#like there is an equilibrium and the economy always finds its way there

[opinions-about-tiaras]

It's always worth noting, I think, that there's a few crucial differences here that affect things like AirBnD, Uber, Lyft, etc. that don't have a lot of currency when it comes to things like Amazon or the legacy industries.

And that's ease of entry.

Building railroads and steel plants and oil refineries is a shockingly capital intensive process that favors first movers and established incumbents. It takes years to build them, they occupy valuable land and can't just exist anywhere (fights over railroad rights-of-way could literally escalate into corporate murder) and once they exist, anyone looking to enter that market space and compete must have incredibly deep pockets and an iron will.

Amazon works the same way; it worked for years to build up its infrastructure and business relationships and suchly to the point that entering the same space is incredibly hard. There ARE competitors, but they're sort of anemic in the US.

Social media networks have very low (comparatively) barriers to entry, but the nature of social media is that network effects are paramount, which, again, privileges first-movers and established incumbents.

The "sharing economy" doesn't work like that. It is not hard to build an app, and once you have that app built, it is not hard to find people willing to use it.

This means that the old strategy of "take losses to build market share and brand loyalty (I don't understand why the tweets at the top of this post have "loss" in scare quotes, that's literally what was happening, a service was being sold for less than the cost to provide it) and when you have monopoly power jack it all up" doesn't quite work, because the instant you do that you can be undercut by a new entrant.

However.

Because of this, paradoxically, the ease of entry can function as its own barrier to entry.

What can happen is that intelligent people will look at this dynamic and go "sure, we COULD enter this market. But let's say we do that. And let's say we undercut everyone and achieve dominance, and let's say we then raise prices. Someone will just do the same thing to us, right? Leaving us with fuck-all?" And so the established firms continue to exist.

(There are of course a lot of unintelligent people out there with money to burn.)

Basically, the eventual equilibrium for something like ride-hailing should eventually end up being "two or three firms, after figuring out the bare minimum they can pay their drivers and the bare minimum level of service that people will accept, manage to squeeze yearly profits on the order of 3-5% out of their market share."

If they're taking in more profit than that, a competitor can enter the market, pay drivers more and accept a lower profit, and out-compete them. If their service gets TOO shitty, someone can enter the market and out-compete them on service at the same profit margin. And if your profit margin sinks much below three percent, that's VERY risky; one bad year can wipe you out.

This is, logically speaking, what should happen eventually. We can see the shape of this starting to come; Uber and Lyft are slowly inching their way to sustainability.

[saybees]

Y'know, something that I think isn't talked about enough is landlords discriminating against people for their age. Unfortunately they ARE allowed to do this because there are apartment buildings that are like seniors only 55+ type things, BUT a lot of landlords won't rent to young people simply because they're young. When my ex and I moved to the west coast we had a VERY hard time finding new places to live all the time. People wouldn't rent to us because we were barely 20. We had steady jobs that made enough to cover at least rent every month, but we had never rented before so we had no references and we were overlooked for SO many places. I couldn't even tell you how many places we applied for.

Like generally landlords are shit. They aren't allowed to discriminate against people for a lot of things, but there are also a lot of things they CAN discriminate against people for and they will do all of the things. Why? Because they can??? Is it a power thing?

And the thing that doesn't make sense to me is that a lot of landlords would rather leave a place empty rather than rent to the young couple with a dog that work at a grocery store. If they leave the place empty they are paying for the utilities and the taxes with no income from that property, but if they throw in tenants that are just less than their unicorn rainbow sparkle ideal they are instead making revenue. From a business standpoint it makes absolutely zero sense for a landlord to choose to leave their property empty instead of renting it out to someone less "desirable" to them.

Oh

I just got it. It clicked. They're doing it on purpose to drive prices up. Demand is higher and supply is lower so the price spikes. Dirty bastards.

Eat the rich.

[kitchenproductssuggester]

Lloyd AC Technologies in India + the Best Models & Tips

India is a nation that's ultimately hot. Thus, humidity and heat are common in India. Now, to overcome the heat at houses, air conditioners are considered to be the ideal solution. With everything becoming net-linked, millennials and generation-z desire their appliances to be clever.

Among those brands that cater to the cooling needs with intelligent technologies is Lloyd. And in addition, it appears to be among the earliest AC manufacturers in India that Havells obtained in 2017.

Lloyd is your number two manufacturer by earnings after Voltas. Lloyd provides both windows and splits air conditioners. Lloyd AC Review contains all the specification of the best Lloyd AC Brand.

Thus, what's making people run following Lloyd ACs? Why you need to (or perhaps not) purchase a Lloyd AC, let us see in this report.

Key Lloyd AC Technology

Rapid Cooling with 4-Way Swing

Is not it frustrating on a sunny day that you come directly to your house after a day outside in the sunlight, and your AC requires some time to cool down if it had been turned off sooner?

Well, this issue is using the AC for ages. But luckily, brands such as Lloyd are creating positive changes in this way to lessen the cooling time.

New Lloyd ACs include Quick Cooling technology that's designed using a 4-way cooling system that the firm believes can cool the room down in under two minutes.

It accomplishes Rapid Cooling utilizing a 4-way blade swing that thrusts the cool air into 4 distinct sides and hence done the Cooling considerably quicker than normal ACs.

Wireless AC Control

Among the main USP of Lloyd AC is its own wireless AC control utilizing a Wi-Fi system. This feature liberates you from the trouble of looking to your remote to control the huge cooling appliance.

Now all you must get a smartphone download the Lloyd AC distance program, and control your AC from any place on your palms. Just consider it: you're into the bedroom, but your AC is operating in the hallway, and nobody is around.

You may just turn off the AC in your hallway by lying on the mattress of your area without having to get up from the bed! Not turning off and on, other configurations such as fever, style, swing, etc., may also be controlled via this mobile application.

BLDC Motor and EEV For Energy Conservation and Optical Climate Control

Premium split ACs by Lloyd include a BLDC motor rather than a conventional induction engine. BLDC motor stands for brushless DC motor, and the principal differentiating factor is that the BLDC engine has permanent magnets when compared with electromagnets within an induction engine.

BLDC motor is famous for reliability, efficiency, and very low sound emission. ACs coming using BLDC motor are readily attached to the house inverter.

This is quite advantages for individuals who have regular power cuts in their house and rely on inverters during load shedding. BLDC motors at Lloyd ACs are complimented with a digital expansion valve (EEV) which regulates the flow of refrigerant.

EEV contributes to efficient and better cooling, notwithstanding erratic fever or varying climatic state out. Premium Lloyd ACs can operate even at a temperature as large as 60oC.

10-step Inverter with Twin Rotary Compressor

New split ACs introduced by Lloyd include a 10-step inverter controller. Do not confuse this futon compressor technology using all the inverters you use for powering your homes through the power cut.

Inverters used within the AC are for the velocity controller so that AC runs in line with the load. A 10-step inverter means that there are 10 unique frequencies where the compressor can operate.

Inverter technology could be considered an automobile accelerator. Just like as soon as the compressor requires more electricity, the inverter gives it more electricity by running at higher frequencies. If it requires less power, it provides less electricity by conducting at reduced frequencies.

With this technology, the AC’s compressor is always on but brings less power or much more electricity based upon the warmth of the incoming air and the amount set from the thermostat. The speed and strength of the compressor are corrected appropriately.

Twin Rotary Compressor for Lower Noise Generation

Lloyd is among those silent AC manufacturers around. That is mainly because they utilize a twin rotary compressor which leads to significant sound reduction.

What's more, in addition, it trims down the energy consumption resulting in saving on energy bills. Furthermore, the low-noise fan blade, fantastic air-duct layout, and utilization of noise-isolating fabric modern Lloyd AC keep peacefully cool surroundings in your house.

There's also a mute style that brings the sound level to its underside to approximately 20 dB.

Copper Condenser

To save costs and deliver down the AC costs, many AC manufacturers favor utilizing aluminum condensers in their own versions as it's more economical.

But modern Lloyd AC includes a copper condenser using 100% inner grooved aluminum, which eases in a quicker and smoother flow of refrigerant.

Additionally, aluminum has better heat transport performance compared to aluminum. Copper is also a lot more lasting as it could withstand a greater volume of atmospheric pressure.

Thus, your AC with an aluminum condenser with continue long and lead to lower maintenance cost in the time of fixes.

PM 2.5 Filter with Self-Clean Technology

Together with the increasing air pollution, the filter has grown into one of the vital qualities to check from the ACs besides energy efficiency.

In accordance with WHO (World Health Organization) quotes, amounts of air pollution are on a significant increase in growing economies like India.

A lot of studies have indicated that air pollution may be the reason for increasing instances of respiratory ailments.

Thus, air filtration becomes one of the very significant facets of the AC, and the Lloyd is the air purifier manufacturer that's offering powerful and powerful PM 2.5 filters inside their own premium split ACs to handle this matter.

For the uninitiated particulate matter, PM 2.5 describes extremely fine particles within the air that are of the dimensions 2.5 microns in diameter (or less). Micron is a component of dimension on a microscopic scale with one inch equating to 25,000 microns.

Emission from vehicles along with the burning of timber and petroleum are the principal sources of PM 2.5 particulates. But thankfully, superior Lloyd split AC coming using PM 2.5 filter may filter these impurities within the air.

Aside from the impeccable air filtration technologies, superior Lloyd versions arrive with the Self Clean characteristic, where the filter cleans itself.

Through this automatic cleaning procedure, the indoor system is controlled at a cooling mode at a lower fan speed to ease the removal of dust out of evaporator fins.

Then it switches into a fan-only mode to dismiss the moist air disinfecting unit. This phase removes bacteria and fungus.

Pros and Cons of Lloyd AC

The operation of all Lloyd ACs, generally speaking, is remarkable. You'd see a lot of positive things from the Lloyd AC. Wi-Fi management comes among the very first notable things you'll notice in Lloyd divide ACs.

Assessing your AC working with a smartphone is surely a pleasant encounter. Another benefit is in its Quick Cooling that warms the space in a couple of minutes.

Yet another interesting thing we enjoyed about versions like LS24B22FI is the fact that it allows to switch off the index on the AC, which shows temperature. Because of its 4-way blade swings, the cooling system accomplished by the AC is uniform.

There isn't much to whine about the Lloyd air conditioners, but there are particular areas that require improvement. Energy efficiency is just one of these.

The ISEER evaluation of Lloyd ACs falls supporting the Japanese manufacturers such as Daikin and Mitsubishi. Yet another drawback of Lloyd AC is they do not arrive with an integrated voltage stabilizer.

Consequently, if the energy source in your house is inconsistent, you need to avert Lloyd ACs or need to purchase a stabilizer together with the AC.

Lloyd is a budget manufacturer, and if you're interested in finding an adequate excellent AC at a nice cost, then Lloyd is a superb selection. Their build quality might not be like that of high-quality brands such as Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Daikin, and so on, but they are great value for money.

Conclusion

Lloyd is an inexpensive luxury AC manufacturer, and that is why individuals who search for the equilibrium of great excellent AC, trendy technology, and fair price select for Lloyd AC.

Lloyd is among a few brands that have its own production plant in India. In reality, it used to provide parts for ACs to other manufacturers such as Voltas, Godrej, and Whirlpool.

Thus, Lloyd is unquestionably an ac specialist. Overall, Lloyd is a fantastic alternative if you're trying to purchase an AC. It includes a few cool features and provides great value for money.

Go for Lloyd AC in case that you use technologically innovative AC at a fantastic price point and have a steady power source in your home.

Which are the best AC models from LLOYD?

Lloyd is one such brand that's excelling in manufacturing high-quality Air Conditioners. The air conditioners in Lloyd are packaged with contemporary features.

They offer a variety of air conditioners, including Window ACs, Split air heaters, Tower ACs, Portable ACs in Addition to Cassette ACs. We'll be reviewing three of their ideal Lloyd ACs within this report.

Lloyd 1.5 Ton 3 Star Window AC

The first AC Inside this record is really a Window AC out of Lloyd. This Air Conditioner includes a 3-star evaluation from BEE. The capacity of the AC is 1.5 tons.

Another top quality characteristic of this AC is that the Air Filters, which can be useful in maintaining the standard of the air pure and fresh.

This AC also has a Dehumidification quality which enables the unit to function in Fan style or Cooling manner, thereby ensuring effective dehumidification without reducing the temperature of your room.

The AC also includes a"self-Diagnosis" role, which assists in discovering errors and then shows them on the LED of the AC's interior unit.

The condenser of this AC consists of 100 percent aluminum, making the Air purifier corrosion resistant. When there's a power failure abruptly, then the AC will automatically restart when the electricity is restored, and also, it is going to function from the prior setting.

Pros:

Air Filters assist keep the air dust-free and pristine.

The AC includes remote control.

The AC requires very low maintenance.

5 decades of warranty on the compressor.

Cons:

The compressor guarantee period is less when compared to other ACs.

2) Lloyd 1.5 Ton 5

This really is a Split Air Conditioner using an Inverter out of Lloyd. It has a 5-star rating along with a "PM-25 Air Filter", which assists in trapping all kinds of airborne contaminants, such as spores, pollen, dust, pollen, bacteria, etc.

It keeps the air clean and wholesome. With the support of this"Quick Cooling" attribute, this AC is likely to make your room more comfortable in only 45 minutes.

The AC also employs the"Air Cooled Electric Control Box" technologies, which assists in efficiently cooling the outside unit of the Air Conditioner even when the temperature outside is as large as 52 levels.

The Air Conditioner also includes"Golden Eva Coils," which protects the device from rainwater, polluted air, or dust. The LED screen also remains concealed, and the AC also doesn't require an outside stabilizer.

Pros:

Numerous air filters keep the air clean.

The AC is very energy efficient.

The LED display is hidden.

The AC takes only 45 secs to cool the room completely.

Cons:

After-sales service from the company isn’t commendable.

3) Lloyd 1.5 Ton 3

This is Just Another High-Quality Split Air Conditioner from Lloyd. The capacity of the AC is 1.5 a lot, and also the very attractive characteristic of this AC is its own "Ayurvedic Tulsi" air filter.

Tulsi is an excellent antioxidant and helps in providing powerful protection against germs, germs addition to fungi. The air filter also has activated carbon, which assists in absorbing damaging properties and discharge fresh and clean air.

The coil of this Air Conditioner consists of "Hydrophilic Aluminium Fins" to protects the AC's condenser against rust and thus increasing the life span of this Condenser coil.

Another fascinating aspect of this AC is the fact that it's the"smart Multi Fold Evaporator'', which economically pushes out the indoor warmth. When there's a power failure all of a sudden, then the AC will begin automatically from its previous setting once the electricity comes back.

Pros:

The LED display is hidden.

Compact in size.

The air filters ensure blowing out cool and fresh air.

It has a “Tulsi air filter” as well.

Cons:

Customer service is not commendable.

Conclusion

These are just three of the very best Air Conditioning made from the reputed Llyod business. Consequently, if you're wondering as to that Lloyd AC you ought to prefer purchasing, then this guide would be of fantastic support to you.

There are many brands in the marketplace selling a variety of kinds of air conditioners and, it's easy to become confused. We've clarified all of the characteristics of the three Lloyd air conditioners, so you have the entire value of the cash you invested and find the item of your own choice.

Lloyd AC is from which country?

The year 2020 watched a vast majority of Indians becoming aware of the brands they buy products from. Consumers showed much interest in purchasing from local brands in India to encourage Indian brands and especially boycott goods sold by Chinese manufacturers.

This further saw numerous internet users fad looking for the source of any organization's country. Likewise, since the summer season is already here, a range of individuals are thinking about purchasing a new air conditioner for themselves.

That is the reason why numerous individuals have been tendency hunting about AC brands along with the organization's origin. Interestingly, the firm Lloyd watched many individuals asking about"Lloyd AC nation," "Lloyd new from which nation," and related questions. This is more info regarding the business brand Lloyd and that nation it belongs to.

A word for LLOYD itself

According to the info stated on the official site of the newest Lloyd, it's been stated that Lloyd AC source is India. The official site claims the headquarters of the business is at Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Here's What the About Us' section on the official site of Lloyd reads:

Lloyd has carved a market across India with its impeccable quality criteria together with the unmatched item, service, and guarantee. We, Lloyd, have consistently thought that all of our merchandise is a package of pleasure delivering happiness to houses.

It has helped us get the confidence and smiles of more than 3 million clients. Due to this love and trust, we've been continuously evolving with a bevy of new-age inventions and smarter alternatives.

Lloyd is among the pioneers from the AC category. As we're poised to meet our promise of earning homes more happiness, we bring forth our selection of technologically innovative and visually styled outfits of new-age Air Conditioners, LED TV and Washing machines.

So, the bottom line is:

It's well worth noting that Lloyd is possessed by Havells India. Lloyd's started their travel in India as a joint venture beneath Fedders Lloyd from 1956.

The newest became a sacred brand from the year 2007 if Fedders went bankrupt in America. It was subsequently possessed by the BR Punj Group before it was acquired by HAvells India in Feb 2017.

Tips for making best use of LLOYD ACs

Below are a few of the advice for making use of space air-conditioners. Proper use of Modes and Settings readily available in your Space A.C. can guarantee decent health and relaxation to you and lower your energy bill also.

Below are a few hints!

Your area air-conditioner (A.C.) may or may not possess the Settings and Modes supplied below. Each Setting and Mode is clarified prior to notification when or how to utilize it.

1 – Cool Mode

What can it be? In Cool Mode, the fan operates constantly, and the compressor turns off and on just as needed to keep the set temperature.

When to use it? Utilize the Cool Mode if you desire Room A.C. to cool the space and take care of the room temperature as you set.

2 – Fan Mode

What can it be? In Fan Mode, the fan operates continuously along with the compressor off.

When to use it? Utilize the Fan Mode if you don't want cooling but need the fan in the A.C. to give ventilation (airflow ) from the area.

Rather than conducting the A.C. in Fan Mode (that will provide only restricted ventilation), then you might prefer to conduct the ceiling fan (if it's there in the area ) to get a comprehensive airflow.

3 – Dry Mode

What can it be? In Dry Mode, the fan along with the sealing machine of the A.C. operates; however, the A.C. doesn't blow out chilly air.

As the air moves through the A.C., the humidity (water vapors from the air) condenses on the evaporator, so the air comes out of the dryer.

Thus it's a function that reduces the humidity in the room, which makes it comfier when humidity beyond the area is high. But it’s clearly understood that the A.C.

in Dry Mode isn't meant to substitute a dehumidifier or function for a dehumidifier. The capability to dehumidify an A.C. is a lot lower than that of a dehumidifier.

When to use it? Utilize the Dry Mode through rainy and spring seasons once the temperature isn't hot enough to operate the Cool Mode. However, the humidity is somewhat high.

4 – Smart Fan Mode or Energy Saver Mode

What can it be? Energy Saver or Smart Fan Mode is Meant to decrease the energy intake of this AC.

If this style is set, the AC cools the space normally along with the compressor turn off and on as needed to keep the set temperature. When the temperature drops below the set temperature, the compressor turns off, and the fan will also be switched off to conserve energy absorbed by it.

However, the fan is going to be switched off and on every 2-3 minutes to look at the temperature within the room. When the temperature increases above the set temperature, the compressor will turn on together with the fan.

When to use it? It's always fantastic to use Energy Saver Mode since it reduces the energy intake of this AC. However, some users don't enjoy this manner due to turning their fan on/off repeatedly.

5 – Sleep Mode

What can it be? The Sleep Mode works just together with Cool Mode. The goal is that the AC will slowly increase the level of temperature preserved by it throughout your sleep.

This helps to boost your comfort level since, throughout sleep, the metabolism in the human body decreases, and thus the need for cooling additionally reduces. Another advantage of this model is the decrease in energy intake of this AC because of cooling.

When to use it? In case you've put your AC in Cool Mode along with the Timer isn't turned on before you go to sleep, then you need to use Sleep Mode.

6 – Temperature Setting

What can it be? From the newer-type ACs, the temperature maintained by the AC is shown in digital form, and also, this temperature could be put by the consumer in the desired value.

From the old-type ACs, the temperature isn't shown, while the temperature setting is permitted on a potentiometer using a round knob. It's been observed that lots of AC users place the temperature in the bottom value (16oC or even 18oC or"Really Cool"), believing this will give quicker cooling.

In fact, this doesn't occur because the AC, no matter the temperature air, injects cool air at 16oC into 18oC to space. The compressor turns off when the AC attains set temperature from the room, and then the temperature is kept at this setting by turning the breaker off and on.

The way to use it? The ideal temperature setting in the factors of your health in addition to relaxation is 24oC to 27oC (24 to 27-degree Celcius).

At precisely the exact same time, this setting (rather than the typical setting of 18oC or so) will prevent substantial wastage of money and safeguard the environment also. In the case of old-style ACs, the temperature knob ought to be placed around mid-way.

7 – Fan Speed Setting

What can it be? As a Frequent practice, the Majority of the space ACs have three configurations of Fan Speed, which are Low, Medium, and High, Together with an Off position.

The fan is intended for venting or flow of the chilled air created by the AC. The fan speed doesn't alter the cooling created by the AC, but greater ventilation has a superior cooling effect on the residents of the room.

The way to use it? The Fan Speed ought to be chosen in accordance with the venting (airflow ) desired. It's usually much better to choose Low or moderate-rate AC fan and utilize a ceiling fan to get a comprehensive airflow in the room.

8 – Timer-Off Setting

What can it be? The Timer-Off air is supposed to set time delay or the shifting time (in minutes or hours ) to turn off the AC mechanically when air conditioning isn't required, and so prevent wastage of money and electricity.

The way to use it? Ordinarily, the Timer-Off is placed appropriately in the time of going to break or to bed with the space AC running, so the AC will be automatically switched off after the wait or in the specified period.

9 – Timer-On Setting

What can it be? The Timer-On Setting is supposed to set time delay or the shifting time (in minutes or hours ) to switch on the AC automatically. As a normal situation, the consumer might prefer the space to be chilled a bit before he returns from the workplace in the day.

He could use this timer setting to change on the AC mechanically at the proper time, rather than maintaining the AC running through the day. The usage of Timer-On can consequently offer a great deal of energy conservation.

The way to use it? The Timer-On could be placed appropriately (as soon as the AC is off), so the AC will be automatically charged following the specified delay or in the specified period.

[momaeder]

LETTER

LETTER

My dear friend Gutiérrez Please forgive me for having left the vatican without a word to you. I just could not bear the thought anymore of remaining in this situation I felt constrained. constrained by this system the ubiquitous logics and regulations of the economy, the legal system, the political system, the mass media, the church [1] Bound to a mortal body, by bonds as strange as they are powerful, my care for the preservation of this body tempts the soul to think only of self, and gives it an interest opposed to the general order of things, which it is still capable of knowing and loving [2] The only place where I was at peace was in my garden. Where I would watch the songbirds on their travel to africa. So free and close to the sky. Moving freely not because they had to but because they wanted to. I watched in silence over our mortal agonies, guide of messengers, bonds and cords, angel flying in limpid air, nimble as a rocket, leading us toward the other world. [6] it was on one of those afternoons when I heard a bird chirping, singled out and trapped between the branches of a bush the heaven had sent an ortolan So sweet that bird, and dear to me, May it sing on ever sweetly sang, among the blossoms free, Singing with such mastery. [4] I felt a youthful, holy, vital bliss In every vein and fibre newly glowing. [19] But not in holy reverence to our Lord, but in lust. [20] I could not let go of the images that arose in me and that came along with the thought of consuming the bird with all its feathers and freedom. The memory of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. [5] With this thought it dawned on me If moral precepts seem laughable, if the person preaching is irritating, for no one lives like an absolute angel, then vital experience matters eminently.The foolish life doesn’ t expose itself; the good one puts himself in danger, like intelligence when it wants to invent.It dives into this experience, into this adventure, exceptional and everyday, in which destitution, suffering, failure, frustration, mistakes and sin itself teach us more than every other thing in the world. [7] Religion connects the disconnected. But I will unbind the connected, unbind the priest more than he unbinds himself; unfasten the shackles, knots and connections.It is in this way that in space and the world atomism is profoundly irreligious : principles separated by the void. but if I disconnect the connected, then physics comes back down to religion.Then the atom is indeed the same word as templum, the temple, the distinction of local variety within the global space. [3] The restaurant I opened up. The palais ortolan. For my getaway I found a perfect site, bringing with it it’s own luggage like I am, yet willing to turn things around. The house that used to be an absolute identity, [...] in a determined guise, that is, as identical absolute

, it was posited as such by reflection over against opposition and manifoldness; [...] the negative of reflection and determination in general. [8] but it has grown tired of the Absolute anonymity of the representer and absolute loss of the selfsame [9] it wants more. It wants to understand me and my doings and moreso it wants to unveil to the world what I try to do secretly. Reversing the processes of becoming in my restaurant as to present it to the world. It has become a tracing element; it reveals the network of unobservable relations in the box. Because it’s not their sum that produces the cooks and ingredients. It’s the trace of blood on their shirts. It traces routes in the black box. [10] On the line that it is tracing, there is only  matter and movement, movement which is more or less complicated, more or less delayed. [12] Yet The moment of the exclusion of madness in the subject who seeks the truth is necessarily hidden from the point of view of the architectonic ordering of the system [11] it does not completely get what I am doing, unveiling the goods and guests that enter my place, tracing the fumes and scents through the building projecting the red light of my pandemonic kitchen onto the veil I put up. But yet it cannot fully grasp my intentions, my way of dissolution. But somehow even if we do not work together, we work between the two. [14] It’s better to find a symbiotic equilibrium, even fairly primitive, than to reopen a war that is always lost because we and the enemy find renewed force in the relationship. [13] Even if it is a bit unconfortable for me that all the traces of my workings are reveald to the city it provides me with the spaces to hide in plain sight behind the veil of my apparent workings, to cultivate as much of my land as I require to grow the figs I need for [16] the birds to gorge on. To collect Locked in frozen layers, a universe of ancient creatures that awaits another chance at life. [15] To Transform substances into a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. [17] To move freely between earth, water, fire and air. Growing, cultivating, conserving, dissolving and cooking the artefacts I collect on my way. To create something that has never been sensed before. To witness the veil of maya being torn apart [21] as all the symbolic faculties of man are stimulated to the highest pitch of intensity; something never before experienced struggles towards expression, the annihilation of the veil of Maya, unity as the spirit of the species, even of nature. [22] To stare my guest in the eye as his whole world unravels and witness the revelation that. Dreams and madness then reveal themselves to be made of the same substance. [18]

on another note As my actions have drawn attention, the media, members of the public, and politicians have begun to pay attention. [23] Recently I have gotten a reservation from a name familiar to me from the Michelin Guide. I will report to you how it went as soon as possible. My dearest regards go out to you LENNY

[1] Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture Vol 2 [2] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [3] Serres, The Birth of Physics [4] von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde [5] Deleuze Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [6] Serres, The Natural Contract [7] Serres, The Incandescent [8] Hegel, The Science of Logic [9] Derrida, Of Grammatology [10] Serres, Rome [11] Foucault, History of Madness [12] Deleuze, Bergsonism [13] Serres, History of Scientific Thought [14] Deleuze, Dialogues [15] Braidotti Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary [16] Montesquieu, Persian Letters [17] Deleuze Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [18] Foucault, History of Madness [19] Hovestadt Buehlmann, Quantum City [20] Zizek, Less Than Nothing [21] Costelloe, The Sublime [22] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [23] Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#8yrsago Stephenson's REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller

Back in 2010, I found myself in Seattle (I was touring with my novel For the Win -- a young adult science fiction novel about gold-farming), I stopped by Neal Stephenson's place for breakfast and asked him what he was working on. He said, "You ever heard of 'gold-farming?'" I couldn't help but smile.

Stephenson's one of my favorite novelists, a writer who is both very good at what he does, and who is nevertheless willing to go all the way out to the edge of his prodigious talents and take brave risks. Even when these don't fully pay off, they're always exhilarating experiments -- Stephenson's imperfect results being better than most writers' best days. So while Snow Crash and Diamond Age drew critical fire for having a lot of seemingly ornamental plot-discursions that never quite paid off at the end, the insanely ambitious and enormous System of the World ruthlessly hunted down every conceivable loose end and executed it before the final page was turned. As much as I enjoyed the latter, I found that I preferred Stephenson's loose ends to the sometimes mechanical exercise of tying them all off. His next book, Anathem, solved this problem somewhat by having a lot fewer moving parts (a bit of a joke there for those of you who've read the book!) and thus a simpler, cleaner finish. As good and audacious as Anathem was, it lacked the intense, fractal plot-complexity of System, and I missed that a little.

REAMDE, Stephenson's latest novel -- the "have you ever heard of 'gold-farming'" -- novel is a book that represents a new kind of equilibrium in Stephenson's literary canon: a book that is simultaneously as baroque as System of the World and as cleanly and crisply finished as Anathem. It is, in other words, a triumph, all 980 pages of it.

REAMDE starts off as a clever, if somewhat straightforward technothriller. Richard Forthrast is the black sheep of a rugged, formidable midwestern family. After a checkered career of minor crime and notoriety, Richard has founded an enormous and enormously profitable multiplayer online game, called T'Rain. This has left him uncomfortably wealthy and powerful, and somewhat constrained by his corporate success. But at least he can help out his relations, like his favored adopted niece Zula, an Eritrean refugee who was raised on the family homestead in Iowa and is now putting her advanced geoscience degree to work as a technician in the T'Rain world, designing the geosystems that deposit precious metals where gold-farmers (an integral part of the T'Rain economy) can dig it up.

The story begins in earnest when Zula's foolish hacker boyfriend sells some stolen credit-card numbers to a front for the Russian mob, and then finds himself at their mercy as the bagman's entire user directory is encrypted by a piece of malicious ransomware called REAMDE (a Chinglish mangling of "Readme") that is targeted at T'Rain players (the malware also encrypts the backup). Now the mob needs to pay off the ransom -- a trifling $75 worth of virtual gold -- so that they can decrypt the data. Except that the in-game region where the gold-drop is to be made is now clogged with powerful griefers who waylay extortion victims and steal the gold they're bringing to the crooks.

After a bunch of wrangling and danger, Zula, her hacker boyfriend, and the Russian gangsters end up in Xianmen, China (the first two aren't there voluntarily), trying to track down the virus's author, and that's where the ambition of the REAMDE starts to kick in. You see, at this point, Stephenson is only a couple hundred pages into his thousand-page epic, and he's only marshalled a few of the many bands of characters who spend the next 700 pages embroiled in one of the most startling, exciting, white-knuckle technothrillers I've had the pleasure of losing a week of my life to.

REAMDE goes from being a story about virtual worlds to a much bigger geopolitical tale about the war on terror, filled with grace-note, high-detail technical excursions into international shipping, American survivalism, MI6 spycraft, Philippines sex-tourism, and lots and lots and lots of guns. This last part is one of the great testimonials I can make about REAMDE, because books about guncraft generally bore me down to the marrow. But Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself.

Combine that with a cast of characters that, while recognizably Stephensonian archetypes, are nevertheless novel, likable, and complex, and you've got a powerful, magnificent book that is worth the sizable forests that will have to be demolished to commit it to paper, and the sizable lump that it will represent in your bag or briefcase while you finish it. Here's a book that, all on its own, makes a hell of a case for buying an ebook reader, assuming you can find a DRM-free ebook edition.

REAMDE

https://boingboing.net/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-p.html

[andy-we-ardilla]

Towards Stratified Healthcare and Precision Medicine for Developing Economies during the Covid-19 pandemic through Network Modelling and Natural Language Processing

Nowadays, the ever-increasing volume of information recorded every second has brought significant opportunities and challenges to both life and science. For instance, during the current Covid-19 situation, several medical records are being registered in large databases, and this data brings up two essential, yet straightforward, questions: How to identify and warn possible patients at risk from current patients data? And is there a way to identify successful procedures to threat Covid-19? In this work, we discuss how Network Modelling and Natural Language Processing, which are valuable tools from Data Science, can deliver an answer to these questions in a Stratified Healthcare and Precision Medicine context. Furthermore, we also provide an ethical discussion of to what extent these methods may impact the public.

Let us present one example which is currently happening in clinics and hospitals worldwide: In a third-world country, there are numerous medical facilities currently overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients. As the World Health Organization has not identified a standard procedure to tackle the virus, many doctors and nurses are dazzled trying to treat patients effectively and develop a prognosis. This process is affected by several factors: limited medical resources, lack of a standard procedure nationwide, patients from different medical backgrounds, and a pressing need for quick medical response. However, every step of treatment gets its digital footprint in a local database. This example is an open door for Stratified Healthcare and Precision Medicine. The first is the ability to identify essential differences across populations and to act accordingly in healthcare provision; whereas, the second focuses on establishing a prognosis for each patient based on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. To see how to implement these, we now introduce Network Modelling and Natural Language Processing.

Network Modelling (NM) is the study of the interaction between objects or entities. It uses graphs to represent relationships. Here we present two uses of NM for our example above. Firstly, Systems Biology approach to the study of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has effectively revealed the life span of the virus in different surfaces, and determined the structure of its proteins, explaining its transmission rate and effect on human cells. With this information, hospitals can take measures which could prevent community spread of the virus. Also, labs can research on proteins reaction to assist the production of new therapies and drugs, complemented by hospital records on patient-specific datasets during trials, ultimately reaching Precision Medicine. Secondly, by using a communication network, it is possible to identify and prevent future cases of people with risk of dying of Covid-19. Through the Resource Description Framework (RDF), we can trace a path between a current Covid-19 patient and their household. Hence, if a patient is certainly in touch with someone of a population of high risk, additional measures can be taken to prevent contagion or to do a preventive intervention, thus accomplishing stratified healthcare.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of Data Science focused on processing, analyzing, and interpreting human languages. Focusing on Precision Medicine, NLP is useful when analyzing pathology reports to relate records to an individual's health. However, it is essential to identify a standard set of procedures that have, historically from a data point of view, been successful in treating the virus; hence, allowing for a more informed decision to be made when considering treatment options. There are several ways to do this, like using rule-based techniques or machine learning. For instance, university hospitals, in partnership with IBM, can use Watson to determine the best method to perform this analysis quickly. Laterwards, this knowledge could be applied nationwide with the use of open-source packages like NLTK. However, if there is no access to this kind of tools, engineers, mathematicians, and statisticians can collaborate with health professionals to provide an NLTK-based nationwide tool. Whatever the method, we would focus on accurately classifying a patient and find the steps that the medical team took to treat it. This way, we can use this technique of Precision Medicine to develop Stratified Healthcare.

At this point, we have seen how combining NM and NLP are useful tools to develop Precision Medicine and Stratified Healthcare for our example above. Moreover, they have been essential in answering the questions proposed at the beginning of this piece of work. Notwithstanding, we have not considered the difficulties related to both approaches, which are of technical and ethical nature.

Not surprisingly, to apply any of the tools previously described for the example discussed, we need a stable internet connection, a server to store data, and computation capability. In third-world economies, this is sometimes too much to ask. Furthermore, if we could overcome these issues, then the lacking of a systematic medical terminology, like SNOMED-CT, would limit processing. Without medical supervision, the output of the analysis would be limited, yet guaranteeing medical assistance for research during the pandemic is not practical, even less if professionals do not know how to use a computer. Without a doubt, if the country overcomes these challenges, then a great opportunity would be ahead. We could not only tackle the pandemic efficiently, we could, more importantly, develop a Data Science-based Health System, and we would have the tools for future disease control.

From the ethical point of view, what pops up pretty quickly are privacy concerns. Consent is essential to apply NM in identifying risky cases, as patients may not want to disclose their personal information nor identify the participants of their households. Information breaches, hacking, discrimination by neighbours, and personal motives are among the fears of compliance. Likewise, the proposed use of NLP includes these drawbacks alongside a possible misuse of information from organizations and researchers. Even though these tools may bring a benefit, they can also affect the wellbeing of the public. Thus, the state and research facilities should guarantee an ethical treatment of data, similar to the General Data Protection Regulation, always assuring consent accurately and adequately. This way, an equilibrium can be reached to both, benefit the nation and ensure people's rights.

Some references:

Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32075877

Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32182409

These open-access articles are available at:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1260.long

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

[theorynexus]

77:   Why am I so hungry?

That subtitle was totally unrelated to this post. I just am. Okay, this is actually the next day, now. It turns out I wasn’t able to complete this post yesterday for some reason or another. Let’s get this show on the road, now. ...

I continue to appreciate the echoing effects of certain phraseologies, reactions, and conversations throughout Paradox Space, even when the same people are not the ones uttering them.

That’s soooo cuuuute!~   (The knitting, not Jane’s behavior. Though I could be sarcastically insulting her by saying as such, that is not what is going on right now.)

This is really all quite beautiful. Though it is a little sad that Kanaya laughs at Karkat’s eligibility, I suppose it is reasonable that she of all people would recognize the difficulty of his fit into the role.

Ohhh gasp! A new character!  And one who seems to be born for the role that they’re playing!  Very, very interesting~ More importantly: I am glad to see that Hussie is sticking to the idea that the gods influence their universe in some abstract ways following its creation.  Though this could also be as a result of her actually being in the world (after all, vectors of influence in a media-savvy, highly developed world can be quite potent, indeed!), I like to think that that is not necessarily the case, at least.

Honestly, that actually sounds quite beautiful. It’s something of a shame that she wants to swiff that way~

Yeah, I can certainly see why watching a bloated monster excrete eggs and bloody rainbow slime might turn one off from the idea.  Reminds me of the scene from Alien 4. The one with the Alien Queen that had been altered with Ripley’s DNA. You know what I’m talking about.   Bloody disturbing is what that is. Not that I can’t understand why it might be beautiful to trolls.  However, the thought of being a mostly sessile organism whose sole purpose is the release of eggs is something I’m sure most human women would not be too fond of, naturally.  Not that I’m meaning to kink shame any who happen to find that kind of thing arousing. It’s just, well, realistically... a bit problematic for my tastes.

To be fair, Dave’s always had a desire to be an influencer.  That said: his theoretical actions were also aimed as a necessary retaliation to Jane’s own departure from the proper equilibrium. I do not blame Dave for that decision, and honestly think that it’s actually the responsible thing to do.  The only thing that might allow evil to prosper in the world when there are people with the capacity to stop it is for those people to let the matter fester and rot everything around it. Those who have the capacity to stop its rise have a responsibility to do so-- or at least to try. To fail to have done so, and simply to have allowed Jane to run unopposed would be nearly as unethical as actively supporting her, knowing that her intention was to perpetrate a campaign of reproductive control and gradual genocide-- or at least that she was likely to do so, given all of the evidence that they had available.   As such, I can place no blame on Dave in regard to this.

This is because Dirk is subtle, and thus insidious, as much of the world’s worst evil happens to be. To bring him up is not something so obvious as to question the somewhat flagrant behavior of the one he would pull the strings of.

I think that it is probably good for her to be taking things slow and focusing on the “now” while she recovers, but I do hope she doesn’t reject that greater calling for too long. Worrying about things in general can be a very healthy thing. Particularly for a seer.  Her responsibility as a god did not cease when the universe was created.

Rose is right to question that. Just because things have calmed down for a moment doesn’t mean a long-term threat like ambition is going to totally fade.  Mind you, it may very well do so, considering Jane’s present desire to break away from things, but they do not know that to be in play. Besides, as I was saying, being gods, they have a very long-term horizon to consider. Honestly, Dave and Jane wanting to be concerned at least to some extent with the flow of the economy might not really be so bad, if neither of them was intent on essentially bending the wills of others to their own desires in order to see the path they had in mind be blazed by their civilization. Unfortunately, the level of interference a god ought to have in a society (especially one so peacefully-developed as this one is) is a matter that is sticky and somewhat difficult to properly establish as a hard-and-fast rule. Even so, 0 interference is something they couldn’t do even if they actively tried.

For one, they aren’t old. I do certainly know the feeling of a young person thinking that they are old right as they cross into adulthood, though, so I won’t begrudge them that. More importantly:  Pffft.  You think that marriage takes away the need/impulse to be cool?   What a silly one you are.  It just means the development of more in-jokes and maybe the redirection of where the coolness might have to go.  ;3 (I am a very silly person too, yes.) ... What the heck does “Bank’s closed” mean?

Cartoonishness aside, this is all a rather nice scene.  I appreciate the little touches like the fact that Rose is hesitant to dip her legs in the muck that Kanaya has already become comfortable with. It’s very interesting to hear that the grubs chew through their own eggs, by the way!   Also that the legs are off-beat, which I suppose might mean that the grubs have to get used to walking?  Very, very curious stuff!

You mean like grub paste?   Man, mulched flesh... that is a weird image. I guess it means like hamburger?

***can’t help but release intermittent giggles because of the incredible dramatic irony factors, here***     On a more serious note, though, it is really interesting to see that trolls having actual ancestors is a relatively rare thing, despite the emphasis that Highbloods put on the idea of everyone having one.

And also the hearts of all who read this in the foreseeable future, I’m sure.   Man... the idea of Vriska actually having a chance at a life with responsible and non-abusive parental figures is such a dream come true!   And honestly... this particular scenario is a very interesting one, in particular. Not one I would have ever considered possible!   Not sure it technically counts, but ‘t’is very interesting+captivating, nonetheless!

Yeeessss!~  Perfection! <3 Though honestly I am still not convinced that Vriska will not be eventually saved via Retcanon-involved dramatic dives and flourishes, but I do in fact believe that she is dead as can be right now, considering Rose’s vision.  Despite the fact that the Void of the Green Sun Black Hole should block most Light from penetrating its mysteries and escaping, I think that Rose’s powers would be the ones to be capable of it, if anything in reality can do so. 

And I’m sure that shall include when the little child gets up to just the right kind of mischief and messes with their various irons in the fire.   X3

[eyalnachum08-blog]

Eyal Nachum

Eyal Nachum is a fintech guru and a director at Bruc Bond. Eyal is the architect of the software that SMEs use to do cross-border payments.

Eyal Nachum

Youthful startups often have fantastic concepts that they challenge to put into training, experiencing too many obstructions along the way. Too much, these stumbling blocks lay on the path in order to a solid banking as well as payments infrastructure. Three international executives at Bruc Connection give their advice.

BOSS of Bruc Bond Singapore Krishna Subramanyan, Country Supervisor for Poland Krzysztof “Kris” Matuszewski, and Board Fellow member Eyal Nachum in a new talk to Konstantin Bodragin, Brüc and up. Bond Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. KILOBYTES: Hi guys, thank you for which makes the time. To be able to start, what tips may you give a youthful fintech startup?

Eyal Nachum: Give attention to time-to-market. Forget in relation to everything else. You must find a product out right now there. 3 quarters of a functioning product is a lot better than fully of nothing. As soon as you accomplish have something working, speak to the people using this. Talk to your clients. They will understand which you’re only starting out and can be more forgiving at the start. They will give you actually the feedback you must have. A person can build the various other even just the teens using that understanding. From Bruc Bond, many of us are continue to always discussing to our consumers. That allows us to constantly increase in the techniques our clients will need.

Krishna Subramanyan: I would offer a fintech startup the very same assistance as for just about any start-up. It will be incorrect to be able to focus on your individual product or service or idea, despite the fact that it is usually tempting for you to do so. First, recognize a customer population to help be dished up, and perform to understand their very own soreness points. Product employs the particular pain points driven from the decision to serve in order to this specific client population.

Krzysztof Matuszewski: You need to be able to be methodical. First, locate your niche. This will probably be your own market possibility. Then, survey. Check out there the competitors to uncover regardless of whether somebody’s already carrying out what you would like to do. Locate technical companions to aid you avoid hasty decision-making and to meet your current time-to-market goals. Do buyer improvement well. Always check out your presumptions and possibly be ready to pivot, to alter the course of your own personal tool to fulfil typically the customers’ needs. Then obtain comments again. With each and every new product launch, new update, every single alter, you must acquire feedback. Keep your development/marketing equilibrium healthy. At first, you must keep your product merely good enough, but with no marketing and advertising you will skip your industry fit. Also, and find buyers. An individual will need funds for you to increase.

KB: Getting often the infrastructure proper can help to make or break task management. Just what should young fintechs consider about when it will come to their banking/payments commercial infrastructure?

EN: Approach that inside three stages. 1st, the actual infrastructure doesn’t make a difference to help customers, just get the product or service out. Second, do simple infrastructure, so you can easily have a proof principle. The third stage will be the hardest from an facilities point of view. You have in order to achieve scale. Just how? Anyone need a clear purchaser direct. Even if the idea feels like it would certainly slow you down, to get scale you must do it. You actually also have to have got a very good grasp connected with the rules and also adhere to them. If a person do crypto and desire an account with regard to salaries, your bank can enjoy nice at period one particular, but not stage about three. Don’t step on almost any paws. Set up structure in a way that will does not necessarily break anybody’s principles.

KILOMETER: Use credible functioning working devices and comply using regulations totally. If an individual don’t, you could drop your infrastructure. Be firm with security, and benefit from integrations when you could. Open financial and the particular PSD2 in The european countries exposed up a whole planet of options with API connections : explore the item.

KS: Structure must become flexible to conform to adjustments in understanding and natural environment. Real-time abilities for long term innovation are key. It truly is becoming harder to preserve buyers. What is beneficial is the capacity to illustrate to customers that most of us are usually listening all typically the time. Therefore, there needs to be anything new, exciting on present in which sets the rate inside first few days, months, groups on often the back of client responses. New architectures must influence APIs and micro-services to back up this pace.

KB: Krishna, are there specific concerns in terms of Singapore and Parts of asia most importantly?

KS: Fintechs in this article wish to accomplish a lot having very little quickly. Typically the teams are very ready but limited in assets. Firms that can prosper inside a mutually supportive setting are those who win. So, work with others to experience the pace along with the perspective. For illustration, while open bank is definitely not set in regulation, the particular biggest banking participants are trying to reach out to be able to the smallest fintechs to have interaction and collaborate.

KB: Kris, how about the EUROPEAN UNION?

KILOMETRE: There is extremely strong competition within the EUROPEAN, both among obligations fintechs themselves and with financial institutions. The market is properly controlled, but there are generally a lot of restrictions to adhere to. In the WESTERN EUROPEAN, you must consider info rights into account. You should meet the requirements associated with the GDPR, the legal guidelines designed to guard men and women and legal agencies coming from new risks which is part of the actual data economy. These can be quite difficult to follow. On the particular other hand, Brexit provides chance to attract shoppers departing the UK, and so there are options just about everywhere.

KB: B2B [business-to-business] and B2C [business-to-consumer] usually are a couple of very different modes regarding business. What sort involving unique payments/banking challenges complete startups during these spheres deal with that the other folks would not? How can they get over them?

KM: Fintech corporations fall into either the business-to-consumer income model or perhaps business-to-business type. Each unit has its own problems, although the B2C gross sales routine tends to end up being much shorter compared to the BUSINESS-ON-BUSINESS sales cycle, since organizations are slower to embrace new-technology. For B2B at this time there are a handful of significant challenges. One is this banks offer a established of related payment goods and already have a substantial customer base. The next is that businesses usually have very complicated in addition to extensive product needs, consequently payment fintech must give good service and in business excellence to compete around the corporate market. Therefore, organizations from the SME industry come to be frequent clients connected with repayment fintechs. With B2C, different challenges rise for you to the top. First associated with all, there are money washing. The importance of corporate regulatory solutions in this is previously mentioned all else. There exists levels of competition from small business charge cards, cryptocurrencies and digital funds, and from money exchange and remittances as any establishing niche.

EN: Often the BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS world wastes regarding several weeks a 12 months on audits and construction. That’s the reason you see a lot of ideas concerning lowering the headache. Together with B2C you can’t wait too long. There’s always movement as well as change. There isn’t a real challenge to stability inside the B2C sphere due to help the quantity of players, and also prices are fairly repaired due to competition. The largest challenges right now tend to be ethnical. There are vocabulary barriers in between banker along with customer. Everything we need are usually solutions regarding specific markets: the unbankable or bauge, immigrants, consumer banking in international languages, student-specific services, and so forth.

KS: Collection of global business banking partnerships stays the important. Depending on the corporate state, banking challenges can certainly vary substantially. Banks behave to this crissis in addition to cost of retaining enterprise in different ways. Fintechs need to spend considerable moment to understand almost every partner’s direction. Ability to fit target growth segments regarding banking partners to all their unique must be a great ongoing, daily exercise.

KILOBYTES: Thank you for getting the time and then for your personal advice.

[edwad]

would you consider it a critique of marx that his work was misinterpreted for so long and to such a degree? as in not just by reactionaries and whatnot but by people who liked and felt inspired by him

yeah i mean i think there’s room there to be critical of marx in part due to his incomplete break with the classical tradition that he was attempting to subject to a ruthless critique, opening him up to a lot of different misreadings. the ricardian categories never quite left him even as he moved away from them. heinrich’s work emphasizes this problem and in particular the physiological conception of abstract labor which serves to concretize and naturalize a historically specific/socially-constituted object: what in the contribution marx terms “Tauschwert setzende Arbeit” or “exchange-value-positing/setting labor” (for more on this, i strongly recommend reading samuel chamber’s there’s no such thing as “the economy”, chapter 2).

another aspect of this though is in the nature of the work itself, which is attempting to unpack and explain the world around us as well as the theories of the world around us which such a world generates — by no means a particularly easy thing to express. marx struggles with his genealogy because he’s trying to grapple with terms that are [un/]loaded and complicated in such a way that he often fails to express the inexpressible, which isn’t to say that we should critique marx because he was somehow “wrong” in his wording (this oversimplifies the problem), but that, as he himself states in the preface to the first edition of volume 1, “beginnings are always difficult in all sciences”. this applies both to the reader (as he directs it in the preface) as well as to the author of such a science (in this case, marx, who announces that he has “popularized” [not always a good thing] parts of the text so that they can be grasped more easily). this means that there is some difficulty in both getting the point down, which often requires the construction of a whole new language to express the new mode of thinking, but also in getting the point across to readers that will see this foreign kind of approach as often being incomprehensible, or which needs to be converted into more familiar terms (as many have done by turning marx into a ricardian, a general-equilibrium theorist, a wayward proto-post-keynesian, etc). he does, however, “assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself [sic].”

in all though, i think the bulk of this — even where we can find room to genuinely criticize him (as in the first instance) — stems from the incompleteness of his project. we are often working with manuscripts where marx was in the middle of his investigations but which were published as if they were only missing the polish of a final draft. many of the problems hadn’t been worked out yet, which is why we can’t simply rely on a “reconstruction” of marx, which supposes there’s a complete theory which is already there latent in the manuscripts waiting to be teased out. the truth is, marx hadn’t figured it all out and his work is understandably contradictory at times. that doesn’t make it useless by any means, but it does turn a lot of criticisms of marx’s work into criticisms of marx’s untimely death, which is very different than simply saying marx “got it wrong”. it’s more that he never had the time to potentially “get it right” in the first place, since he was still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out.

we can use his work as an extremely valuable starting point, which had all the disadvantages which are typical of “beginnings” in science, but one of the strengths of marxism is its open-endedness and i think that’s how we have to look at our responsibility as marxists, to further develop this “science” of a critical social theory alongside the political force which is capable of overcoming all the problems which it describes. if this is our purpose, then marx has already done most of the work for us.

[stolethekey]

tbh @starkravinghazelnuts’s endgame theory is obviously incredible and rightfully sort of famous in the mcu fandom

but

in game theory, the “endgame problem” refers to the collapse of cooperation between players as a repeated “game” draws near its final round (a game is essentially any situation where two people/entities have to choose an action, and payoffs from the decision depend on the others’ decision). as a result, the Nash equilibrium (the actions that, generally, result in the highest payoffs for both players) isn’t reached because both players have deviated from a mutually-beneficial decision to one that seems to minimize personal loss (or maximize personal gain, but the former is more relevant here).

this almost always results from a lack of communication or an inability to communicate (think prisoner’s dilemma, where each prisoner will always confess even though they could achieve a better outcome if both kept quiet). if the communication is there, it can result from distrust; a player doesn’t trust the other to do their part, so he opts for a different choice.

if Thanos is the endgame, the events in civil war represent the penultimate round of the game. which fits this perfectly.

the ramifications of the endgame problem vary, but on a larger scale, it can have a huge impact; the collapse of Eastern European communist governments and economies in 1989 was largely due to this phenomenon. for our purposes, it can result in a group of superheroes being torn apart and the deaths of half the human population.

and idk how to fully explain this in a way that isn’t completely dense and incomprehensible to people who aren’t really into economics (it’s kind of an elitist field), but I find it a little hard to believe that so much of the MCU has followed this path by pure coincidence.

i have like two followers on this blog so no one is gonna see this but I just thought it was interesting idk

[dhallucr-blog]

Nike’s Kaepernick Campaign: Hegemony, Alienation, & Flak

Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign and President Donald Trump’s fixed attention on the Kaepernick campaign are examples of how those in power use the media to reinforce Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State.” Whereas Nike exploits lower tiers’ alienation in a capitalist society, a concept explained by Arthur Asa Berger in “Alienation” and “The Consumer Society”, President Trump deploys flak, the fourth propagandist filtre listed by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in “Propaganda Model”, to sway public opinion concerning Nike’s Kaepernick endorsement.

Nike’s advertisement featuring partnership with professional football player Colin Kaepernick critiques America’s hegemonic practices while the campaign itself epitomizes hegemonic practices. According to Gramsci, “the attempt to exercise power will always be made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion—newspapers and associations— which, therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied” (75). The “believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything” campaign attempts to win the consent of subordinate groups through coercion. For example, market research has shown that Nike customers are mostly marginalized youths. Thirty-Mile Zone Sports calculates that “13% of Americans identify as African American, yet 18% of Nike buyers are black. Hispanics account for 16% of the population, but represent 19% of Nike buyers. And, Asians account for 3% of the population, but 5% of Nike customers” (TMZ sports). Given that Nike’s consumer base reflected a large number of minorities pre-Kaepernick endorsement, the advertisement implies more of a power move to manipulate lower tiers into a buying mood. How ever Nike expresses pro equality for people of color throughout the media the company is still a leader in violence overseas involving child labor, poor working conditions, and underpay for people of color. Clearly Nike’s endeavor sides more with sustaining capitalist hegemony than exercising activism.

Evoking emotion to manipulate marginalized audiences to spend their hard working money is a propagandist technique to maintain the hegemonic class system and shows an exploitative relationship between high and low tiers. According to Arthur Asa Berger, “People must be driven to consume, must be made crazy to consume, for its consumption that maintains the economic system. Thus the alienation generated by a capitalist system is functional, for the anxieties and miseries generated by such a system tend to be assuaged by impulsive consumption” (52). As Nike co-opts a social movement for its own private gain, people of color are emotionally moved by the company’s political stance and are even more motivated to consumption, a symptom of their alienation. For example, post-Kaepernick advertisement Nike had made $6 billion, claims Alex Abad-Santos on Vox magazine. That’s $6 billion Nike has made off of the alienated spirit in America’s capitalist society and not a portion of the revenue went to scholarship, charity, or society’s alienated. Berger quotes Karl Marx, “Every man speculates upon creating a new need in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him with a new pleasure and thereby in economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egotistical need” (52). It appears that Nike established an alien power over subordinate groups especially given that their campaign diverted people’s attention from police brutality and their core message once analyzed translates to “buy shoes” which thus maintains the consumer culture and America’s hegemonic class system.

Though there has been an equilibrium of positive and negative media attention regarding Kaepernick being the face of Nike’s 30th anniversary campaign, President Donald Trump used his power and influence to bring more attention to negative media responses by producing flak to sustain hegemonic structuralism. According to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “The producers of flak add to one another’s strength and reinforce the command of political authority in it’s news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and ‘correcting’ the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line.” (28) President Donald Trump over a multitude of social media tweets has publicly rejected Nike’s decision to make Kaepernick the new face of their brand for the reason that Trump deems Kaepernick unpatriotic and his actions (kneeling during the national anthem) disrespectful to the American flag. One of Trump’s tweets read:

“Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” (Twitter).

Many right-wing conservatives, the bulk of Trump’s voters and social media followers, in response to Trump’s censure, took to twitter to burn their Nike sneakers. Trump’s power and influence to produce flak may have to an extent persuaded public opinion as Trump used propagandist techniques by associating two unrelated concepts to push hegemonic structuralism. As Trump’s statement implies, one can’t be patriotic and stand against systemic injustices, one can’t be patriotic and continue to watch the National Football League when players kneel, and those who approve of Nike’s Kaepernick campaign aren’t after all true patriots.

Overall, both Nike and President Donald Trump are large entities prevalent in mass media that act within hegemonic structuralism to main existing class systems such as capitalism and social stratification. The aftermath of Colin Kaepernick protesting police brutality led to Nike and President Trump, being powerful influencers and leaders’, to deter the public from America’s injustices to support private interests. For example, Nike manipulated its consumers’ alienation in society to support a cause that Nike fails to support in its entirety other than through motivating people to buy their shoes. Further, Trump has also deterred the public from the social movements political message by translating Kaepernick’s protest to unpatriotic. Both used media to exploit and mislead the masses and in doing so have acted to maintain hegemony.

Works cited

Abad-Santos, Alex. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Ad Sparked a Boycott - and Earned $6 Billion for Nike.” Vox, Vox Magazine, 24 Sept. 2018, www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17895704/nike-colin-kaepernick-boycott-6-billion.

Berger, Arthur.“Alienation” and “The Consumer Society” in Media Analysis Techniques.6th edition. San Francisco State University, USA.

Gramsci, Antonio.  “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, pp. 75-80. New York: Routledge, 1994[2013].

Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. “A Propaganda Model,” in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 1-35.

Staff, TMZ. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Deal Adds Up When You See Customer Data ... And We Did.” TMZ, TMZ.com, 10 Sept. 2018, www.tmz.com/2018/09/06/colin-kaepernick-nike-contract-urban-consumers-market-research/.

Trump, Donald (@realdonaldtrump). “Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” Sept 5, 2018. 6:39 AM. Tweet.

[businessweekme]

Companies Give Worker Training Another Try

A tight labour market forces businesses to spend more to develop their employees’ skills

Economists love worker training, but ­companies are often reluctant to provide it. The benefits of training can walk out the door if newly skilled workers are poached by a competitor. “I call it the ‘I drink your milkshake’ problem,” says Jake Schwartz, chief executive officer and co-founder of General Assembly, a computer-­coding boot camp acquired this year by Switzerland-based staffing firm Adecco Group AG. In the years before the global financial crisis, companies steadily decreased training. The U.S. Census Bureau found that just 11 percent of workers received employer-sponsored training in 2008, down from 19 percent in 1996. When the financial crisis hit, throwing millions out of work, training seemed less important than ever: Why spend the money when you can pick up the skills you need from the bountiful ranks of the jobless?

Now, though, corporate attitudes appear to be shifting, albeit gradually. While the Census Bureau hasn’t reprised its count of employer-­provided training since 2008, the Association for Talent Development, in a survey focused mainly on advanced economies, found that direct training expenditures rose from $1,081 per employee in 2009 (the first year of the survey) to $1,273 in 2016. The U.S. ranks near the top of the global heap, with 66 percent of workers receiving training from employers in the past year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see chart).

Near-record-low unemployment is one big reason companies are recommiting to training. With a U.S. jobless rate of just 3.7 percent in September and more than 7 million unfilled positions as of August, employers can’t find the people they need in the ranks of the jobless, and ­luring them away from other employers has gotten prohibitively expensive in some cases. “Your choice is always make or buy. ‘Buy’ is steal somebody else’s worker, which requires higher wages,” says Anthony Carnevale, founder and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Fifty-five percent of U.S. employers surveyed by ManpowerGroup this year said they were providing additional training to cope with talent shortages, followed by 40 percent who said they were recruiting outside their traditional talent pool. Only 26 percent said they were offering higher salaries.

Rapidly changing job requirements also demand more training. Just a few years ago experts were predicting that computers and robots would soon make flesh-and-blood workers obsolete. Someday, perhaps, but for now the main effect of automation has been to force humans to develop new skills to work with intelligent machines, rather than for them. “All of a sudden you look up and you say, ‘Oh, we still do need workers,’ ” says Jacob Duritsky, vice president for strategy and research at Team NEO, an economic development organisation for north­eastern Ohio.

Employers are discovering that becoming a learning organisation is a good way to fend off headhunters. Especially now, with change happening so quickly, workers will stick with a company that helps them continuously upgrade their skills, says Bill Priemer, CEO of Hyland Software Inc. in Westlake, Ohio. In a survey this year by LinkedIn Inc., 94 percent of employees said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.

That’s not to say all training is good. A lot of employers teach “tightly specified, highly standardised tasks” that will soon be taken over by computers, says John Hagel, co-chairman of the Center for the Edge, a unit of Deloitte LLP that researches business and technology. Hagel says companies should instead be drawing out employees’ “curiosity, imagination, creativity, emotional intelligence, social intelligence,” which are harder for machines to replicate.

There’s also a tussle over who should do the training: employers or schools. Community colleges are often willing to tailor curricula to employers’ needs, but even they balk at teaching specific tasks that will be useful to just one or two businesses. Executives, meanwhile, complain that the U.S. educational system is pumping out unqualified graduates. In a recent survey of OECD nations, U.S. millennials scored lower than their peers in 15 of 22 countries in literacy and were tied for last in numeracy and “problem solving in a technology-rich environment,” according to an analysis of the results by the Educational Testing Service. Employers often have to provide remedial training for entry-level workers in areas such as basic math.

Because worker training benefits the society as a whole, not just the individual employer, there’s an economic case that government should provide it directly or at least subsidise it. Yet in the U.S., public spending on labour markets (which includes unemployment benefits) has fallen from 0.8 percent of gross domestic product in 1985 to 0.3 percent in 2016, according to OECD data. In July, President Trump signed an executive order creating a Council of the American Worker and directing funds to apprenticeships and retraining for older workers without college degrees. On the other hand, the current administration sought—but failed to secure—a 40 percent cut in funding for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the biggest federal worker retraining programme. Achieving the right balance between public and private is tricky. Thijs van Rens, an economist at Britain’s University of Warwick, says his research with colleague Roland Rathelot and others finds that ­public funding for training is largely a giveaway to employers. Singapore offers a model of how to combine the two. It subsidises qualifying companies that provide training through its new SkillsFuture initiative, but the grants don’t cover the full cost. That discourages companies from offering sham training just to get money from the government.

Anna Lim, the founder and majority owner of Soup Spoon Pte, which owns 30 restaurants in Singapore, says she had to have her instructors certified and her training results regularly audited to get SkillsFuture to pick up part of the tab. Does she worry that other companies that don’t train will free-ride on her investment? Not much. “In Singapore right now we have stopped thinking like that,” she says. “At the end of the day it’s about uplifting the skill set of the whole industry. We have to be broad-minded.” To upgrade the world’s workforce for the skills of the future, the ideal environment is what economists call a high-trust equilibrium: Each employer invests in training because it’s confident others will do likewise. We’re not quite there yet. Peter Coy

The post Companies Give Worker Training Another Try appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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[emptymanuscript]

Capitalism

I started threadjacking another post. Instead I’m going to put it here. I am pro capitalism. But like being actually patriotic, instead of just putting on the outfit, being for something means looking its faults in the eye.

At its simplest, Capitalism is the principle that the free exchange of currency creates a marketplace that will balance at the point where supply meets demand.

That’s how Capitalism is supposed to work. When that isn’t what happens, Capitalism has failed to work. Failure is not a feature, it is an extremely dangerous bug. 

If you take any econ, you will see the “supply and demand curve” chart:

Market Equilibrium, or the perfect price of a product, is supposed to occur where the supply of all producers of any given product intersects with the demand by all potential buyers for that given product. This is what Capitalism is designed to do. People get what they want as best as possible while some people “make” money by either producing a product cheaper than is neccearry for the the average of all producers to make the product or by paying less for the product than they are actually willing to pay. But eventually all equilibrium is reached by everyone hitting that intersection point and no one really makes money, there is only the exchange of goods at the perfect value. 

BUT the problem is that this isn’t a law. It’s a design. And the incentive to play along with it is that money making. It is possible for this to get skewed to hell. The post I was threadjacking was about the fact that this principle has utterly failed in the housing market. 

In the US there are 18.9 million vacant homes. That’s 18.9 million units past the supposed intersection point. There are 3.5 million homeless people. That’s 3.5 million buyers who can’t get the supply. That is a massive disparity and inefficiency. That is total market failure. Because the market is meant to hit equilibrium. So if there is too great a supply, the price of a unit is supposed to drop so more people who demand but not enough to meet the price will be able to afford it.

Equilibrium occurs with 0 units left / 0 buyers left. We’ve got 18.9m / 3.5m. Properly working market forces should move those numbers down until one or both equal 0. Which means we would still have the very wrong balance of 15.4m / 0. Which is where the real and not actually Capitalist problem is occuring.

Remember we want 0/0, that means home prices should continue to decrease even past the point where everybody has a home. It has to decrease to the point where there are enough two home and three home owners to stop the downward cycle. Which means all home values, which the US has been stupidly reliant on for most of my life now, would drop. The 50 million dollar mansion someone just bought isn’t actually worth anywhere near that much, no matter how many bedrooms it has. 

The US has propped up its economy on home values. Let them return to their proper prices and we drop into yet another recession. Which President George W. Bush knew when the home market bubble burst. So he and his friends in the government, rushed to stop it and propped home pricing up. This caused the subprime situation to start. That was all people finding a product in the inefficiency of the system of another product. And then, instead of the housing bubble deflating according to the system, the bubble of the debt products the banking and investment systems had created burst and it all went to hell. 

Housing prices did fall a LOT but nowhere near where they should have. People lost all the value in their homes and then kept losing money in it. President Obama’s fiscal policy slowly reversed all of that over the course of his two terms until the point that we’re more or less where we were in that regard before W interfered. But the propping up has never been removed. 

This isn’t Capitalism failing, this is the wealthy and elite (who somehow always eventually overlap) exploiting the system to make sure they keep their money and keep getting richer. They are forcing our economic policy to create this situation when a properly functioning Capitalist System actually says they should be losing money hand over fist. Not just directly with their own property holdings but also because their money is providing all the underwriting for everybody else’s mortgages, and the more those crash, the more they get loss on their investment instead of return. They are building their wealth on the economic servitude of our whole system. You work to pay your rent, for your landlord to pay their mortgage, for the bank to pay their investors. Etc. Funny how you also work for the same people that your money eventually goes to. 

That isn’t capitalism. That’s... the aristocrats stepping on the backs of the proletariat and the “higher” classes too.

But at some level, this has to be seen as Capitalism’s issue, too. There’s the way something is supposed to work and then there is the way it actually does work. Note that I’ve skipped entirely the free exchange of currency. It’s not the free exchange of currency when one buyer can be treated differently than another because of race. Which happens. Happens plenty. 

Capitalism has become our favored method for distributing the powers of Colonialism, both within our own borders and abroad. Where Capitalism would tend to negate Colonial power and wealth gathering, we hobble it and make sure it can’t function the way it is supposed to. Where Capitalism would exacerbate it, we go all out to exagerate it. This is the whole no taxes, don’t tread on me philosophy of the libertarian. Money must only be used in the marketplace, and the markets (taxes for benefical government beaureaucracies) that buy products and services for those without money are dismantled. 

That Capitalism is incapable of defending itself toward its own proper execution must be acknowledged a fault. That Capitalism is so capable of functioning toward the ill of people must be acknowledged a fault. But most of all, that Capitalism allows itself to function as a moral code when it is in fact amoral, must be seen as immoral. 

I am pro-capitalism. Have been for the majority of my life. And I expect to be such until Capitalism fails, which seems inevitable in the ever nearing future. What I am vehemently against is seeing Capitalism as a moral system or allowing it to trump our moral systems. I may not be Christian but it is hard to miss that Jesus went after the moneylenders, the capitalists of His day. Money must serve within a moral framework, never the other way around. 

That 3.5 million people are homeless when there are 5 houses for every one of them must be seen as immoral. Capitalism, honestly executed, is a way to handle that immorality by slashing the pricing of houses so we can all be in a position to afford housing. But if that won’t work. If Capitalism can’t or won’t rectify that moral failing, then Capitalism isn’t good enough and another means of solving the moral quandry must be taken or we don’t have the right to call ourselves moral.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#8yrsago Stephenson's REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller

Back in 2010, I found myself in Seattle (I was touring with my novel For the Win -- a young adult science fiction novel about gold-farming), I stopped by Neal Stephenson's place for breakfast and asked him what he was working on. He said, "You ever heard of 'gold-farming?'" I couldn't help but smile.

Stephenson's one of my favorite novelists, a writer who is both very good at what he does, and who is nevertheless willing to go all the way out to the edge of his prodigious talents and take brave risks. Even when these don't fully pay off, they're always exhilarating experiments -- Stephenson's imperfect results being better than most writers' best days. So while Snow Crash and Diamond Age drew critical fire for having a lot of seemingly ornamental plot-discursions that never quite paid off at the end, the insanely ambitious and enormous System of the World ruthlessly hunted down every conceivable loose end and executed it before the final page was turned. As much as I enjoyed the latter, I found that I preferred Stephenson's loose ends to the sometimes mechanical exercise of tying them all off. His next book, Anathem, solved this problem somewhat by having a lot fewer moving parts (a bit of a joke there for those of you who've read the book!) and thus a simpler, cleaner finish. As good and audacious as Anathem was, it lacked the intense, fractal plot-complexity of System, and I missed that a little.

REAMDE, Stephenson's latest novel -- the "have you ever heard of 'gold-farming'" -- novel is a book that represents a new kind of equilibrium in Stephenson's literary canon: a book that is simultaneously as baroque as System of the World and as cleanly and crisply finished as Anathem. It is, in other words, a triumph, all 980 pages of it.

REAMDE starts off as a clever, if somewhat straightforward technothriller. Richard Forthrast is the black sheep of a rugged, formidable midwestern family. After a checkered career of minor crime and notoriety, Richard has founded an enormous and enormously profitable multiplayer online game, called T'Rain. This has left him uncomfortably wealthy and powerful, and somewhat constrained by his corporate success. But at least he can help out his relations, like his favored adopted niece Zula, an Eritrean refugee who was raised on the family homestead in Iowa and is now putting her advanced geoscience degree to work as a technician in the T'Rain world, designing the geosystems that deposit precious metals where gold-farmers (an integral part of the T'Rain economy) can dig it up.

The story begins in earnest when Zula's foolish hacker boyfriend sells some stolen credit-card numbers to a front for the Russian mob, and then finds himself at their mercy as the bagman's entire user directory is encrypted by a piece of malicious ransomware called REAMDE (a Chinglish mangling of "Readme") that is targeted at T'Rain players (the malware also encrypts the backup). Now the mob needs to pay off the ransom -- a trifling $75 worth of virtual gold -- so that they can decrypt the data. Except that the in-game region where the gold-drop is to be made is now clogged with powerful griefers who waylay extortion victims and steal the gold they're bringing to the crooks.

After a bunch of wrangling and danger, Zula, her hacker boyfriend, and the Russian gangsters end up in Xianmen, China (the first two aren't there voluntarily), trying to track down the virus's author, and that's where the ambition of the REAMDE starts to kick in. You see, at this point, Stephenson is only a couple hundred pages into his thousand-page epic, and he's only marshalled a few of the many bands of characters who spend the next 700 pages embroiled in one of the most startling, exciting, white-knuckle technothrillers I've had the pleasure of losing a week of my life to.

REAMDE goes from being a story about virtual worlds to a much bigger geopolitical tale about the war on terror, filled with grace-note, high-detail technical excursions into international shipping, American survivalism, MI6 spycraft, Philippines sex-tourism, and lots and lots and lots of guns. This last part is one of the great testimonials I can make about REAMDE, because books about guncraft generally bore me down to the marrow. But Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself.

Combine that with a cast of characters that, while recognizably Stephensonian archetypes, are nevertheless novel, likable, and complex, and you've got a powerful, magnificent book that is worth the sizable forests that will have to be demolished to commit it to paper, and the sizable lump that it will represent in your bag or briefcase while you finish it. Here's a book that, all on its own, makes a hell of a case for buying an ebook reader, assuming you can find a DRM-free ebook edition.

REAMDE

https://boingboing.net/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-p.html

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Donald Trump Is Trailing By Most Measures. Then Again, He’s Been Here Before

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

About this time four years ago, there was a smug confidence among the pundit class in Washington that Hillary Clinton was going to grind her way to a victory, Donald Trump was going to spend the rest of his life claiming he had been cheated of the White House and politics would find its equilibrium and forever swear off treating elections like a reality show.

Golly, were we wrong. Whatever the current polls say, we should consider this possible election outcome: Trump may well win a second term.

The President is back at the White House and reportedly on the mend after three nights in Walter Reed, recovering from COVID-19. He’s champing at the bit to get back out on the campaign trail himself. He says he wants to debate Joe Biden next week as planned, and he’s sending Vice President Mike Pence into tonight’s debate in Utah and tomorrow’s rally in Arizona ready to fight for votes.

Trump has been running for re-election since he won in 2016. Even in the window between his win and his Inauguration, he held “thank you” rallies. He started raising money and building a machine earlier than anyone in U.S. history. His takeover of the Republican Party started in the West Wing and the Republican National Committee, but he carefully installed loyalists in state parties and, in turn, shoveled GOP cash to them to build-out turnkey get-out-the-vote operations for him.

There is always a back-and-forth on which party has the upper hand when it comes to the use of tech, but no one can deny Trump has gone bigger on social-media spending. On Facebook and Google alone this year, Trump has spent $195 million to Biden’s $124 million, according to tracking done by Democratic firm Bully Pulpit Interactive.

Over the years, Trump has proven to be a Teflon contender, the ever-cascading series of scandals that have befallen his tenure never seeming to stick. Despite lagging Biden in national polls, he remains within striking distance in key states like North Carolina and Florida. Trump has had his hands on the wheel for the last four years. It’s been a bumpy ride, but for many voters, that’s been fine. The pre-coronavirus economy was humming along, Trump had alienated many global peers but hadn’t started any more wars, and the impeachment saga proved insufficient to remove Trump from office. His ability to shock and offend is now a rote part of American politics.

There are, of course, things Trump should be worried about. He’s been slipping with important blocs of voters since his first weeks in office. In the latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, there comes this warning sign: before the debate in Cleveland, Trump was ahead of Biden by 23 points among white voters who lack a college degree; after the debate, that advantage shrunk to 14 points. Trump faced his biggest declines among older voters and suburban women, two groups he is now on pace to lose by more than points.

Trump came to power in large part by being underestimated. There’s a lot of that happening again, with observers looking at data points like white voters’ slide away from Trump and his financial troubles. But Trump is also not wrong when he asserts that many of the people who will vote for him — not MAGA loyalists, but those who will ultimately cast their ballot for him anyway — aren’t showing up in polls and are still as aggrieved as they were four years ago when they helped vote him into power.

On Nov. 3, if Trump easily carries a vault of important states like Texas and Georgia, plus holding on in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona on top of the states that are already expected to be in the bag with him, we could see a Trump win declared that night. Biden has said he will concede if he loses. But whereas Biden has a half-dozen routes to the needed 270 electoral votes, Trump’s path is one that requires everything falling into place and little margin for error.

A lot of Americans just want this election to be over. We’re all tired. And given that collective lack of sleep, we could also be as wrong as we were four years ago.

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By Philip Elliott on October 07, 2020 at 01:38PM