"What happens when you crush the spending power of the people and you give lots of money to big business? Big business collects this money — of course, it’s free money; why wouldn’t they take it? But they look outside the window of their skyscraper in Paris or Frankfurt, and all they see are impecunious masses. They’re not going to invest, because the many out there can’t afford to buy high value-added goods. But they have this money that has been printed and given to them, so what do they do? They go to the stock exchange and they buy back their own shares. Their share price goes through the roof, and their bonus is connected to their share price, so they are laughing all the way to the bank. They go and buy a new apartment, a new yacht, more Bitcoins, a work of art. Asset prices go up, while the many are still impecunious and there’s no investment. After fifteen years of that, it’s the end of Europe. It is the reason why Germany is now deindustrializing. It is deindustrializing because it did not invest anything in the last fifteen years. The managing directors and the members of the board of directors were doing splendidly, but they were not investing. While the Chinese were investing their heads off and Elon Musk was investing in Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and so on, Europe had zero net productive investment for something like sixteen or seventeen years. That is preposterous. The result is that now, Europe is dying. If people ask — and they should ask — why it is that fascism is having a second or third wind, it is because this is what happens when you have something like 1929." https://jacobin.com/2025/07/yanis-varoufakis-on-the-legacy-of-greeces-oxi-referendum #EU #Greece #Euro #EuroCrisis #OxiReferendum #Democracy #PublicDebt #Austerity

A última temporada marca uma tentativa de estabelecer a ponte entre a genialidade das primeiras duas temporadas e o comercialismo industrial das temporadas seguintes. De certo modo, o esforço é bem conseguido. Não obstante, mais uma vez o último episódio não deixa de se assemelhar bastante à narrativa típica do final de uma telenovela. Então o fast-forward dos último seis minutos é completamente ridículo - precisamente por ser demasiado rápido e curto. Apesar do que disse, "Six Feet Under" não deixa de ser uma série bastante boa. Não tão boa para a poder considerar uma das três melhores séries de sempre ("Sopranos", "Better Call Saul" e "Breaking Bad" são para mim indubitavelmente melhores), mas ainda assim não deixa de estar no meu Top 5 - atrás de "Mad Men" mas ligeiramente acima de "BoJack Horseman". Por outro lado, "Six Feet Under" é possivelmente a melhor série que retrata a minha geração ("Geração X"). Nesse sentido, talvez seja possível que esteja a valorizá-la excessivamente. Possível próxima série a ver: "The Crown" (2016-2023).

"Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness." https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion #Religion #SiliconValley #Christianism #Christianity #Palantir #Anduril

"While haste and speed often get confused, they differ in that the second shows control instead of panic. You can maximize speed while keeping accuracy quite high; beyond a certain point, though, spending more time on accuracy, style, or other aspects that prevent a document from going live always yields diminishing returns. Nobody reads perfect yet outdated docs, except historians. Even then, docs aren’t perfect, because documentation can’t ever be perfect. This is a key principle I stand by (call it the Ferri Paradox if you want): Any document describing a system is necessarily inaccurate. And yet, this reality doesn’t significantly alter the impact of our work, because we aim for simplicity and usefulness over extreme faithfulness. Given how imperfect products are, docs are a charitable portrait. Now, how you write docs quickly depends on a number of factors. Some of those factors you can’t control: your overall amount of experience as a writer, your initial expertise with specific technologies, and the way features are developed and released in your organization. But other aspects are yours to act upon. For example, you can decide how to best use the technical resources at your disposal and how to approach writing the docs and asking for feedback." https://passo.uno/how-write-tech-docs-quickly/ #TechnicalWriting #TechnicalCommunication #SoftwareDocumentation #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #Docs #Documentation

Basic Questions That Every (Technical) Writer Should Try To Answer - AKA Technical Writing 101: I assure you that If you can answer all of these questions, your readers won't mistake you for a chatbot :) 1. What is the purpose of the document that I'm writing? 2. Why am I writing this document? 3. Who is the target audience of this document? 4. Is this document part of a series of documents? 5. If so, have I established a nexus to the other documents in the series? 6. Are there any predefined formal requirements that the document must meet? 7. Does the document meet those requirements? 8. Does the document include an introduction? 9. Does the introduction clearly explain the purpose of the document to the target audience? 10. Does the introduction present the topics that will be explored in the body of the document in a straightforward way? 11. Does the document include a conclusion? 12. Does the conclusion provide a good summary of the previously explored topics? 13. Does the conclusion tell readers what they should have learned by following the document? 14. Does the body of the document include use case scenarios based on user personas that explain the potential advantages of adopting the explored tools or methods? 15. Does the body of the document depict real-life examples of how readers can immediately start using the tools or methods explained in the document? #TechnicalWriting #TechnicalCommunication #Writing #Nonfiction #Documentation #Docs

"These documents have been the subject of requests by ranking members of Congress and litigants following the rendition of hundreds of Venezuelans and a small number of Salvadorans to the Salvadoran prison known as CECOT in March—the rendition of Venezuelans being effectuated under the purported wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act. The documents provide few additional details on the prisoner transfer arrangement between the United States and El Salvador—telling in its own right. Rather than memorializing the full terms of the deal, the principal function of these documents appears to be establishing a written record that the United States sought and received (and then sought to remind El Salvador of) assurances that detainees transferred to El Salvador would be treated humanely and not tortured, consistent with El Salvador’s obligations under the Convention Against Torture. Seeking such assurances that foreign partners will not violate international law is a longstanding practice by the U.S. government—a practice of dubious value. Here it seems that State Department lawyers sought to create a paper trail in an attempt to rebut claims that the United States or U.S. officials renditioned people to El Salvador intent that they be abused—actions that could violate the United States’ own treaty obligations and potentially expose U.S. officials to criminal prosecution abroad. These documents should be understood as a legal fig leaf." https://www.justsecurity.org/117271/us-elsalvador-diplomatic-notes/ #USA #Trump #Immigration #Deportation #ElSalvador

RT @curaffairs We on the left need to do better than the Democratic Party line and the politics of compromise. If our elected “socialists” like AOC and others aren’t willing to do this, we know which way to vote. We can, and should, close ranks. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/07/how-aoc-went-from-influencer-to-influenced

"For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.” But based on the names we know so far, Cherny’s team is less the Avengers and more the Great Lakes Avengers — the hapless joke team of uselessly powered “heroes” who do more dying than saving the day. The Project 2029 brain trust now tasked with saving the Democratic Party is quite literally composed of the same line-up of people who brought the party to its knees in the first place, handing Donald Trump power not once, but twice. The Democratic Party’s defeat was born of a combination of a decades-long rejection of working-class politics, corporate influence that has captured the party, and a foreign policy hawkishness out of step with a war-weary American public. But it seems Project 2029 is less about reckoning with this reality and more, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel put it, putting out “a Dem[ocratic] message disconnected from left-wing groups,” with one person who’s involved texting him that “the groups are the Achilles Heel of the Deomcratic Party [sic].”" https://jacobin.com/2025/07/democrats-project-2029-centrism-clinton #USA #Centrism #Democrats #DemocraticParty #Project2029

"Musicians speaking out against Israel has become a mainstream topic as artists are using famous festival stages to express their opposition against the ongoing genocide. Consequences followed swiftly, with Manchester’s RADAR cancelling Bob Vylan’s performance and Kneecap facing legal action after Glanstonbury. In the electronic music world, an entire pro-Palestine movement is now gaining momentum. Over the past couple of weeks that world has been shaken up by news of a beloved large scale festival becoming owned by one of the most notorious private equity firms in the industry. The initial news of Barcelona-based festival Sónar – which took place 12-14 June, 2025 – being bought by Superstruct Entertainment flew under the radar. Superstruct itselft was purchased by private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co in 2024. A wave of concerned artists signed an open letter and withdrew en masse from the festival because of KKR‘s ties not only with Canada’s Coastal GasLink pipeline, but also connections (archive) to Israeli settler housing in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) later officially called for a boycott of the festival. Here is all you need to know about how this happened and why it matters." https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/pro-palestine-festival-artists-boycott-israel-linked-company/ #Music #MusicFestivals #ElectronicMusic #EDM #Sonar #Barcelona #Israel #Palestine #KKR

Grace Jones - Nightclubbing (1981) This album is awesome, with a magnificent participation of Sly and Robbie on the rhythm section. Talking Heads meets Jorge Ben meets Vampire Weekend meets Tim Maia meets Augusto Pablo meets Mac de Marco meets The Clash meets Fela Kuti Connection Kingstown -> New York -> Rio de Janeiro -> Paris -> Lagos -> Amsterdam -> London https://youtu.be/Ih9HHP3AZrA?si=oES9raGaPoXMkXTU

"No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. AI-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency. Online innovators are trying out alternatives. Some propose a pay-as-you-crawl system, in which AI bots are charged for reading sites’ content. Others are working on systems that analyse chatbots’ answers to determine where their information came from, so that sources can be compensated. Tech firms resist such ideas: giants don’t want their crawling of the internet to be metered, and startups fear they will be made to pay for training data that pioneers like OpenAI were allowed to grab for nothing. Optimists cite the music industry, where piracy gave way to profitability when streaming platforms invented new ways to charge consumers and compensate artists. Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, AI companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, OpenAI relies entirely on others for its content." https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/17/to-survive-the-ai-age-the-web-needs-a-new-business-model #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #OpenWeb #Copyright #IP

RT @GaryMarcus this is hilarious. like they just woke up and discovered that black boxes are uninterpretable. in reality this was always going to happen, and something many of us warned about for years. arrogance is what has gotten us to this point. https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-google-deepmind-and-anthropic-sound-alarm-we-may-be-losing-the-ability-to-understand-ai/