above. But since last February, the Canadian has pivoted his business to cater to a market more than 8,000 miles away: Ukraine.

Now, there are 40 Draganfly drones in Ukraine, repurposed for search-and-rescue missions in bombed-out buildings, landmine detection, and other military tasks that Chell declines to detail. The company has demonstrated its tech to the Ukrainian Air Force, the Ministry of Defence, as well as President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s fundraising initiative, United24. “There isn't a branch of the government we haven’t worked with or interacted with in some way.” Sometimes he gets texts from Ukrainian contacts, saying a friend of a friend needs a drone for their unit, can he help? Draganfly obliges, of course, for a discounted fee.

Since Russia invaded, military aid has been flowing into Ukraine. The US has committed $39 billion since the war started, the UK $37.3 billion, and the EU $12 billion. Chell and his company are part of a scramble of international tech companies rushing into the country to try and benefit. Business has been so good, he’s set up a field office in Ukraine with four full-time employees. But Draganfly is operating in Ukraine not just to support the cause or to collect the cash. It’s also come for the data.

The war in Ukraine presents an unprecedented opportunity for military tech companies. The scale of the fighting and the sheer number of weapons systems and high-tech sensors deployed have created a vast amount of data about how battles are fought and how people and machines behave under fire. For businesses that want to build the next generation of weapons, or train systems that will be useful in future conflicts, that is a resource of incalculable value.

“Everybody could have the same AI engine. The only differentiator now is how good are the data inputs that you have,” says Chell. “Making sure that it's your sensors collecting that data, and feeding it into your software, is absolutely important. It’s more important than ever to be present.”

There is an old, much derided, cliché that data is the “new oil”—not only because of its cash value, but because of how it will fuel so much of the future economy. Just as large language models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are trained on hundreds of billions of words, AI products in the defense world also have to be fed vast amounts of data. A company selling drones that can autonomously identify tanks, for example, needs to train its software on huge numbers of images: tanks covered in camouflage, tanks obscured by bushes, tanks deep in mud. It needs to be able to recognize the difference between a military tank and a civilian tractor, as well as what type of tank it’s looking at, so it knows friend from foe. For a company like Draganfly, which is selling drones with landmine-detection software, staff need to train their AI on thousands of images, so their system can tell the difference between a rock formation and a modern mine.

“Ukraine is the only place in the world where you can get that data at the moment,” says Ingvild Bode, associate professor at the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.

Draganfly is far from the only company to have noticed the potential of Ukraine to gather data. Chell is among a wave of international AI executives traveling to and from the conflict to test and train their products. German AI company Helsing says it has staff regularly traveling to the country. Data analytics company Palantir has opened an office in Kyiv and is offering its services pro bono. “You have to ask yourself, why are they doing that?” says Bode. “There are a number of reasons, and the value of the data will absolutely be one of them.”

Some international companies working in the conflict zone are using their experiences in Ukraine to refine the products they are selling back home. Seattle-based BRINC has designed “Lemur” drones, which are designed to be able to break through windows to access buildings. In the US, they’ve been marketed to police to use in active shooter scenarios. But in Ukraine, they’re being used to help search for survivors after missile attacks, according to the company’s founder, Blake Resnick. The company recently released its Lemur 2 model, which “does utilize some feedback that we've gotten from Ukraine,” he says. The new model can make floor plans of a building as it flies around and can maintain its position in the air, even when the pilot takes their hands off the controller. These ideas might have grown out of BRINC’s work in Ukraine, but according to the company’s YouTube advert, they’re now being marketed to police forces back in the US.

The “data is the new oil” cliché might illustrate data’s value. But it also speaks to the way data can be extracted from a country without benefiting the people who live there. In the first year after the invasion, Ukraine was so welcoming to American tech companies that even startups whose pitches had been rejected at home by the Pentagon got the green light to be trialed by Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines. But that warm welcome is starting to chill, as Ukrainian government officials recognize how valuable their battlefield data would be if it remained in Ukrainian hands.

“You can’t even imagine how many foreign companies are already using Ukraine as a testing ground for their products: AI companies like Clearview, Palantir; anti-jamming systems; everything that has a software component is in Ukraine right now,” says Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine's deputy minister for digital transformation.

Ukraine is very aware of the value of its data, Bornyakov says, cautioning that companies shouldn’t expect to arrive in the country and get access to data for nothing. “This experience we’re in right now—how to manage troops, how to manage them smarter and automatically—nobody has that,” he says. “This data certainly is not for sale. It’s only available if you offer some sort of mutually beneficial cooperation.”

Instead, Ukraine wants to use the data that’s being gathered for its own defense sector. “After the war has finished, Ukraine companies will go to the market and offer solutions that probably nobody else has,” Bornyakov says.

Over the past few months, Ukraine has been talking up its ambitions to leverage its battlefield innovations to build a military-tech industry of its own.

“We want to build a very strong defense tech industry,” says Nataliia Kushnerska, project lead for Brave1, a Ukrainian state platform designed to make it easier for defense-tech companies to pitch their products to the military. The country still wants to partner and cooperate with international companies, she says, but there is a growing emphasis on homegrown solutions.

Building a domestic industry would help protect the country from future Russian aggression, Kushnerska says. And Ukrainians have a better understanding of the dynamics of the battlefield than their international counterparts. “Technologies that cost a huge amount of money, made in [overseas] laboratories, are coming to the front line, and they're not working,” she says.

Brave1—which was exclusively open to Ukrainian companies for its first two months of existence—is not the country’s only attempt to build a homegrown industry. Kushnerska describes secret tech conferences, attended by Ukrainian tech executives and Ministry of Defense officials, where discussions can take place about what the militaries need and how companies can help. In May, Ukraine’s parliament voted through a series of tax breaks for drone makers, in an attempt to encourage the industry. Those government efforts, combined with the huge demand for drones and the motivation to win the war, is creating entire new industries, says Bornyakov. He claims the country now has more than 300 companies making drones.

One of those 300 companies is AeroDrone, which started out as a crop-spraying system based in Germany. By the time of the full-scale invasion, the company’s Ukrainian founder, Yuri Pederi, had already moved back to his home country. But the war inspired him to pivot the business. Now the drones, which can carry heavy loads of up to 300 kilograms, are being used by the Ukrainian military.

“We don’t know what the military are carrying,” says Dmytro Shymkiv, a partner at the company, who used to be deputy chief of staff for Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president who preceded Zelenskyy. He might plead ignorance to what AeroDrone drones are transporting, but the company is collecting vast amounts of data—up to 3,000 parameters—on each flight. “We are very much aware of what's going on with every piece of equipment on board,” he says, adding that information about flying while being jammed, or in different weather conditions, can be repurposed in other industries or even other conflicts.

Aerodrone offers a glimpse of the future companies Bornyakov is describing. Armed with that data, the company sees a wide range of options for its future once the war is over, both military and civilian. If you can fly in a war zone, Shymkiv says, you can fly anywhere.

[hasufin]

Robots

Not to be too much of a downer, but I’m a little worried about what our economy will look like post-recession.

Okay, let’s start with an ugly fact: we’re going to have a recession. They’ve been talking about one for a couple years now. And it’s like we’ve been slowly sliding into it. We’ve got the ongoing Retailpocalypse - which I’m still not sure if there’s some hidden issue that I don’t understand or if it’s mostly just most traditional retailers utterly failing to adapt to the Internet (I have ZERO sympathy, you fuckers have had thirty years) and leaving the market open for one or two players. But “economists” have been warning of a recession for a while.

And honestly, it almost feels like many big companies are trying to make one happen. Lots of needless layoffs, reduction in spending, not to mention the Fed basically saying “Oh my! Inflation is out of hand, let’s do something to reduce how much money consumers have instead of trying to get prices down!”

I don’t understand the forces which lead to recession. This feels... forced. But I’m pretty confident that it will happen. Unemployment is going to go up, homelessness will rise, etc.

Now, for those who have been through recessions - which, sadly, means most of the people reading this - this means unemployment, uncertainty, and poor job prospects. If you’re fortunate enough to keep your job, it’s still not great.

What happens, in my experience, is that companies reduce headcount even though the work doesn’t reduce nearly as much. You end up with one person doing the jobs of three or four. The company has an “open req” to get more people, but there’s a “hiring freeze” so it won’t happen until much later. I don’t know what companies gain by claiming open positions which they have no intention of filling, but this happens often enough I assume there’s an advantage.

Yet, through heroic effort, those who remain employed (and glad they dodged that bullet) will keep things running. The employer will then conclude “Aha! You weren’t giving your 100% before! In fact, we’re sure you still aren’t! No help for you!” and the remaining workers slog on, just glad to be employed. Headcount never rises again, the positions remain quietly unfilled. Workers burn out, but there are always more people - skilled, capable, but desperate people - who will take those jobs.

This is grim enough. But I am seeing many companies investing very, very heavily in machine learning. Amazon already uses automated forklifts for their warehouses. I think many places with large scale logistics are trying to hold on until self-driving vehicles become a thing - Amazon, I suspect, hopes to jump driectly from repurposed UPS trucks to purpose-built robotic delivery. Uber and GrubHub almost certainly want to replace “independent” drivers with a fleet of self-driving cars.

But more importantly is the behind-the-scenes machine learning algorithms. There are more and more tools which companies are using to handle the traditionally very headcount-intensive customer service component; other tools to perform large-scale data integration and automate a variety of other tasks.

What I am worried about now is, companies will lay off large numbers of people, and using these new technologies they will simply... not hire people for those roles anymore. There are reasons why this is Not Great - it removes a major feedback component to decision-making (e.g., you no longer have someone to say “Hey, our customer requests are shifting, we need to rethink our supply chain”) but companies are always happy to let someone else do the innovation and simply profit off others’ work.

But from an employee perspective, I just worry about the scale of the unemployment event we’re looking at, and our response to this. What we should be doing is having serious questions about the nature of our economic system and how we can make it work for the existing population.

What I know we will do is cast it as a moral issue, blaming the people who are hurt by these shifts, without addressing the underlying issues, while maybe doing a few minor stopgap fixes to prevent outright rioting.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Strike Action

The entertainment industry really is hoist by its own petard at this point.

Look, for years they’ve been flinging New Hotness after New Hotness after New Hotness at us, expecting us to consume and move on. Thing is, they were flinging New Hotness at us so fast and furious that we didn’t have time to consume everything.

Also ... we’re not like that, for the most part. There’s an awful lot of people who cherish movies and shows, and watch them over and over again, even if it’s just for comforting background noise until the Best Bits happen and you pay attention to those. (Hell, especially then.) Plus given the economy lately, we’ve had to work longer hours, for less money, and a lot more stress, and in those circumstances, some of us need the comfort of the familiar, not something new to fixate on. So we have stuff we’ve lamented not being able to watch, or read, or play.

And now their trying to take horrific advantage of writers and actors (I mean, everyone else too, but writers are getting screwed on residuals and probably facing the same “Everything you do will be fed into the AI and be used to generate content for us forever and we won’t pay you a dime for it” situation as the actors are) has hit the point where the people who actually generate the content are standing up and saying “NO MORE!” Which ... good for them.

Thing is, Hollywood is going to try to flip the script; try to make the writers and actors the bad guys because, “We had sooooooo much lovely content to give you but we can’t unless we take criminal advantage of the people who make it possible so they’re taking all your New Hotness from you!”

And me? Well. I look at my Netflix watch list.

And my Amazon watch list.

And my Steam library.

And frankly my DVD collection.

And I go, “...I ... don’t actually need any new hotness right now; I’m still trying to get through five years of what is now Old Hotness. And honestly, if you wanted me to be invested in New Hotness, you wouldn’t keep cancelling shit before your were forced to pay residuals. So this is on you.”

And then I go back to my book, or game, or whatever I’m doing.

We’re not going to get bored and blame the actors and writers for depriving us. We know shit. We know that “professional actor” is not synonymous with “wealth and fame”. We know how hard writing is, and how little it’s appreciated. We know that CEOs would skin their grandmothers to sell the hide for leather if it made them a profit. Most of all, we know what it is to struggle against people who want to use and abuse us while giving us zero benefits for it. We know that actors have been taken advantage of for decades. Hell, probably centuries, if we’re predating recordings. And writers have been taken advantage of for just as long. So ... we root for the ones we can relate to. That’s not the CEOs.

We are not scabs. And we’ve got enough entertainment forage laid by to get through a strike. CEOs, who live and die by their projected earnings and quoted stock prices, don’t have enough ... well, anything to get by. They’ve been running on thin ice for awhile now. Now they’re being prevented from running and the ice is creaking under their feet.

GOOD.