#post in banking sector

[dreamdolldeveloper]

back to basics

mostly free resources to help you learn the basics that i've gathered for myself so far that i think are cool

everyday

gcfglobal - about the internet, online safety and for kids, life skills like applying for jobs, career planning, resume writing, online learning, today's skills like 3d printing, photoshop, smartphone basics, microsoft office apps, and mac friendly. they have core skills like reading, math, science, language learning - some topics are sparse so hopefully they keep adding things on. great site to start off on learning.

handsonbanking - learn about finances. after highschool, credit, banking, investing, money management, debt, goal setting, loans, cars, small businesses, military, insurance, retirement, etc.

bbc - learning for all ages. primary to adult. arts, history, science, math, reading, english, french, all the way to functional and vocational skills for adults as well, great site!

education.ket - workplace essential skills

general education

mathsgenie - GCSE revision, grade 1-9, math stages 1-14, provides more resources! completely free.

khan academy - pre-k to college, life skills, test prep (sats, mcat, etc), get ready courses, AP, partner courses like NASA, etc. so much more!

aleks - k-12 + higher ed learning program. adapts to each student.

biology4kids - learn biology

cosmos4kids - learn astronomy basics

chem4kids - learn chemistry

physics4kids - learn physics

numbernut - math basics (arithmetic, fractions and decimals, roots and exponents, prealgebra)

education.ket - primary to adult. includes highschool equivalent test prep, the core skills. they have a free resource library and they sell workbooks. they have one on work-life essentials (high demand career sectors + soft skills)

youtube channels

the organic chemistry tutor

khanacademy

crashcourse

tabletclassmath

2minmaths

kevinmathscience

professor leonard

greenemath

mathantics

3blue1brown

literacy

readworks - reading comprehension, build background knowledge, grow your vocabulary, strengthen strategic reading

chompchomp - grammar knowledge

tutors

not the "free resource" part of this post but sometimes we forget we can be tutored especially as an adult. just because we don't have formal education does not mean we can't get 1:1 teaching! please do you research and don't be afraid to try out different tutors. and remember you're not dumb just because someone's teaching style doesn't match up with your learning style.

cambridge coaching - medical school, mba and business, law school, graduate, college academics, high school and college process, middle school and high school admissions

preply - language tutoring. affordable!

revolutionprep - math, science, english, history, computer science (ap, html/css, java, python c++), foreign languages (german, korean, french, italian, spanish, japanese, chinese, esl)

varsity tutors - k-5 subjects, ap, test prep, languages, math, science & engineering, coding, homeschool, college essays, essay editing, etc

chegg - biology, business, engineering/computer science, math, homework help, textbook support, rent and buying books

learn to be - k-12 subjects

for languages

lingq - app. created by steve kaufmann, a polygot (fluent in 20+ languages) an amazing language learning platform that compiles content in 20+ languages like podcasts, graded readers, story times, vlogs, radio, books, the feature to put in your own books! immersion, comprehensible input.

flexiclasses - option to study abroad, resources to learn, mandarin, cantonese, japanese, vietnamese, korean, italian, russian, taiwanese hokkien, shanghainese.

fluentin3months - bootcamp, consultation available, languages: spanish, french, korean, german, chinese, japanese, russian, italian.

fluenz - spanish immersion both online and in person - intensive.

pimsleur - not tutoring** online learning using apps and their method. up to 50 languages, free trial available.

incase time has passed since i last posted this, check on the original post (not the reblogs) to see if i updated link or added new resources. i think i want to add laguage resources at some point too but until then, happy learning!!

[cumbunnywitch]

I've seen at least one, but posts saying not to blame the people who didn't vote for Harris because whatever are fully in the wrong and they always will be.

You chose moral high grounding and purity culture over the possibility that our protests would work. You chose "she leaned too right in her campaign" over "Trump and the people who want to puppeteer him are going to get a lot of people killed." You chose the democrats being idiots over the republicans want a racist rapist.

You didn't choose? No, you had a choice. You used yours. If you chose not to vote because you wanted to use your non-vote as a voice to show the democrats that they have to win your vote, you're still going to get your face eaten by the leopards. They aren't going to hear you anyway.

Protests work on the left side of our shit-ass two party system because they at least pretend to care.

Here's just, off the top of my head, the things you decided were less important than telling the democratic party "No you have to be good enough":

Student Loan Forgiveness or Relief

Healthcare

Trans Rights

LGBTQIA Safety

Abortion rights

Palestine/Gaza

Ukraine

Industry Regulation(notice all those recalls on food lately?)

Cost of Living

Police Reform

Taxes

There's no such thing as a single-issue voter, not anymore. The right is diametrically opposed to making any of the above better for anyone, whether or not they voted for that shitstain, unless you're very rich, and very white, and a very straight man.

Honestly, if you voted for Jill Stein, at least you fucking voted. Her numbers won her absolutely nothing but at least you voted.

But no. "Don't vote for Harris because she's not good enough! She's running a campaign to secure moderate republicans!" Yea no fucking shit. That's what they've been doing for the last forever. Yea, it still sucks. But most moderate liberals who actually vote still struggle with that list up there. There's literally a democrat trans woman who just got voted in who wants to support Israel's genocidal campaign of murdering every Palestinian.

And you know what? If she sees that line, she might actually stop and think and move a little bit over to my perspective. Every conservative sees that line and immediately thinks "Yea kill the fuckin' brown people!" because they don't consider them fucking people.

If you didn't vote because you saw people saying Harris wasn't leftist enough, not liberal enough, she was a former prosecutor or the democrats haven't done enough for you in the last 4 years, you fell for the Russian psyop. You fell for the propaganda.

Does it suck that Harris wanted to court the swing states and their moderately conservative voting base over to vote for the first woman president? Yea, it's been a shitty idea for decades and they've been doing it for as long as I've been voting. Obama was the center-ist centerist ever, and he still got healthcare reform passed. He also drone striked a lot of people and gave banks billions of dollars when the financial sector faceplanted after trying to balance on a pin for the longest time.

I was gonna add a read-more or chop this up better but no. You get to read the whole thing. If you didn't vote, or you voted for trump, I want you gone. Unfollow me, block me, because you clearly either don't care enough to prevent our slide into authoritarianism and a fixed court for the next 60 years, or you actively hate me.

[eightyonekilograms]

Ignore the attention-getting headline about fertility. I made a pledge a little while ago to stop talking about fertility issues; I'll do a longer post about that pledge later, but I'm sick of that discourse and how it's now just going in circles with nothing to show for it. But click through to the post anyway about South Korea's dysfunctional small business culture.

One of the awkward findings in business and economics is, despite how much people dislike them, giant megacorporations are much more efficient than small businesses, in terms of worker productivity (as long as those corporations have to compete in a global marketplace and aren't propped up by subsidies, protectionist trade policy, or monopoly protection).

This happens everywhere, but I didn't realize it was particularly bad in South Korea:

Between the Hyundai apartments and Samsung theme parks, South Korea certainly looks like a nation of big business. But looks can be deceiving: peak beneath the hood and you find that the Republic of Samsung is a nation awash in shitty small businesses.  With just 14 percent of jobs at companies with over 250 employees, South Korea has the lowest proportion of jobs at big companies of any nation in the OECD. Contrast this with the U.S., where 58 percent of jobs are at such companies. ... Small businesses aren’t always bad for employees—maybe you get more autonomy and fewer shrill HR managers. But South Korea’s small businesses are distinctively unproductive and retrograde in their work cultures, making them far less attractive employment options.  While SMEs are rarely as productive as large ones, it is truly striking how unproductive South Korea’s small businesses are compared to those in Western nations. The OECD, for example, found small service sector firms in Korea are 30 percent as productive as larger firms with over 250 workers. In the Netherlands and Germany, that figure is 84 and 90 percent, respectively. Similarly, the Asian Development Bank found that in 2010, small Korean firms with five to 49 workers were just 22 percent as productive as firms with over 200 workers. ... The story of South Korea’s ingenious use of corporate subsidies, it turns out, has been oversold. South Korea’s government in fact shells out lots of money keeping unproductive small businesses afloat, with little in the way of economic gain to show for it. ... So why does South Korea spend so much money subsidizing poorly run small businesses? The simple answer may be that it is especially good politics in a nation where chaebols are met with suspicion over their ties to the government. Politicians can point to this “support” for small businesses as evidence that they are not in bed with firms like Samsung.

This is a fascinating example of policy backfire: Korea's chaebols are so big and politically unpopular that voters demand tons of subsidies for the romantic ideal of small family businesses, which keeps them permanently uncompetitive and unproductive, where people have to work much longer hours for the same pay you'd get anywhere else.

[azure-cherie]

Mini post on ways to gain using the lord of your 11th house

Lord in 1st : showing yourself off , modelling, body art , dancing .

Lord in 2nd : singing, banking , share market .

Lord in 3 rd : mass communication, acting,crafts , any kind of skills, artist .

Lord in 4th : interior design, architecture, anything doorstep .

Lord in 5th : pediatrician, teacher of small kids , divination, astrology , poet .

Lord in 6th : doctor, exorcist , 9-5 jobs , engineering .

Lord in 7th : share market , corporate companies, matrimonial service, gains through marriage.

Lord in 8th : Tarot , astrology, forensic, psychology, anything miscellaneous.

Lord in 9th : Teaching , travelling, spirituality, mediation instructor.

Lord in 10th : offices , any sector involving planning , government.

Lord in 11th : social work , computer engineering, manufacturing industries, social media business.

Lord in 12th : psychic , travel agent , spiritualist , religious leader .

Tell me if you want a detailed reading:) I'll make a post later ;)

Masterlist

Paid services

[oopsie0503]

this makes me so mad

Ramattra mine controlling omnics has to be the single stupidest plot point I've ever seen in a work of fiction in my entire life. It's giving 'this radical extremist trying to liberate his people and create a better world for them is going to be too based. people are going to say he is so real for that.' but it's also giving 'sci-fi world where we kill evil robots like in helldiver's 2 is more profitable. make him eviler.'

Here's why it makes absolutely no sense for Rammatra to mine control omnics:

Resorting to mind control and manipulation implies that there are no sentient omnics with his same ideas and mindset. It implies that NOBODY is willing to join him and that otherwise he would be alone. This is not true. It's just not there's no chance there are zero omnics who agree with his line of thinking.

Null Sector has control of at least one omnium, and Ram is an engineer. He is able to build non-sentient bots to be canon fodder, he does not need the sentient ones. He would not let more of his people die when the job is better suited for non-thinking robots who can be mass produced. The bots the omnium produced were outdated but if they took control of the omnium they most certainly could update the blue prints to be stronger. He literally built his nemesis form dude. Imagine an army of nemesis bots. That'd be terrifying. Shit load scarier than. a couple of zombie zenyattas without the god powers.

Mind controlling omnics to send them to their deaths is so stupid. It's so against what he believes. I don't think there's ANY good reason for them to have gone this route with him! It is fucking stupid. I hate it. The 'he became too radicalized' thing is dumb . it's dumb.

(also this isn't a 'rammattra is perfect and has never ever done anything wrong in his entire life' post. but I also do not think he deserves to be the story's main villain when Talon is right there.)

a few edits: I reread some of the lore after getting questions and realized that it isn't explicitly stated what the helmets r doing. there are implications that it's a "if they won't join null sector on their own accord we will... convince them" type vibe. I'm hoping they don't go down this route and instead go with like.

the one I think would be interesting is they're uploading Omnic consciousness to a data bank so that their souls are not confined to a single body and even if they're destroyed their sentience will live on to be put into another body or something. I think that'd be cool but honestly unlikely.

[argyrocratie]

"In February, four months after Hamas broke through the fence around the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military establishment secretly employed hundreds of Palestinian workers from the West Bank to repair it. The incident represented one of the only times that Palestinian workers have been allowed to return to work within the Green Line after the Israeli government revoked almost all of their work permits in October.

The Israeli military establishment’s decision to rehire previously-banned Palestinian workers, which bypassed elected lawmakers on the official Security Cabinet, represents a growing tension between Israeli leaders’ divergent approaches to Palestinian laborers.

(...)

In the post-October 7th moment, Israeli leaders are retracing this familiar debate about Palestinian labor, but the rise of the far right has meant that the exclusion pole is much more powerful than in previous iterations. According to Hussain, a 60-year-old Palestinian laborer and West Bank resident who worked in construction near Tel Aviv before October 7th, Israel’s cancellation of almost all work permits has created one of the most dire crises Palestinian workers have ever faced. “The situation was never this bad even during the First or Second Intifada,” Hussain told Jewish Currents, asking that only his first name be used to protect his job prospects. “I have a family of seven and I haven’t worked in five months. I haven’t been able to buy meat since October 7th. We are relying on Allah and no one else.”

(...)

In the first two decades after it occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel opted to integrate a Palestinian labor force in the hopes that ensuring a basic level of welfare for Palestinians would maintain calm. But Israel changed tack with the onset of the First Intifada, the late 1980s Palestinian uprising against the occupation. In that period, Israel’s repeated closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which intensified following a wave of Palestinian militant attacks, barred tens of thousands of Palestinians from reaching their workplaces. This created a crisis for employers in the construction sector, where the dependency on Palestinians was most acute, and since Israeli workers were unwilling to work in these hazardous jobs—which also became socially stigmatized due their association with Palestinians—the government had no option left but to bring in workers from elsewhere. As a result, by 1996, the Israeli government had granted 106,000 permits for foreign migrant workers.

The shift to supposedly pliant and depoliticized foreign labor was seen as not only a way to keep the Israeli economy going, but also a strategy to quash the Intifada, which leveraged Israel’s dependency on Palestinian workers to put forward political demands through frequent strikes. “When the working Palestinian population rose up and threatened the interests of the state and employers, migrant workers were brought in as a sort of strike-breaker population,” said activist and anthropologist Matan Kaminer, who researches migrant workers in Israel. Bringing in a non-Palestinian labor force was also seen as preparation for an imminent two-state agreement: “The Oslo years also represented the most significant attempt to wean Israel off Palestinian labor because the government genuinely believed that there would be political separation,” Preminger said.

For right-wing Israelis, however, the potential replacement of Palestinian labor with foreigners triggered other latent anxieties. “The Israeli right was worried about foreign workers because if they were given rights and equality as non-Jews, it could create a liberal society where the first and most important marker is not the fact that you’re Jewish,” said Yael Berda, an academic who studies Israel’s permit regime. Preminger echoed this point: “In Israel, there is a constant negotiation between the inclusionary economic pressure to hire cheap or otherwise exploitable labor, and the exclusionary political pressure of an ethnonationalism that doesn’t want any non-Jews.” To manage this tension, Israel restricted the rights of its new migrant labor force. Even as more than 100,000 foreign workers were brought to Israel by the turn of the millennium, they were not allowed to bring their families. Most came on five-year visas, which gave a clear terminus to their lives in Israel, and there was no route to naturalization. Guaranteeing that migrants’ time in Israel would be finite “ensured that the costs of social reproduction—care of children and the elderly, long-term medical treatment, and so on—were not borne by Israeli society,” Kaminer said, adding that “all these draconian measures were designed very explicitly to ensure that migrant workers don’t become a permanent non-Jewish population.”

Despite these measures, Israeli leaders remained concerned that this population would naturalize, a problem they didn’t have with Palestinian workers. “One of the main advantages [of Palestinian labor] is that Palestinians are part of the economy without being part of the polity, which means you can extract labor without paying the social and political cost of their belonging. At the end of the day, they return to their homes,” said Berda. These concerns, alongside the economic and security benefits Israel enjoyed by hiring subordinated Palestinian workers, eventually led to their return.

For their part, Israeli employers welcomed this shift because, in Preminger’s words, “Palestinians were familiar with the land and the language, and they knew how to do the work, and how to work with Israelis.” Israel also benefited in other ways: As opposed to foreign workers, who send remittances back to their home countries, “Palestinian workers live in a captive market, and all their money ultimately ends up getting recycled into the Israeli economy,” said Abed Dari, a field coordinator with the workers’ rights NGO Kav LaOved. Leila Farsakh, a Palestinian political economist, explained that Israel’s decision to employ Palestinians further consolidated the de-development of the occupied territories, with labor migration to Israel—which accounted for up to one third of the Palestinian workforce during the ’90s—decimating smaller industries in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The higher salaries Palestinian workers were offered in Israel also contributed to pulling them out of agricultural work, facilitating Israel’s land confiscations. “Palestinian labor migration has played a key role in binding and subordinating the Palestinian economy to Israel,” Farsakh explained.

Even more crucially, labor migration became a central pillar in Israel’s regime of control over Palestinians, especially once Israel established its extensive system of work permits in the 1990s and set up a network of checkpoints with which to surveil Palestinian labor after the Second Intifada broke out in 2000. As Berda argued in her book, Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank, the permit regime constitutes “one of the most highly developed systems of control over a civilian population anywhere in the world.” Since a permit can be denied or revoked if the applicant is found to have engaged in any political activity—even peaceful protest—the system has served as a successful deterrent against individual Palestinians’ political participation. The broader closure policy in response to Palestinian uprisings also offered a collective deterrent, what Berda termed “an instrument for managing the political conflict in the labor market.” Following the Second Intifada, Israel also expanded the category of “security threat,” which led the number of Palestinians blacklisted from receiving movement permits to grow from only a few thousand before the Second Intifada to one-fifth of the male Palestinian population by 2007. Those who were denied permits sometimes became Israeli collaborators, which caused widespread suspicion and frayed social bonds within the occupied West Bank—as did the emergence of a class of Palestinian brokers invested in facilitating and managing Israel’s labor regime. These dynamics have continued into the present: As Farsakh noted, “the fact that the West Bank didn’t explode after October 7th is a testament to the success of this pacification policy.”

(...)

In this context, far-right politicians’ hardline rhetoric against Palestinians, and their insistence on bringing in foreign labor, seem likely to result not in a replacement of Palestinian workers but in “a new security regime for managing them,” according to Farsakh. Berda concurred, adding that “the influx of migrant workers will give Israel even more leverage over Palestinian workers, which will mean worse working conditions and more surveillance.” Indeed, the military establishment’s recently proposed pilot for a partial reentry of Palestinian workers explicitly suggests the use of “advanced monitoring systems that have never been used before” as a way to address the far right’s concerns about Palestinian militancy. In crafting this harsher version of the previous system, Israel looks poised to draw from the precedent of both the Intifadas, bringing in a migrant labor population to depress Palestinians’ power as it did in the ’90s while also heightening surveillance on Palestinian workers as in the 2000s. For the Palestinian workers on their receiving end, these emergent re-entry policies constitute a bitter lifeline, offering a short-term improvement on months of unemployment, but a long-term erosion of their already precarious rights."

[theology101]

BG3 Companions Ranked

This post is for Haley Whipjack on youtube and tiktok and her only so everyone else can leave. But they have three fun videos where she ranks the companions by increasingly silly Metrics. I propose the following

Most likely to turn a non contact sport a contact sport

Minthara. She will elbow, knee, anything to get an advantage and win. There are NO lines that she won’t cross

Astarion. He also has no moral limits but the amount of effort that he puts in heavily depends on his mood. Some days he’s throwing hands, most the time he’s barely paying attention

Karlach. There is no malice in her brain, at all, but she gets really excited when she plays the game and sometimes accidents happen, and by sometimes i mean a lot

Minsc. The same as karlach, but he’s a bit lower cause boo will try to reign him in a bit

Lae’zel. This is actually a flawed premise for lae’zel as she only enjoys contact sports - but if she’s playing an actual game of basketball with rules and stuff, she’ll obey them. If it’s her and karlach playing in the local park, they’re both throwing hands while playing basketball

Shadowheart. She doesnt do it the whole game, but whenever she thinks she can get away with it, she’ll do it. She has moral compunctions about it and feels bad later but in the moment she’s like “oh this is so smart”

Halsin. The caveat is that it’s never violent or painful, because he plays with a lot of children. He, thaniel and oliver play with him in bear form so he just like, knocks them over a little, puts his paw on them, etc

Gale. He wouldn’t, because he doesnt like the concept of cheating like that… but if he was losing? If he started getting really pissy about it? He’s making that sport contact

Jaheira. She just wouldnt do it, but also probably isnt even playing the sport or bothering to pay attention

Wyll. He would NEVER! I don’t need to say much more

Most likely to owe money to someone:

Minthara. She’s committing fraud and tax evasion to fund her various schemes, but it’s all underhanded and subversive that’s it just an open secret. She has BILLIONS in some bank accounts in Thay and no one is ever touching it

Gale. He has so, so, so much student loan debt. Even more from his phase when he was an addict. He can hear the whispers of the private sector but he’s still try to stay pure in accademia

Astarion. He committed Check Fraud. And owes Cazador a lot in back pay for his ‘rent’ and ‘food,’ but if you kill the old bastard Astarion get the estate so its all fine

Karlach. Straight up buys things without knowing how much money she has because she want the thing - but only for like, impulse purchases, and that kinda spontaneity has put her in debt. Plus she has a BUNCH of subscriptions she forgot to quit out

Halsin. He straight up does not know that, but he had an overdue ticket that he owed but he doesnt have a mailing address so no one can tell him

Minsc. Honestly? He doesn’t handle money. If he did, he’d hand it to Boo. If he can’t do that, he will lose it and get in trouble. Jaheria does it

Shadowheart. Not likely to have much debt, pretty sensible, but might get like, a ticket a lot. Red lights have little interest for her

Jaheria. So she has debt, and probably will for a while, but she’s also had it for a while and none of it is especially crushing. She paid off her house decades ago, so most of her money is spent on her children. Now especially that they’re young adults she has more debt on top of living costs - and Minsc too

Wyll. He’s good. He came from money and he gets it. He had a wild amount of debt from Mizaora but by the end of the game he’s good. He’s good

Lae’zel. That’s breaking a rule (because if people are mad its your fault), and Lae’zel would NEVER do that. Plus her life style is INCREDIBLY spartan. m

Most likely to have pets (and what kind):

Halsin. He doesn’t call them pets, but that’s really what the ones in the emerald grove are. For all intents and purposes, they’re domesticated - he just talks to them so he doesnt call them pets

Minsc. He has a hampster in game

Gale, he has a cat (if you origin play as him, otherwise she’s off screen :/ )

Shadowheart. In the farm ending? In her idyllic country side life? She has pet after god damn pet. She loves them all, she has Scratch, a Barn Cat, a House Cat (who doesnt like to go outside), Sheep, Chickens, Cows, you name it? She’s got it

Minthara canonically has a history of pets - we know of mimics, displacer beasts, and giant spiders. She has pets, but they’re VIOLENT things and she does feed them people

Lae’zel. If you count a dragon as a pet, but that feels demeaning. Otherwise (besides being Shadowheart’s wife) and an otherwise practical animal, she’s alright.

Astarion. He likes pets and would love to live in the house with one… he just doesnt want to be its primary care giver. Nothing on animals, he just wont put in the effort. He’s above Wyll because i think he would get incredibly and unhealthily attached to whatever animal he ends up with.

Wyll. He might get a dog, probably not if he’s in hell. It’s something he’s thought about in his head for his possible future but nothing concrete. If he did, he’d take really good care of it, but he wouldnt go out of his way to get one

Karlach. She wants a pet, sooo badly, but can’t have one. Well, maybe she can get a Hellhound or something, but she’s going to be in combat scenario 24/7 so thats… probably temporary

Jaheira. She has enough going on in her life to deal with having a pet. She might coexist in a space with an animal, but she did not want it and is taking 0 steps in that things development or care. She’s busy

Who graduated College and for what major:

Gale. Multiple PhDs at a VERY young age, im thinking like, chemistry and physics? Then he doubled down on some more

Astarion. He’s a lawyer, so he went through college and then law school, as well as passing the bar. Probably has an expired license though and will not be updating it before trying to practice law. His major was pre-law, cause he knew what he wanted as his job but didnt know what he was passionate it

Minthara. She had a VERY good private tutor growing up for multiple subjects, went to a very prestigious university that her uncle was a member of the faculty, buildings named after her family, the whole nine yards. She stopped formal education after her four years but has taken up a number of other subjects to study. PoliSci or Psychology major

Lae’zel. She went to the Military Academy for the Gith, graduated like two months ago and then gets tadpoled. Definitely an anatomy major to know the most fragile parts of the body

Jaheira. She grew up in a comune of hippies and was home schooled by them, but since becoming more active, she’s taken a few courses at the community college to get a civics degree.

Shadowheart. She went to catholic school her entire life, was going to go to a catholic college, but then she changed her hair and moved to the west coast. Since then she’s just been hanging out as a bisexual

Wyll. You’d think he’s be higher, but he became a monster hunter at 17, so he didnt even finish High School, then he either lands a cushy government job and will be too busy, or a monster hunter still and also too busy

Karlach. Dropped out of high school and joined up with Gortash at 16

Minsc. Has never attended a school, he’s just fine. He doesnt know how the world works and frankly? He’s not interested. The least information curious man on the planet

Halsin. He is confused by the concept. You know the type of environment Jaheira grew up in? That. It’s him. He creates that mind of environment for children.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Consider the fertilizer sector. The tripling of fertilizer prices in 2020-22 – which drove up food prices – was partly fueled by higher costs for nitrogen fertilizer, which reflected the rising price of natural gas. But new data from GRAIN/IATP show that leading firms hiked fertilizer prices well beyond what was needed to cover increased production costs, increasing their operating profits to 36%, even as they sold less product. The resulting profit ratios were three times higher than before the Ukraine war began, and well above the 13% average posted by S&P 500 firms. Global grain traders have similarly been able to translate tighter supplies into record profits. In mid-2022, grain multinational Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) recorded its highest-ever quarterly profits. Its rival Cargill also banked record profits, with total revenues soaring by 23%. Such profiteering is made possible by growing corporate concentration in the food and fertilizer sectors. ADM and Cargill are two of the four “ABCD” firms – along with Bunge and Dreyfus – that control an estimated 70-90% of the world grain market. Just four firms account for 75% of nitrogen-fertilizer production in the United States, and 72% of the potash-fertilizer market globally. Through decades of mergers and acquisitions, such firms have been able to expand their influence up and down the supply chain, while amassing huge amounts of market data. Now, a proposed $34 billion merger between Bunge and Viterra – the grain arm of the commodity giant Glencore – would mean further concentration of soybean and canola processing and distribution across the Americas.

[mariacallous]

A trove of Russian military and financial documents has been destroyed in a series of cyberattacks carried out by Ukrainian military intelligence, the Kyiv Post has reported.

The cyberattacks took place from Monday to Thursday, according to the news outlet, which cited sources from Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). Over 800 Russian servers were reportedly affected, leading to the loss of military, administrative and financial documents. Mobile internet banking services with two Russian banks, the Moscow Credit Bank and Rosselkhozbank, were also reportedly interrupted as a result of the attacks. An unnamed Ukrainian military intelligence source cited by the Kyiv Post said: “The loss of data and documentation has led to a partial or complete halt in the operations of service providers and consumers across various sectors.” “It will require significant resources to search for and recover lost data, further demonstrating to the local population the poor technical infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” the source added. The reported data breaches are the latest in a series of coordinated cyberattacks by Ukrainian military intelligence specialists as part of the war against Russia. Several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in July resulted in severe disruptions to services affecting Russia’s central bank and social media networks.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing

As tech giants reach terminal enshittification, hollowed out to the point where they are barely able to keep their end-users or business customers locked in, the capital classes are ready for the final rug-pull, where all the value is transfered from people who make things for a living to people who own things for a living.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys

“Activist investors” have triggered massive waves of tech layoffs, firing so many tech workers so quickly that it’s hard to even come up with an accurate count. The total is somewhere around 280,000 workers:

https://layoffs.fyi/

These layoffs have nothing to do with “trimming the fat” or correcting the hiring excesses of the lockdown. They’re a project to transfer value from workers, customers and users to shareholders. Google’s layoff of 12,000 workers followed fast on the heels of gargantuan stock buyback where the company pissed away enough money to pay those 12,000 salaries…for the next 27 years.

The equation is simple: the more companies invest in maintenance, research, development, moderation, anti-fraud, customer service and all the other essential functions of the business, the less money there is to remit to people who do nothing and own everything.

The tech sector has grown and grown since the first days of the PC — which were also the first days of neoliberalism (literally: the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail). But despite a long-run tight labor market for tech workers, there have been two other periods of mass layoffs — the 2001 dotcom collapse and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

Both of those were mass extinction events for startups and the workers who depended on them. The mass dislocations of those times were traumatic, and each one had its own aftermath. The dotcom collapse freed up tons of workers, servers, offices and furniture, and a massive surge in useful, user-centric technologies. The Great Financial Crisis created the gig economy and a series of exploitative, scammy “bro” startups, from cryptocurrency grifts to services like Airbnb, bent on converting the world’s housing stock into unlicensed hotel rooms filled with hidden cameras.

Likewise, the post-lockdown layoffs have their own character: as Eira May writes on StackOverflow, many in the vast cohort of laid-off tech workers is finding it relatively easy to find new tech jobs, outside of the tech sector:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/03/19/whats-different-about-these-layoffs/

May cites a Ziprecruiter analysis that claims that 80% of laid-off tech workers found tech jobs within 3 months, and that there are 375,000 open tech roles in American firms today (and that figure is growing):

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/blog/laid-off-tech-workers/

There are plenty of tech jobs — just not in tech companies. They’re in “energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more” — firms with intensely technical needs and no technical staff. Historically, many of these firms would have outsourced their technological back-ends to the Big Tech firms that just destroyed so many jobs to further enrich the richest people on Earth. Now, those companies are hiring ex-Big Tech employees to run their own services.

The Big Tech firms are locked in a race to see who can eat their seed corn the fastest. Spreading tech expertise out of the tech firms is a good thing, on balance. Big Tech’s vast profits come from smaller businesses in the real economy who couldn’t outbid the tech giants for tech talent — until now.

These mass layoff speak volumes about the ethos of Silicon Valley. The same investors who rent their garments demanding a bailout for Silicon Valley Bank to “help the everyday workers” are also the loudest voices for mass layoffs and transfers to shareholders. The self-styled “angel investor” who spent the weekend of SVB’s collapse all-caps tweeting dire warnings about the impact on “the middle class” and “Main Street” also gleefully DM’ed Elon Musk in the runup to his takeover of Twitter:

Day zero

Sharpen your blades boys 🔪

2 day a week Office requirement = 20% voluntary departures.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma

For many technologists, the allure of digital tools is the possibility of emancipation, a world where we can collaborate to make things without bosses or masters. But for the bosses and masters, automation’s allure is the possibility of getting rid of workers, shattering their power, and replacing them with meeker, cheaper, more easily replaced labor.

That means that workers who go from tech firms to firms in the real economy might be getting lucky — escaping the grasp of bosses who dream of a world where technology lets them pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom on wages, benefits and working conditions, to employers who are glad to have them as partners in their drive to escape Big Tech’s grasp.

Tomorrow (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.

Image: University of North Texas Libraries (modified) https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth586821/

[Image ID: A group of firefighters holding a safety net under a building from which a man is falling; he is supine and has his hands behind his head. The sky has a faint, greyscale version of the 'Matrix Waterfall' effect. The building bears a Google logo.]

[pb-dot]

Some Thoughts on the Reddit Blackout

Like many new arrivals on Tumblr these days, I used to be a Redditor until recent developments encouraged me to take my business elsewhere, and I have been following the development of the story as thoroughly as I can without actually giving Reddit any more traffic. With the most recent development of the Reddit admin corps taking on a suite of strategies lifted straight from the depression-era railroad baron playbook, I figured the time has come to talk a little about the wider implications of this whole story.

The Tech sector is, to the best of my understanding, in a vulnerable place right now. After the Web 2.0 gold rush and years of consolidation and growth from the biggest actors, your Alphabets, Twitters, Metas, and so on, many of the larger sites and services are reaching the largest size they can expect to grow to. How, for instance, could Facebook or Twitter grow much more now that everyone and their mother is on Facebook and Twitter? Prior to the Musk buyout, Twitter seemingly settled on upping engagement, making sure people were on Twitter longer and invested more energy and emotion in the platform, usually by making damn sure the discourse zapping through that hellhole was as polarizing and hostile as possible. Meta, meanwhile, has been making bank on user data as advertisers, AI folks, and any number of other actors salivate over getting their hands on the self-updating contact and interest registry that is Facebook.

With the rise of what we apparently have decided to call AI, data is now more valuable than ever. I consider this to be yet another Tech Hype Bubble on the level of NFTs or Metaverses, but, like with the two above, I can imagine it's hard to explain that when you are a Tech CEO and your shareholders ask you "Hey, how do you plan on earning us money off of this AI/NFT/Metaverse thing?" This is not to say CEO Steve Huffman isn't handling this whole thing with the grace of a three-legged hippo, but merely to suggest that his less-than-laudable decisions and actions in this mess don't arise from his character alone but also is a result of wider systemic issues.

One of these issues is the complicated role user data plays in modern websites and -services. Since its inception as a publicly accessible space, the question of how to monetize the Internet has been a tricky one for site and service owners. Selling ad space on your website or service has long been the go-to, but this in itself presents its own issues, having to curate content that is considered ad-friendly, malicious or careless actors making using said service or website less attractive for customers, and finally how to convince your advertisers that they get what they pay for in the first place, ie. "how do I know people even look at our ads?" All of this is before you even stop to consider how ads massively favor large, established actors.

It's no small wonder, then, that several startups in the era of internet mass adoption chose to forgo ads, or at least massively deprioritize them and/or relaunch them as "promoted posts," in an attempt to escape the stigma around ads. Meta/Facebook is probably the biggest fish in this particular pond, but we also see other services such as Twitter and Reddit follow the same pattern.

What makes this work is that the data these platforms collect from their users isn't all that valuable on a person-to-person basis, knowing that so-and-so is 32 years old, lives in a traditionally conservative part of the city, goes to Starbucks a lot, and listens to Radiohead isn't particularly useful information for anyone but a dedicated but lazy stalker; When viewed as an aggregate, however, large collections of data on a large population becomes quite valuable. This is especially true if you're working with, say, targeted ads or political campaigns. Look no further than the Cambridge Analytica data scandal for an example.

Now, all this is to illustrate the strange position the user occupies in Web 2.0. We tend to think of ourselves as the customer of Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and so on, but it isn't the case. After all, we don't pay for these services, and if we do it's to buy freedom from ads or other minor service modifications. It is more correct to say that we make up the product itself. This is true in two respects, first, an active social community is vital for social media to not be entirely pointless, and second, we generate the data that the platform holder seeks to monetize. This hybrid product/participant role doesn't map cleanly to traditional understandings of "worker," but I argue it is a closer fit than "customer."

All of this is to say that it is immensely gratifying to see the Reddit Blackout taking the shape of a strike rather than the more typical boycott model we've seen in the internet-based protests of yesteryear. Much of this, I think, we can thank the participating Reddit moderators. While the regular platform user can be *argued* to be a worker, the moderator inarguably is one, and the fact that they aren't paid for their efforts is more a credit to the prosocial nature of humans than to the corporate acumen of the platform holders. Either way, moderating a subreddit is work, if the subreddit is large, it's quite a lot of work, and moderators keeping malicious actors, scammers, and hatemongers out of everyone's hair is a must for any decently sized social space to not be an objectively terrible experience. So, if you were to, for example, withhold your labor (moderating for free) which you as a worker can do, it would be plain irresponsible to leave the place open for said bad apples to ruin everyone's bunches, thus the shutdowns.

I don't think it's a controversial take to claim that the Reddit admins also view this more as a strike than a boycott, given their use of scabs, intimidation, and other strikebreaking tactics in an attempt to break the thing up. This is nothing new, and the fact that Reddit admins are willing to stoop to these scumbag tactics tells us that their bluster about the shutdown not affecting their bottom line is nothing more than shareholder-placating hot air.

As this entire screed has perhaps demonstrated, I believe the Reddit Blackout is important. My stay at Tumblr so far has been excellent and will probably continue past this strike no matter what outcome it has, but for others in my situation, or perhaps entirely alien to the Reddit biome, I ask you to consider: If we do not stop this level of consumer and user-unfriendly bullshit Reddit have been pulling on the API change, where will it pop up next? Who's to say the next bright idea in corpo-hell isn't "Hey boss, how about we charge these nerd losers a dollar per reblog? And maybe a fiver for a Golden Reblog (TM)?"

This is perhaps getting into grandstanding, but I believe we are way past due for a renegotiation of what it means to be a platform holder and -user on this hot mess of an internet. If we as users do not take an active, strong stance on the matter, the Steve Huffmans, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world will decide without us. One does not have to be a fortune teller to see that the digital world this would create would not have our best interests in mind any more than the current one does.

So, in closing, I wish to extend my wholehearted support to the participating Moderators of Reddit and everyone who has decided to take their business elsewhere for the duration of the shutdown. Even without getting into the nitty-gritty of the API situation, this is a fight worth having, and may we through it make a world that's just a little bit less shitty.

Become Ungovernable

Become Unprofitable

Stay that way.

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

i adore reading your analytical posts abt soc so much jts not even funny; stumbling upon your account was like a coming across a goldmine 🙏 ALSO I RLLY WANT TO ONOW ABT THE SHE TREATS US LJKE MARKS ESSAY IVE NEVER THOIGHT ABT THAT RLLY also i loved the mr crimson post anw im sorry i’ll shut up now

Thank you so much, I’m so glad you like them!!

This is the first time someone’s submitted a question so bare with me because if there’s any way to do this wrong I’ll probably manage it, but here are my thoughts on the red herrings :)

She’s treating us like marks - an analysis of Leigh Bardugo’s use of red herrings in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom

*warning: CONSTANT SPOILERS AHEAD!*

I happen to be an absolute sucker for a good bit of foreshadowing, I think if it’s done well it’s one of the best literary techniques out there, so it’s something I always like to try and be on the look out for when I read. With books that I go back and reread, in this case many many times (seriously I’ve never specifically counted but I’m pretty sure I’m at over ten times each for the duology, it’s ridiculous), I like to find the things I didn’t realise were foreshadowing the first time round. When rereading six of crows and crooked kingdom, I realised that a lot of the things I expected to be foreshadowing didn’t actually come to fruition whilst other, seemingly less important, details were the actual foreshadowing. I LOVE IT! It’s genius, because it leaves the reader worrying about one thing so they’re too distracted to realise the groundwork is being laid for something else. But you know what that makes me think of? Kaz’s ideology of “What’s the easiest way to steal a man’s wallet? […] Tell him you’re going to steal his watch,” and “you have to let the mark feel like he’s won”. Leigh Bardugo literally cons us, and she tells us that she’s doing it in Crooked Kingdom when the group are certain that they know where Inej is being kept, but Kaz says “Too obvious. He’s treating us like marks”. GENIUS

So I compiled a few of my favourite examples (in no particular order), if you know of any I’ve missed please add more I would love to see them!!

The cannon at the Ice Court. When the Crows first arrive in Djerholm they see a cannon built into the the cliff face, a defence mechanism for the Court, and Kaz says what might be one of my favourite underrated lines of his: “I’ve broken into banks, warehouses, mansions, museums, vaults, a rare book library, and once the bedchamber of a visiting Kaelish diplomat whose wife had a passion for emeralds. But I’ve never had a cannon shot at me”. Jesper jokes that “there’s something to be said for novelty” but then continues to say that a cannon would be useless against a ship as small as theirs and that it’s designed for “invading armadas”. They don’t mention the cannon again, but it stuck in my mind when I first read it as a looming threat, a reminder that the danger wouldn’t end when they left the court. So when they arrived in the harbour was I expecting soldiers, or a heartrender, or for Nina to take parem? Nope, I was too busy worrying about the schooner being blown to pieces - especially when the Crows all have such specific painful and/or traumatic experiences linking to water, with 4 out of 6 of them being drowning related. But that isn’t to say that the waiting soldiers at the dock weren’t foreshadowed. All the way through Leigh Bardugo constantly reminds us that Matthias had never seen black protocol in action, and that his time in the prison sector had been brief, but she lulls us into a false sense of security by letting us believe that the secret bridge onto the White Island was all Matthias was hiding. We trust him by this point, so we don’t expect anything to be different to what he’s told us, even though this is an aspect he couldn’t possibly have predicted. Bonus points for the fact that Nina’s poor well-being in the aftermath of the drug is foreshadowed by a joke at the awful Inn they go to before the job; the food is disgusting and she says “when I don’t want to eat, you know there’s a problem”, and in Crooked Kingdom it’s many times emphasised that she’s unhealthily losing weight and her appetite has vastly decreased, with Matthias buying her chocolate biscuits “in the hopes she’d eat something”.

The poison pill. Leigh Bardugo worked very hard in Crooked Kingdom to make us think that Nina might die. We went into that book knowing there was a strong possibility that she wouldn’t come out the other side; we knew very little about how she was coping with parem withdrawal at the end of soc, but we had seen around a minimum of five grisha being destroyed by the drug so far. (That’s a guess I haven’t actually counted). So we went in with the idea that she was already in a precarious situation, and even though we begin to see her regain herself she struggles throughout the novel both physically and mentally in the aftermath of the drug. Matthias begins to dream of being lost on the ice in the worst storms known to Fjerda, knowing that she was out there somewhere and that he could not reach her. This sounds like it’s foreshadowing her death. Then when the pair go to the Ravkan embassy, Tamar gives Nina a small yellow pill that Genya made; she explains that it kills instantly and painlessly, saying “we all have them” to make sure they cannot be drugged and enslaved by the Shu government, who are hunting for grisha with the Khergud at the time. Matthias is terrified by this, but Nina just slips it into her pocket without a second thought. At that moment I thought that Nina would almost take the pill only to be stopped by someone else, because it felt too obvious that it would kill her, but I did wonder if the Khergud would be the ones to stop her and so she would still be lost. But the pill never gets mentioned again, except when the Dime Lions come for Nina at Sweet Reef and she briefly remembers that it’s still in her pocket. Then never again. And Matthias’ dreams were, of course, actually foreshadowing the FESTIVAL OF PAIN AND TORTURE that is chapter 40.

Mr Crimson. I’m so glad you like my Mr Crimson idea! Basically I posted saying I think that he represents death in the novels and I’ve also talked before about how I think the Komedie Brute costumes that the characters usually adopt are representative of their character; Kaz the Madman, Nina the Lost Bride, Inej and Wylan the Grey Imp, and Jesper and Matthias Mr Crimson. I won’t go into detail about all of them but if you’re interested the post is on my page, but with the idea that Mr Crimson represents death it’s very important to me that, although all of them wear his cloak at least once, he is the only Komedie Brute character taken on by Jesper and Matthias (at least to my recollection, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So of course I would argue that Matthias taking on the image in Crooked Kingdom foreshadows his death, but in that case what does Jesper’s represent? I came up with two options but I actually think you could combine them into one: it’s a red herring to make us align him with the literal death of Matthias, whilst actually foreshadowing the metaphorical death that his addiction and mental well-being are driving him towards as he tries desperately to stop them - in his own words to Colm “I’m dying anyway, Da, I’m just doing it slow”

Oh god sorry that this is yet another long post I hope y’all enjoyed this enough for it to be worth the time it takes for you to read all my ramblings 😭

Tagging people who asked for this one in the replies to my essay titles post - @the-magnificunt @flerkenkiddingme @luridorangeandviolentviolet @snowblack-charcoalwhite

[soon-palestine]

Damages to Physical Structures Estimated at $18.5 billion as of end January

WASHINGTON, April 2, 2024 – The cost of damage to critical infrastructure in Gaza is estimated at around $18.5 billion according to a new report released today by the World Bank and the United Nations, with financial support of the European Union. That is equivalent to 97% of the combined GDP of the West Bank and Gaza in 2022. The Interim Damage Assessment report used remote data collection sources to measure damage to physical infrastructure in critical sectors incurred between October 2023 and end of January 2024. The report finds that damage to structures affects every sector of the economy. Housing accounts for 72% of the costs. Public service infrastructure such as water, health and education account for 19%, and damages to commercial and industrial buildings account for 9%. For several sectors, the rate of damage appears to be leveling off as few assets remain intact. An estimated 26 million tons of debris and rubble have been left in the wake of the destruction, an amount that is estimated to take years to remove.

The report also looks at the impact on the people of Gaza. More than half the population of Gaza is on the brink of famine and the entire population is experiencing acute food insecurity and malnutrition. Over a million people are without homes and 75% of the population is displaced. Catastrophic cumulative impacts on physical and mental health have hit women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities the hardest, with the youngest children anticipated to be facing life-long consequences to their development.

With 84% of health facilities damaged or destroyed, and a lack of electricity and water to operate remaining facilities, the population has minimal access to health care, medicine, or life-saving treatments. The water and sanitation system has nearly collapsed, delivering less than 5% of its previous output, with people dependent on limited water rations for survival. The education system has collapsed, with 100% of children out of school.

The report also points to the impact on power networks as well as solar generated systems and the almost total power blackout since the first week of the conflict. With 92% of primary roads destroyed or damaged and the communications infrastructure seriously impaired, the delivery of basic humanitarian aid to people has become very difficult.

The Interim Damage Assessment Note identifies key actions for early recovery efforts, starting with an increase in humanitarian assistance, food aid and food production; the provision of shelter and rapid, cost-effective, and scalable housing solutions for displaced people; and the resumption of essential services.

About the Gaza Interim Damage Assessment Report The Gaza Interim Damage Assessment report draws on remote data collection sources and analytics to provide a preliminary estimate of damages to physical structures in Gaza from the conflict in accordance with the Rapid Damage & Needs Assessment (RDNA) methodology. RDNAs follow a globally recognized methodology that has been applied in multiple post-disaster and post-conflict settings. A comprehensive RDNA that assesses economic and social losses, as well as financing needs for recovery and reconstruction, will be completed as soon as the situation allows. The cost of damages, losses and needs estimated through a comprehensive RDNA is expected to be significantly higher than that of an Interim Damage Assessment.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Major South African banks are providing funding for the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group, according to an investigative report Wednesday in the Jerusalem Post that also names a former Muslim community leader as a key figure in the financing operation.

The Post reports:

Research conducted by The Jerusalem Post staff and several sources uncovered what appears to be a network of several South African organizations and straw man companies deeply involved with funding Hamas activities through the Al-Quds Foundation, an international group sanctioned by the US and outlawed by Israel, using accounts registered in major local South African banks: Standard Bank, Nedbank, and Absa. … Sanctioning by the US and Israel notwithstanding, the foundation continues its operations across the globe, featuring roughly thirteen branches in different countries, sometimes holding different names. In South Africa, a registered organization named “Al-Quds Foundation SA” also exists which openly admits on their new website that they are “a branch of Al-Quds foundation with headquarters in Lebanon.” The organization itself boasts about its fundraising activities, claiming funds would be transferred to the needy in Gaza. The foundation’s website lists Sheikh Ebrahim Gabriels as its director, leading the South African branch since 2019.

Gabriels was once the head of the Muslim Judicial Council, the umbrella body for Muslims in South Africa, with authority over religious matters as well as communal affairs. The Post describes Gabriels as closely connected to leading Hamas officials.

Nedbank, the one bank that replied to the Post‘s queries, would not confirm the identity or existence of the Hamas accounts, while maintaining that it complies with international sanctions. South Africa’s banking sector is viewed as one of the few remaining repositories of expertise and competence in a country plagued by corruption, crime, and an ongoing brain drain.

Hamas’s apparent funding in South Africa could help explain why the country has led the charge against Israel in international fora such as the International Court of Justice, where South Africa is pursuing a case of “genocide” against Israel. The ICJ said Wednesday that it expects to issue a preliminary ruling on Friday, just two short weeks after oral arguments by both sides.

[boxboxblog]

Track Analysis: The Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez Circuit

Hello, this is part of a new series I am doing about F1 circuits. I will be post about the closest race's track, and when we have breaks I will fit in ones about tracks we have already seen this year.

(Map of corner, turn, and straight names as of 2023)

This clockwise track is a very unique one in F1. At its rather high altitude (7,350 feet, the highest on the calendar), the thin air puts a lot of stress on both the driver and the car itself. It also effects the aerodynamics of the car and the engine strongly. For example, ex-F1 driver and 2016 WDC Nico Rosberg has stated that on sharp corners, many drivers can't even breathe.

Sector 1:

First Straight: One of the the longest straights In F1, cars can reach up to 224 MPH. It is a straight-off-the-bat speed free for all here, and once they hit that first turn, drivers really have to focus on petering off that speed and braking properly. This first straight is a DRS zone

Turns 1-3: A tight chicane immediately after the long first straight. Leads to a lot of craziness, especially on the first lap, and requires a precise braking and strong handling skills.

Sector 2:

Second Straight: The straight between turn 3 and 4, this is another DRS zone that gives drivers a chance to pass into turn 4, but is much shorter than the first.

Turn 4: A sharp left, leading into a slower section. A lot of drama can happen here. Drivers need to be prepared for the technicality required for the next sections here.

Turns 5-6: A series of medium speed technical turns where a lot of spectators are packed. Not a particularly fast area, but a huge test of drivers skill and precision.

Turns 7-8: Fast paced S-shaped curves that require a balance of speed and stability. This is coming out of a highly technical section, so drivers must really put on a burst of speed before they hit another slower section.

Turns 9-11: Another slower section, drivers must be prepared to get through it smoothly and accelerate into the straight after it, so the ability to gauge when to switch from precision to aggression is paramount here.

Sector 3:

Final Straight: The last DRS zone, even shorter than the second one. The tightness and the jump from speed of a straight to the sharper 12 to 17 section is very complex, and requires strong awareness of braking zones.

Turns 12-15 : 12 is a partially banked corner that leads to a mini straight, which goes into in multiple tight corners. This area is quite tight and driver must have precise control, with 13 being an incredibly sharp right-hander. It ends on a relatively slow corner in 15.

Turns 16-17: These turns are sweeping and allow drivers to pick up speed before getting back to the main straight.

Strategy:

So, starting out the race, there is that very long straight. This leads drivers to pick up a massive amount of speed, but they must be careful to time their braking exactly correctly, as on such a fast along straight it can be difficult to gauge correctly. This straight is perhaps the most unique thing about this circuit, aside from the elevation. Other than the typical race strat on tight corners and looser S-curves, this circuit also requires a lot of focus on tire management and cooling. Tire management because this is usually a one-stop track and cooling because the high elevation means that air is thinner and will not cool the engine as effectively. Another thing to consider is the effect of the elevation on downforce. It create less downforce (also less drag), which means teams must run a higher downforce set up than usual, which some cars do not respond well to. This is one of those tracks where certain cars shine and certain cars fail. In general, drivers must strike a good balance between pushing speed in the straights and precision in the corners.

Upsides and Downsides:

This track can be fascinating to watch due to its mixture of high speed and low speed sections. It has extremely long straights, loose corners, sharp corners, complicated chicanes, etc. It really puts a lot of drivers skills to the test and can lead to some pretty interesting races. A downside is that is can be rather difficult to overtake around this circuit, especially because they recently shortened the DRS sections, which many fans complain about.

Alright so that is my quick look at the The Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez Circuit. I hope it was enlightening.

Cheers,

-B