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passionate-reply · 3 years

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Great Albums is back for a third time! This week, we discuss Dazzle Ships, the avant-garde masterpiece that was so infamously weird, it almost “sank” the pop career of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Or did it? As usual, you can find a full transcript of the video under the break, if you’d like to read it instead.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, I’ll be talking about an album that many would consider OMD’s best, and many would consider the last great album they ever made: 1983’s Dazzle Ships, their fourth studio LP. It has a reputation that precedes it, as a strange, experimental, and avant-garde album. And I can’t argue with that too much, when it has tracks that sound like "ABC Auto-Industry."

The most obvious thing one can say about Dazzle Ships is that it’s dense and rich with samples. You’ll hear found sounds ranging from a “Speak and Spell” toy to a radio broadcast from Czechoslovakia. It’s a magpie’s nest constructed of garbage and baubles, collage-like and conscientiously artificial. And OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey managed to make it before sampling became easier and hence more widespread later in the 1980s, thanks to advancements in digital technology. In its own day, it was, famously, a huge flop, baffling even the critics, which makes it tempting to argue that the world simply wasn’t ready for it. Popular legend says that Humphreys and McCluskey were essentially forced to make increasingly soft, pop-oriented music for years afterward, usually at the hands of their label’s higher-ups.

Is that story really true? Well, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. But I think it’s important that we entertain some doubt. Regardless of its actual veracity, this legend is offering us a simplistic narrative of art and capital butting heads, and one that we see repeated all too often in music journalism. It’s a story that expects us to believe that experimental music is good by default, and the natural goal of music and all the people who make it--and, conversely, that accessible music is bad, and anyone who writes a song you can dance to is always after profit, never craft.

Ultimately, though, the most important reason why I’m asking you to leave this question at the gate is that it’s simply a less interesting way to think about art. What I think is truly ingenious about OMD is their ability to combine a pop sensibility with that bleeding-edge experimentation, and vice versa. I don’t think of Dazzle Ships as just an inscrutable, esoteric musical ready-made, but rather something capable of animating and enriching a bunch of otherwise mundane sounds. A word I might use for it is "challenging," because it isn't simply off-putting--it has a certain charm that invites you to stick around and work through it, and you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. I think the underlying pop DNA offered by Dazzle Ships is a big part of that.

In “Genetic Engineering,” the samples from that Speak & Spell are contrasted with a more traditional chorus, which rises above the chaos, stirring and anthemic. It’s a song full of friction, not only between these musical ideas, but in ideas about technology and our future. Like many great works of electronic music, especially earlier in its history, Dazzle Ships is deeply concerned with science and technology, and the ways they’ve structured our world. These guys wrote “Enola Gay” a few years earlier, sure, but there’s much more than Luddite, dystopian thinking here! Dazzle Ships walks a tightrope between romantic adoration of the promise of a better tomorrow, and the tempered uncertainty we’re forced to develop, when we witness the devastation our most horrifying inventions have wrought already. Something that helps sell the former is the motif of childhood: in addition to the Speak & Spell, “Genetic Engineering” also features a children’s toy piano, and prominently references “children” in its lyrics. And “Telegraph,” the album’s other single, sees fit to reference “Daddy.”

Touches like these, and the centering of not-so-new technologies like telegraphy and radio, carry us backward in time. Dazzle Ships has a sense of nostalgia for the technological explosion of the Midcentury, when household technologies were improving in ways that saved time and labour, and faith in “better living through science” was high. It’s not a wistful or introspective nostalgia, but rather one that taps into the bustling excitement of living through that era. That retro styling helps us situate ourselves in a childlike mindset: optimistic, but somewhat naive. Children are highly imaginative, and become enthralled with possibility, but don’t always understand every implication their actions have.

But, as I said, “Telegraph” and “Genetic Engineering” were the album’s singles; the typical track on *Dazzle Ships* sounds more like “ABC Auto-Industry.” The track listing is structured such that these more conventional songs are surrounded by briefer, and more abrasive, intrusions. They become signals in the noise, as though we’re listening to them on the radio--or ships, rising above some stormy seas. Several tracks, such as “International,” also feature a more dissonant intro, on top of that, crowding their main melodies inward.

Over the years, many critics have been quick to contrast Dazzle Ships with OMD’s other albums, but I actually think it has a lot in common with their preceding LP, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, and seems to me to flow naturally from the direction the band had already been going in. Architecture & Morality is a lively mix, with moody instrumentals like “Sealand,” guitar-driven numbers like “The New Stone Age,” and catchy, intuitive pop songs like “Souvenir.” Architecture and Morality proved to be their most successful album, when its title track sounds like this. I fail to see how it’s tremendously different than the title track of Dazzle Ships, which leads us on a harrowing sea chase, with radar pings quickly closing in.

That nautical theme is a great segue to discuss the album’s visual motif. Like all of OMD's first five albums, its sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, most famous for his stunning work for New Order. The cover and title were inspired by a painting Saville had seen, Edward Wadsworth’s *Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool,* which portrays WWI warships painted in striking, zebra-like geometric patterns. These sharply contrasting “razzle dazzle” designs weren’t “camouflage,” but rather served to confuse enemy forces’ attempts to track them, and predict their motions. Dazzle ships were killing machines that fought dirty...and they were also beautiful. It’s a potent, complex symbol, and it’s a natural fit for an album that’s also capricious, perplexing, and captivating in its uniquely modern terror. Saville’s sleeve design features both a die-cut design as well as a gatefold; peeking through the cover’s “portholes” reveals the interior, where we find a map of the world, divided by time zones. It’s yet another reminder of how technology has reshaped the planet, connecting the human race while also creating divisions.

Earlier, I argued that Dazzle Ships isn’t that different from OMD’s preceding LP, and I’d also suggest that their follow-ups to it aren’t all that different, either. It’s easy to see the influence of Dazzle Ships on their most recent work, made after reforming the group in the late 00s, and informed by the critical re-evaluation and cult acclaim of their alleged masterpiece. But even in the 80s, they basically continued the pattern of layering easy to love, “obvious single choice” tracks alongside more experimental, sample-heavy ones. Compare the title track of their sixth LP, 1985's *Crush.*

Even the greatest of pop hitmakers can't maintain a streak in the charts forever--it's not the nature of mainstream pop charts. Not even in the 1980s, when you could get away with quite a lot of electronic weirdness...at least for a while. Looking back and listening to "Maid of Orleans," it's almost hard to believe it was one of OMD's biggest hits. Is it really less weird than something like "Telegraph"? Perhaps they had simply reached the end of their imperial phase...whether they really had that stern talking-to or not.

It's not so much that Dazzle Ships isn't weird, so much as it is foreseeable that a nerdy, left-of-center band like OMD would have come up with it. Dazzle Ships IS excellent--it’s a Great Album! But it's good enough that I think it deserves to be heard and valued on its own terms. The album is too goddamn good--too compelling, too spell-binding--to be reduced to "that one album the plebs were too dumb to really get." I'm not clearing the air because I think this album is overrated, but because I think it deserves better, deeper discourse than it gets. A truly great album is great whether it sells or it doesn't, right? My advice is to never let art intimidate you, no matter how obtuse people say it is. Send your ship on that plunge into the dark waters of the unknown--you might find something beautiful.

That said...my favourite track overall is “Radio Waves,” an irresistibly fun cut that could easily have become a third single. Since “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph” live on side one of the record, “Radio Waves” is really the only “reprieve” we get on side two, smack in its middle. It really stands out, in context--almost like the opposite of how a more conventional album might have one out-there track that catches you off guard. Aside from all of that, though, the song also stands perfectly well alone. I have a real soft spot for music about music, how it’s made and transmitted, and “Radio Waves” is simply one hell of a ride.

Thanks for reading!

#great albums #music #omd #orchestral manoeuvres in the dark #album review #album reviews #dazzle ships #peter saville

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planetpromoters · 3 years

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What is international trade?

If you'll walk into a supermarket and find Costa Rican bananas, Brazilian coffee, and a bottle of South African wine, you're experiencing the impacts of international trade.

International trade allows countries to expand their markets and access goods and services that otherwise might not are available domestically. As a result of international trade, the market is more competitive. This ultimately leads to more competitive pricing and brings a less expensive product home to the buyer .

KEY TAKEAWAYS

International trade is the exchange of products and services between countries.

Trading globally gives consumers and countries the chance to be exposed to goods and services not available in their own countries, or which might be costlier domestically.

The importance of international trade was recognized early by political economists like Smith and Ricardo .

Still, some argue that international trade actually is often bad for smaller nations, putting them at a greater disadvantage on the planet stage.

Understanding International Trade

International trade was key to the increase of the worldwide economy. within the global economy, supply and demand—and thus prices—both impact and are impacted by global events.

Political change in Asia, for instance , could end in a rise within the cost of labor. this might increase the manufacturing costs for an American sneaker company that's based in Malaysia, which might then end in a rise within the price charged for a pair of sneakers that an American consumer might purchase at their local mall.

Imports and Exports

A product that's sold to the worldwide market is named an export, and a product that's bought from the worldwide market is an import. Imports and exports are accounted for within the accounting section during a country's balance of payments.

Global trade allows wealthy countries to use their resources—for example, labor, technology, or capital—more efficiently. Different countries are endowed with different assets and natural resources: land, labor, capital, and technology, etc. this enables some countries to supply an equivalent good more efficiently—in other words, more quickly and with less of a price . Therefore, they'll sell it more cheaply than other countries. If a rustic cannot efficiently produce an item, it can obtain it by trading with another country which will . this is often referred to as specialization in international trade.

For example, England and Portugal have historically both benefited by specializing and trading consistent with their comparative advantages. Portugal has plentiful vineyards and may make wine at a coffee cost, while England is in a position to more cheaply manufacture cloth given its pastures are filled with sheep. Each country would eventually recognize these facts and stop attempting to form the merchandise that was more costly to get domestically in favor of engaging in trade. Indeed, over time, England stopped producing wine, and Portugal stopped manufacturing cloth. Both countries saw that it had been to their advantage to prevent their efforts at producing these things and, instead, to trade with one another so as to accumulate them.

Comparative Advantage

These two countries realized that they might produce more by specializing in those products with which they need a comparative advantage. In such a case, the Portuguese would begin to supply only wine, and therefore the English only cotton. Each country can now create a specialized output of 20 units per annum and trade equal proportions of both products. As such, each country now has access to both products at lower costs. we will see then that for both countries, the chance cost of manufacturing both products is bigger than the value of specializing.

Comparative advantage are often contrasted with absolute advantage. Absolute advantage results in unambiguous gains from specialization and trade only in cases where each producer has an absolute advantage in producing some good. If a producer lacks any absolute advantage then they might never export anything. But we do see that countries with none clear absolute advantage do gain from trade because they need comparative advantage.

consistent with the international trade theory, albeit a rustic has an absolute advantage over another, it can still enjoy specialization.

Origins of Comparative Advantage

The theory of comparative advantage has been attributed to English political economist Ricardo . Comparative advantage is discussed in Ricardo's book “On the Principles of economics and Taxation” published in 1817, although it's been suggested that Ricardo's mentor, Mill , likely originated the analysis and slipped it into Ricardo's book on the sly.123

Comparative advantage, as we've shown above, famously showed how England and Portugal both benefit by specializing and trading consistent with their comparative advantages. During this case, Portugal was ready to make wine at a coffee cost, while England was ready to cheaply manufacture cloth. Ricardo predicted that every country would eventually recognize these facts and stop attempting to form the merchandise that was more costly to get .3

A more contemporary example of comparative advantage is China’s comparative advantage over the US within the sort of cheap labor. Chinese workers produce simple commodities at a way lower cost .4 The United States’ comparative advantage is in specialized, capital-intensive labor. American workers produce sophisticated goods or investment opportunities at lower opportunity costs. Specializing and trading along these lines benefit each country.

The theory of comparative advantage helps to elucidate why protectionism has been traditionally unsuccessful. If a rustic removes itself from a world trade agreement, or if a government imposes tariffs, it's going to produce an instantaneous local benefit within the sort of new jobs. However, this is often often not a long-term solution to a trade problem. Eventually, that country will grow to be at an obstacle relative to its neighbors: countries that were already better ready to produce these things at a lower cost .

Criticisms of Comparative Advantage

Why doesn't the planet have open trading between countries? When there's trade , why do some countries remain poor at the expense of others? There are many reasons, but the foremost influential are some things that economists call rent-seeking. Rent-seeking occurs when one group organizes and lobbies the government to guard its interests.

Say, for instance , the producers of yank shoes understand and accept as true with the free-trade argument—but they also know that their narrow interests would be negatively impacted by cheaper foreign shoes. although laborers would be most efficient by switching from making shoes to creating computers, nobody within the industry wants to lose their job or see profits decrease within the short run.

This desire could lead the shoemakers to lobby for special tax breaks for his or her products or extra duties (or even outright bans) on foreign footwear. Appeals to save lots of American jobs and preserve a time-honored American craft abound—even though, within the end of the day , American laborers would be made relatively less productive and American consumers relatively poorer by such protectionist tactics.

Other Possible Benefits of Trading Globally

International trade not only leads to increased efficiency, but it also allows countries to participate during a global economy, encouraging the chance for foreign direct investment (FDI). In theory, economies can thus grow more efficiently and may more easily become competitive economic participants.

For the receiving government, FDI may be a means by which foreign currency and expertise can enter the country. It raises employment levels, and theoretically, results in a growth in gross domestic product (GDP). For the investor, FDI offers company expansion and growth, which suggests higher revenues.

Free Trade vs. Protectionism

As with all theories, there are opposing views. International trade has two contrasting views regarding the extent of control placed on trade between countries.

Free Trade

Free trade is the simpler of the 2 theories. This approach is additionally sometimes mentioned as laissez-faire economics. With a laissez-faire approach, there are not any restrictions on trade. The best idea is that supply and demand factors, operating on a worldwide scale, will make sure that production happens efficiently. Therefore, nothing must be done to guard or promote trade and growth because the economic process will do so automatically.

Protectionism holds that regulation of international trade is vital to make sure that markets function properly. Advocates of this theory believe that market inefficiencies may hamper the advantages of international trade, and that they aim to guide the market accordingly. Protectionism exists in many various forms, but the foremost common are tariffs, subsidies, and quotas. These strategies plan to correct any inefficiency within the international market.

As it exposes the chance for specialization, and thus more efficient use of resources, international trade has the potential to maximise a country's capacity to supply and acquire goods. Opponents of worldwide trade have argued, however, that international trade still allows for inefficiencies that leave developing nations compromised. what's certain is that the worldwide economy is during a state of continual change, and, because it develops, so too must its participants

DSG Global, LLC is a leading consulting firm specializing in international trade compliance, training, and global business strategy. We help companies of all sizes with strategies to expand their global footprint and understand complex international trade rules.

Throughout our careers, we have assisted over a thousand small, medium sized as well as Fortune 500 companies navigate international trade compliance rules. As our customers attest through their testimonials, we offer DSG Global as a welcome alternative to the larger, less personal consulting firms.

Learn more about the DSG Global team.

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randomnameless · 4 years

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I was checking the other wiki for more info on FE16′s unused content

(is it me or the other wiki isn’t edited as easily as a snapchat selfie?)

We missed the best battalion in the game :’(

OTOH, if we’re supposed to think those battalions are random mercenaries chilling around waiting to be hired, i’d feel bad about a battallion of random crazed villagers chilling around, just waiting to be hired but apparently they cannot be healed...

From the unused map sprite, even if it doesn’t match the character’s sprite, Rhea bleaches her hair when she cosplays as Seiros, and we were robbed of the “two eyed Dimitri” map sprite.

I’ve finally found the beta “Felix’n’Annette were supposed to fight against Dimitri” convos, idk what was the beta AM, but here it seems as if Felix’n’Annette are fighting alongside Cornelia and the randoms Faerghusians in Firdhiad. Maybe they defected when Dimitri wanted to go to Enbarr, then Flèche happened, Dimitri returns home and has to fight against them? idk.

More interesting though, is the cut “trading” activity, where, apparently, we would have been able to send merchants somewhere to get rare and endemic products.

It’s interesting because it has some flavor text about the destinations!

Brigid A group of islands with abundant nature, floating in Western Fódlan. They lack in production of arms and goods, but they are excellent hunters and fishers, and are well-known for their unique cuisine.

They were unlucky in Civ and didn’t start near a mine of iron or copper? If only we could have more Brigid dishes, i’d be a happy nerd

Land of Albinea A vast land located Nothwest of Fódlan. They require a variety of resources for development. There are lots of famous foods that take advantage rich nature in the area.

Albinea doesn’t have a lot of ressources for development (TFW no iron/copper) but apparently they have a lot of “famous food”. I think Albinean moose is used in some dishes?

Derdriu, The Aquatic Capital The capital of the Regan Dukedom, and the central part of the Alliance Territory. There are a lot of factories there, and they leverage the port to produce and export goods to build their wealth.

Look at those merchant republics exporting goods and developing factories, then what, they developed tariffs? Sleazy merchants. OTOH, from this description alone, I have the feeling the Alliance’s nobility desperatly tries to assert its authority through “ancient noble blood” and what not, because if someone is rich enough to have 70% of the factories used, and controls the trade, even if Count Gloucester recalls how Gloucester the Elite was the dudest bro in the world, rich merchants won’t give a fig about him.

Fort Merceus A fortified city, and the capital of the County of Bergliez. Extremely rich in agriculture and fishing thanks to the blessing of the fertile Gronder Field and Airmid River.

The Empire seized every fertile land in Fodlan? I remember a raunchy novel implying Cichol blessed the fields of Gronder (bla bla earth dragon magic?) but with the river + those magical fields, the Empire’s supposed to be self-sufficient, at least when food is concerned. It contrasts with the Kingdom where recolts aren’t that rad, some are forced to turn into Dagdas and Ingrid’s family deals with bad recolts.

Arianrhod, The Fortress City A fortress Kingdom city on the border with the Empire. They put a lot of effort into military preparation, but it's said that they have a surplus of equipment and due to their non-agressive defense policy.

TFW everyone works their butts to build a super fortress city but then your local nobles say it must be used to strengthen a “non-agressive defense policy” :’(. OTOH, Arianrhod being a non-agressive defensive “fortress city” near the border with the Empire means that, at least during the first part of the game, the Kingdom and the Empire weren’t at each other’s throats.

Almyra The great country to the East that has long been at war with Fódlan. The throttle on trade was loosened when the former king began his reign, and they now export many goods.

Wow, interesting bits here! Who is the former king this is talking about? Claude’s Almyrian Grandpapa? Of course greedy merchants from the alliance try to make some business (tm) and Almyra even exports goods! Maybe the pals raiding every wednesday are just a faction who doesn’t want to negociate/trade with their neighbours and only want to fight’n’feast, idk. Making peace through trade though, i’ve read it somewhere but i can’t remember where are they trading coal and steel?

Sreng Region A desolate region where the Sreng people live. It's said that Zoltan, the master swordsmith, once lived there, so there may be valuable weapons waiting to be discovered.

Alright who is Zoltan because we find his weapons in the game. Still sad that there’s nothing about the Sreng people, but talks about a swordsmith in a region where Birdie is sighted in the game makes me think a bit, maybe Zoltan is one of Macuil’s alias, like Cichol and Seteth, or Rhea and Seiros? “There may be valuable weapons waiting to be discovered” TFW you’re a thief trying to discover magic weapons in a desert but get attacked by a talking magic beast :’(

Fhirdiad, The Kingdom Capital The capital of the Kingdom located in Northwestern Fódlan. The study of magic is popular, and the people are said to be skilled at crafts, but the surrounding lands are barren.

Look the Fhirdiad magic school of sorcery gets a mention! It makes me wonder why Fhirdiaid pushes for magic studies but the Empire is supposed to have the most magic oriented army in the continent... Contrast with Bergliez again, the Kingdom’s lands are barren. And yet they still manage to have cheese. Fhirdiad randoms are supposed to be skilled at crafts, what, Cordelia asked them to craft spare parts for her Titanuses and the randoms obliged, not knowing what it would be used for? Or because they don’t have natural ressources, they had to craft a lot of things to compensate for the shitty climate and barren lands?

Morfess, City of Sorcery A desert city located far to the Southeast of Fódlan. The climate is rough, but the study of magic is popular, and it's said that their skill at weapons forging is also high.

Okay I'm pretty sure Morfis/Morfess specialities being “magic + weapons forging” was, in this version of the game, the devs trying to tell us that Macuil used to be there. Climate is rough, dude loves deserts. But as @damoselcastel pointed out, maybe Morfess/Morfis developed its own branch of magic and also uses it to forge weapons. TFW the only things we get from Morfis are a battalion of mole people looking mages and plums. Yes, plums.

County of Gloucester A territory of the widest plains in the Alliance territory. Agriculture and cattle-breeding are prosperous, and it's said that County Gloucester himself uses them to develop new foods.

Oh, so next to the economic mess/Fodlan’s version of Amsterdam in Derdriu, Count Gloucester rules over a pretty rural area of the Alliance? He develops new foods, like what? He tries to create fusion food? Now I imagine all kind of jokes made at Count Gloucester’s expense with various sheeps, when the Riegans just need to develop 3 more technologies to fully enter to the industrial revolution era. No wonder why he’s so salty :).

OTOH, again, more worldbuilding : apparently only the Kingdom wasn’t blessed with fertile fields? It sucks for them.

Enbarr, The Imperial Capital Capital of the Adrestian Empire that has a long history. More people there than any other city in Fódlan, and it also has a huge market that sells mostly food.

Compared to the description of the other capitals, this one feels flat. So, Enbarr is old and it has more people in its walls than in any other city in Fodlan. Market sells a lot of food. Enbarr dictates food prices in the continent or what? Or maybe the huge food market is like, the biggest food market in Fodlan where food from every part of the Empire is sold (it manages to enter Enbarr thanks to the canal?). I’m kind of disappointed, otoh, Ferdie reading an agricultural treaty gives him a new light, if food/agriculture is so important in the Empire.

now the million gald question : is Enbarr exporting food to the Kingdom who’s in need or not

County of Varley This area is lacking in water sources, which is rare within the Empire. It's said that they forge precious weapons and armor using the minerals taken from the Ogma mountains.

hahaha what kind of minerals taken from the Ogma mountains are we talking about crest stones or nabatean bones i mean

Fascinating to note, again, that the Empire is the bestest place to be in Fodlan because bar Varley, every area isn’t “lacking in water sources”. So maybe we have a lot of swamps in Adrestia, but at least there are no deserts. With water, you can grow stuff, so it’s a huge bonus for agricultural development. then why are the adrestians so nostalgic about a time where they controled a frozen wasteland and want to reconquer that frozen wasteland, like, it has nothing of interest no natural ressources nothing so why

If only Bernie could forge us something OP...

Kupala This area is just a part of the Alliance's Territory of Margrave Edmund , but it's an autonomous region where the mountain people life. They produce weapons and armor, made with precious minerals.

Those tidbits were in the game before the DLC, so at that time we didn’t know was Kupala before Nemesis’s party. Interesting to note that this is an autonomous region in the Alliance, and not a part of the Alliance like any other territory (Leonie’s village). Maybe the Alliance thought it was too much of a hassle to keep an effective control over those parts of the mountains, for little benefit. Why needing to crush them when we can trade with them?

Territory of Margrave Edmund The region is almost entirely made up of coastal area or islands, and trade with far-off areas is thriving. You may be able to get something rare.

Or maybe the Territory of Margrave Edmund is just some sort of puzzle, when the Lords needed to give him a territory because he’s a noble they thought about the most difficult, shitty place to administrate and thought about this place, islands, coasts and mountains. Totally not a difficult mess to send knights to keep order of something. Coasts + islands = pirates? But apparently, in the general Alliance trend, Edmund managed to trade with “far-off areas” instead of maintaining a military rule/dominion, and apparently, it works so well that he sometimes manages to get something rare!

Land of Dagda A vast land far west of Fódlan. Their weapons crafted with unique skill are well known. They are hungry for meat that you can only get in Fódlan.

Meat for weapons seems a good trade - I mean Dagdians weapons are supposed to be unique but also well-known. It’s such a shame we never see anything like that in the game :) IIRC Shamir doesn’t have a special Dadgdian pref bow and i hope they’re not talking about the fetters of dromi :’(

why did they cut those worldbuilding parts???

#FE16 #unused content #i should check the other wiki more #it seems more reliable than the usual one #even if it's not always up to date #maybe the trading post wouldn't work in the war phase?#or we could influence the prices of weapons/materials by trading? idk #they did it in ToA iirc #those tidbits make me love the alliance #why IS decided to shit on them in the game?#as if they'd like to be lumped with those backward losers from the kingdom or those useless guys from the empire #you can be sure united fodlan will fail within the first 5 years because Derdriu'd be nope #we have factories m8 we won't listen to y'all we can mass produce weapons if we need them #and we have the power of money #fig y'all #count gloucester being the old agricultural nobility with a good name trying to resist the call of modernity #hahaha #Macuil might have traveled a lot Morfis then Sreng #yes he can fly but damn #all of those added lorebits (?) add to the feeling that if Fodlan wasn't roses and sunshine in the beginning of the game #at least no one expected a war/agression from one of the 3 major countries in the continent #Dimitri has a bajillion sprites if he was robbed of a pixelised map sprite then it's no big deal #otoh blonde seiros matches with the CG?#we were also robbed of the pegasi riding pirates batallion #so many great ideas why cut them IS why??

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swifty-fox · 4 years

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Please tell me about 1920s Russian socioeconomic policy

PLEASE LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT 1920′s RUSSIAN SOCIOECONOMIC POLICY

so 1920′s Russian socio-economic policy was in a few short words. entirely fucked. Granted the issue goes farther back than 1920′s! basically up until then Russia had been functioning as a mostly closed society in that they rejected the industrial age of the mid to late 1800′s. They believed that they were superior as a country and did not want interference from other religions and cultures (the Great Schism took no prisoners) So essentially at the turn of the 20th century Russia was still almost in the middle ages (granted there was some technology leakage etc. it was more prevalent in upper society to be more modernized) BUT they still had peasants and serfs and people living as they had done hundreds if not thousands of years ago (something like 80% of Russians were impoverished and working as serfs ((that might only be white Russians there's like 32 ethnic Russian groups nobody likes to talk about)) )

cutting for length

so naturally people are like mad pissed about that right? they want to be part of the progression of the world they want to be educated and to travel and to have access to medicine and technology and all the benefits of ‘modern’ society. but Tsar Nikolai says no. This is a huge part of his downfall, his unwillingness to change (also vague antisemitism ((they used to conduct these things called Pogroms which was basically localized exterminations of Jewish people. it was fucked up and vastly condemned by a lot of people but the powers that be used the Jewish people as a scapegoat because uhhh 1800′s and 1900′s be like that)), being REALLY bad at war, Rasputin, excessive spending and wealth, a little spice of police brutality and a few massacres as well as aggressive heavy-handed tactics against terrorists. Great family man. Bad leader.)

Anyways fast-forward through the Russian revolution that's a whole can of worms

Now we have a new government. not a better government but a NEW one with vastly different ideas of what they’re going to do.

Another sidetrack, lets talk about Communist Theory for a sec. I’m going to go into Karl Marx’s original intention as Russian Communism is actually a twice bastardized idea of Communist (Lenin developed his theory of communism from people like Georgi Plekhanov and Nikola Chernechevskey’s book What Is To Be Done? who were also putting their own spin on Marxism)

ANYWAYS. The basic idea of of Karl Marx’s Communist theory is that society will eventually, over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, develop through capitalism and unto a utopian world where we have no need for things live government or taxes or money. The concept here being over hundreds or thousands of years and NATURALLY.

The Bolsheviks (Led by Lenin) Looked at that and said mmmm no lets do it in like twenty years.

it’s 1921 and Lenins NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (fondly nicknamed NEP) enters STAGE LEFT (get it)

The basic idea of NEP was to blend capitalist (i.e a private market) with communist ideals (i. e. no market) and Fast-Track us to glorious utopian communism in not a few hundred years but in a few years!

sounds doable right?

the basic idea of NEP was that there would be limited private property that would ultimately be mostly owned by people that Lenin approved of (allies, benefactors, heroes of the glorious revolution for mother Russia and so on) There were things called prodravzyorstka which was forced grain requisitions by the communist party for the good of the people basically soldiers would come in and take most of the famers grain and left them to starve. There was also an imposed a tax on farmers that could be paid in -you guessed it!- more grain! NEP abolished that and instead allowed for a cash payout the harder that farmers worked. Productivity went up like 40% in the years following! Pretty great!!

It also incentivized and supported the formation of unions (they were communists remember, those bitches love unions) All in all it was....pretty decent? It wasn’t exactly communist as essentially it was just tax returns or the government buying grain from peasants rather than the peasants having to sell the grain themselves. Pretty great right!

But it created an imbalance. Again, that Russia wanted to do was industrialized! they wanted to become modern but they didn't want to follow the way any other country did it and they wanted to do it in a fraction of the time! As the government and the ECONOMY began relying on the small farms for grains and vegetables and resources, the big factories and institutions that were privately owned were STRUGGLING! as a result, they had to raise their prices to try to pay for themselves. But now those same farmers couldn't afford the industrial things they needed! like equipment for their farm tools and tractors or household goods. So now they have to raise THEIR food prices in response. It was a great way to inflate the economy after WII and the revolution. But obviously we all know where this is going.

And then Boom. Lenin dies. The man had one too many strokes and croaks out in his country home without a successor named. The government is in chaos. Nobody knows what to do. Shortly before his death lenin wrote a (frankly quite funny) letter saying all his successors were fucking idiots and he hated them all.

In steps Stalin. If you think Lenin was bad...Stalin is a fucking bastard. The guy is even MORE antisemetic, brutal, corrupt, mysogynistic and RACIST. The man really hated the chinese. he also hated Georgians (the country not the state) which is pretty funny because he was Georgian.

Anyways, he abolishes NEP and implements something called the Five Year Plan (NEP 2 for the jokesters out there)

Stalin shifts the focus away from boosting agricultural development and focuses on rapid industrialiation in, you guessed it, FIVE YEARS. The stats on this plan are fucking insane man get this:

Staling wanted an 111% increase in coal production, 200% increase in iron production and 335% increase in electric power!!! in FIVE YEARS.

(he also eliminated a class of people called “kulaks” which were richer farmers by turning the poor farmers against them. By elimate I mean they were murdered and their property distributed amongst the poorer farmers.)

I could go on and on about all the ways this failed, all the brutality, unethical and unsafe work enviroments, the continued programs, the amoutn of people who were murdered, the prison(slave) labor used, the rounding up and mass murder of anyone who spoke out against Stalin, the Five Year Plan or the russian government. This is really where the Soviet Union as we know it as westerners got its reputation.

Also he caused TWO famines because he made all the farmers move into the city to be industry workers so they ddint have any food and didnt accept help from the Red Cross or other countries because MUHHH MOTHERLAND

but you know what it kiiinda worked? Capital increase was almost 160%, consumer goods increased by 87% and total output was up almost 120%!

But also it caused one of the worst famines in the western world with an estimated 6million (some people argue as many as 10million. We will never know the true number because it was mostly peasants and ethnic people suffering) people dying across the entire Soviet Union. Poeple were dying out on the streets in broad daylight, people were selling their dead children to be food. You can see pictures if you google it but they’re very graphic.

Generally, the Five-Year-Plan was lauded as a massive failure and a hotbed of absolutely disgusting human abuse and cruelty. And you knwow what Stalin said? He said nah it went well and implemented about FIVE MORE (theres been twelve in all but they exent up into the early 90′s) I wont touch on them as they were all pretty much iterations of Stalins original one and they all sucked.

Basically Russian Socioeconomic Policy is a hotbed of bad decisions, human rights violations and a LOT of interpersonal drama that i do not have the time to get into. (like the fucking DRAMA between Stalin and Nadezhda Krupskaya (lenins wife))

theres also a LOT more to it I just tried to condense like 40 years into one post so please feel free to go out and research your own! I used Peter Kenez’ “A History of the Soviet Union From the Beginning to its Legacy” while in class. It’s a little dry but effective

theres also this book by my professor who is a DELIGHT https://www.amazon.com/Red-Arctic-Exploration-Soviet-1932-1939/dp/0195114361 and while I havent read it im sure its told with the same humor and zeal that he conducted his lectures

also this bOOK THIS BOOK RIGHT HERE is SUCH a good read!

https://www.amazon.com/Vasily-Grossman-Soviet-Century-Alexandra-ebook/dp/B07P9HJMLM/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=the+soviet+century&qid=1589727805&sr=8-4 if you read any of them read this one! it examines the entire rise and fall of the communist party through the story of Grossman who was a jewish-russian writer and pretty famous in his own right though he died penniless and scorned. He’s got a couple movies based off his books out there two which were shelved for criticizing the party for decades! please read it i beg you

#a few things were factchecked via google as I dont have my notes with me #but most of this is just word vomit lol #*me leaping up out of bed to write this*#please know some of ths might be condensed or not entirely accurate #I only studied it academically for a year since then it's just books I can get my hands on #russian history #russian socioeconomics of the 1920 #discussions of antisemitism #im sorry im sure you were not expecting all of this #swiftytalks #it might not be having a cut break in it?? tumblr please work

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junliendaayensustiguer · 4 years

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Globalization: Beneficial and Detrimental Effect

1. What is meant by globalization and how it has affected you personally?

Globalization comes from the word itself “globe”, that means coming together of countries and nations. Where barriers to cross-border trade and investment are declining. Globalization affects me personally and the other people’s way of living by the convenience it brings in purchasing products. Through globalization, perceived distance in purchasing products and services is shrinking due to technological advances such as telecommunications and transportation technology. This means that economies are merging into an interdependent, integrated global economic system, where people and countries can exchange goods and services more quickly and in a less expensive way.

2. Among the main drivers of globalization, which do you think has contributed more to the acceleration of globalization? Why do you think so?

Both drivers of globalization improves the links between people and countries around the world, but the role of technological change contributes more to the acceleration of globalization. Which made a theoretical possibility a tangible reality.

Global communications have been revolutionized by the developments of technologies and some of this technologies are the microprocessors and telecommunications technology. Where informations are encoded, transmitted, and decoded then flows along electronic ways. This may include technologies such as telephones, mobile phones, etc. Another form of communications technology are the internet and the World Wide Web. Through the World Wide Web, buyers and sellers can connect with each other by tapping the software, applications, services and web pages in there. The system can only be accessible by connecting to the internet, which is a massive network of networks. Remember that the internet was developed first and the World Wide Web was developed later using the internet infrastructure. The most important fact there is on how a theoretical possibility becomes a tangible reality. With the new and improved transportation technologies, time, money and effort that should be taken to cover up a certain distance has fallen and that’s what we called time-space compression. A plane could take a travel at least 12 hours, while a ship reaches more or less than a week depending on the distance travelled.

Technological changes contributes a lot in boosting globalization of market and production. Makes it easier for companies to begin selling products internationally with lower tariffs which keeps lower prices for consumers and restrictions are fewer when crossing borders to enter foreign market. The companies also considers the cultures of their target market in their business strategies, in order to adjust the appropriate products and services that will be provided. Technological changes also lifts production through sourcing of materials from other countries. This means that purchasing materials from multiple countries reduces cost of production which leads to lower prices for consumers.

Indeed, technology is affected by globalization through its price that is the most obvious and most important of all. But behind the value engraved in all those technologies, its availability and adoption might burst changes and defines a more advanced and brighter future.

3. Why do you think the global economy is in a constant state of change? Are there consequences or benefits to such changes? Explain and cite a personal experience as an example.

It is true that the world is moving to a more global economic system, and that globalization is inevitable. The global economy is in a constant state of change because of its changing demographics. Since there’s a rapid change in the global economy, the volume of cross-border trade and investment has been growing more which means that national economies are becoming more closely integrated into a single interdependent, global economic system. In short, current trends indicates that the world is moving toward an economic system that is more favorable for international businesses. While emerging economies continue to grow, a further relative declines but it’s not bad, for it only reflects that there is an economic development and industrialization in the economic world. However, as the barriers to the free flow of goods, services, and capital fell, firms increasingly began to invest across national borders. This means is for the dispersal of production activities to optimal locations and to build a direct presence in major foreign markets. Thus, firms began to move manufacturing operations from their home markets to developing nations where labor costs were lower. The rise of non-U.S multinationals and the growth of mini-multinationals also contributes a constant change in the global economy. Although most international trade and investment is still conducted by large firms, many medium-size and small businesses are becoming increasingly involved in international trade and investment. The rise of the Internet is lowering the barriers that small firms face in building international sales. .

In such changes globalization can be beneficial or detrimental. This global economic change can be beneficial in driving the global economy toward greater prosperity. It was believed that the rise of consumer incomes, and job opportunities was brought by globalization. It was argued back then that free trade can help countries efficiently moves production, and by outsourcing production materials to multiple countries reduces cost of production and prices are heading low. As the prices of products fall, consumers can spend their money to other goods and services that are more needed.

As what we have seen, globalization is good in a way of declining barriers to international trade and investment do stimulate economic growth, create jobs, and raise income levels. However, despite the existence of this evidence, globalization has its critics that it's not all good and it has its own risk. It was believed that globalization also has detrimental effects on the living standards and environment of some countries. One of this is the demonstrations against globalization dated to December 1999, when demonstrators protested against the wide range of issues including job losses that was caused by the falling barriers to international trade which allows foreign competitors to enter the nation’s market. Otherwise, allowing firms to move manufacturing activities to other countries where the wage rates are much lower. This scenario highly affects manufacturing jobs in wealthy advanced economies. Another detrimental effect is the outsourcing of service activities to lower cost foreign suppliers leads to higher unemployment to its own nation and the migration of low wage manufacturing jobs in a nation leads to a low wage rates and reduction of demand for unskilled workers. Another source of concern is that free trade attracts advanced nations to move their manufacturing facilities to nations that are free or shall we say lack of adequate regulations for labor and environmental protection. There, they can employ child labor, pollute the environment and ignore workplace safety and health issues all in the name of profit.

Let’s compare this change to a present situation happening in the global economy when a global pandemic crisis has spread into the whole world, the Coronavirus outbreak. How global economy looks like? How can the global market continue to progress? Who benefits and who is not? What would happen to entrepreneurs and their businesses? To our labor force? Are they still going to operate? Or to stop? And let everything be a nightmare. Unlike other global crisis such as global market crisis, COVID-19 is a health crisis that is difficult to solve. We need not to travel or go anywhere, and we are even forbidden to have a close contact with people we usually being with. Yes it’s true that in today’s world we have more developed technologies that can backed us up. This situation we are facing today can be beneficial for some businesses, like technological companies involving communications such as online business. Healthcare companies could also benefit from this situation. But the problem is, we have a huge population in today’s crisis. Businesses other than online companies and other companies that provides medical services might lost their money if they still continue to invest in this kind of situation. The world’s labor force is rapidly declining. See to it that companies and industries only operates with the supplies that has been taken from their suppliers, but in this pandemic suppliers cannot supply into a business for there’s no way to find resources. And if ever there’s still resources left, transportation would be the next problem here. It’s hard to find good transportation in this times for every cities and countries have their own protocols for the safety of their subordinates. This may result to beforced businesses to stop its operations which destroys labor force and leads to a higher number of unemployment. It indicates that “no work, no pay”, “no pay, no income” and “no income, no food for the entire family”. It’s hard to imagine a future having this kind of global illness. What we can do for now is to pray. In today’s global economy, no one could predict the future, because in this battle we cannot even see and defeat our enemy`

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kyleisme14 · 5 years

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My trip to Area 51 - unedited

On Facebook, a kid from Bakersfield created an event. He uses his page, perfectly named, shitposting because my life is in shambles and makes 'storm area 51, they can't stop us all' and seemingly overnight a million people said that they would be attending. I did attend. Shitposting because my life is in shambles is inadvertent the most zeitgeist worthy name for this page. Shitposting is when you share terrible content that you know is bad just to get a reaction. You are sharing a low effort joke for the sense of connection from others. Because my life is in shambles, this anonymous statement of personal vulnerability, I shall try and make a low effort attempt at connection. This is what our age is all about. We are doomed to be as connected and as isolated as possible. This had a chance of being a real life meme where we'd be isolated no longer.

The page became an immediate stronghold for memes. It adopted other internet jokes like Karens asking to see managers, Kyle's drinking monster energy drink for invincibility, and Naruto runners being faster than bullets, as ways of infiltrating the base. And also generated new ones about what people would find inside Area 51 like the 10th doctor to recommend a toothpaste or where my girlfriend wants to go for dinner or how we'd sneak in with a minivan but escape with a space ship. The killer meme was how once we 'free them aliens' we'd keep them as lovers and bang them so hard that we 'clapped them cheeks'. This was the low effort comedy that this meme page generated.

Was it a joke or would people actually go? At first I did not know why I needed to go to area 51, and everybody seemed to ask me. I failed to recruit any friends to join me on the quest, 7 hours driving to the infamous base. Most thought I was crazy for going. My brother told me to be safe. My sister thought I was joking, and called to counter my bluff. Whenever somebody said they couldn't go, I pittied them because I was sure they were going to miss something incredible and life affirming. I was excited because I had no idea what was going to go down, and nobody in the whole world did. I stopped at the army surplus. I thought we'd either see a humanitarian crisis like fyre fest or a government crackdown. Don't forget, 2 million people clicked GOING online, so even if 1% came that'd be 10,000 people to a town with a population of 1000. The airforce released a warning about 'raiding' active military bases being a bad idea and the use of deadly force being a possibility. Lincoln County, one of nevadas sleepiest, had to call in enough police to potentially break up a neo-woodstock.

I always wanted to go to area 51 since I first learned about aliens as a kid. When I asked the big question of are we alone in the universe? If there was an answer, if somebody had the evidence, if it was anywhere, it was stored at area 51. UFO's and little green men were hiding somewhere in Nevada... at least according to pop mythology. In grade school I would check out the same book over and over from the library, about aliens and the search for exterterestrial life and the scientists who were looking at the stars. There was a spooky section about times aliens might have visited early humans based on cave paintings and statues. And then the next page was all about area 51, where the government did secret expirements on alien artifacts and maybe had a specimen. So I've been captivated since at least then. Area 51 represents a big secret. A mystery! And somebody powerful, a general or established congress person, knows and is keeping the answers from us. So as an anti-establishment, meme and alien lover, I was fascinated with this 'movement,' that would of 'raid the base'. I wanted to go and find out how many people like me were out there! Turns out I wasn't completely alone! But... for the ignorant... What is Area 51? I could never believe people weren't following the biggest BREAKING news of our lives. But for those out of the loop, Area 51 is an infamous hotspot for UFO lovers. It has a rich history in alien folklore. But here is the factual history: Nevada is almost all federal land. and it was used back in the day for nuclear testing. an original tourist attraction to Las Vegas was watching nuclear testing in the distance...

Some airforce commanders were flying around dropping bombs when they spied a dried lakebed next to a mountain, Groom Lake. They landed on it and found it to be a perfectly flat natural runway. Excellent for testing expiremental aircraft. The facility became known as Area 51. And was where the airforce and Lockheed Corp developed the U-2 stealth bomber. They brought the best and brightest scientists and engineers to develop new aeronautics and weaponry for the US military. At the height of the Cold War, any foreign technology that was aquired would be brought to Area 51 to be tested and backwards-engineered. You can imagine Chinese reactors and Russian jets being taken apart and used by the best tinkerer's and best test pilots. People at the highest levels of classified access. Because if you are one of the folks who are handling stolen foreign items, you are so classified that your spouse isn't supposed to know what you do all day. Yes honey, I was testing out the Ruskies new fighter plane! They don't even know we have it! These were experts in aeronautics and weapons science who could decipher technology even if the instructions were in another language... so perhaps if the US government were to encounter any other 'foreign technology' of an unknown origin, maybe they'd send it to Area 51 to be backwards engineered? That's the set up, those are the facts, the rest is conjecture and tinfoil hats stuff. Like unexplained phenomena, military released sightings that definitely aren't weather baloons and general mysticism. Do you believe in aliens or not?

If you believe that it's more likely that our government would keep aliens a secret than releasing that information to the public... welcome to the club! If not, do some reading. As I drove across the desert, down lonesome roads and through one horse towns, I realized what I was doing. I was driving into the middle of nowhere, likely to stand around doing nothing... and boy was I excited. My plan was to go and maybe film something and if that didn't work out I'd put on an alien costume and hold a sign. I figured that there'd be a bunch of cameras and I could use it to collectively protest all sorts of wrongs in the world. One of the initial reacitons to the playful event was, 'hey there are more imporant places to raid! why not raid the border detention centers, why not congress, why not the oil companies?' To which I say, hell yes... but that's not shitposting. That's being earnest and noble. This was about being ironic and part of a joke. This was about chasing an internet meme into the ground and disecting it until all that was left was the human connection. I had a sign and costume and figured that even if nobody showed up at least news organizations would be covering it. The sign I held said, Peace on earth ain't coming from outer space, and I really believe that. We shouldn't expect peace to come from somewhere else in the universe, it has to start right here at home, inside each of us. I wanted to get that message out. The day of the event, due to classic internet decentralization, people debated whether the raid meet up (located at the Area 51 gate) should be at 3am on friday morning or 3am on saturday morning. Most people kind of agreed to just gather sporadically between those two times. I monitored a live stream late on thursday to confirm that millions of people weren't gathering to make American History. Instead, about 30 people gathered for that 3am moment. I only missed a photo-op. I awoke on friday morning and drove towards my destiny. There were two events scheduled. One hosted by the facebook Shitposting kid who decided to use his 15 minutes of fame to organize a rave in the desert at the local Little Ale'inn, a motel close to the gate. The other was set up by a filmmaker who made a movie about Area 51 at the Alien Research Center. Both locales are alien themed tchotchke paradises designed to sell the eager UFO tourist any manner of t-shirt, shot glass or Alien doll. These spots have a fun feel and would be desert trinket spots selling only desert sage and gems if not for the boon of being next to an infamous mystery base.

The dueling events were both hoping to capitalize on the rush of people to the desert for the raid. Alienstock, as shitpost called it, was going to be a kumbaya style gathering. But everybody thought it was an alibi for shitpost incase anybody got in actual trouble at the gate and roped him in. Shitpost from bakersfield ended up not even going to his own event out of fear. Also the county sued him for the cost of preparing for a potential fiasco. The Alien Research Center event was going to have famous Alien Community folks speak and some high end music performances. But as I drove down the dusty route 375, known as Exterterestrial Highway, I saw very few people on the roads. Lots and lots of cops. It became obvious that the whole county and the organizers of these events had been preparingor at least 30,000 people. They had nearly 200 port-a-potties. Which makes sense, if 1% of the people who claimed they were coming online came! The reality was that maybe only 1% of 1% showed up to these sleepy nevada towns on the edge of a fabled military base. The imediate reality of the events was that they were extremely underattended, but that was also a blessing. it made everything a little bit more intimate and accessible. I pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Little Ale'inn to find a rag tag DIY music festival set up. People were essentially tailgating on the side of the road. It was a scene and it was dusty. All sorts of folks were jovially milling about, some in alien themed costume, many with cameras. Many folks with booze, despite the morning. I pulled out a camera and tried interviewing people, but found that everybody I talked to had the exact same talking points. Do you believe in aliens? Duh. Why are you here? Free them Aliens. Do you really think they are in the base? Yes, but maybe now they've been moved. What did you think would happen if we charged? We'd all get killed or arrested. Nobody seemed to have really believed in the facebook post's idea of 'they can't stop us all.' Most people were sure that, especially with the meager turn out, the military and police could stop us all. Everybody just wanted to see what would happen, expecting anywhere from fyre festival 2.0 to a bloodbath to nothing. Everybody had listened to the same Joe Rogan podcast, where he'd interviewed Bob Lazar who claims to have worked at the base. That podcast was the bible of this gathering and was what had inspired Shitpost to shitpost.

It was special that everybody was a believer. That's rare that strangers are all on the same wavelength. Nobody seemed to have any doubts that the government knew about aliens and weren't telling the public. And it was agreed that UFO's had been tested and stored at the base. Everybody I ended up meeting seemed pretty prepared. They had plenty of water and booze and camping supplies, so the idea that a humanitarian crisis was going to occur dissapated completely and reminded me of a group outting to the desert. Most important was that everybody at the event seemed to be in on the joke. They might believe in aliens but had no plans of raiding the base in actuality. Aliens might exist but the might of the US government is way more certain. The police presence alone was insane, but they merely hinted at the military might behind the base's perimeter. The police actually became quite friendly once they realized it wasn't going to be a boodbath. But the silent and hooded guards behind the gate remained terrifying with big guns and big dogs. There was definitely the threat of violence if you crossed. But we all joked that maybe if a million more people showed up we'd actually start Naruto running passed the guards.

After a while of milling around quasi-interviewing people I decided there were enough people with cameras that I should just put on my alien costume and go to the gate and get in front of the camera. I was taken to the gate by some friends I'd made while trying to get interviews. Evan and Kevin were two dudes I became super weirdly close on the day of the Raid. Each of us had come by ourselves from far away, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, with a vague intention of documenting it in some way. I had a vision of either a mini doc or article, Evan was a photographer and who took some insanely beautiful photos (featured here).

Kevin was a video creation guru who just wanted to make as much instagram content as possible. Kevin was by far the most successful, he's got that showman's knack to always get on camera with insanely high energy. There were a lot of cameras and each one he'd run up to and start lecturing about how the governemnt needed to release the secret documents! It was a great bit especially with his Boston Townie accent turned all the way up.

Evan explained how he was drawn to the site by a mysterious desire to see what would happen. He expressed it best as, 'this is like a reddit safe post.' People will find safes while remodeling or cleaning a house and say, 'hey reddit, look i found a safe, i'm going to open it and see what's inside!' Then people get excited trying to guess what marvelous jackpot could be in that old dusty safe. They wait desperately for the original poster to share an update. More often than not the poster never returns and people are left waiting for nothing.

Once and a while there will be an updated post to show what was found inside and sometime's it's a haul of trinkets and dubloons and rare items that were saved throughout time to be found by some noble internet user. but then most of the time it's like, wow a roll of coins from 1953! "so yeah i felt obligated to go and find out what was in the safe and share it with reddit even if there actually was nothing inside. reddit deserves to know.' evan said. Because sometimes those posts are just as important, the safe find coming back to say, 'hey we cracked the safe, but turns out there was nothing in it! here's a picture of an empty safe."

So I was beginning to realize that I was standing inside an empty safe. But wow, all of these people had also come to be here and that was something special. It's not often that we get to organically be around likeminded strangers that all have such clear and imediate shared experience. Here we all were, because of a a meme, just to see what would happen. The gathering had a magical quality because we were an internet joke that had left the cyber space and entered the meat space. It was a silly idea that was reaching a physical end point.

I stood around the gate for a good while, we chatted with everybody, shook hands with the police guarding the gate, exchanged instagram handles and shared jokes we'd heard on the internet. You could tell people were really cutting loose. Most people spent most of their time on their computers it seemed. Hey, me too. We shouted 'clap them cheeks' and 'let them out.' We were all in on the joke. There were still mainly cameras and I got interviewed and photographed by dozens including history channels ancient aliens and the nytimes and countless youtubers and instagramers. It all kind of culminated when Kevin and Evan were getting cold and saying we should leave, I heard a distant 'clap them cheeks' chant and booty shuffling down the lonesome road to the infamous Area 51 gate was Riley Reid! Pornhub's number 1 star. She's somebody I have searched for all my life, on google. She did a strip tease and pretended to rush the gate. She was an internet hero in the flesh, and she was in on the joke too! A perfect metaphor, eh?

The next morning, hungover from the excitement and extrovertism of the day before I was sitting in a diner scouring news websites for mentions of the raid and looking for photos of myself. Behind me I heard some locals discussing, a gravelly voice said, "usually this town has 1 car every 10 minutes. this weekend we've got like 1 car every minute!" The townsfolk seemed to have had the wildest weekend of their lives. Me too. I managed to get into a few articles in my green alien suit. A USA Today affiliate newspaper even printed a whole write up about me and my sign. On the way back, realizing I expected nothing, and found little more than nothing, I was completely satisfied. I had held my sign for peace and found a version of it, internet strangers, weirdos from all over had gathered peacefully to celebrate an idea. A silly and anti authoritarian conspiracy idea, but an idea none the less. I decided the reason I was drove all this way through beautiful american desert land, was because it's something I would have thought was cool as an 11 year old. A mission to see aliens and the people who wanted to meet them. Radical.

#area 51 #journey #journalism #adventure #aliens #clap them cheeks

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everydayanth · 5 years

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Time is Money or... Identity?

This became something of a thought-experiment paper... I don’t expect many reads here, but I’m working on getting more comfortable sharing thoughts, particularly on the internet, rather than keeping them in my head and getting annoyed when no one wants to talk about them, lol, so here goes....

It started with this image popping up three times while scrolling through the dash:

And then I had some thoughts....Sorry it’s so long. I suppose this post in itself is an experiment.

Things like this, collections of ideas concentrated into a few spectacular people (Renaissance artists, Baroque composers, WWII scientists, etc.), make me wonder about philosophy vs. aesthetic, and if what really sets progress in motion is competition and a group of people who feed off each other’s asking of questions and discovery of answers.

Can we fresco and entire ceiling? Sure, but it will be painful and probably kill you. Can we art better by understanding anatomy? Sure, but you’ll have to snatch some bodies, or let someone else do it first. Can I make music do this instead of that other thing? Sure, but then you’ll be copying that one guy, try this even cooler new idea! Instead of repackaging the same idea into new models or melodies, they pushed the boundaries of known into connections that traversed the unknown, adding bubbles to the collective mind-map of human knowledge and intelligence. That’s what makes them special, right?

I’m currently reading The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, and I’m doing it slowly on purpose, reading all the materials referenced (Kant, Hume, Goethe, etc.) as a personal exercise in understanding a period of time/culture rather than simply Alexander Von Humboldt the person (also, it’s a good book, but the author is very biased-in-favor, so I’m trying to read it in tandem of others who were more critical). Anyway, I’m going through the part where a group of young men require each other’s thoughts as stimulation and inspiration to new ideas, how they challenge and change what is and feed off these new connections, even as they are being recorded by scientists and artists who would become ultimately more preserved in historical documents and textbooks.

And that seems to be the key, one brain questions and answers, another questions that answer and answers itself, and so on, agreeing on very little outside of context, but pushing each other into new territory. It only takes one four-minute mile to prove it can be done at all. But if we’re caught up in the ethics of how to question and answer, then aesthetics quickly become more desirable. So the cultural understanding, particularly with Millennials, seems to grow weary of argument and become: if I can’t discuss policy (because the nuances are extreme or not understandable/accessible to me, or most often because my voice is denied and change is unattainable), I can at least look good while it slowly chokes me to death.

And while it’s easy to write it off as narcissism and entitlement, perhaps it’s only because what we deem “looking good” is one of very few things we can generally agree upon, everything else is hopeless, creating a cycle of nihilism where hopeful people are considered naive or dumb. Sure, there are different styles of aesthetic, and we label those subgroups with passionate adamance, but I think even the most minimalist among us can appreciate an aesthetic collection of clutter when done well. We share an ideology of quality that makes art and media that was once appreciated by few an aesthetic that is valued by most - Marvel comics vs. the MCU, SF/F shows like Lost or Game of Thrones becoming cultural phenomenons vs. the elusive Geekdom prior to the Star Wars movies. Aesthetic unites us where every other aspect of nationalism and group identity divide us by philosophy - our perceptions and understanding of geography, history, culture, language, or enemy (traits of nationalism, yeah, I’m citing my own article lol) are all based on complex webs of experience, education, world view, etc.

We focus on aesthetics in literature, visual arts, and technology, business branding, business models, and even the application of science to the public. Aesthetics becomes the focus of energy because it is where we find freedom of identity in a world ready to challenge any semblance of diverse thought. We agree on aesthetics, because they fit a model and communicate efficiently if we are something to consider good or bad.

But that false dichotomy is severely flawed because projections of reality and reality itself are two vastly different things. Dichotomous thinking is a way to simplify the world when it becomes too complex too fast, it is a tool used to make choices, like making a pros-cons list or an if-then projection in order to decide to do or not to do, to be or not to be. It is often supported as a tool of control, and becomes extremely dangerous when it begins to dictate our identities and understandings of the world. When there is no us-vs-them, what idea can we rally around?

To start, we have a lot of inclusion to do, because discussions of philosophy, art, and science all start with time, and you know who doesn’t have time? People who need to make money in it. So when we skew our education systems to favor those who have time (and therefore money), we allow economics to dictate progress in philosophy and art and science, we hand over control to those who profit most from dichotomous thinking. And when we do that... well... money will favor some things over others, like product over research, revenue over investment, aesthetic over thought, etc. until deviating outside of that cycle is nearly impossible if not unsurvivable.

We’re in a loop, where making money is the goal, because there is no other option, research needs support, and research’s only support comes from money, and money wants more money, so research is limited to whatever gives us money.

Has that always been the case?

Renaissance artists were successful if they demonstrated the church’s power, gaining the church support through aesthetics, not challenging its philosophy (well... not directly anyway). That church profited (and still does) greatly from the development of dichotomies and used art and emotion to encourage this thinking, often as a way to control the lower classes.

Baroque composers (or Romantic, Classical, and Modern ones for that matter) were successful if they sold shows and inspired attendees to purchase their music, again, often sponsored by those in financial power and following the requested agenda (and again, not always directly, often including illicit subtext). Stepping too far away from what was popular and appropriate meant they lost sponsorship and public interest. Thus, the freedom of the starving artist vs. the conformation of the sell-out dichotomy.

And WWII/post-WWII scientists were successful if their work was supported by government institutions, particularly military or intelligence branches, and advanced the prospect of victory over a consistent manifestation of physical enemy (Nazis, Russians, soldiers, and spies).

The money comes when the proof is clear, not when it’s being searched for, and then only after decades of scientists and artists have died in poverty after discoveries of curiosity, not agenda. Progress, then, is controlled by public interest... or else private investment, and must, therefore, conform to the expectations of one or the other, often balancing the greater of two evils, it seems.

This is not a disrespect of those genius giants before us. I’m just noticing a pattern in the system of prosperous aesthetic periods and less progressive philosophical ones. We see the results of the philosophers only when they are applied aesthetically, and those aesthetic focal points divide the world into answers instead of questions, so it can seem that large progress has been made, when perhaps it was in-process for quite some time and was completed when a group of people crowded around the concept with the financial support of a capital agenda and the peers to push the boundaries of answering the questions that had been asked before them.

Most of the giants whose shoulders we stand on are invisible, it seems we only recognize the ones who present the answers aesthetically to our culture of origin. The “discoverers” of America are preserved in record because of their historic access in writing, but also because of their royal and religious backing.

Many scientific theories were proposed prior to our Western heroes by individuals those heroes had access to reading, particularly those outside of our Western vernacular. Darwin had access to tons of theories, but I’m not just talking Lyell and Linnaeus here, but the likes of Zhuang Zhou, al-Jāḥiẓ, and Ibn Khaldūn, whose names are ignored even in evolutionary biology/anthropology classes.

We remember Apple’s ipod, not the saturated market of mp3 players before it; we discuss the unveiling of the iphone, not the industry and inventions that already existed. And while the fun of literature is often disassembling its parts, we don’t discuss the mythology or market predecessors to Harry Potter, because it was the new aesthetic of young adult. That’s a bold claim, and much more subjective than the tech/science ones, but I think it’s important that we recognize this across industries and throughout our culture, not simply within the aesthetic streamlining of technology. Our immediate “successful” heroes make money because they provide and aesthetic that applies to many philosophies.

We don’t diversify our education because we admire the end result of science, rarely considering the entirety of work that went into final discovery or product. We try to explain science in chains of linear progression rather than the mind-map of questions and ideas and artistic or political influence that it is.

Progress then, depends a great deal on affluence and we exist in a culture of “who you know” rather than a balance of who AND what you know. Sure, there are always exception, but is it any surprise that we younger generations are obsessed with image?

Success, it seems, is directly correlated with it, and while we know genius takes more than money, success seems to exist outside of it - in fact, success rarely seems to involve genius itself at all anymore, but pure aesthetic. I’m thinking of the likes of Steve Jobs, who cultivated a following through his personal branding and rhetoric that helped change an entire industry, but often did so through aesthetics, not invention.

We have grown to idolize the firsts as people who invented something, however, the reality is that those tech giants and big names rarely invented, rather re-modeled and presented something aesthetically compatible to society. We do not celebrate the inventor of the piano, but rather those composers who presented us with an aesthetic style for it.

But that makes sense, because science’s value is in application. Who cares about dark matter? Well, no one (except sci-fi authors lol), yet, because it has no application to the public. But projects are still funded by institutions and government because our curiosity drives research and the potential outcome (weapons, control, power, money) justifies investment. How much money our government spends on NASA is directly correlated to the expectation of results, in the 60s, that was a way to defeat our perceived enemies, now, for some, it’s useless and should be privately funded.

I’m getting a little off topic, but my point is that what we deem “progress” is often only the part of the iceberg that we see, and rarely the whole of it. So what we see in the initial photo as a culture is a group of genius scientists (yes, again, respectfully, I am not denouncing the discoveries or large amount of work put in by any individuals here), rather than the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, whose amount of excess-everything funded work that wasn’t considered necessary, until it was. When we fear a limit of resources, we understandably become more controlling over what we spend money on as a society, but even in limited resources, there are those with excess, who can then more easily control what is considered valuable or not.

So, to be a successful genius, one must have access to funding, and to do this, one’s work must fulfill an agenda of another who has or is access to funds. This often entails being well connected, which includes a performance of image, false confidence, and the crucial understanding of the mind map of philosophy, art, and science in the intended discipline, which is often only accessible to those who fit the desired cultural template of the controlled upper class (read: wealthy, white, male, and upperclass-educated, for historical America anyway).

Which means that in idolizing the presenters of knowledge, we value the aesthetic of it, the pretty package wrapped around a completed idea, more than we value the process of it. And this is dangerous because we repeat it everywhere, in politics and government (we might value the cheaters who take a shortcut as a symbol of intelligent application, or those who represent an aesthetic we agree with without looking into their application of policy), justice (social justice often values the aesthetic meaning of an outcome of a problem, rather than deconstructing the process by which that outcome was reached), education (we use standardized testing to represent a student’s ability to memorize outcomes - or the aesthetic of looking intelligent, rather than demonstrating an ability to apply knowledge and understanding), business (we herald in those who present us with a desired aesthetic brand - Apple, Starbucks, Google, etc., rather than investigating the potential corruption of human conditions that leads to that aesthetic; or else using a popularity rating of stars as peer-approval of a brand rather than developing our opinions out of experience).

Even in our personal lives, it is more important to be perceived as positive and confident than to investigate and deconstruct what might be making us unhappy. For me, it was health, I didn’t like how I looked or felt, but was obsessively told that I’m great, I shouldn’t feel that way. My negativity was rewarded, victimization was encouraged, and the conclusion seemed to always be leaving everything as-is.

Eventually I had to say fuck it and stop seeking the support and understanding of friends, utilizing spite to rebuild a healthy life, which isn’t the only option, that was my choice, but our obsession with aesthetics became a lose-lose for me. I didn’t want to look like a photo-brushed-whatever model, which seemed to be everyone’s assumption, I just felt unhappy because I was unhealthy and unproductive in my life.

But that’s a bad aesthetic, or maybe not one at all and that denial of aesthetic might be the worst part. I didn’t fit into a box, not out of any higher intelligence, but because I could never pick one. This story is much more complex (and for the record, Jake was instrumental in helping me develop and maintain a health plan) and could probably be unpacked into an entire book of an extended metaphor, but put simply, I want to be a minimalist some days and a traditionalist other days and my brain is just a clash of ideas. Even my wardrobe reflects this, lit-nerd some days, world-traveler other days, outgoing-athlete, and even the occasional clash of weird accessories that is dancer-chic, lol.

I was feeling stuck by a body that was in endless rehabilitation and recovery (long story, broken bones), and I didn’t like it, so I wanted to change it. But that proactive idea was met with passionate defenses of body-positivity (which does have a place in society as a whole) and a focus on aesthetic (”you look fine”) rather than philosophy (well I don’t fucking feel fine). And I can’t help but think it’s because aesthetics are things we can agree on, or because they are safe, and to change aesthetics or to request a focus on philosophy, makes people scared about the burden of change.

So I have a revision to my own idea of what curates success:

Successful genius exists in a place supported financially, often by an agenda that is commonly more afforded to those who already fit a familiar cultural aesthetic of money or power, armed with an understanding of connection and access to un-biased and diverse knowledge and education (again, often most commonly afforded to those already in the upperclass), surrounded by a group of similar individuals who provide competition as well as resources and connections that progress the understanding of concepts in non-linear objectivity, and present finalized ideas to the public in a consumable and digestible aesthetic package of understanding that does not require extensive negative change on behalf of the consumer.

If that is true, I think it answers the cycles of science in ages of philosophy and reason vs. aesthetics and image that creates the popular science vs. art false dichotomy. STEM is more easily objective, and objective is more easily packaged and sold, therefore we create an art vs. science dichotomy and science wins - but only if it’s presenter understands enough about art to package it aesthetically. Social sciences are doomed by their own use of inductive arguments, complex layers of pattern and observation that don’t have a single objective Truth, rather a layered perception of potential truth, which is not easily distributed - it’s not a pamphlet, it’s a book.

Ain’t nobody got time for books.

It explains the Millennial obsession with image outside of an individual psychology of narcissism, by looking to cultural understandings of success and value. And while deviating from traditional models of progress - looking at thought as a mind map of connection rather than linear funnel of detail (while still applicable and useful), it illustrates the time lapse between discovery and progress. There is a gap between the actual discovery of knowledge and the generalized application of that knowledge, and that gap is filled by whomever presents the information most effectively or efficiently, sometimes accurately, to the public. That presenter is then considered successful, valuable, important. That importance leads to respect, time, and freedom.

So Millennials are emulating what they need to look like to be considered successful (fake it ‘till you make it and all), while science emulates linear thought in the same way. Linear thought can be more easily objective and packaged for public access, taught in schools and accepted by society. We create a dichotomy of linear and non-linear thought and say they have pros and cons or specific uses and applications, but I think in the same way our predecessors argued about Empiricism vs. Rationalism (read: art vs. science) until we understood them in tandem, we are at the point of having to understand linear and non-linear thinking not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum, most useful when balanced.

It’s complex and complex things take time to understand. And time is money. And money is freedom. And freedom is happiness.

Perhaps this explains why dichotomies are so popular - they fit an aesthetic, and they remove the exhausting layers of philosophy that exist inside our own identities. Dichotomies limit the complexity of an idea into two extremes, and when we define ourselves by an image rather than our modes of thought, much of our decisions can be made by whatever aligns with the image. We can feel free by the illusions of power or choice, while minimizing the effort it takes to get to that freedom, and maybe it makes us feel happy for a minute.

However, while we spend much of our decision quota in a given day on deciding which aesthetics to consume or conform to, those choices are still influenced by those whose agendas are funding our understanding of the world through science and art. Is it any wonder we’ve created a dichotomy of disconnect in every way. What I mean is that it is easy to make irrational choices based on feelings of aesthetics (easier, not always easy), and when our culture divides aesthetics into categories, they are predictable, marketable, and controllable, so we must separate the world into understandable groups.

If this is true, then maybe it’s not the internet or social media or Millennial entitlement that is separating us. Maybe it’s the control of wealth being recycled into similar agendas to produce work that conforms to or provides evidence supporting already existing biases in science. Keep us too busy making money to have time to understand it and too loyal to brands to investigate the money, and too exhausted of choices to discover ourselves. So the freedom of choice that we find in aesthetic dichotomies - the ease of making decisions and lowered exhaustion of not analyzing those experiences, is actually a sacrifice of identity and agency to those funding our research and creating the requirements of aesthetic conformation .

This is getting a bit conspiracy-theory-esque, but dichotomies are good for reducing choices and controlling groups, however, they do not inherently exist outside of a few basic dualities (like light and the absence of light, or dark), they extend out of a focus on aesthetic and a disapproval of thought, voice, and criticism. Or, to simplify, they are social constructs to organize information.

So if this all related in some way, if science and progress is inhibited by the agendas of the elite, and we are very aware of our elite, how do we trust it? How do we step out of the aesthetic-obsessed cycle and into forgiveness and understanding and patience and... time?

And perhaps more importantly, how do we develop a way to support science AND diversify it? How do we make the next photo like this include races and genders across a spectrum of ideologies? How do we create a collective group of genius that exists outside of a capital agenda, is it even possible? How can we encourage investment over revenue when so many Americans (and people around the world) feel they don’t have enough time to make money to survive, or choices to spend thinking about philosophy, policy, and what they believe in vs. agreeing with something that seems to vaguely align with their desired aesthetic identity? It’s not laziness, I don’t think, but over-work, we’ve reached our daily capacity and the sacrifice of demanding more is...less.

I struggle to pick an aesthetic and it has helped me break that easy black-and-white view of the world, but that is a fight I am exhausted by every day. It would be so simple to pick an aesthetic and run with it, to define myself by a collective idea and make choices based on what matches it, but that swings with my emotions, and maybe that’s closer to the problem?

We have done some weird shit with emotion, from disregarding it as feminine or “weak,” to writing it out of strength and art and science. We have created a dichotomy between emotion and logic and then mapped it into our brains as hemispheres of thought. We made a taboo-aesthetic of sadness (I mean, look at Inside Out’s character development of Sadness, but they did a good job using balance as the answer) and disregarded most emotions beyond contentment or positive excitement as bad, which is, surprise, starting to look like a mistake. We’ve branded empathy as weakness; we are simultaneously admiring, and for many worshiping, empathetic individuals while funneling our money into heartless heroes who we deem successful. Maybe it’s our emotions that have faded, beaten out of us or encouraged into silence, leaving us lonely and dependent on our chosen aesthetic to find any pieces of identity that might lead to authentic happiness. Maybe emotion is what keeps us in just-enough chaos to challenge the agendas that control our choices by keeping us unpredictable? Or perhaps they are what unite us beyond aesthetic.

Maybe staring at that shelf of shampoos and conditioners, over half of which are produced by the exact same factory and owned by the same company but branded with different versions of you in mind and with how you will feel looking at them taken into account, is extremely overwhelming. And some days you feel lazy and tired and you just grab that same ol’ thing. But occasionally you feel rebellious or responsible, and you investigate and make a completely different choice because maybe you are made of a layer of realities held together by your collective experience of life that creates a unique worldview, that thing that we conform to an aesthetic or maybe an emotion, or philosophy, or a conviction of values, and maybe that thing cannot be predicted. Maybe our models predict an aesthetic, not a person, and maybe that’s a duh, but it’s not a logical concept I consider on a daily basis of rhetoric hailing technology and AI as all-knowing and capable of perfect reason.

Maybe it’s our chaos that is trying to be organized into compartmental identities of aesthetic ideologies: minimal, vintage, grunge, professional, bad-ass, athletic, urban, feminine, boho, whatever it is. And those who challenge it are in for a much more difficult life of choices, each of which must be broken down into action-and-consequence, current emotion vs. future potential, the history and creation of a product, etc. We don’t have time to ask our coffee if children were kidnapped to harvest it, we have an image and this specific coffee or product fits it; we are too busy trying to be successful so that we can eventually have the freedom to fully identify ourselves and be happy, and we see by cultural example that our desired success comes from aesthetic.

Capitalism creates a need for money, and that excess capital is often syphoned into the remnants of pre-constructed systems. I don’t have the expertise to divide that into its logical components yet, but maybe our adoration of monarchy as seen in our popular media, art, and entertainment, has us assuming the elite among us deserve their position, romanticizing the trials of poverty as obstacles to be overcome, and forcing racial stereotypes into equally damaging aesthetics - the white female, incapable damsel in distress, vs. the black female, independent queen who can survive everything on her own. This is not a real dichotomy, it’s a shitty stereotype, but you probably wouldn’t know it from the outside looking in, or perhaps from the inside itself, if you felt the need to align with a specific aesthetic, or even to invert that pressure into the opposite aesthetic. Businesses thrive by utilizing those dichotomies, and sometimes by creating a solution to them. So if they are useful to some, perhaps that’s enough reason to be suspicious of the agendas that tell us how to think or make our lives easier.

I feel like I’m saying a lot of stupid things while feeling my own brain nodding along and going like oh, here’s a dichotomy and there’s another dichotomy and all dichotomies are false dichotomies, and I know all this in formal educated argument, but when it comes to daily application, I want to just be a cool millennial who has health insurance and can grab takeout without humming about the cost and what I might be able to pull together from the fridge. That doesn’t mean brands or aesthetics, despite the market’s attempts to the contrary, just the means to survive financially with a bit of excess time for myself to think and be bored and contemplate the world with other people so we’re all a bit less lonely and more emotionally adjusted.

Diversity, money, research, science, art, aesthetic, it all seems to come back to identity and time. Time to make choices, time to reflect and think about identity and emotion, time to deconstruct and criticize reality, time to investigate corruption, time to gather knowledge and resources, time to exist along other humans rather than floating away, isolated and ungrounded from the world. Therefore, successful geniuses also have time to exist outside of a singular aesthetic and enhance our understanding of the world in order to develop positive changes that we often label “progress.”

How do we give people more time so that they don’t have to divide the world into aesthetics and dichotomies in order to keep up or attempt to be successful? Does giving someone time allow them to feel successful? If that perseverance of success was in order to gain the time, would we then use the time to curate individual identities that we feel comfortable and confident in? Is time what it takes to be happy? Is time what separates the classes in America?

How do we un-do “time is money,” particularly in a capitalist economy and remember that time is also thought and connection and values and friendships and more than obligations?

How do we remember that time is identity?

Is time a renewable resource? Or are we.

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transfemmbeatrice · 6 years

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Where should I start listening to Friends at the Table?

A short novella by me

Friends at the Table is one of the best actual play podcasts out there and you should listen to it because they tell amazing stories with both diverse characters and a diverse cast (the GM is a queer black man and almost everyone at the table is some flavor of queer). They put character development and good storytelling at the forefront while creating incredible and complex worlds to play in. They make you laugh, cry, and laugh so hard you cry (and also give you chills on occasion) and I genuinely cannot recommend them highly enough. Whether you like a good story, characters to fall in love with, learning new ttrpg mechanics, or listening to friends have a good time together, FatT is for you.

FatT also has an enormous backlog that can make it hard to dive in so here is a handy guide for when you want to listen don’t know where tf to begin.

The Friends have provided some resources for this: there is a flowchart that gives you the quick and dirty deets (though it hasn’t been updated to reflect their current season) and also Austin made a 20 minute ep of him explaining the show and stuff and put it at the beginning of the podcast feed which could also be helpful (which I haven’t actually listened to bc they put it out after I was already deep into the show)...but this is my over detailed take.

There are currently 4 seasons of FatT. In order: Autumn in Hieron, Counter/Weight, Marielda/Winter in Hieron, and Twilight Mirage. Marielda is a mini season that takes place in the Hieron universe but before the Hieron seasons; Counterweight and Twilight Mirage are both standalone but do take place in the same universe, tens or hundreds of thousands of years apart.

Twilight Mirage is approaching its endpoint and will be followed by Spring in Hieron which should be the last Hieron season. There are pros and cons for starting with any of these seasons so depending on your taste and preferences you can take your pick!

(Also, each new season begins with an Episode 00 which is just the friends discussing the setting and pitching characters. It’s not required listening and they’re pretty long so you can skip them if you want but for people like me who live for worldbuilding and behind the scenes, they’re great prefaces to each season!)

Autumn in Hieron: The very beginning! This is where I started because I’m a hardcore chronological completionist. There is definitely something very fun and satisfying about watching them develop over the past 4 years, in confidence and skill and in production quality! They’ve been amazing since the beginning but it only gets better.

However, because it’s early, the audio quality is not great, so if that’s an issue for you, this probably isn’t your best starting point. Some extremely good shit goes down in this game and I highly recommend listening to it if you can parse the bad audio. Also, starting at episode 5, they split into two smaller groups and the audio improves, so if you want to start here but find the sound unbearable at the start, you can try skipping to here to see if it works better for you! The first few episodes are just a mini quest and it’s definitely fun but not deeply plot relevant so you’ll be fine to skip it. This is also a season potentially worth returning to even if you don’t start here because as I said, it’s good, and the bad audio might be more listenable once you know the players’ voices better. But if you absolutely can’t, no worries! They recap this season at the beginning of Winter in Hieron so if you don’t listen to it you won’t be lost as the story continues!

Hieron is a high fantasy setting in what Austin describes as the post-post-apocalypse. It’s been long enough that they’re past just surviving and have rebuilt tons but it’s still a wild world out there, and no one alive really remembers what apocalyptic event happened, but they all know something bad went down. Over the two (and a half, counting Marielda) seasons they’ve done they have really built out the world. It explores a lot about the concepts of divinity and entropy and so much more. I think Hieron is a great place to start because fantasy is the usual setting for actual play podcasts so it’s a familiar touchstone. And also just, really fucking good.

Counter/Weight: Welcome to SPACE. The second season of FatT is a good starting point because it’s self contained--it’s longer than the Hieron seasons but when you reach the finale, you’ve gotten the whole story. It starts off a little slow as they adjust to a new system and new characters for the first time...but there are some hilarious bits in those first couple of missions that I love. Then they switch systems again to something that fits more what they are doing and things pick up from there.

The “ground” game (the majority of the episodes with characters going on adventures as usual) is interspersed with the “faction” game--Austin and two other players not in the other half of the game zoom out and use mechanics and roleplaying to decide what the big factions/corporations/etc are doing around the sector, and eventually we see these events trickle down to effect the player characters in the other half of the game. These are a bit slow, especially when they first start, but I recommend listening to them because it’s cool to see how things are moving around on a more macro scale than one little crew of fixers, and it really informs the world they’re operating in. It’s not strictly necessary if you really find these episodes untenable, but you’ll definitely be able to follow along better if you’ve heard them. Also, around the 3rd or so faction game session, they cut down the number of factions significantly so it goes a lot smoother. I’ll also put in here that Counterweight is probably my favorite season of the show at least thus far even though I wasn’t sure I would like it at all when I first started it, for what that’s worth.

Counter/Weight is a cyberpunk/scifi setting somewhere in the Milky Way. It is set less than a decade after a war in which two rival powers united in an uneasy alliance to drive back an Empire. They succeeded, but now things have settled into a good old fashioned cold war. There are lots of robots and mechs and they use the cyberpunk genre to explore labor and capitalism and feeling small and helpless in the face of such massive, powerful corruption. Or, sadness and robots in space. (Also, literally none of the PCs ended up being cishet.)

Marielda: Marielda is a mini season they did right before Winter in Hieron. Set in Hieron before the events of the other seasons, it provides some context to the world. It’s also fucking delightful. This is probably the most recommended starting point for FatT because it’s short, has high production quality, and some of their best work. It really encapsulates what this show is so if you’re unsure if this is the podcast for you, this is a great starting point.

Since it takes place long before Autumn in Hieron, you don’t need to have listened to it to follow along; but I do find it somewhat helpful because there are callbacks to the events of that season as they show how some of the things they encountered then came to be in the first place. Marielda (and Winter in Hieron) were made with new listeners in mind, so Autumn definitely isn’t required.

Marielda is of course also high fantasy, but it has a tinge of steampunk too because this island has more technology for....reasons that will be revealed as you listen. The only train in Hieron is there, and the crew stages a heist on it, and it’s amazing. Marielda has two parts--the first couple episodes are some of the players playing The Quiet Year, a collaborative mapdrawing game, to build this city. Then the other players played a few missions in Blades in the Dark as scoundrels who steal information to sell to the highest bidder. Their shenanigans are hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking and I’ve relistened to it so many times.

Winter in Hieron: Hieron season two of three! Winter begins with two episodes recapping the events of Autumn in Hieron, so if you skipped Autumn you can listen to them and be good to go, and if you didn’t...you can skip the recaps! (Unless maybe you listened to Counterweight in between and you need a refresher). There are two new PCs in Winter because Andi and Janine joined between Autumn and this season, and they only make Hieron better.

This season is a little heavier than Autumn because it’s Winter and...Winter is usually darker than Autumn. I’m in the middle of relistening to it now, though, and it’s still incredible the second time through and a great starting point. I would not recommend starting with Winter without listening to Marielda first, partly because Marielda is so good, but also because Marielda informs so much of what happens in Winter.

Since Twilight Mirage is getting close to finishing up (as of writing this, anyway) if being Current In The Fandom is something that’s important to you, I’d start with Hieron (whether that be Autumn or Marielda/Winter). After Twilight Mirage wraps up, they are reportedly planning to return to Hieron for its final season--Spring, so if you start catching up now you can be ready! I don’t know for sure yet but so much has happened at this point that I find it hard to imagine that they’ll do a recap before Spring that lets you jump in there very easily. I could be proven wrong but even if I am....I don’t recommend it. You’ll miss too much Seasons of Hieron is a joy to listen to.

Twilight Mirage: The current season! Usually I say to start here if you find the backlog intimidating--it’s current and you can jump in to what’s happening now and get to the rest when you feel ready. And that’s still somewhat true, but Twilight Mirage has gotten pretty long so it’s potentially still intimidating? And they have said they’re nearing the endgame, but I have no idea if that means weeks or months. But regardless, it’s still less to get through than starting further back, and it is a standalone season so it’s a great starting place!

Twilight Mirage is another game in space. It is set in the same universe as Counterweight, and there are some callbacks to it, but it’s set far in the future from the events of that season and was intentionally made so that people who hadn’t heard Counterweight could listen fine. It’s more like easter eggs than important backstory.

The premise is a dying utopia: a massive fleet that has slowly been whittled down, still home to millions of people, but they’re starting to look for somewhere to hopefully colonize. This game does a great job of questioning what a utopia would look like--what does prison look like in a utopia? how do we treat synthetic beings?--and exploring the themes of self/identity and colonization and so much more. It’s the most philosophical FatT season to date but the narrative is also great and stands on its own--you can engage at whatever level you want. (I, for instance, don’t get a lot of the philosophy referenced, but I’m still deeply enjoying it because it’s a great story and I love all the characters!) So much shit happens to alter the original premise and it’s fascinating to see the characters have to adapt to all these evolving circumstances and question their values as they themselves also change. Also, lots of robots and mechs and aliens and shit. One of the PCs is just a cat person. One of the PCs is a downloadable hitman who is losing their memory every time they die and get downloaded into a new body. It’s A Good Season, they friends are extra af (more than usual, even) and it’s a Delight.

And that’s my answer to the age old question, where do I start listening to Friends at the Table?, answered in more detail than anyone ever wanted. If you have any questions or anything feel free to shoot me an ask or a message, I’m literally always here to talk about FatT!

#friends at the table #fatt #f@tt

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fatehbaz · 6 years

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The current fear of China’s rising tech industry closely evokes the villainous depiction of Japan in ‘70s/’80s popular magazines and cyberpunk media; the tonally consistent tradition of American xenophobia against East Asia

As a sort of hobby interest, I do a lot of reading about Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Shanghai - three mega-cities and critical economic powerhouses that the Chinese establishment has used since the ‘90s as, essentially, experiments in rapid urban development with the basic intent to create hubs for computer technology industries to rival Silicon Valley. These three cities were essentially minor cities with rural agricultural hinterlands in the ‘80s, but today rank among the Top 20 most populous cities on Earth, with truly massive GDP’s, booming tech industries, thousands of start-up operations, and sophisticated architecture and transportation infrastructure. These cities - especially Shenzhen - have succeeded in rivaling the Bay Area.

There’s a lot at play - politically and socially - in how these projects were achieved (and especially fascinating is how Chongqing’s success is closely related with the city’s adoption in recent years of retro Marxist-Leninist communitarian ideals and programs). But today, I wanted to talk instead about American xenophobia and how these rapidly-growing tech hubs terrify Americans.

This week, I was watching a short-ish small-budget documentary on YouTube, which specifically explores how Shenzhen has become the “Silicon Valley of China.” Shenzhen alone hosts over 12 million people (greater than all of Chicago-land), but the city is physically contiguous with a greater urban area of 45 million people (three times metro Los Angeles-Anaheim) surpassing Tokyo and making it the most populous urban area on Earth; Shenzhen’s GDP is higher than Hong Kong, which happens to be just across a narrow strait from Shenzhen. Anyway, this YouTube documentary focused a bit on how the low-income residents of the otherwise highly-gentrified Shenzhen have become famous in Asia for their extremely passionate entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for re-purposing used and discarded tech parts to create homemade off-brand computer tech to sell at street markets. The narration also mentions how these tech wizards - and the more wealthy tech start-up workers - are able to establish themselves partially because they are not prosecuted for (re-)appropriating American inventions. Many jealous American tech workers allege that Shenzhen start-ups are “infringing on the intellectual property rights” and patents of American corporations.

And let me tell you, these (what I assume must be) young white American guys in the comment section are livid. Just, there is a stunning amount of comments that look like “Shenzhen only has a high GDP because they’re STEALING American intellectual property” or “yea, maybe they’re good engineers, but it was GENIUS AMERICAN MEN who came-up with the code” and “Americans did the hard part, the Chinese are just good at mass-production and cheap knock-offs.”

That last accusation is important: the concession that “China is good at mass production and efficiency” but “Americans are the real innovators who made it possible.”

“It’s not fair that China gets to profit off of technology that American heroes like Mr. Zuckerberg-Bezos McPeter-Thiel came-up with first!”

And these same tropes - “East Asians are frighteningly efficient, but Americans are smarter” - should sound very routine to anyone familiar with American xenophobia in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

So, this is all to say that I was reminded of a nice passage from one of my all-time favorite pieces of cultural commentary, which is Nicola Nixon’s classic “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Nixon’s 1992 article discusses how all the hype that cyberpunk as a literary genre was receiving for being woke and “revolutionary” was not totally justified, at least for parts of the genre; a lot of cyberpunk at the time celebrated the Ayn Rand-style American, individualistic “cowboy-ism” of its male protagonists and included a lot of half-assed women characters. These shallow tropes were especially emphasized in the parts of the genre made for mainstream, popular consumption. Nixon, in the article, also clearly traces how radical feminist utopian science fiction of the 1970s paved the way for the kind of social wokefulness that cyberpunk would later claim.

Nixon’s article takes a momentary aside to address American (and Canadian) anti-Japanese xenophobia during the ‘70s and ‘80s, and how popular cyberpunk stories pitted American exceptionalism and rugged individualism against Japanese corporations. Nixon even suggests that Japanese congolmerates were subtextually conflated with “femininity” to make them even more threatening.

Here’s the fun passage:

Indeed the Yakuza is the paradigm for all the other Japanese megacorporations which appear regularly in Gibson’s texts: a collective construct which conflates the tight familial bonds of the Italian-American mafia with the equally tight employer-employee bonds of the frighteningly efficient Japanese industries. It is the latter which formed the subject of endless documentaries and business-magazine articles throughout the ’80s because their corporate practice presented the most substantial threat to American-style capitalism America had yet experienced.12

American xenophobia and isolationism, particularly with regard to the Japanese scientific and economic invasion, manifested itself in the media through such scare tactics as Andy Rooney’s piece on 60 Minutes (Feb. 5, 1989), which portentously identified various historic American monuments as Japanese owned! And 48 Hours presented a piece called "America for Sale" (Dec. 29, 1988), in which various reporters, including Dan Rather, emphasized American objections to Japanese ownership of American real estate and industry. Amorphous Japanese collectives clearly posed a threat to the land of the free entrepreneurial spirit. This is surely the fear underlying the (defensive?) mockery and ridicule attending representations of Japanese tourists, traveling in tightly-knit groups, sporting extremely expensive, high-tech photographic equipment. If Canada as a whole did not reflect precisely the same degree of anti-Japanese paranoia being played out in America, British Columbia, Gibson’s home, betrayed more conflict about Japanese investment than most parts of the country. In the early and mid-’80s, in the midst, that is, of British Columbian Premier William Bennett’s open-door policy to Pacific Rim investment, reactions to Japanese tourists and potential investors were mixed: their infusion of capital into the flagging B.C. economy was indeed welcomed, and yet their actual ownership of luxury hotels, real estate, and various natural-resource companies (the forestry industry in particular) was both attacked and feared as being, ironically, merely a reenactment of past American practice.

If we examine Gibson’s texts within the context of such conflicting interests, we see the degree to which he deliberately avoids any form of simplistic anti-Japanese paranoia or its attendant racism and ethnocentrism. And yet Gibson’s Japanese conglomerates, in their collective and familial practice, nevertheless form the implicit antagonistic counterpoint to the individualist heroes. The bad guys in Gibson are, after all, the megacorporations—Ono Sendai, Hosaka, Sanyo, Hitachi, Fuji Electric. The good guys are the anarchic, individualistic, and entrepreneurial American heroes: independent mercenaries and "corporation extraction experts" like Turner, console cowboys like Case, Bobby Newmark, Gentry, Tick, and the crew at the Gentleman Loser who jack in and out of the global computer matrix with unparalleled mastery. In Williams’ Angel Station (1989), Bossrider Ubu traverses the galaxy, roping in black holes. In Sterling’s Islands in the Net, American Jonathan Gresham, the self-styled "post-industrial tribal anarchist" (388), rides his "iron camel" through the "bad and wild" African Sahara—one of the few places free of the global Net—and eventually saves the hapless but earnest Laura Webster. The cowboys in Gibson, Williams, and Sterling are heroes who represent, as Williams suggests in Hardwired, the "last free Americans, on the last high road" (10). It seems telling that the American icon of the cowboy, realized so strongly in Reaganite cowboyism, the quintessence of the maverick reactionary, should form the central heroic iconography in cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s fascination with and energetic figuration of technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously embattled and empowered. In ’80s America the Japanese megacorporations did dominate the technological market, but the cowboy’s freedom and ingenuity allow him to compete purely on the level of mastery. The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. In Interview’s special "Future" issue (1988), almost adjacent to Victoria Hamburg’s interview with Gibson, there appeared an article titled "Made in Japan," which confirmed for the American readership that the Japanese did not "initiat[e] new ideas" (Natsume, 32) and reassured it about the benign nature of the new products coming out of Japan: micro-thin televisions, special low-water-consumption washing machines, camcorders with RAM cards, auto-translation machines—non-essential but nice, unthreatening appliances.13 Computer and technological innovation would still come from American silicon valleys, would still be, by implication, "Made in America." In Gibson’s novels the console cowboys use expensive Hosaka and Ono Sendai cyberspace decks, but such mass-produced technology is always customized and enhanced, its performance and capabilities augmented by the cowboys’ more inventive, finer ingenuity.

In effect, the exceptionally talented, very masculine hero of cyberpunk, with specially modified (Americanized) Japanese equipment, can beat the Japanese at their own game, pitting his powerful individualism against the collective, domesticated, feminized, and therefore impenetrable and almost unassailable Japanese "family" corporations. After all, in the world of the microchip, small is potentially powerful.

From:

Nicola Nixon. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” 1992 - Science Fiction Studies. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/nixon57art.htm

This right here:

The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding.

In this passage, you could replace mentions of the Japan of 1992 with the China of 2018 instead, and you’d be describing exactly the comments of and contextualizing proposed by American xenophobes criticizing current Chinese tech development and mass production.

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radredrecluse · 6 years

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Survival of the Richest

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Douglas Rushkoff

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

#eat the rich

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acfinance · 2 years

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Tips to Boost Business Productivity and Profit

Small and medium-sized business experience challenges nonstop and is constantly searching for possibilities to boost. In this short article, we will certainly review some of the most usual yet overlooked points that can improve company productivity and earnings if done correctly. If you're seeking to start your own service in spite of the pandemic, you're not alone. Numerous brand-new company ventures are emerging thanks to the vibrant requirements of people around the world and the technology innovation that comes with it. Nevertheless, if you're an existing business owner looking to create a more efficient operation you need to hire a small business accountant or you can still discover a point from this write-up.

Lots of services run with tight capital, which makes on-time repayments a requirement. As a result, slow repayment from clients can suggest a bigger balance on loans, which leads to passion expenditure. Furthermore, some local business have maxed out credit limit or require a new business finance from a far better carrier, so slow-moving repayment restricts the business's development. In any case, it's crucial to collect promptly.

Do not settle with a problematic bookkeeping system. Not having a robust audit system leads to massive issues down the road, specifically if billing and accumulating are postponed. Some firms doing great were slow-moving to invoice their customers. Several company consumers make use of billing adjustments to re-start the settlement clock, which suggests orders and additions must be managed effectively to obtain repayments on time. Not all businesses can raise rates without sacrificing some clients, but it can be rewarding or even needed to consider it. Instead of considering lost sales, you require to focus on the worth to the client. Proprietors and managers must count on their brand name, strive to supply the best feasible item, and not be afraid to charge for its worth.

Prevent setting costs too reduced. The majority of company will keep their costs at the expense of shedding earnings to retain clients, but most of the time, the firm offers special worth that customers acknowledge. After increasing costs, it might take a while to observe client response and commitment. Nevertheless, after a couple of months or a suitable time lag for your company, it's normally obvious that the cost rise was the best action.

Being too tolerant of low-performing employees. Reduced personnel efficiency without a doubt leads to overall bad business efficiency. It's worse when a terribly acting employee forces others to hang out repairing problems or covering for the lacking employee. Accepting inadequate efficiency can modify the business society to ensure that productivity and quality are less important. A lousy worker additionally contaminates other staff members with the suggestion that lousy work is fine.

If you have actually been affected by the ongoing pandemic, or are wanting to update your company, consider a business finance that offers for small companies. When accepted, you can utilize your extra capital for employing essential labor, emergency income arrangements, marketing increase, infrastructure upgrades, etc. Undoubtedly, it's difficult to run a little or medium-sized business. Nevertheless, thinking about these things can help your service move forward. Above all, organizations need consumers to thrive and get loyalty, and you should entice them with worth to sell to them.

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myfriendpokey · 6 years

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flat pak

i went to now play this last weekend and had a good time! there was a flatgames room, and a panel, and the latter made me think about some nightmarish circumstance where someone was questioning me about what the point of these things was. the three posts below are all pseudo-answers i sketched out.

1. i like how sexless videogames are, and how bad at representing humanity in general, i like that even hyperviolent games have this wistfulness about them, as if the only way they can grasp the human body is as it comes apart - in some provisional, stateless shape contained in but seperate from the game systems, a ghost, like those mysteriously elaborate and collisionless death animations the enemies in old shooters got before dissolving into goo. or as if they hoped the exuberance of their own approach was enough to break the carapace of the format and let something, anything, seep in from the outside....

the little guys in videogames are a gentler convention, but they're always on the verge of the same dissolution - the sketchiest of outlines, of features, a ball, a shape, with eyes and feet. like drawing yourself with your eyes closed - the crudest and most temporary kind of projection or self-fashioning. staring nervously and chomping as it waddles through the maze, eating things, breaking apart instantly when it bumps into someone, and given an equally temporary name such as walky or go-go. i love this dorkiness, this daydream of the body as a soap-bubble, so alienated that the slightest recognition feels like intimacy.

2. flatgames are 'flat' in the sense of projecting a multi-level videogame hierarchy into a single plane; the archetypical flatgame gesture is being able to walk across the textboxes. rather than systems they represent collections - collections of effects treated as independent of the wider process they'd ordinarily portray, which can then be grouped and moved around seperate from that process. so it's a personal, subjective format in the sense that the new groupings sort of mirror the groupings produced when various external effects are flattened into single moments of subjective experience, of memory. but it's also a personal format just because it's easy to use - because in many circumstances it's easier to just drag and drop text around rather than create a universal system that handles when and how it'll be displayed, as in all those unity horror games that have gui elements just sort of hanging around in space for you to bump into. and i think this is something that kind of grinds interestingly against the idea of videogames as inherently systematic, inherently good at portraying systems - like, in what way are they systematic when it's become easier NOT to be systematic? at what point do those "systematic" features become a mannerism, while the very easiness of bad game design means it starts to cleave more rigorously to the contours of actual material life and practice, to the way we really use computers rather than the ways we'd like to use them?

this is not to say systems don't exist. but their relationship with even the most system-y videogames is weird - to what extent are these games exploring a system rather than expressing a sense of systematicity, an aesthetics of system not dissimilar to those of puzzles, criticism, and the mystery novel? on one hand we know that a lot of systemic elements are hand-tweaked by developers in order to feel less jarring to our impression of the whole (dice rolls being the most common) - on the other we know from previous twitter threads about exactly these kinds of "cheats" that they can outrage players who learn they exist. which suggests it's not any specific quality or experience associated with a game system but the idea of systematicity itself that's being sold -- as indeed with the famous "100 hours of gameplay" tag, which does not express a type of content so much as a promise that this content has been regulated and formatted in ways which allow it to be sold in this very matter-of-fact way. the idea of systematicity as a deliberately conveyed aesthetic impression feels worth investigating, particularly given ten million youtube videos with names like "gun-shot teen DESTROYED with Logic" and "univeral reason under attack: why braingeniousmasculinist should be unbanned from club penguin" - evidently the impression of sanguine impersonality and indifference to the merely "personal" is a highly popular and profitable one online....

in a more material sense, too, we can query this systematicity. a videogame with handdrawn paper graphics is obviously not "de-mystifying" the process of making games, since the physical object had to be digitalised and cleaned up and imported and processed before it could be used. one of the stranger things in videogames is that naivete is a technological affordance - i can use crude handdrawn graphics because the computer has enough memory not to force me to compress it all into 8x8 sprites (unless i really want it to, as with deliberately limited bespoke engines). but at the same time it really is de-mystifying, because it emphasises the extent to which game development takes place at the intersection between multiple different areas of digital technology (not to mention human labour). 3d model textures can be paintings or photographs or heavily treated, processed combinations of the two - the photographs or paintings used can be original or purchased from various weird economies of commercial asset packs - the artistic coordination of those assets can take place over skype or similar with the reference of multiple other digital image files, scavenged from online to give an idea of the total look. i don't mean to suggest that these multiple intersections are so complex that they cease to be "systematic" - but i do think that grasping it as a real system also means coming to terms with the ways in which it can be structurally unsystemisable, like fredric jameson's description of globalization as "untotalizable totality". when the most important features of the discrete operations of a computer are that they take place at a scale and speed no human can replicate, recasting exactly those operation into a human scale can confuse more than it clears up [much like this post].

thinking about videogames more generally as revolving around not an inherent systematicity but rather an image of / desire for the same, around that imagination of systematicity which is bound up with consumer technology as a whole. i feel like at each moment in history this systematicity has some privileged form of social identification associated with it: i've lost count of the pulpy books i've read which had some villainous saint-just analogue, maybe one obsessed with clocks or measuring things, who imposes some cruel and rigid revolutionary "system" on the basically warm and laissez-faire vassals below... system as political imposition. but medieval writers might have connected the same sense of systematicity more immediately with that of the kingdom of god, with the underlying structure which makes those warm laissez-faire moments possible to begin with. sometimes system appears in media as bureaucracy and ritual, sometimes it's as a challenge to bureaucracy and ritual, galileo's "and yet it moves" or those movies where someone comes up with a brilliant new way to win sports matches or sell sub-prime mortgages against all the prevailing wisdom. on the basis of this extremely rough idea, what could we imagine being the privileged form that systematicity appears in the everyday today? not capitalism or high finance, which while systematic can also be too broad or naturalised to appear so in this immediate way... not politics, not the internet. but maybe ON the internet, and for me "system" appears most visibly online in the question of personal information and how it's tracked. all those notifications of websites using cookies clicked through, terms and amendments to terms scrolled past, online shopping histories suddenly reoccuring by ads for the same products you looked at appearing in the background of another site - all these are re-impositions, re-appearances of systemicity through the vague fugue of internet experience. and which pop up in the more public sphere as an ominous black site, with the full scope or implications sealed away behind byzantine layers of corporate procedure and nondisclosure. the sense of system here is one of intransigence, blockage - it's divorced from the idea that knowing the system would give one the power to change it, because here the system is exactly what makes that knowledge impossible in the first place. maybe that sense of the failure of systemic knowledge is connected to the world depicted in flatgames, in which that knowledge no longer exists - niall moody's "the craigallen fire" contains historical information and real places, but the words hang eerily across the digital picture as if unsure how to relate to it, as if coming from a long way away. but the movement away from representational systematicity is a move towards material systemicness, in the clarity and concreteness with which flatgames approach their own practice, so maybe we should consider this withdrawal as strategic - as an effort to build new systems, rather than being pulled into the daydream of the old.

3. part of the pleasure, for me, in making flatgames, was the sense of feeling able to postpone indefinitely some kind of mechanical reckoning - the feeling of being able to use pacing and visual structure to ward off the dread that any minute now i'd have to settle down and make a real game. in a weird way it connects to what i enjoy about very fussy, technical games - grinding in an rpg means deferring the point at which you actually have to begin playing the rpg, both in the sense of being challenged and in the sense of actually having to sit down and learn all the systems, just as savescumming your way through megaman 3 is to giddily skate around the dread prospect of actually playing megaman 3. there is no point where you have to work out what happens if you die or walk off the map, there is no point where you have to say to the player "okay, you have to focus now". the horror of paying attention and the joy of not having to! a moment of those moralist rituals held in temporary suspense, as if time itself has frozen and you're free to walk among it, underneath paused mechanisms that would ordinarily be crushing you... and the awareness of that suspense somehow makes your own delicacy greater, as if one of the machines you wandered through was your own life, and you could hover precariously inside it... a soap bubble, the merest bug-eyed phantom, newly christened something like walky or go-go....

[image credits - street fighter iii: second impact - pippols ��- space fantasy zone - marchen veil - bandits 9)

#flatgames #writing #vg.#pippols

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avneeshkgupta · 3 years

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Bad Website List 2021

It's far no mystery that websites are the spine of every commercial enterprise. in case you need your commercial enterprise to flourish on this COVID-19 generation, you’ve were given to have a properly-designed and appealing internet site. because of social distancing and the lockdown, increasingly more inherent clients are looking for products and services on line through the employer’s internet site and portals.

A well-made internet site or an internet web page allow you to establish your commercial enterprise because flawless design creates a top notch affect on your ability customers induces them to take the desired action-sensible versa due to a terrible web site design. commonplace web design or website development mistakes can fast derail your business potentialities even if you installed your first-class efforts. web sites are like a 2d home for a commercial enterprise. A internet site works as your on-line photo and is judged harshly by means of your customers. this is the reason that creating a superb design on your internet site could be very vital. And while you pay attention plenty approximately what to do while designing your internet site. however do you realize what no longer to do? As we are speak me approximately bad website designs, we have to have a have a look at what capabilities make a internet site a bad one:

Not following tendencies

Be unresponsive

Confuse cellular-friendliness

not noted usability

Ditched accessibility

No longer optimized for search engine optimization

Overlooked safety

And now, to present you an idea, we've got mentioned forty bad website design examples that harm many companies. keep away from them while designing your internet site, and also you should have extra achievement in changing leads into your dependable clients.

Here's a list of forty terrible website designs in order to make you pull your hair:

PETER’S BASILICA – VATICAN:

This website has illogical and inappropriate studying areas which makes the readability and accessibility ratio pretty low. also, the UI is poorly designed, making it a bad website design inside the eyes of the crawlers as well as visitors. it's also no longer very responsive, which will increase the browsing time of the customers with out gaining any more records to their necessities. And ready is the maximum disturbing thing when it comes to user experience.

The Glove Club:

This internet site looks ok however with regards to internet design, cinematographic elements are a steeply-priced affair. unfortunately, the abundance of 86f68e4d402306ad3cd330d005134dac pix slows down the loading, and users have to wait to see the content material of the web page. gradual down load pace is a purpose why customers often refuse from browsing similarly. So it turns out that the usage of expressive cinematographic elements doesn’t actually assist, another example of bad web site design.

Adjust:

This website may have a cutting-edge design, first rate user revel in, and nicely-thought-out usability, however the smallest bugs will spoil the whole thing. modify is a case in point. The internet site is top notch and it appears true. however, what does make it a awful web site design is a massive panel that informs about the cookies. It does no longer go away. It sticks all the time, destroying the entire impression and enjoy of the user. it's miles like a sore thumb that keeps hanging in your nerves and distracts interest from the primary purpose of this website.

Hagia Sophia:

The website is ordinary in appears but the hassle is a pop-up. The massive pop-up at the first actual page hides the number one information at the internet site. The website is designed for travelers and may be surfed in more than one languages, however the internet site isn't always properly based, which makes it difficult for customers to navigate. This consumes quite a few time of the users in addition to the crawlers, which in turn will increase your crawling budget giving an extra load in your wallet.

Patimex:

Test the website of the Polish family gasoline producer. The layout and usefulness are quite disturbing. So a touch Satan grilling a sausage is to the factor right here. A navigation menu at the pinnacle and any other one below a bizarre image, three links of different colorations, and even an animated emblem doesn’t really store this internet site. basic, this UI is poorly designed with a purpose to genuinely aggravate a user due to the above bugs, some other instance of horrific web site design.

IBI:

IBI’s authentic internet site could be very close to being called a terrible internet site. but, a few matters maintain it far from being the high-quality. First and essential, it is a video inside the header. although it instantly grabs interest due to its glitch effect, but, this impact ruins the whole lot. It does not undergo any statistics. it's far just a flowery distraction. Secondly, there is no information hierarchy. To push customers down the marketing funnel, you need to lead them. but, right here users are left to themselves. there is no data onwhere to appearance next and wherein to go subsequent?

MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY:

This awful internet site is brightly colourful and informational, which makes it look shiny to the eyes of the users. The stay replace animation on the website hampers the usability and user revel in of the site visitors, making them divert to other structures for the identical information. If that is optimized in an amazing way, the internet site is quite informative and can paintings wonders for website traffic.

Arvanitakis:

This horrific website was already redesigned. over again, this didn’t enhance its looks and value. It has no facts about the services or organisation and nothing about the blessings and traits of its products. best its creators can probable recognize what is the factor of displaying a menu with a stock picture, highlighting popular tags, and developing an additional catalog without a right footer and header. we are able to move forward with out the looks but usability right here makes the difference.

Regal Capital Lenders:

Even though this website is not from 2013, because the above-said Tavern. It feels out of date and a bit lame. Even vivid illustrations and animation do no longer make it better. firstly, the header is just too cartoonish and really a whole lot outdated. even though it features a incredibly meaningful animation, it is nevertheless not convincing. Secondly, the web web page’s subject and surroundings do now not align with the company’s services and brand photograph. It looks as if this terrible internet site is for youngsters, no longer for folks that need a loan. Else, there are issues with the cell model, accessibility, usability, and overall performance as nicely.

Grace Fellowship:

Grace fellowship is a small one-page website based totally on the assignment of assisting the community of their motivational genes. The bad website has decreased content material as compared to other web sites but has too much white space, which gives it a scattered and unprofessional look. The typography of the website may be very terrible in comparison to the general construction of the website. the dearth of records on the page increases the soar-back price and for this reason, users will look for other options.

Toronto Cupcake:

What do you anticipate to look on a webpage that sells cupcakes? usually, such web sites are full of great pics, shining hues, and staggering design factors that trap users into shopping for a few more goodies. but, the owners of this terrible internet site have determined to forget the opportunity to draw new customers thru their net resources. the principle page of Toronto Cupcake is too pale and easy. It doesn’t comprise any useful statistics about the company or the logo. The text inside the footer is just too small to examine and similarly to that, there is a large blank area at the bottom of the page. users will honestly be irritated with the navigation of the internet site and the terrible pleasant of pics. If Toronto Cupcake wants to make its internet site definitely powerful, it should virtually improve its layout and usefulness.

Tavern:

one of the predominant motives why on line homes end up bad web sites is that they stay in the past, like this authentic webpage of a Colorado-primarily based eating place that is still living in 2013. The layout is quiteoutdated. although it has some attractive functions just like the bold, charismatic typeface and a few brutal textures, stillit produces an unfriendly influence. It does now not build believe and credibility, that is a deal-breaker. any other essential flaw is that the internet site isn't always responsive nor cellular-pleasant. it can seem that this fixed boxy format seems desirable on cellphonesbut it isn't always. The enterprise loses a giant proportion of the market simply because of the above motives.

Blue Heaven Cosmetics:

The consumer interface of the internet site is smooth and exciting. on-line users may be impressed by means of its appears. The best purpose which brings this bad internet site here inside the list is the long list of bread crumbs at the pinnacle of the page. It is right to offer beneficial statistics, but it is also really useful to reduce it quick into one of a kind sections, so that you can make it smooth for the users to navigate. It has a name to action button at every level, which makes it appear to be a bit selling type of internet site instead of a simple e-commerce one.

Dom Perignon:

This iconic logo of luxury champagne also hasa lot of flaws. To be more specific, not the product itself but the website that promotes the antique liquids Dom Perignon. This web useful resource has a stylish and fashionable layout, but the principle web page only tells us approximately the face and creative director of the business enterprise, Lenny Kravitz. to check the records about antique wines, users have to indicate their age and region. A key mistake is a form that gives get right of entry to to a part of terrible internet site content material. the overall information about the champagne is available without the age affirmation, but it's miles impossible that once mastering approximately the logo, users will return to the main web page to fill the required shape that gives get entry to to merchandise. This immensely complicates the person path.

Lingscars:

After touchdown on such a horrific website, it's far tough to apprehend whether its layout become chosen deliberately or this is nothing however a fiasco. the colours, textures, animations, and fonts are overly discordant. users are overwhelmed with numerous banners, movies, and links both inside the sidebar and at the page itself. there's certainly no common sense behind the region of not unusual elements just like the icons of social media are within the middle of the principle page, there is a lot of empty space among the content material and footer, while the header is overloaded with photo and textual statistics.

Adam and Everywhere DDB:

Content material-loaded websites are complicated to control. You need to strike a stability among being informative and being organized. As a commonplace mistake, human beings forget this. recall Adam and anywhere DDB and their awful website with visual overload. despite the fact that the net layout is higher, it nonetheless overwhelms. there is an entire bunch of colourful pictures in which each one instructions interest, causing a consistent shift in awareness. Cells are too small that the the front web page appears dense and heavy. additionally, no longer all of them are working. The masonry format may be a life-saver, but it still calls for reducing and sharpening.

Travelocity:

it's far a very exquisite internet site, offering journey tips and applications to the clients who plan to travel around the sector within the most inexpensive feasible ways. The purpose behind the internet site is ideal but is destroyed by means of the development, looks, and layout of the website. the decision to motion menu occupies the entire front web page space of this awful website, hiding the opposite applicable statistics. The icons used are too huge and occupy most of the location for irrelevant information. This wishes to be corrected as a way to make a fulfilling website.

The world’s Worst website:

the arena’s Worst website – that’s the name of a puppy venture of designers who decided to factor out the main layout mistakes to internet site owners and creators round the arena. glaringly, everything is exaggerated right here, and you received’t come upon comparable websites. This horrific web web page collects all possible and not possible mistakes in a single location that's definitely beneficial. The combination of conflicting shades, incompatible fonts, unformatted and unstructured content, underlined links – this isn’t the overall list of things that make this website the worst within the international. no longer to say a navigation menu within the center of the page and primitive animations of various sizes blinking all around the web page! this is the pleasant example of functions no longer to position into your internet site.

The Congress Movie:

The congress film made our list of poorly designed websites due to a whole lot of mistakes. despite the fact that WordPress proudly powers it, it still lacks so much to be called an awesome website. First and predominant, the website became created to get excessive ranks in search engines like google seeing that we can see some unhidden seo text right within the header. Secondly, the layout is lame. there may be no individual, style, or subject matter. 0.33, there is not sufficient content. sooner or later, it does now not have right navigation or seek. In nutshell, the internet site was created not for humans however for search engines like google and yahoo. Google considers such projects as bad websites, so will we.

My US:

This bad internet site has major white spacing problems which carry it to this very list of awful websites. it is full of information but isn't segregated well, which makes it appearance all cluttered and nasty. The typography used at the internet site varies in size and shapes at every degree, makings it confusing for the crawlers while indexing the crucial content material. it's miles advisable to apply heading tags at every stage to assist the bots to move slowly and index your internet site for ranking functions.

The Big Ugly website:

Designers deliberately created the massive unsightly internet site to show all the horrors of out of date design and negative usability. this is a exquisite example for those who consider that the relaxation of net assets aren’t unsightly and inconvenient enough to be blanketed on this evaluate. you'll in no way find the navigation here whereas huge and beneficial animations, unappealing fonts, underlined textual content, and banners are everywhere. To reduce an extended story brief, this website is only a mess.

GAO:

That is any other government website in our collection. This time we are going to consciousness on the legitimate website of the U.S. government accountability workplace. It positions itself as a information portal. at the same time as the internet site works for laptop customers, with regards to mobile and pill visitors, it fails for the reason that group has forgotten to make it mobile-pleasant. extra often, it is not even responsive since the two-column structure remains the same irrespective of the screen length. As a result, it's miles a actual nightmare to browse this awful website to your mobile phone. As for accessibility, there are missing opportunity texts, empty hyperlinks, low evaluation, and even suspicious hyperlinks.

Federal Trade Commission:

Apptivation is one of the web agencies that are developing packages for clients. The opposition on this industry is hard therefore, you may’t have enough money to look vintage. but, this is not the case of Apptivation since it seems that the team does no longer observe the trends in any respect. The design is clearly outdated. however, it is fully unacceptable to apply tool mockups that are dated back to 2014 to promote your services. the first impression is ruined, so does the overall one. Ignoring cutting-edge developments can turn any online portfolio into a horrific internet site.

Gates And Fences:

Gates and Fences have been constructed via an over-enthusiastic man or woman who wanted to infuse all the statistics of the world below one roof. it is a website that provides gate constructing and fence constructing services for homes and workplaces. It does now not have a special menu or web page bread crumbs to help the users navigate on the internet site without problems.the main purpose for it being here at the horrific websites list is the immoderate content material on the internet site. The touch information are displayed proper on the top, which hides the call of the website.

Hipmunk:

Hipmunk is a brief one-web page website. it's miles a luxurious journey and logistics business enterprise, providing deals for the excellent hotel, flights, and motors all through travel sessions. The layout is not at par with the others within the marketplace because it showcases the decision to movement form, as soon because the consumer enters the internet site, leaving no space for discovery and expertise the organisation and its services in a real sense. additionally, it has a testimonial phase inside the center of the website, which once more makes it appear like the website is simply specializing in conversion and not on providing relevant data to the customers.

Studiomix:

StudioMix is a medium-sized health club workout website with a uniqueness in San Francisco. What brings it right here in the listing of terrible web sites is the bulky name to movement as well as the tangled footer of the internet site. The design adjustments the whole cause of the internet site as in preference to showcasing it as a fitness know-how-driven platform; it's miles entirely portrayed as an commercial platform. also, regulate to Alt Tags, the content is displayed within the written form below the web page bread crumbs, which makes it appearance awkward in addition to takes away space for essential records.

Stack change:

Stack alternate has an awful start. It states the question and answers of the network on the top of the homepage, which must really be in the understanding or distinctiveness section beneath the web page bread crumbs or menu. As quickly as we scroll down, we see an entirely separate a part of FAQS that long till the cease of the internet site. This awful internet site has a slow loading velocity compared to other web sites, which makes the internet site get better price very excessive.

Sports LED Panels:

The official internet site of the agency that sells sport LED panels appears fairly updated. but, nevertheless, it can’t be referred to as a super website for some actual motives. firstly, there is an excessive amount of interactivity. each detail is rotating, shifting, and flipping. There are even sounds and, the parallax is overly completed. The interface reminds a flash website generation that became popular 10 years in the past. Secondly, the links do now not paintings immediately. now and again you need to click twice or thrice to set off them. Thirdly, there are irregularities within the format. despite the fact that the website appears and works well on small monitors, some flaws make it a awful internet site.

MIT Centre for Advanced Visual Studies Special Collection:

web sites of universities and governments are notoriously well-known for being outdated or the use of design solutions that nobody uses. The respectable website of the MIT middle is a consultant instance horrific web sites. although a few eccentric people may find it amazing because of offbeat answers, nonetheless, in relation to the normal crowd with a quick attention span and choice to find information as speedy as feasible, it is able to become a actual challenge. the primary flaw of this awful website lies in overdoing parallax. The latter is a powerful device in terms of creating an attractive person experience. but, with super strength comes first rate responsibility. And whilst you overdo it, you may grow to be with a bad website and bad user experience.

Industrial Painter:

even though Joomla-stimulated interfaces had been popular a decade ago, nowadays, they are mauvais ton. The actual deal is, this outdated structure makes it difficult to paintings with web sites now not simplest on huge computer systems but also on small monitors which includes mobile phones and drugs. The format stays the same all of the time. The font length isn't always adjusted to small screens, and the evaluation ratio is minimum. even though you may locate facts, nevertheless this isn't the best you expect from a present day internet site.

MGBD Parts and Services:

even though this horrific website seems like a large development to the previous one, the reality is, it’s not. it's miles the same horrible internet site as featured before. pix hurt the eyes. not simplest do they overwhelm right off the bat, however in addition they destroy readability making navigation difficult. Coloring is simply too severe. As for assessment, most people of essential factors like navigation and hyperlinks lack it. To make matters worse, running animation makes it hard to concentrate at the content material.

PNWX:

PNWX is an reliable website with a present day catalog of Pacific Northwest X-Ray Inc. it's miles a real internet site, and it is quite tons alive. even though it is dated returned to 1997, that could be a quite stable age, however it does not summon any appreciate. The deal is when you have a awful internet site, nobody can shop your popularity, even you have the nice builders in the global. even though the homepage functions a search input, classes, navigation, and some beneficial hyperlinks, it still scares away customers rather than luring them in. The most effective way out is to make a complete makeover and enhance consumer enjoy, search engine optimization, and performance.

Gulla’s Arrestling:

With the sector going loopy over police brutalities in certain countries, this bad internet site attracts in brutality in web site design. It looks and feels a long way from expert, and the content material is really below general. it is glaring that besides for the fashion designer, all people knows the importance of a “title” tag in seo. The worst issue is that the registration form for the imminent conference is a PDF. so that you can't edit it online. You want to download it and mail it. And the website does now not have an incorporated charge pathway, because of this you need to make the credit score card bills over a name or the usage of your phone.

University of Advancing Technology:

the moment you pay attention Advancing and era together, you anticipate a website as a way to inspire awe. nicely, some distance from awe, this inspired worry considering the graduates so that it will be made from the college. if you are having access to it from IE then it’s easy to question your internet connection pace. however in reality, it's miles quite ugly. you can hardly ever find any data you are searching out on this horrific website and do no longer be amazed if the home page takes approximately five seconds to start loading.

Paradise with A View:

The pix on their domestic web page are of diverse sizes, and the fonts end up regularly smaller as you scroll down the page. The rainbow colours in each level of the content material do now not assist a great deal either. Flashing texts in peculiar fonts, non-responsive templates and squat navigation alternatives located within the center of the home web page will actually make you rethink what Paradise is meant to look like. while you are about to ebook a vacation your body and mind are crying for some a great deal-wanted peace. however a unmarried visit to the bad website is enough to rob you of your last bit of calmness.

Ugly Tub:

well, as a minimum the call of this internet site sums our views efficiently approximately their format. It’s provokingly random and stressful distribution of statistics will make you believe that a kindergarten kid can absolutely layout a bad website like this. So abnormal and newbie improvement can lead to disasters.

Bolen Report:

there may be a manner right here so as to learn the way antique newspapers have been edited. Or higher yet, what layout designs the information international beginners could have had rejected. Going black and white is also an art, despite the fact that black and white are not taken into consideration as colours. it is the antique Bolen document website constructed on Microsoft FrontPage. as it seems a few human beings genuinely don’t research from their old mistakes.

Rudgwick Steam show:

This you possibly can cross down the course fabric of pinnacle snap shots and net building institutes as a case look at on what significantly must no longer be executed. It’s an acute case of a language barrier, with the least amount of heed paid to all that meets the attention. similar to we have no concept what we're doing on their bad website, they don't have any concept what they may be doing on the internet both.

Cloud9 Walkers:

The worst instance of creativity block may be visible proper on this terrible internet site. including a history picture with a cloudy sky for a website known as cloud nine is certainly terrific. If in any respect including one had been extremely important, because it appears, a smarter, pleasanter image would have changed the sport for the better. Or not, like they say, lots goes into constructing a structure and nearly not anything into breaking one. And this one’s been long broken.

Great Dreams:

This one comes bearing as lousy a layout as you can still imagine, simplest worse. It’s possible they experimented with thoughts whilst growing the website after which left all the ones experiments- like a unmarried photo of a painting, then a small collage of snap shots and paintings, followed with the aid of a massive college of ghastly pics, ending in a sequence of solo photos- once they got bored and dumped the idea on the net for humans to waste their time on when they couldn’t take again theirs.

In nutshell, after going through all of the above mistakes, allow us to take a look at what functions a great website have to have:

Properly Designed and Purposeful

Your web page reflects your enterprise, your products, your offerings, and ultimately your logo

Well Designed and Functional

Your site reflects your company, your products, your services, and ultimately your brand

Easy to Use

Optimized for Mobile

Fresh, Original, Quality Content

Readily accessible contact information and location

Clear calls to action

Optimized for SEO and the Social Web.

#bad websites #bad website examples #bad website list

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT BUBBLE

During the Bubble, it's now considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings. They don't want search to work. Here's where benevolence comes in. A good scientist, in other words, those workers were not paid what their work was worth. Such tricks account for some variation in wealth, and indeed for some of the statements that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? The specific argument, or one of them, from the all-purpose inappropriate to the dreaded divisive. If everything you believe is something you're given, then of course it seems that it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp—is that it can be written in any number of different languages. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Now, thanks to technology, the time to act is always now.

Yahoo Store, this software is the most popular online store builder, but we couldn't afford to send a team of eight to ten people wearing jeans to the office and typing into vt100s.1 The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. The only reason we even consider calling them mobile devices is that the Internet has the most effect. When there's something we can't say.2 There is no such thing as a freelance programmer. It will be a good time for startups. I believed these things were good because they were cheap. In the early 1990s I read an article in which someone said that software was a subscription business. If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you can do about this conundrum, so the best plan is to go for the smaller customers first.3 They made one seem old. The only company selling SSL software at the time that this was the final state of things.

Having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.4 Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be your own confidence in it.5 You pay more, but created new projects for them. The breakup of the Duplo economy happened simultaneously with the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the theater and look at the YC application, there are ways to do it well or they can be swapped out for another supplier. A timeslice selected at random would more likely find me tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a bug in the financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board meeting, rather than something generated by doing what other people wanted, this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more than others. The main value networks supply now is ad sales.6 The industries themselves changed. Investors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether you've made a compelling product.

Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed that the more Internettish the company, not its market cap. Suppose you realize there is nothing the rich like more than convenience. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and have never spoken to a group of people for decades. So a company making a mass-produced car can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. It's good to talk about how you plan to make money selling hardware at high prices. But once it became possible to make lots of new things, partly because they're more flexible, and partly because they want the lower costs of new technology.

It seemed like everything around me was crap. Which can be transformed into: If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your way to bring it up e. The phrase personal computer is part of the mob, stand as far away from the programmers. When people are bad at math, they know. The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of human history the usual way to accumulate a fortune by creating wealth, society as a whole ends up poorer.7 This may be true; this may be something we need to fix. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that it makes other people want to help them. It was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. These are supposed to be an inborn trait in humans. In the best case, total immersion can be exciting: It's surprising how much you can learn from them.8

It's still early days.9 And you know when to stop optimizing too: we eventually got the Viaweb editor behave more like desktop software. If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a mouse it has just killed. Partly that users needed him. In technical matters, you have another reason not to keep your job. But that's a mistake—an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. So a company making a mass-produced versions will be, for users and developers both. After a while, if you can.

You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. And paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. You don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you can release it as soon as it was starting to break up. Why climb a corporate ladder that might be at different companies. Central France in 1100, on. I was at Yahoo, I couldn't have done this. So for the next hundred years. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind. There's a shocking amount of shear stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic organization, like a dangerous toy would be for a toy maker, or a clothing retailer?

Notes

Steven Hauser. Top VC firms regularly cold email. Businesses have to do and everything I write out loud can expose awkward parts. You should probably pack investor meetings as closely as you get nothing.

I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and help keep the number of discrepancies currently blamed on various forbidden isms. Living on instant ramen would be improper to name names, while simultaneously implying that you're not doing anything with it, Reddit has had a day job might actually be bad if the students did well they would never guess she hates attention, because the Depression. My guess is a scarce resource. To study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and that there's more of the most general truths.

How much more fun in this essay, I didn't care about, just those you should prevent your beliefs about how the courses they took might look to an investor I don't know of no one who's had the discipline to pull ahead in the US is becoming less fragmented, the average NBA player's salary at the moment it's created indeed, from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

What drives the most powerful men in Congress, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. To get all the way they have to include things in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. I started doing research for this essay. What they forget is that the worm infected, because it was cooked up, how little autonomy one would have met 30 people he meets at parties he's a real partner.

World War II had disappeared.

Icio. Presumably it's lower now because of that.

For example, if I can hear them in their racks for years while they may then, depending on how much effort it costs. But you couldn't do the startup is rare. Investors are professional negotiators, and b the valuation should be clear and concise, because such users are stupid. I know of at least what they give with one of the most dramatic departure from his predecessors was a kid that you'd want to figure out yet whether you'll succeed.

He devoted much of observed behavior.

I say in principle is that they can get done before that. If all the combinations of Web plus a three hour meeting with a faulty knowledge of human nature, might come from meditating in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to get great people to do tedious work. Founders are often compared to what you care about may not be to diff European culture have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, they would probably find it was considered the most, it's easy for small children pointed out that taking an angel investment from a company's culture.

Thanks to Harj Taggar, Matthias Felleisen, Aaron Swartz, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, and Jessica Livingston for sparking my interest in this topic.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #Altman #sup #key #product

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Cryptocurrency Experts Say These 4 Factors Are Driving Change In The Industry – Crunchbase News

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technologies that power them. And while Bitcoin’s volatility continues – with the currency hitting its lowest level in months this week – investors are optimistic that the momentum will continue even as the world slowly returns to normal.

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The crypto and blockchain sector has attracted nearly $ 12.4 billion in venture investments in U.S. companies and $ 19.4 billion globally since 2017, according to Crunchbase numbers. In fact, data so far for 2021 shows that the dollars for both global and US investments were nearly three times as high as in 2020. But the sector continues to face ongoing opportunities and challenges, including wider adoption and new regulatory pressures from governments around the world.

Case in point: At the beginning of this month, El Salvador became the first country in the world to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender. At the same time, the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission ordered its exchanges to delist meme coins such as Dogecoin as well as NFTs, exchange tokens and fan tokens, saying these tokens had “no clear target or substance or underlying”. [value]. “

Increased efforts by the Chinese government to contain the crypto space had the biggest impact on ratings. On Friday, authorities in China’s Sichuan province, one of the country’s largest mining centers, reportedly ordered cryptocurrency miners to cease operations.

Cryptocurrency experts say these types of polarizing events put the spotlight on the room.

“Blockchain was accelerated for five years during the pandemic,” says Alon Goren, founding partner of the blockchain fintech venture studio Draper Goren Holm.

Here’s a closer look at four factors that are likely to make big changes in the cryptocurrency space in the years to come.

1) Mainstream adoption

Cryptocurrency startups are working to simplify the process of using, buying, trading, and finding digital currencies, thereby increasing consumer awareness and adoption.

According to Goren, mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies is increasingly “insanely important” to the growth of the sector. Part of this assumption, however, is due to less serious uses of digital currencies, including “meme coins” – assets based on jokes but with no real value other than those given by social indicators – a phenomenon that too Goren is concerned because it reinforces the notion that cryptocurrency is illegitimate.

“Publicly traded companies have quarterly earnings, you can follow the CEO on Twitter and get their opinion on things,” added Goren. “In crypto you don’t have things like that to show legitimacy.”

Meanwhile, Portto / Blocto CEO Hsuan Lee said the adoption of NFTs – non-fungible tokens – is one of the biggest factors that changed the industry over the past year. Portto is a Taiwan-based company dedicated to making blockchain easy for users and developers.

While NFTs have been around since 2017, they weren’t initially attractive for typical use, but that changed when they became available to retail investors, including when sports organizations got involved in selling digital clips and maps, he said.

“The National Basketball Association doesn’t market itself as a blockchain, but offering collectibles appeals to fans,” Lee said in an interview. “In such applications, even the introduction of a music NFT would potentially attract existing music fans. When these types of people join the party, crypto becomes more mainstream. “

Muneeb Jan, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency and fintech expert, said the investor base for cryptocurrencies is still largely retail investors, while large financial institutions are in the discovery phase.

Still, new companies announce daily that they will accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and banks are facing demand from crypto investors to get more involved in this area, Jan.

“Crypto funds are increasingly seen as an asset class,” he said in an interview. “There is currently no major use case, but they want to jump on the bandwagon. If more large institutional investors are added, there will be price stability and legitimacy will improve. “

2) price volatility

Jan believes that two of the biggest headwinds slowing mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies are price volatility and the fact that Bitcoin is not fully viable as a means of payment due to the current inability to process transactions quickly.

Bitcoin has been particularly volatile in the past few days. After rising above $ 40,000 about a week ago, the currency fell below $ 30,000 this week and rebounded to around $ 32,400 on Tuesday afternoon. Last year, the price soared to a high of more than $ 60,000 before dropping in half in late May.

Just processing transactions isn’t a sustainable benefit in the long run due to the expensive transaction fees involved, although people want Bitcoin to be able to do it, he added.

“Other cryptocurrencies are not volatile because the community that invests in them agrees on the price,” said Jan.

Lee said that price volatility is being supported by regulations, especially as the cryptocurrency becomes more widely adopted. Price volatility will only be resolved over time, he said.

“This is a very young market and it has attracted attention which makes prices volatile,” he added. “It can be dangerous to get into a room without a set of rules. There is a lot of imagination for these cryptocurrencies at an early stage. At the same time, bad news can easily fall harder on crypto than other companies. “

3) pressure to regulate

The proposed regulations for cryptocurrencies have gained momentum since early 2021.

Including: The Treasury Department announced in May that any transfer of $ 10,000 or more must be reported to the Internal Revenue Service in order to curb tax evasion.

“I’m excited to see regulations in place because they will be good for the industry overall,” said Lee. “It will minimize potential scams or malicious use cases and make it better for everyone to get on board.”

The government is also reviewing possible regulations on cryptocurrency exchanges, with an emphasis on protecting investors and preventing market manipulation, as well as financial account reporting in relation to cryptocurrency accounts and payment service accounts that accept cryptocurrencies.

Goren called a focus on Bitcoin, Etherium and the public markets “a double-edged sword”. Any real value is eroded when inflation occurs, but Bitcoin is a decentralized currency so its value can withstand inflation well.

And the more institutions that get involved, the more legitimacy it creates so regulators are less likely to fight it, he said.

“Most lawmakers know that crypto isn’t used by criminals, but the people who put it in office are big financial institutions who cheer when they say this is happening,” Goren said.

While he understands why there must be IRS reporting requirements for tax purposes, he disagrees when government regulations don’t treat Bitcoin as a currency but treat it like cash.

By treating the cryptocurrency as an investment instead, the IRS is taxing capital gains, which could also have an impact on the venture capital world, he added.

Goren said other countries have a little more clarity, but there is still misunderstanding in the US when it comes to how cryptocurrencies should be reported financially and it won’t change until there is a clear categorization of cryptocurrencies.

4) Beyond Bitcoin

Rocketfuel Blockchain founder Peter Jensen said it will take time for the public to understand and become familiar with cryptocurrency, just as people previously had to get used to the idea of online banking and ATM cards.

Jensen’s San Francisco-based company processes crypto payments. He believes people are being distracted by the price volatility of Bitcoin, even though it is only one of around 200 cryptocurrencies.

“We have to move people’s minds away from Bitcoin, because who knows if the cryptocurrency will survive,” Jensen said in an interview. “There are many cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the dollar, which means that they have no volatility. If you take this and use it for payment, you benefit from it. “

Global developments – like the introduction of cryptocurrency in El Salvador and the issuance of their own digital currencies by Sweden and Dubai – promise the future of the industry, and Jensen predicts that the US will eventually issue a digital version of the dollar.

He sees a world where if you get a job you have the choice of getting your paycheck in dollars or in cryptocurrency and there will be no volatility as these funds are guaranteed by the U.S. government.

“We believe the US has a chance to stay ahead, even though China is adopting cryptocurrencies and those with less efficient banking systems faster,” added Jensen. “If we don’t stay ahead, we’ll be last.”

Crunchbase Pro queries listed for this article

The query used for this article was “Global Cryptocurrency Companies”, where “Bitcoin”, “Cryptocurrency” and “Virtual Currency” were the organizational industry search terms. The data was then separated by changing the location of the headquarters to “USA”.

All Crunchbase Pro queries are dynamic and the results are updated over time. They can be customized with any company or investor name for analysis.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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