anti-ai people need to understand that the opposition communists have to luddism and reactionary sentiment isn't like, a moral one. the main problem with luddism is that it doesn't actually work. like when we say 'we mustn't try to fight against technology itself, we need to fight against the social system that makes it so that advancement in technology and labour-saving devices lead to layoffs' the reason we're saying it is because, if you try fighting the technology, you're going to lose, and you're still going to lose your job too. when you say 'yeah i understand your criticism but I'm still going to fight against AI' you very clearly did not understand the criticism, because the point is that it isn't even in your own self-interest, because it will not work. the fact that, even if it did work, it would only mean maintaining a privileged strata of 'skilled labour' above other workers is secondary -- because, again, flatly resisting technological advancement has never worked in history.

Photographer Bradley Waller

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My one friend group can't stop saying, "See you in hell!" in a cheerful voice instead of, "Talk to you later!" and my other friend group can't stop calling things "penis" instead of "cool" or "good", so I just unironically uttered the phrase, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," as I got off the phone.

I lost the post on my dash where this would have been a fun addition but these are the krill that blue whales eat! Some people think krill are like nearly microscopic or something but they are very decently sized shrimps

Can't remember what decade-old X-com-like game it was but the sequel had the story pick up after joining the aliens in their plan to make the whole earth into a big brain, subsuming almost all of your fellow man and the whole rest of the biosphere to feed its growth.

Boring: Video game sequel establishes that the secret "true ending" with lots of fiddly unlocking criteria is what canonically happened.

Also boring: Video game sequel establishes that the unlockable secret ending is a counterfactual "what if" scenario and the standard ending is what canonically happened.

Not boring: Video game sequel establishes that the non-standard game over you receive if you somehow manage to die during the tutorial is what canonically happened.

Even Modi’s former economic aides find the recent growth rates of 8% announced by the government “mystifying.” Major discrepancies in the way GDP is being calculated make the data hugely problematic. One of Modi’s former chief economists holds that if correctly measured, India’s economy would actually be found to be decelerating.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment is plunging. FDI levels are now the lowest in nearly two decades. Even local investors are shying away from opening their wallets. Private capital expenditure remains low. Private sector investment has in fact been falling as a proportion of GDP since 2012 and the economy is now largely driven by huge government investment.

The consumer goods market continues to be sluggish, with people cutting down on staples—emblematic of economic stress. Private consumption growth is the slowest in 20 years, setting aside the pandemic low. Tractor sales, a proxy for the economic health of villages (where 70% of Indians live), have fallen steeply. Banks are battling the worst deposit crunch in two decades as household savings are at a 47-year low while household debt levels are at a record high. Not exactly the signs of a booming economy. In the last financial year, India’s goods exports fell 3% and its crude imports, 14%.

Unemployment is also endemic. The share of young people with secondary or higher education among unemployed youth has almost doubled in 20 years; a third of graduates are unemployed. Jobless Indian youth now pursue opportunities in conflict zones in Israel and Ukraine, and try to smuggle themselves into the West. Indians are currently the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., their numbers having surged faster than those from any other country.

Despite all of Modi’s drumbeating on boosting India’s manufacturing sector with his much-trumpeted “Make in India” campaign, manufacturing’s share of the GDP has fallen.Far from increasing manufacturing jobs, India is losing them in millions. The ranks of farmworkers, meanwhile, have risen by 60 million in the past four years. Agriculture now actually employs a greater share of workers than it did five years ago, a reversal that points to deindustrialization.

There are also concerns about data manipulation. Before the last parliamentary election in 2019, the government buried its own employment data before the election as it showed the unemployment rate to be at a 45-year-high, leading to resignations of members of the National Statistical Commission. A key five-yearly consumer survey result was withheld that year because of “data quality issues.” When it was finally released this February, it showed poverty and inequality has fallen, and consumer spending had tripled in a decade. That contradicts the government’s own findings and data found elsewhere.

did you know that, besides the apple of knowledge and the pomegranate of life, there’s another mystic fruit, one that grants you a sense of purpose?

yeah, it’s the raisin d’être

Even with a blank map, a lot of people can only name 45-50 of the 64 states.

Label the States [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Geography Challenge: Can you label all the states? [An unlabeled map of the United States, but instead of 50 states, there are borders for 64.]

actually, I think spiders georg should be counted. just because he's the best at what he does doesn't mean we need to discredit him. he's part of the statistic too

It's fucking crazy that the law and the money and that shit is just kept in various spreadsheets and books (old timey spreadsheets) and people's heads and shit. Like that's it. It all behaves like a machine but there's no machine! If everyone decided to pound sand one day and go whack off instead it would just stop! If they like, lost the wrong spreadsheets or whatever it would just fuck a bunch of shit up! There's like literally no line between two guys going "you want to get pizza or chinese food? pizza? sounds good let's do that" and the entire international financial industry. It's like just a gradient of complexity and coordination in Deciding To Do Shit. Crazy.

Executive dysfunction life hack

Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”

Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”

Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.

the dishwasher could probably clean so many other things but we're all just too hung up on the name to even imagine