#an article analysis for economics

[vammieposts]

TOMORROW IM SUPER CRAZY HOMEOWRK HUMAN WISH ME LUCKKK

[jcmarchi]

Is Sentiment Analysis Effective in Predicting Trends in Financial Markets?

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/is-sentiment-analysis-effective-in-predicting-trends-in-financial-markets/

Is Sentiment Analysis Effective in Predicting Trends in Financial Markets?

Sentiment analytics transforms financial market prediction by uncovering insights traditional analysis often misses. This strategy captures the market’s mood and attitude toward assets and industries by processing text data from news, social media and financial reports. 

As its effectiveness becomes more evident, interest in using sentiment analysis for market forecasting rapidly grows. This technology empowers traders and investors to anticipate market shifts more accurately, making it valuable for real-time informed decision-making.

Sentiment Analytics in High-Frequency Trading

Integrating sentiment analytics with algorithmic trading has reshaped how financial markets operate, especially high-frequency trading. Algorithms can adapt to market shifts and allow traders to seize opportunities by tapping into real-time data.

However, interpreting this data comes with challenges. The market’s complexity is amplified by the diverse cognitive patterns of those involved, as they react differently under varying conditions. Analyzing the market is tricky because it requires advanced algorithms to capture and apply sentiment insights for sound financial decision-making. As the technology evolves, the ability to refine these strategies will be crucial for staying ahead in an increasingly fast-paced trading environment.

Advanced Techniques in Sentiment Analysis

Sophisticated NLP algorithms — such as transformer models and deep learning techniques — are at the forefront of financial sentiment analysis. These advanced methods have improved the ability to extract relevant insights from large volumes of text. Large language models are crucial in this process because they offer superior accuracy in analyzing and interpreting financial data compared to traditional methods. By understanding nuanced language patterns, LLMs can identify shifts that might go unnoticed.

Context-aware models enhance sentiment accuracy by considering the broader context in which financial statements are made. This approach allows them to distinguish between different meanings of similar words or phrases, depending on the situation. For example, in financial reports or news articles, words like “risk” or “volatility” can have varying implications based on the surrounding context. These advanced NLP techniques can better gauge market sentiment and make predictions more reliable and actionable.

The Role of Sentiment Analytics in Managing Market Risks

Sentiment analytics enhance risk management frameworks by providing real-time insights into market behavior, which predict and mitigate potential dangers. Analyzing this data allows institutions to identify emerging issues before they fully materialize. This proactive approach allows the early detection of market volatility, enables decision-makers to adjust their strategies and reduces exposure to adverse events.

One effective strategy involves integrating data with traditional risk management tools to create a more robust risk assessment. For example, sentiment-driven insights can help forecast market downturns during periods of heightened market uncertainty. This allows firms to hedge their positions or reallocate assets to safer investments.

Another practical example is during significant geopolitical events, where adverse sentiment spikes can signal increased market risk. Incorporating these trends into their risk management practices lets financial institutions navigate market uncertainties and protect their portfolios from unexpected losses.

Cross-Referencing Sentiment Data With Market Indicators

Correlating sentiment analytics with market indicators like volatility indexes, trading volume and price movements develops a well-rounded understanding of trends. While sentiment data provides valuable insights into the mood and expectations of market participants, it is most powerful when paired with these traditional financial indicators. 

For instance, a surge in negative feedback might signal a potential downturn, but confirming this with rising volatility or declining trading volumes adds credibility to the prediction. Media influence also shapes market sentiment, particularly during economic downturns. Recession fears can be amplified or alleviated based on the frequency and tone of media coverage, with fewer mentions often leading to a decrease in public anxiety.

Moreover, cross-referencing with market indicators enhances the robustness of trend predictions by offering a multifaceted view of market dynamics. A combined model incorporating sentiment data with traditional indicators can better anticipate market shifts. It does so by accounting for trading behavior’s psychological and quantitative aspects.

For example, a model integrating this data with indicators and trading volume during economic uncertainty can provide early warnings of market stress. This holistic approach ensures sentiment-driven predictions rely on real-world financial activity.

Challenges in Predicting Long-Term Market Trends

Predicting long-term market trends with sentiment analytics is complex due to its dynamic nature. Here are factors posing significant challenges to accurate forecasting.

Temporal Dynamics

One of the primary challenges in predicting long-term market trends using sentiment analytics is accounting for feedback shifts over different time frames. Market behavior can change rapidly due to new information, global events or shifting public opinion. These fluctuations make it hard to maintain a consistent analysis over an extended period.

Additionally, there is the issue of sentiment impact delay over time, which complicates long-term forecasting. Sentiment-driven market movements often have a short-lived effect, making it challenging to determine how long a particular trend will continue to influence the market. As this feedback decays, its predictive power diminishes, leading to potential misjudgments if not adequately accounted for. This requires regularly updating and recalibrating models to ensure long-term predictions remain accurate and relevant.

Sentiment Ambiguity

Accurately interpreting mixed or neutral opinions presents a significant challenge in sentiment analytics, particularly in the context of financial market predictions. Comments with neutral sentiment often pose problems for analysis systems, as they can misidentify or misunderstand this data. These neutral or mixed tones can muddy the landscape, making it difficult to draw clear conclusions. Additionally, detecting subtle nuances such as irony or sarcasm further complicates the process, as these expressions are challenging to train systems to recognize.

The volatility of market sentiment adds another layer of complexity to long-term predictions. When opinion shifts are abrupt or inconsistent, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain accuracy over time. As a result, models aiming to forecast long-term trends must be sophisticated enough to handle these nuances. They must capture and correctly understand data in the context of market dynamics.

Innovations and Future Directions in Sentiment Analytics

Emerging technologies and methods in sentiment analytics push the boundaries of what’s possible in market trend prediction. Innovations like sentiment-aware reinforcement learning and real-time analysis enable more responsive and adaptive systems that instantly react to market changes.

Transformer-based pretrained language models are at the forefront of this improvement because they enhance context awareness and capture the dependencies between different contexts. These aspects improve the accuracy of opinion analysis tasks and simplify discerning market sentiment with greater precision.

The potential impact of these innovations on market trend prediction is substantial. As sentiment analytics becomes more sophisticated, it will provide deeper insights into market dynamics. These advanced technologies will continue shaping financial decision-making, leading to more reliable and actionable predictions.

The Future of Sentiment Analytics in Financial Markets

Continuous innovation in sentiment analytics is essential for staying ahead in the fast-evolving financial markets. Integrating these insights with other advanced models will enhance prediction accuracy, which is crucial to effective economic strategies.

[fursasaida]

This article is from 2022, but it came up in the context of Palestine:

Here are some striking passages, relevant to all colonial aftermaths but certainly also to the forms we see Zionist reaction taking at the moment:

Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority [i.e. the whole white population post-apartheid as a minority in the country], particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.

[...]

Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that “the lives of many whites exude sadness.” The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.

But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.”

What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.

The article goes on to discuss:

"Mau Mau anxiety," or the fear among whites of violent repercussions, and how this shows up in reported vs confirmed crime stats - possibly to the point of false memories of home invasion

A sense of irrelevance and alienation among this white population, leading to another anxiety: "do we still belong here?"

The sublimation of this anxiety into self-identification as a marginalized minority group, featuring such incredible statements as "I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a ‘liberal internationalist,’ not a white racist...I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet" and "[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] also fought for a people without much political representation … That’s why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes,” from a self-declared liberal environmentalist who also thinks Afrikaaners should take back government control because they are "naturally good" at governance

Some discussion of the dynamics underlying these reactions, particularly the fact that "admitting past sins seem[ed] to become harder even as they receded into history," and US parallels

And finally, in closing:

The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. [...]

He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”

[biglisbonnews]

How American And European Banks Are Dealing With The Fallout From The U.S. Banking Turmoil https://seekingalpha.com/article/4603960-how-american-and-european-banks-are-dealing-with-the-fallout-from-the-us-banking-turmoil

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obediallah at The Dean's Report:

No one can deny that Donald Trump has shown a significant level of cognitive decline since he first ran for President in 2015 at the age of 69 years old to where he is today at 78. But what we’ve seen with Trump is far more than normal aging. Trump—as countless mental health experts have stated—is showing symptoms of dementia.  While people can debate if Trump is in the early or mid-stages of severe cognitive decline, what can’t be debated is that this poses a very serious national security issue for our nation. Consequently, this issue demands far more media coverage. On Monday night, I interviewed, psychologist Dr. John Gartner--the founder of “Duty to Warn” –who was first on my show back in April when he was waving red flags about Trump’s mental decline. In April, Gartner noted that Trump “can't get through a rally without committing one of these” tell-tale signs of dementia, such as saying the incorrect word or “combining or mixing up people and generations.”  

He also directed my attention to a petition signed by more than 500 licensed mental health professions—including best-selling authors and well-respected psychologists—warning that Trump was exhibiting signs of dementia. Gartner noted in April that “we're noticing deterioration almost every day” with Trump. Here we are six months later.  After discussing what Dr. Gartner has observed with Trump over the past few months, I asked this simple question: “Does Donald Trump have some form of dementia?” In response, Gartner answered succinctly, “There's absolutely no doubt.” Gartner explained that on his podcast, “Shrinking Trump,” he has welcomed mental health professionals who specialize in dementia—such as from “Duty to Inform”-- and they reached the same conclusion. “We've had neuropsychologists, neuropsychiatrists on the show who have gone through their analysis” and confirmed what they are observing is dementia, Gartner noted. He added, “When you really talk to the experts and the super experts, it's even more apparent,” that Trump’s exhibiting symptoms consistent with this condition.

Dementia is not a term that should be thrown around whimsically to score political points. Dementia—as Dr. Gartner explained—is “brain damage.” He continued that it’s “a deteriorating organic process in the brain where the cognitive processes start to break down.” He added alarmingly that with people like Trump, “they only go in one direction. They keep sliding downhill.” Adding to the credibility of this diagnosis is that dementia runs in the Trump family. As Donald’s own nephew, Fred Trump III, explained on my show recently, Donald’s father, Donald’s older sister, Maryanne and Donald’s cousin, John Walters all had dementia. And as the NY Times reported ten days ago in an article on Trump’s cognitive decline, “Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately.”  They added, “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical.”

Just look at Trump’s conduct in the past week that provides more jarring examples. At an event at the Detroit Economic Club when he was supposed to address economic issues, he literally began to speak of Elon Musk’s missiles landing, “Biden circles” that were “beautiful” but Biden “couldn’t fill them up” to “we’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians”–all in the same incoherent answer.  I played that clip for Dr. Gartner who commented that it makes “you realize how completely lost Trump is.” In addition, Trump while appearing on a podcast last week literally delivered a 12 minute (yes, 12 minute) meandering answer that was so incoherent it caused the hosts to joke that Trump was not rambling, he was “weaving.” One host added that they “don’t even want to know the answer anymore,” they just want more “weaving.” They were humoring Trump who was not making sense.

And at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump told the crowd to vote on “January 5”—not November. That of course could simply be a minor mental flub, but what came next was truly bizarre. Trump told the audience that it was time to end the questions and just listen to music. I’m not kidding. The context was that two people had passed out from heat at the event, to which Trump asked, would “anybody else would like to faint?” Trump then declared, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”  Then—as the Washington Post reported—"For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.”

Yes, Trump stood on stage for nearly 40 minutes at a packed Town Hall where instead of answering questions, he danced. I know it sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch, but it was real life. If President Biden had done that when he was the nominee, we would’ve seen non-stop coverage exploring his mental state. All of this is why this is truly a national security issue. As Dr. Gartner explained, a person with dementia like Trump could be easily manipulated by “corrupt businessman or any hostile foreign power.” He cited the examples of how devious people have taken advantage of those with dementia to get them to sign a will that makes the person the sole beneficiary. But in the case with Trump, we are potentially talking about Trump agreeing to allow wealthy backers like Elon Musk to financially benefit at our expense. Or worse, allow our enemies to take advantage of him—more than they even did in the past.

Dean Obeidallah succinctly explains that Donald Trump’s dementia is not only a political issue but also a national security issue.

[demonslayerunhinged]

Unhinged analysis

Why is Sanemi so aggro? (Part 2)

This section is mostly from a class/economic standpoint and doesn't really focus on the demon attack on his family. It is also not only based on my little understanding based on the research I did about poverty and class in Edo/Late Meiji Japan but also based on my experiences as someone who grew up poverty-er-adjacent.

This blog here has an article that does a deep dive into Sanemi based on Japanese culture and history. Their work was what inspired me to do a deeper dive into Sanemi's poor backgoround. It's in Japanese but the translations are so worth it, and they have writeups on other characters!

Now lets get to it, this is post is going to be very long and very sappy, be warned.

His Background

We all know that Sanemi grew up poor, but it's poor in a way that's different from the other characters. We can attribute Gyomei's poverty to his religious faith in a way, Tanjiro and Muichiro are more modest than actually poor - at least they own their houses. The Shinazugawas had a shitty landlord whose son made fun of them for being 'the poor people with too many kids', they lived in these rundown, face-to-face, the-neighbors-know-all-your-business row houses.

Sanemi grew up in the slums with a population of citizens who were essentially 'left behind' during the rise of urbanization and industrialization. These citizens not only had to deal with characterizations that portray them as being ignorant, uneducated, boorish, dirty, aggressive, mannerless and ignorant, but also with being preyed upon by greedy landlords, merchants and businessmen. The government weren't of much help either because they would rather put in efforts into removing them as far as possible from the modern cities, away from the eyes of foreigners.

In my experience, slum dwellers rarely if ever rise above their station in life. Their lack of education and exposure prevents them from making a better life for themselves and even if they do move to the city, they are stuck doing menial or manual labor jobs with shitty pay. They spend their entire lives in perpetual poverty no matter how hard they work and how many jobs they take because they're ultimately fighting a system that has not only abandoned them but also creates policies that prevent them from moving higher in life.

Due to these frustrations, a lot of them take up gambling and drinking alcohol to cope with their sorrows. Frustrations with the system and with their situations lead to a lot of them taking up gambling and developing alcoholism to cope. There is also high rate of violence among them, especially domestic violence as heads of households who were usually the ones to go out into the world and deal with the discrimination and struggles while trying to pursue low class jobs would take out their anger on their wives and ultimately children. The children who grow up in this environment, where violence is all they know would eventually go on to become abusers themselves when they start families of their own, that is, if they don't die of illness or are killed before that.

You can read more about it here, here, here, here and here.

We can see that with Sanemi's dad, the piece of shit who took out all his anger and frustrations on his wife and children before ultimately becoming a victim of violence himself.

After his death, we see Sanemi having to take up the responsibility of taking care of the family as was culturally expected of the firstborn and the oldest boy - similar to Tanjiro. When Sanemi's dad died, he had to take up a job to take care of the family. In the scene where he talks with Genya about their dad's death and their promise to take care of their mother and siblings, we can see that Sanemi is pulling a rickshaw.

Rickshaw pullers were among the lowest classes of manual labor, they were referred to sometimes as 'Human horses' and while they were mostly known for transporting people, they were also hired by merchants and regular people to transport goods as well. We're not told of the work his mother did before she turned into a demon, but she might have been a domestic worker or a waitress of some sort. It's not hard to imagine that there were times when the kids had to go hungry.

So what's the point of all this story? Well because children who come from these backgrounds are not only often violent and aggressive in their language, conduct and personality but even if they do manage to make it to adulthood and by some miracle manage to break through the class barrier they often come out of the other side with a MASSIVE inferiority complex.

And our dear boy Sanemi has one, big time.

Now that we've talked about his background, let's talk about how all this contributes to his....

Relationships

In the fandom, the main complaints about Sanemi is his behavior towards Giyuu, Tanjiro, the demon slayer trainees and Genya, so I'm going to focus on just these.

Giyuu

Like I've mentioned before @roseameilatempest already posted a great write-up about Sanemi and his complicated relationship with Giyuu, so I'm just adding to it.

The two main things that create friction in their relationship, aside from Giyuu's inability to communicate are Sanemi's low self-esteem and his aggressive personality. The low self-esteem really showed itself when he questioned Giyuu at the Hashira meeting about his 'I'm not like you guys attitude'.

In this scene he asks

Which is a really interesting question because of all the Hashiras he's the only one who voices this sentiment. Obanai just talks about Giyuu wanting to get ahead, Shinobu just asks him to explain himself, Muichiro doesn't really care, but there's the thing about being the baby of the group so he may not want to butt-in to the 'adult' matters. Gyomei is praying.

Sanemi's the only one who stands up and confronts Giyuu about the matter but given his background as previously discussed it's almost as if he's asking "Are you looking down on me?".

From the little we know of Giyuu's backstory, he didn't grow up in poverty. After his family died, he went to go live with relatives before making the decision to leave and join the corps. He has fair skin and soft looking features in contrast to Sanemi's rough, scarred ones. He has slim, delicate-looking hands with piano-playing fingers compared to Sanemi large, knobby, rough-looking hands with early-onset-arthritis-ass fingers.

Even his conduct has a certain air of class to it. So when Giyuu says stuff like 'I'm not like other girls-I mean Hashira', the inferiority complex part of Sanemi is triggered, and he takes it as an attack on him thinking that Giyuu is looking down on him because of his poor background and his class.

But Sanemi deep down cares, even if he doesn't realize it. Instead of dismissing Giyuu as just being a dick, he tries to get an answer, an explanation, but because of his rough way of speaking and his aggressive personality it comes out confrontational. He doesn't know how to express himself in a non-aggressive way because nobody ever taught him how.

Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤)

Ah yes, Sanemi's BFF. I'm honestly surprised that some people don't understand why Sanemi does not vibe with Tanjiro. Tanjiro embarrassed him in their first meeting, only to escape the consequences for his actions because of the Master's benevolence. He questioned his worth as a Hashira which, as mentioned in the previous post, is the core of Sanemi's identity.

In their second encounter, Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) talked back to him. Now, despite all the wacky and interesting characters, the fancy mods to their uniform with the haoris and stuff, the Demon Slayers Corps are still a military organization. They have a hierarchy, they have rules and punishments for those who break them and within the context of the military and cultural values: You don't talk back to your superiors, you don't disrespect them and you most certainly don't embarrass them no matter how in the right you feel you are. It's not fair, it just is. Some superiors may tolerate it like Tengen, Giyuu, Mitsuri and Shinobu but others, like Sanemi, Gyomei, Obanai and even Muichiro will not.

I mean, even Mitsuri complained about Genya's behavior when she first met him, even though his actions were because of him being shy.

The first time Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) disrespected Sanemi, he was on neutral ground, the Master's mansion. Kagaya is a saint, so he understood Tanjiro's actions, but remember he also chided Tanjiro a bit, even if it was in a soft manner. Now in this second encounter, He's in Sanemi's house, in his domain, and you can't come about here disrespecting your senior in their own house. And If you do, be prepared to face the consequences.

Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) then embarrassed Sanemi again by (rightfully) calling him out on his shitty behavior towards Genya, in public, in front of his other subordinates. He then proceeds to not only block Sanemi's punch but to counter it with an embarrassing kick to the neck, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE SCRUBS! Like what? In some organizations, you could be penalized and immediately kicked out, but like I said, Kagaya is a saint.

That's why Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) was given the reprimand and Sanemi wasn't. Because he was in the wrong.

The concept may seem foreign to people who grew up in the west, but for those of us from home countries that have rigid power and class structures, we know this pain all too well.

That's why you talk and complain about your superiors BEHIND their backs, like Zenitsu does.

I swear, Zenitsu is probably the realest character in the series, I love him so much 😂.

Then in the last encounter they had, Tanjiro embarrassed Sanemi again, but this time it's worse because he did it RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS CRUSH!

Your senior's business is not your business, if you see them fighting, it's best just to leave them alone and pray it's the one you hate that gets his ass kicked.

So here's Sanemi trying to communicate with his crush, and he's about to get to the part where they get to put their hands on each other ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Then Tanjiro comes up and gets between them, ignoring the restraining order and then asking if they were fighting over ohagi.

He then reveals Sanemi's biggest secret: That he's gay-I-mean-er likes ohagi. Neither Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) nor Giyuu see any problem with this because soft boys but for a tough, scary man like Sanemi this is a problem. He's a man, he shouldn't be taking sweets! (which is like a real thing in Japan, so i learned. You can read about it here, here, here and here), also Sanemi loves ohagi becuase his mom used to make it; men shouldn't be thinking about their mommies! Men should be tough and only eat manly things like raw bull testicles and cement!

Then Tanjiro(bestest boy ❤) drives the knife even further by asking him about his ohagi preferences, while Giyuu (who unknown to Sanemi is glad to have found an opportunity to rizz him up) asks him to confirm but in Sanemi's mind he thinks Giyuu is making fun of him too.

So Tanjiro has, so far, called him a shitty Hashira, a shitty brother, and now a shitty man. All he wanted to do was smash and now he's getting pressed by a 16 year old. So yea, our boy is going to react in the only way he knows how - by giving Tanjiro a swift clock to the jaw.

At this point, you've gotta pity Sanemi, he's the real victim in this relationship. But let's move on.

The Trainees

This is another complaint that also confuses me because the answer is so obvious. Why is Sanemi hard on the trainees?

Because Sanemi's training is Infinite Strikes! Because his training is supposed to be hard! Because they're at war! Because Muzan might be coming soon! Because this is a military training! Because the Hashiras are basically Drill Sergeants! Because Sanemi says fuck you!

But seriously, I don't understand why Sanemi and Obanai are getting hate for their training methods when Tengen's was just as harsh, Mitsuri was basically ending family bloodlines, Muichiro deadass was about to sashimi someone's child.

And Gyomei? Gyomei's training basically qualifies as torture by the Geneva convention laws. You see these guys below? These boys are all dead! Dead, i tell you! You can't convince me otherwise!

Even Inosuke died!

The training is meant to be harsh because it's not just the trainees lives at stake, it's the people of Japan, it's the lives of their friends, families and loved ones. The Hashiras know this and Sanemi whose whole life revolves around being a demon slayer and killer, especially knows this.

He and Obanai don't have the luxury of sending the junior slayers back for their protection like they did in the mansion. Like we saw in the last episode of the season, Muzan came after everyone not just the Hashira. Despite his rough and harsh exterior, Sanemi actually cares about his colleagues and his subordinates and he doesn't want them to die needlessly. If that means he has to be the 'bad' Hashira, then that's fine with him.

Genya

There's no justification for the shit he pulled trying to poke Genya's eyes out. I've made like two posts regarding this before about how his actions were not only stupid but will ultimately be pointless because Genya is amazing!

Aside from wanting to keep Genya safe (whatever that means), I think one of the reasons Sanemi doesn't want to come in contact with Genya is because when he's around Genya he's reminded of the past and trauma that he's trying to repress. I don't think it was a random choice that older Genya is dressed in a way almost similar to baby Genya. So everytime Sanemi sees him, despite Genya's size and the awesome things he's done, all he can see is that little boy that he almost failed to protect, that called him a monster, that rejected him and seeing that reopens that old core wound. That he's a monster.

Sanemi isn't ready to face all that, so with the little understanding of his own emotions and the trappings of toxic masculinity, he pushes Genya away becuase doing so is way, way, way easier than talking to his brother. It's easier than revealing to Genya that Genya's words did hurt him, that he failed to protect their mom and siblings and that maybe Genya is right, he is a monster, that even though he saved Genya it doesn't change the fact that he used his very hands to kill the only person that loved and protected them in this world.

I think a lot of people really underestimate the gravity of what baby Sanemi did. Tanjiro couldn't kill Nezuko and I'm sure he himself would've rather died than raise a hand to his loved ones but Tanjiro was lucky in a sick way because Nezuko was not only the only survivor but encountered Giyuu who who gave him the opportunity to save Nezuko, essentially giving her a second life. Sanemi never had that chance. In order to protect his brother, he had to kill his beloved mother, and you can just imagine the amount of damage that can do to a child's psyche.

I read a comment on Youtube that said this was probably the reason why Sanemi was so feverently against the Master's defence of Nezuko and that when Nezuko rejected his blood, his whole worldview must have shattered because if Nezuko was able to overcome her demonic urges and still maintain her sanity, why couldn't his beloved mother?

But you might ask, how come Genya seems fine? Well, he wasn't at first, he was basically Sanemi 2.0 but he was able to make peace with himself, escape the trappings of toxic masculinity and the violence that they were raised in. Instead of bottling up his emotions, he wants to reach out, to apologize for his behavior, to mend their brotherhood because no matter how Sanemi is now, no matter how many times he tells him to get lost, no matter the harsh words he throws at him, to Genya he'll always be his Aniki.

The same Aniki who's been looking out for him, the same Aniki that sought him out and comforted him after he punched the landlord's shitty son, the same Aniki who gave him a piggyback ride despite them practically being the same height just to make Genya feel happy and loved, the same Aniki who let out that brilliant laugh after they made the promise to protect their family as he pulled the Rickshaw to make some money for the family, the same Aniki who is the sweetest, kindest person in the whole world.

While we see the rough, scarred, aggressive and scary Sanemi, Genya only sees this:

I'm sure a lot of us know what it's like to be angry, to lash out, to push people away and how difficult it is go through life in a world that doesn't care about you or your trauma. We know what it's like to be left behind and forgotten. We wander aimlessly through life hurting with a feeling of emptiness and we don't even know why. Some of us overcome, some of us don't. We just make do with the tools and little resources we have and Sanemi is a painful reminder of that.

In Conclusion, Sanemi is a complex character. He's not all star good, he's a dick, some of his actions are straightup unhinged, but that's what makes him human. He's not perfect, and for us to appreciate this character we have to accept him in all his wild, raging, scarred, petty-ass, little-brother-eye-poking, women's-size-7-feet-having, ohagi-loving glory.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Harris campaign kicks into high gear

July 26, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Kamala Harris has the Trump campaign on its back foot. Whatever Trump’s advisers expected from V.P. Harris, they were wrong. Although Trump and his surrogates have tried several lines of attack, each attempt backfires as Trump offends important constituencies he needs to win. In attacking Kamala Harris, Trump is offending Black Americans, successful women, mothers raising blended families, couples trying to conceive, young people, and more. The Harris campaign has responded forcefully, using a pointed sense of humor that is refreshing and attractive to younger voters who see the internet as a battlefield of ideas.

On Thursday, the Harris campaign released a powerful television ad that was a “no-holds-barred” look at the threat to democracy posed by Trump. See The Guardian, ‘We choose freedom’: Kamala Harris campaign launches first ad. The ad is embedded in The Guardian article; I urge you to watch it. If you don’t, here is The Guardian’s description of the ad:

Released on Thursday morning, the ad opens with shots of Harris’s smiling face behind a podium, the word Kamala, the word Harris, and the American flag. The soundtrack is the beginning of Beyoncé’s song Freedom, to which Harris entered and exited her first speech to campaign staffers after gaining lightning speed momentum on the road to becoming the presumptive nominee. The ad is narrated by Harris, whose first words are, “In this election we each face a question. What kind of country do we want to live in?” She continues: “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear. Of hate,” she says, over shots of Trump and JD Vance. “But us, we choose something different.”

On social media, the Harris campaign has been even more aggressive. The Harris campaign took a clip of Trump imitating Kamala Harris, saying, “I’m the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon.” After Trump admits that he is a convicted felon and Harris is a prosecutor, the ad immediately cuts to a picture of Kamala Harris with her voice saying, “I am Kamala Harris and I approve this message.” The Harris campaign is showing early signs of social media savvy—just as Barack Obama’s campaign did in 2008.

The Harris campaign also went after JD Vance, who described Kamala Harris in 2021 as a “childless cat lady” who should not have an equal voice in the future of America because she does not have biological children. (Harris is a stepmother to two children with Doug Emhoff.) Thursday was “In Vitro Fertilization Day.” The Harris campaign released a statement saying, “Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.” See HuffPo, Harris Campaign Wishes Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except 1 Person.

The confidence and swagger of that ad was reflected in the Harris campaign’s immediate acceptance of debate with Donald Trump, set for September 10. But as Kamala Harris demonstrated an eagerness to debate, Trump began hedging his bets, saying he “did not like the idea” of a debate on ABC. See CNBC, ‘Let’s go’: Harris agrees to debate Trump, accuses him of ‘backpedaling’ on Sept. 10 date.

The Harris campaign also used social media to troll Trump's morning appearance on Fox News, during which Trump called Kamala Harris “garbage.” The Harris campaign issued a press release entitled Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance. The press release said,

After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok? Trump is old and quite weird [and] this guy shouldn’t be president ever again.

For their part, Trump and his surrogates were reduced to claiming that Kamala Harris is a “DEI hire,” a “failed border czar,” and a socialist who will destroy the economy of America.

Luckily for Kamala Harris, economic growth and border security both improved in the second quarter. On Thursday, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the gross domestic product grew at a 2.8% rate in the second quarter, well above the consensus prediction of 1.9% by economists. See USA Today, US GDP report: Latest data shows economy grew 2.8% in Q2 (usatoday.com)

At the border, crossings by immigrants dropped to their lowest level since 2020 (under Donald Trump). See CBS News, Migrant crossings continue to plunge, nearing the level that would lift Biden's border crackdown. Per CBS News,

July is on track to see the fifth consecutive monthly drop in migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border and the lowest level in illegal immigration there since the fall of 2020, during the Trump administration, the internal Department of Homeland Security figures show.

My point in noting the responses by the Harris campaign is not to revel in the “zingers” and “smackdowns” that are long overdue. Rather, it is to highlight the nimbleness, swagger, and professionalism of the Harris campaign. The lightning-quick responses would be exemplary for any presidential campaign; they are stunning for a presidential campaign that is four days old.

Although it is still early, it seems clear that the Harris campaign will focus on Trump's criminality, incoherence, age, and hateful agenda. And it is doing so with a satirical edge that transfers easily into internet memes—which is an effective way to create viral messaging that reaches young people. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been caught flat-footed, trying to ignore the awkward creepiness of JD Vance and Trump's part-time approach to campaigning.

All of this should give Democrats confidence that Kamala Harris will run a strong campaign against an opponent who will wage a vile and hate-filled counter-offensive. If the first few days of the campaign are any indication, Kamala Harris is up to the task.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[olderthannetfic]

No.

As always, you should be more cautious when making mainstream art (if you get to be a Hollywood director, for example) than when making niche stuff.

As for which fiction inspires people to do what, the evidence is pretty murky. I'm sure FINR's Dreamwidth will have some links somewhere that someone who is not me can find. Let's not waste our time on freaking out about Japan. There are some well-publicized problems, but it's also a favorite subject of melodramatic reporting in English.

--

Also...

When someone does cite sources, that doesn't automatically mean the sources say what they claim or that the sources are any good. I waded through the twitter thread you sent, and the first source cited is:

Sluzhevsky, Megan, "The Costs of Lolicon: Japan’s Pedophilia Trade" (2022). Senior Theses. 96.

This is an undergrad thesis, so basically worthless. Sorry, not sorry. (I wrote an undergrad thesis myself. It was also worthless.)

The abstract is:

This thesis investigates Japan’s normalization of pedophilia via the proliferation of popular culture and media. This analysis will begin by looking at historical examples of pedophilia, specifically focusing on chigo in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, wakashu in Edo Period pleasure quarters, and the spread of soft power diplomacy after World War II. This phenomenon will also be viewed in the modern context by discussing lolicon in Japanese media and advertising, idol culture in the Japanese music industry, the JK business, and “real” child pornography. The ways that Japan benefits from this culture economically and politically will also be investigated. Finally, this thesis will take into consideration the opinions of those who do not see these media forms as morally reprehensible, and consider the ways this phenomenon may or may not endanger children in real life.

Chigo?! Wakashu? Fucking really?!

It might be a good paper. You can read it if you really want to. But the abstract is not inspiring a lot of confidence. Wakashu, for example, were often young, but it's a social category that has no modern equivalent, and it's not strictly bound by age. To roll this role for young men into hand-wringing about modern lolicon, not even shotacon? What?

The second citation is by a law student. It's a 2011/2012 article. It doesn't seem like it was peer reviewed, but I'm not sure.

[cicaklah]

get ready for my thoughts on yaoi UBI

So I’ve kvetched about UBI in the tags for long enough someone finally asked me what I was going on about so here we go! 

I will start with some caveats: 

I am British, and so I can only speak about the British specifics.

I have for the past twelve years worked as a professional health economist, and health economics is based on social welfare theory (specifically growing out of Arrow’s work in the 1960s and Sen’s work in the 80s/90s). I literally could talk forever about this, but I won’t. If you want to know more, read the pretty good wikipedia article on welfare economics.

But fundamental to welfare economics is two things: if we make a great big change, do the benefits outweigh the costs? And does the change make a fundamental change for good? (aka cost-benefit analysis and pareto efficiency).

The other thing you need to know about me is that I don’t like activists very much, because they never have to show their working, and my entire professional life is showing my working, and critiquing other people’s working. We all have ideas mate, show me the plan! I love a plan! and this isn't coming from anything but personal experience; I have been to talks by UBI activists before, including ones by economists, but I have never had the case made to me that UBI would be either cost-beneficial OR approach pareto efficient. In fact, it usually reminds me of arguments that are based on some other imaginary world, and then I get so annoyed I want to scream. 

In the early 2010s when I was first starting working as an economist, I was asked to build a model to see whether switching a disability benefit from government administered to individual administration would be cost-effective. Essentially, if you were newly in a wheelchair and you needed a ramp building up to your house, would it be better for the government to organise a contractor, or for you to be given a cash transfer and organise it yourself? The answer was that it wasn’t, but anyone who has ever had to hire a builder could have told you that, and the government didn’t have to pay my firm £30,000 to make that decision. But that is what UBI essentially is; a cash transfer where you get cash and the government gets to enjoy less responsibility.

There are 37.5 million people of working age in England. (Nearly) every single working person gets what's called a tax free allowance, where the government doesn’t claim income tax on the first £12,570. (Once you make over £120k, your allowance starts to decrease, and you lose it entirely at I think £150k)

Let’s assume that instead of just not claiming tax on this amount, the government switched to making that £12,570 your UBI. That is £471,375,000,000 just for England - just under half a trillion pounds. In cash, or nearest as in our modern economy. And not one off - Every year. 

Okay, let's say that the country does have a spare half a trillion a year (in cash) lying around. What is the benefit to switching from tax free allowance to UBI? Well, let's assume that no one stops working, so there would be the tax receipts from the 20% income tax on the £12,570, and that’s just a shade under £100 million. Not bad.

But if you’ve seen a UBI post, you will know that people like the idea because they will be able to work less. Which probably means that UBI will need to be paid for in some other way. Perhaps by cutting existing benefits. The universal credit cost is around £100 billion. So we’re still £300 billion short, and honestly, you wouldn’t cut all of universal credit anyway, probably only the unemployment benefits, but I’m not digging into the maths on that tonight. 

But, look, I am sympathetic. I am a welfarist. I genuinely believe that the economy is not just money, that welfare is happiness, it is utility, it is all the stuff that makes life worth living, and it is the responsibility of the government to maximise the welfare/happiness/utility/quality of life of the country through efficient use of taxation and other sources of money. So people give the government money and it spends it on goods and services and then people get utility, and then they spend their own money to get more utility, and ultimately we can gain intangible things that are incredibly valuable. 

But the problem is that cash is cash, cold and hard and very real. I don’t know how unlimited spare time translates into half a trillion real pound coins. I wouldn’t know how to build a model that complex and uncertain, especially as this all assumes that you can live on 12k a year, and that whatever replaces progressive taxation is equally progressive. I haven’t even touched on how having a convoluted welfare state insures it somewhat against being entirely destroyed after a change in political opinions, aka what I call the daily mail test. You think the narrative about people on welfare is bad now? But also, how would you deal with people who didn’t manage their UBI money well? What happens if there is a personal crisis?

The more I look at it, the more the existing system is actually remarkably good value for money. Individualism is expensive. Collective decision making and spending is just cheaper. 

Ultimately I don’t see the additional benefit of UBI, requiring a pie in the sky change, when it is far, far, far more cost effective to strengthen the existing regime across the board; taxation law, social safety net, childcare, working laws, education and health - all systems that are already in place, and have a thousand times higher likelihood to be pareto optimal and cost effective than trying to find half a trillion pounds of cash round the back of the sofa, while torching 150 years of progress so middle class people can write their book without having to have a job. If I was conspiracy minded I would say that UBI feels like a psy-op, trying to shut down old fashioned progress in favour of ripping it all out and starting again.

Ultimately, that is my real annoyance. It is far, far, far cheaper for the government to provide you with your new ramp for your house, and that is done through politics, but not fun moonshot politics, the hard shit that isn’t sexy.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” For decades, US electricity demand rose by less than 1% annually. But utilities and grid operators have doubled their annual forecasts for the next five years to about 1.5%, according to Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that based its analysis on regulatory filings. That’s the highest since the 1990s, before the US stepped up efforts to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. It’s not just the explosion in data centers that has power companies scrambling to revise their projections. The Biden administration’s drive to seed the country with new factories that make electric cars, batteries and semiconductors is straining the nation’s already stressed electricity grid. What’s often referred to as the biggest machine in the world is in reality a patchwork of regional networks with not enough transmission lines in places, complicating the job of bringing in new power from wind and solar farms. To cope with the surge, some power companies are reconsidering plans to mothball plants that burn fossil fuels, while a few have petitioned regulators for permission to build new gas-powered ones. That means President Joe Biden’s push to bolster environmentally friendly industries could end up contributing to an increase in emissions, at least in the near term. Unless utilities start to boost generation and make it easier for independent wind and solar farms to connect to their transmission lines, the situation could get dire, says Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “New loads are delayed, factories can’t come online, our economic growth potential is diminished,” he says. “The worst-case scenario is utilities don’t adapt and keep old fossil-fuel capacity online and they don’t evolve past that.”

archive.today article link

[southernsolarpunk]

Hey what the fuck is this news story?

“ But the world’s largest economies are already there: The total fertility rate among the OECD’s 38 member countries dropped to just 1.5 children per woman in 2022 from 3.3 children in 1960. That’s well below the “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman needed to keep populations constant.

That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.

In the 1960s, there were six people of working age for every retired person, according to the World Economic Forum. Today, the ratio is closer to three-to-one. By 2035, it’s expected to be two-to-one.

Top executives at publicly traded US companies mentioned labor shortages nearly 7,000 times in earnings calls over the last decade, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis last week.

“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year. ��

Is this seriously how normal people think? Improving the bargaining power of workers and increased wages are bad?

“ And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

By 2100, only six countries are expected to be having enough children to keep their populations stable: Africa’s Chad, Niger and Somalia, the Pacific islands of Samoa and Tonga, and Tajikistan, according to research published by the Lancet, a medical journal.

BlackRock’s expert advises her clients to invest in inflation-linked bonds, as well as inflation-hedging commodities like energy, industrial metals and agriculture and livestock.

Import labor via migration or sourcing goods? My brother in Christ they are modern day slaves!! I feel like I’m in backwards town reading this what the fuck?!

“ Elon Musk, father of 12 children, has remarked that falling birthrates will lead to “a civilization that ends not with a bang but a whimper, in adult diapers.”

While his words are incendiary, they’re not entirely wrong

P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which together make up more than half of the US diaper market, have seen baby diaper sales decline over the past few years. But adult diapers sales, they say, are a bright spot in their portfolios. “

Oh now the guy with a breeding kink is going to lecture us. Great. /s

“ The AI solution: Some business leaders and technologists see the boom in productivity through artificial intelligence as a potential solution.

“Here are the facts. We are not having enough children, and we have not been having enough children for long enough that there is a demographic crisis, former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London last year.

“In aggregate, all the demographics say there’s going to be shortage of humans for jobs. Literally too many jobs and not enough people for at least the next 30 years,” Schmidt said.

Oh god not the AI tech bros coming into this shit too. Wasn’t the purpose of improving tech to give people more free time? So they can relax and spend time with family more and actually enjoy life? Isn’t our economy already bloated with useless pencil-pushing number-crunching desk jobs that ultimately don’t serve a purpose?

I’m not going to post the entire article but give it a read. It’s… certainly something. Anyway degrowth is the way of the future.

[psychooomind]

Flickering Lights

Michael Gavey x singer!reader

Summary: Michael and Violet come from completely different worlds, but when their paths cross at university, an unexpected connection sparks between them. As their relationship deepens, they must navigate secrets, misunderstandings, and their own fears. Can their love overcome the odds, or will the time put them apart?

A multi-entry, slow-burn, friends to lovers fic.

You can also read it at AO3 here.

Chapter 2

Chapter 1: First Days

The autumn breeze brushed the girl’s cheeks as she adjusted the strap of her violin on her shoulder. She was walking briskly to her first class, listening to Avril Lavigne on her MP3 player.

She was in an incredible mood, having anticipated this moment for months. Yet, she couldn’t shake the first-day nerves, so she decided to walk from her flat to the university. The imposing Gothic building loomed before her, making everything feel more real than she had imagined: she had done it—she was going to study music.

“ You’ll fail, just like your mother did .” Her father’s words had echoed in her head since she was fifteen, ever since she began expressing her growing desire to study music. Her first spark of rebellion had come when she met Hannah Abraham, a Jewish girl who studied French with her and whose parents had allowed her to take drum lessons. Hannah had mentioned that she planned to audition for a girl group in London that was looking for a drummer. The girl had spent countless hours listening to her friend play the drums after their French classes, so she wasn’t surprised when Hannah got the spot. What Violet didn’t know then was that she would become a fan of the band and, a year later, would join them as a secondary vocalist, becoming part of the incredible Wrecked Shiny Girls.

Now, three years later, she was here, refining her craft. Her father still disapproved of her choices, particularly her involvement with the band, but there was no turning back now. Besides, Frederick Bryon still had Victor, her twin brother, who was also starting university—but at Christian Church College. Victor followed their father’s orders to the letter and was studying economics as instructed.

But Violet had a clear purpose: to prove that studying music at St. Hilda’s was more than just a “rebellious phase,” as her father insisted on calling it. To her, this wasn’t simply a decision; it was her life and her passion.

When she entered her first class, Musical and Artistic Analysis, she sat at the front and waited for the other students to file in. Among the crowd, she recognised Marcey Frey and Caroline Meyer, two girls from her old school. Both ignored her, which came as no surprise—she had never had a good relationship with them.

The professor, Cornelia Shawn, was a renowned British composer who had been teaching at St. Hilda’s since the 1980s. Violet had read several articles about her and her involvement in songs by the likes of Billy Joel, Elton John, and others. When Professor Shawn introduced herself, the room erupted into applause, Violet’s hands among them. She still couldn’t quite believe where she was sitting.

At the other end of Oxford, a boy was getting dressed for his first day. Michael had chosen one of the shirts his mother had neatly ironed and folded into his bag, pairing it with cargo trousers his uncle Alfred had gifted him last Christmas. There wasn’t a mirror in his dorm room.

In fact, there wasn’t much in his dorm room at all. Just a bed with built-in drawers, already made with sheets from home the night before; a desk displaying his weekly pill organiser as its only noteworthy item; and a slightly rusted lamp he hadn’t yet tested to see if it worked. The walls were white but scarred with small patches of peeled paint, evidence of a poster once taped there before his arrival. A corkboard hung on the wall as well, predictably bare.

He had made a mental note when he arrived to unpack his clothes and place them in the drawers, but he’d barely slept the night before. His anxiety was through the roof, so he dashed out to his first class: Calculus. He was the first to arrive, even before the professor, who shuffled in at a slow, weary pace. The man unlocked the room, and Michael took a seat at the front. The professor eyed him curiously before settling in to wait for more students.

A group of students trickled in moments later, filling the room with murmurs and footsteps. The constant noise set Michael on edge until the professor finally rose and addressed the class, introducing himself and outlining the syllabus as though anyone actually needed to hear it.

Michael took notes on everything. He didn’t need to—his memory was impeccable, and he retained every word the professor said with ease. But years ago, his therapist had recommended putting his thoughts on paper when he felt anxious. Today, his thoughts were entirely consumed by calculus. As he looked down at his notebook, he felt a rare sense of satisfaction. Numbers, at least, were beautifully, perfectly controllable.

After class, he headed back to his dormitory but decided to detour through the cafeteria. Inside, a group of students his age were shouting and sitting on tables instead of chairs, talking as though they were the only ones in the room. He recognised them from the night before—the same group of misfits whose “first-night party” had kept him awake. Naturally, he hadn’t been invited.

Among them was a tall boy with a piercing in his eyebrow, laughing obnoxiously with a red-haired guy about a group of students who had tried to join the party without an invitation. Next to them, a dark-skinned boy with an afro was mockingly teasing a girl whose skirt was so short Michael could have sworn he’d seen her underwear. Meanwhile, her friend was fiddling nervously with her hair, casting provocative glances at the boy with the piercing.

Michael knew who they were. They weren’t there to study but to make a mess of things. They were the type who hadn’t earned their place but had wealthy parents footing the bill for expensive and, in Michael’s view, pointless degrees like Art or Business Management.

He, on the other hand, had spent nearly five years preparing to earn his scholarship to Oxford. Not only that, but he had the distinction of being, quite literally, the best young mathematician of his age. He’d won district, regional, and national competitions to get here. His mother had dragged him to every one of those competitions to ensure he reached his goal. And now here he was, watching others squander their privilege, lounging about with famous surnames and deep pockets.

He approached the vending machine, slid in his money, and waited for his chocolate bar. But the old, neglected machine jammed. Behind him, the red-haired boy joined the queue.

“Taking long, mate?” asked the boy, eyeing him curiously.

“It’s stuck,” Michael muttered without looking up, giving the machine a firm knock.

“What was that?” the boy snapped, his tone sharp. “What did you say?”

“The machine’s stuck,” Michael repeated irritably.

Michael sighed, delivered another frustrated knock to the vending machine, and prepared to leave. Behind him, the red-haired boy called out to one of his friends—the one with the piercing—who approached, smirking. Michael didn’t wait for the encounter to escalate. He recognised their type all too well: the kind who could spot an easy target from a mile away.

“All good, Victor?” asked the boy with the piercing.

“Yeah, the nerd broke the vending machine. No drink for me, I guess,” the redhead replied with a laugh.

Michael stormed back to his dormitory, fuming. Spoiled brats. He’d lost both his snack and his time.

As he approached his room, a nearby door slammed shut. He paused, watching curiously. After a moment, a girl’s head poked out cautiously before retreating with a startled “Oh, God.”

He stared at the door, puzzled.

“Sorry,” came a muffled voice from the other side. “I have a hard time socialising with people I don’t know.”

Michael nodded to himself and entered his own room. At least he wasn’t the only odd one on the floor.

At St. Hilda’s, Violet had just finished her first class and was heading to the bustling campus café. The atmosphere was overwhelming, like trying to tune into thousands of conversations all at once. Groups of students animatedly debated the recent tuition fee hike to £3,000 per year at universities across the country. Others read passages from Zygmunt Bauman aloud, while a smaller cluster sat to one side, strumming guitars.

She found a quiet table and sat alone, pulling out her songbook. That weekend, she had band practice, and there were still songs she hadn’t memorised. As she focused on the lines of a new melody, someone approached.

“Mind if I sit here?” asked a girl with curly hair and curious eyes.

“Of course, go ahead,” Violet replied with a smile.

The girl introduced herself as Claire, a literature student who also had a keen interest in music. Their conversation flowed effortlessly, and for the first time since her arrival, Violet felt she might find genuine friendships here.

Later, when Violet returned to the apartment she shared with her brother, she opened the door to find the living room thick with smoke and laughter. Victor and his friends had brought bottles of liquor and a deck of cards.

“Victor, what’s going on?” Violet asked, setting her violin case on the floor.

“Relax, hippie. We’re prepping for our first-night dinner,” Victor replied, raising his glass. Beside him sat a tuxedo and shirt, crumpled and ignored.

“Could you at least not turn my living room into a dodgy pub? You know you can’t smoke in here.”

“Your living room,” Farleigh Start mocked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Beside him, Felix Catton let out a loud laugh. “Looks like the princess here thinks she owns the castle.”

“It is my apartment, Start. If you don’t like the rules, you can leave.”

“It’s Daddy’s apartment, not yours,” Start sneered.

Violet rolled her eyes. “Well, at least I have one, don’t I?”

Farleigh muttered a curse under his breath, and Victor, her brother, did nothing to defend her. Violet chose to ignore them, slamming her bedroom door shut. A chorus of male howls and laughter erupted behind her.

Victor’s friends had always been insufferable, and university hadn’t changed a thing. Felix Catton, Farleigh Start, and a few of the girls, like India Aitken and Anabell Bodley, had all attended the same school as Violet and Victor. She had endured Felix’s relentless advances and Anabell’s passive-aggressive hostility for years. In gym class, Anabell had often ensured they were paired together, deliberately targeting Violet with the ball during games.

That evening, as Violet practised quietly on her bass guitar, she made herself a promise: she wouldn’t let Victor and his friends’ antics derail her ambitions

As Michael wandered through the dining hall, he was still debating whether or not to attend the dinner. Upon arrival, he realised there wasn’t a single available seat. Every table was packed with groups that had already formed, many of them students who seemed to know each other.

Most people didn’t even glance at him, and those who did wore faint expressions of discomfort or indifference. Finally, Michael spotted an empty chair at a table tucked away in the corner. After a moment’s hesitation, he approached and sat down. The others at the table didn’t seem particularly invested in the social dynamics of the room, which, in that moment, was a relief.

A few minutes passed before a boy with brown hair and glasses similar to Michael’s sat down across from him. Michael observed him as he nervously scanned the room, clearly aware of his outsider status. To Michael, he was unmistakably one of them —another invisible presence—and that, oddly enough, made him feel a little less alone.

Without giving it much thought, Michael thrust out his hand abruptly, almost with authority, to break the silence.

“I’m Michael Gavey,” he said, his voice carrying its usual tone of self-assuredness.

The boy, slightly startled but polite, shook his hand.

“Oliver,” he replied.

“Oliver what ?” Michael pressed.

“Oliver Quick.”

“Ah, one of those, are you? A nobody, right?” Michael said with a wry smile, half-expecting a snarky retort.

Oliver shrugged, letting out a nervous laugh.

“Aren’t we all? It’s just the first night,” he replied, glancing uneasily around the room.

Michael’s gaze followed his, pointing out the packed tables where students were laughing and bonding with ease. The contrast with his own corner of the room couldn’t have been starker—a gathering of strangers and misfits.

“Look around,” Michael said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “You see what I see. It’s you, me, and the girl with agoraphobia who hasn’t even left her room.”

Oliver shifted uncomfortably, unsure how to respond. He couldn’t deny the truth in Michael’s observation. Their table was, indeed, a haven for those who didn’t quite belong. Oddly, though, Oliver found the isolation less troubling than he might have expected.

“What are you reading?” Michael asked abruptly, steering the conversation away from the heavy silence but still unable to shake his own simmering frustration.

Oliver hesitated, holding up the book in his hands.

“Nothing in particular,” he said evasively.

Michael wasted no time.

“I’m reading maths,” he announced, a smug grin spreading across his face. “Not because I enjoy it—though I’m brilliant at it. I can solve anything. Go on, test me. Ask me a sum.”

Oliver blinked, taken aback by the boldness of the claim. He hesitated, unsure whether to humour him.

“No, that’s fine…” Oliver said quickly, trying to sidestep the challenge.

Michael wasn’t having it. His need to prove himself burned too brightly.

“Come on, ask me. Anything.”

Oliver glanced at him, his expression growing tense.

“No, really, it’s fine—”

“Ask me a fucking sum!” Michael snapped, his patience wearing thin.

“All right then…” Oliver relented, pausing for a moment. “Four hundred and twenty-three times seventy-eight.”

Without missing a beat, Michael responded.

“Thirty-two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four.”

Oliver stared, visibly impressed. It wasn’t just that Michael had given the correct answer; it was the speed and apparent ease with which he’d arrived at it. Michael leaned back in his chair, a self-satisfied grin on his face, savouring the moment.

Unbeknownst to him, at a nearby table, Victor and Felix were watching. They nudged each other and laughed quietly, mocking him from a distance. Between the two of them, they planned an idea to play a joke on him.

That Friday, Violet had already finished all her classes for the week. She caught a bus to meet her band at Barry’s Pub, a cosy venue with exposed brick walls, an open bar, and most importantly, a raised stage. For The Wrecked Shiny Girls , this place would soon become their sanctuary.

Dany, the owner, had agreed to keep them as the weekend night act, a deal that promised to boost both the pub’s reputation and the band’s popularity among Oxford’s student scene.

“This is going to be amazing,” said Walda, the band’s vocalist, as she adjusted her microphone. “Our big break, ladies. Mark my words.”

Violet tuned her bass and got ready for the opening song. As the first chords filled the air, Jessy stood nearby, chewing gum and untangling her microphone cables.

“It’s too dark,” she remarked flatly. “The stage is practically invisible.”

Violet glanced around and realised Jessy was right. The stage lacked any direct lighting, and with the pub packed, they were in danger of being completely overlooked.

Walda, sporting her punk boots and spiked hair, started grumbling that this was the only place that had given them a chance. Jessy, clearly in a mood, fanned the flames of the argument. Lorelei had to step in to calm them down, while Violet and Hannah exchanged weary looks.

Walda’s temper could be explosive, and Jessy often seemed to be there just to provoke her. While Violet felt like she was exactly where she belonged, she worried that external pressures or the lack of camaraderie between the two might sabotage the band’s potential.

She couldn’t afford to lose this.

On stage, none of it mattered—the tension at home, her father’s disapproval, or anyone else’s opinions. It was just her and the music.

[jcmarchi]

AI could unleash £119 billion in UK productivity

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/ai-could-unleash-119-billion-in-uk-productivity/

AI could unleash £119 billion in UK productivity

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Workday has unveiled figures that suggest AI could unleash a £119 billion productivity boost for UK enterprises. This revelation comes at a crucial time, as the nation grapples with a productivity slump that has persisted for over a decade and a half.

The report paints a picture of a country on the brink of a seismic shift in its economic landscape. With current productivity levels languishing 24% below pre-2008 projections, the promise of AI-driven efficiency gains offers a glimmer of hope for businesses and policymakers alike.

According to the study, large businesses in the UK could save a staggering 7.9 billion employee hours annually through the strategic implementation of AI technologies.

Breaking this down to an individual level, the numbers are equally impressive. Business leaders stand to save 1,117 hours per year – equivalent to 140 working days – while individual employees could reclaim 737 hours, or 92 working days.

“Sizeable productivity growth has eluded UK workplaces for over 15 years – but responsible AI has the potential to shift the paradigm,” explained Daniel Pell, VP and country manager for UK&I at Workday. 

The report’s findings come at a time when political figures are also weighing in on the role of technology in governance.

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair recently commented that while Britain faces economic challenges, advances in technologies like AI mean there has “never been a better or more exciting time to be governing.”

Despite the optimistic outlook, the path to AI adoption is not without obstacles. The report highlights that 93% of both employees and business leaders harbour concerns related to trust in AI. This underscores the need for responsible AI strategies, comprehensive education, and transparent communication initiatives.

Other barriers to AI adoption include fears over safety, privacy, and bias (38%), the need for more time to educate teams (34%), and lack of investment (32%). Additionally, the report identified unengaged employees (41%), lack of incentives (41%), and inadequate technology (35%) as key factors hampering organisational productivity.

The potential economic impact of AI is staggering. Based on the study’s findings, an additional 2.9 hours of work per day translates to £11,058 a year of added value for each average employee. With over 10 million employees in large businesses across the UK, the cumulative effect could reach £119 billion worth of productive work annually.

However, the report also reveals a productivity paradox in the current workplace. In an 8-hour workday, employees and business leaders are genuinely productive for only 5.8 and 5.9 hours respectively—leaving over a quarter of the day unproductive.

The promise of AI extends beyond mere time savings. By taking on mundane and repetitive tasks, AI has the potential to empower workers to focus on more meaningful and impactful work. This shift could address one of the biggest barriers to productivity identified in the report: unengaged employees.

As UK businesses stand at the crossroads of this AI revolution, the report serves as both a wake-up call and a roadmap. It suggests a two-pronged approach to AI deployment: a concrete analysis of potential efficiencies coupled with a transparent strategy to tackle adoption barriers.

Realising the full potential of AI in the UK economy will require a concerted effort from businesses, policymakers, and employees alike. The successful integration of AI technologies could well determine the UK’s economic trajectory for years to come.

A full copy of Workday’s report can be found here (registration required)

(Photo by Belinda Fewings)

See also: Tech executives confident in AI skills, but adoption barriers persist

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, economy, enterprise, europe, productivity, report, research, study, uk, workday

[transmutationisms]

have u read bullshit jobs by david graeber? the book or the article i think they make mostly the same point

yeah i think he's overreliant on a historical argument that is fundamentally idealist and specifically he frequently attributes economic developments to the bad terrible horrible weberian conception of the 'protestant work ethic' or to a really rudimentary analysis of managerial psychology as depending on the creation of underlings. it's just mystifying what is actually very straightforwardly a basic result of capitalism, the creation of and reliance on profit-generating markets and positions regardless of underlying use-value or social worth. also i think he's wrong about some of the jobs he claims are socially useless, eg receptionists and administrative assistants and such are only as useless as the firm overall imo; the work structurally is often p load-bearing.

fundamentally though the real issue is revealed by the fact that he proposes UBI as a solution; this is only possible because ofc this entire framework is blatantly only applicable to an imperial core exploiting the labour of the rest of the world and concerned to distribute the fruits of this arrangement more equally internally without challenging the conditions that make such wealth possible in the first place. fatally liberal analysis at heart.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am discussing anime academia today, I was reading another paper that was equally frustrating, along a different axis:

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This as a premise is a good concept; someone mining the 90's Usenet anime communities for how the fandom saw female fans back then (the article title is quoting one such thread). So of course, the opening line of this article about the anime fandom in the 90's is....sigh....a reference to Donald Trump:

Commenting on the 2016 American presidential elections, multiple news reporters noted that a relationship could be found between Donald Trump supporters and online anime fans

It of course goes on to discuss Gamergate, 8chan, online right-wing radicalization, references to the "Fascist" themes of Attack on Titan, and on and on. The obvious problem with this is that it is irrelevant; the "methodology" section involves this aside about how they pulled this data from Google Archives but Google is an advertising firm and not a replacement for a real archive and we need to Fight The System and buddy my dude that is not germane to your sample size!!! But more importantly, it is backwards. I don't need to explain the argument here in detail; the article is positing a throughline from 90's anime discourse to modern right-wing internet politics through a sort of 'lock-in' effect of built culture norms around misogyny. Which is fine, you can make that argument - but why is all this future stuff in the first section? You haven't really presented the argument yet! This isn't a book, its not the intro chapter - literally 30% of the text of this article is stating a conclusion upfront, justified not through the text itself but citations to other articles about its truth.

This is something media studies pulled from traditional science - traditional science states "established facts" up front that the paper is building on. But that is because - a thousand caveats aside - in chemistry those facts are....facts. They may be wrong facts, but they can, ostensibly, be objective descriptors. This paper cites "anime is still synonymous with far-right ideologies of white and male supremacy, and events of anti-Blackness" like its citing the covalent bond count of carbon. That is not and never will be a fact one can cite, that is an argument; and its not one that is important for understanding this analysis of Usenet groups. This structure is pulled from other sciences, but it flourishes because it lets you pad the citation count of your peers. Its embarrassing how often you can skip the first 1/3rd of a paper in this field - really the worst possible thing to copy from economics (ding!)

This paper also does the insane thing of jumping between citations from 1992 and events in the 2010's like anime culture is continuous between those time periods. Its an extremely bold claim it just does in the background... but lets set that aside.

This hyper-politicization & hyper-theorizing leads to the second issue of extreme under-analysis. This is the actual value-add of this paper:

From this search, I was able to find the discussion threads “How many females read r.a.a.?” (135 messages; opened on July 13, 1993), “Question: Girls on r.a.a?” (23 messages; opened on February 25, 1994), “Female Otakus” (221 messages; opened on June 25, 1994), “Women watching anime” (72 messages; opened on October 4, 1994), and “Female fans - Do they exist?” (61 messages; opened on October 26, 1995). While these discussions may seem like they were spaces for marginalized users to discuss their experiences, they were often started and overwhelmingly occupied by identified male users. In total, I extracted 252 messages from 1992 to 1996 that were relevant to the gendering of anime fandom, and among those, I classified them as 7 kinds of negative networking discursive practices: (e.g. Table 1. Negative networking practices on rec.arts.anime).

252 messages, five threads - later on it will name other threads, so its more than this, but you get it. It has a bunch of data. And from that data, the article quotes...less than half a dozen examples. There are no quantitative metrics, no threads are presented or discussed in detail from this data set. Some other event is discussed in detail, but again it quotes essentially one person once. The provided "Table 1", the only Table, is a list of the author's categorizations of the data; the data itself is not present. Its file format is a CSV, presumably to mock me for clicking it.

There is, from top to bottom, a complete lack of engagement with the data in question. This would fail an intro anthropology seminar; the conclusion is simply presumed from 1% of the sample size while the rest of the messages are left on read. I just don't think there is any value in that, a handful of messages from 1996 divorced from their context and stapled onto modern politics as a wrap-up. What did the people on this Usenet value? How did they think of women collectively? As anime fans, as outsiders, as romantic partners, as friends? What subfactions existed? Questions like those would presumably be the point of this investigation, but they are treated as distractions.

And this article was, in anime academic circles, a pretty well-trumpeted one. I'm not cherry-picking a bad one here, it was the "hot paper" of the month when it came out. Its just that the standards can be so low, its a field that simply lacks rigor. Which doesn't stop a ton of great work from being done btw, that isn't my point at all. My point is that the great work is not selected for; it goes unrewarded, bogged down by academic standards divorced from discovering real insights.

(I do not think the question "why are they misogynist" ever crossed the author's mind. That should be your literal thesis, and its a ghost. Just ugh.)

[eternal-echoes]

Specifically, she found that “twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems.” Other research suggests that the children of never-married single parents tend to do somewhat worse than children of divorced single parents. Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father. But daughters depend on dads as well. One study by Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona found that about one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood. This dramatic divide was narrowed a bit when Ellis controlled for parents’ socioeconomic background—but only by a few percentage points. The research on this topic suggests that girls raised by single mothers are less likely to be supervised, more likely to engage in early sex, and to end up pregnant compared with girls raised by their own married parents. It’s true that poorer families are more likely to be headed by single mothers. But even factoring out class shows a clear difference. Research by the Economic Mobility Project at Pew suggests that children from intact families are also more likely to rise up the income ladder if they were raised in a low-income family, and less likely to fall into poverty if they were raised in a wealthy family. For instance, according to Pew’s analysis, 54 percent of today’s young adults who grew up in an intact two-parent home in the top-third of household income have remained in the top-third as adults, compared with just 37 percent of today’s young adults who grew up in a wealthy (top-third) but divorced family. Why is this? Single mothers, even from wealthier families, have less time. They are less likely to be able to monitor their kids. They do not have a partner who can relieve them when they are tired or frustrated or angry with their kids. This isn’t just a question of taking kids to the array of pampered extracurricular activities that many affluent, two-parent families turn to; it’s about the ways in which two sets of hands, ears, and eyes generally make parenting easier.

The article overlooks the fact that the parenting style of mothers and parenting styles of fathers are different: mothers provides the emotional support so children can have the emotional maturity to grown in adulthood and fathers discipline their children so they know the moral code of the universe so when they grow they would know how to behave within society; hence why children of single mothers tend to get more trouble with the law because they never had the fathers that disciplined them when they misbehaved.

Children needs a mother and a father. Children are biologically made by the union of husband and wife so as a result they have a spiritual connection with them, since human beings are both body and souls. It wouldn't be right to spiritually sever a child's relationship with a parent due to divorce (unless a parent is abusive).