Philippines unemployment rate falls down to 3.5% in February 2024

Recently the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) confirmed that the unemployment rate of the nation fell down to 3.5% in February 2024, according to a Philippine News Agency (PNA) news article. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the PNA news article. Some parts in boldface… Unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent in February this year from 4.5 percent in January, the…

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Me: positive responses to my school work? The hell?

Teacher: well, yeah, you did good-

Me: but this- I! Did this!

Teacher: yes. Well done

Me: holy shite! I did good? What if I do another task?

Teacher: awesome!!!!

Me:

I present to you: the mind boggling concept of getting praised for your accomplishments rather than punished for your mistakes.

I've been living off this experience for over 6 months.

gankutsuou + incest as the meaning of the gothic novel - ruth perry

*Sweating throwing up nauseous dizzy*

What if vox is Asian American

there's a very specific kind of vibe that comes with living with your friends in final year that it just does not have in first year or even second year. like as a fresher it's usually the first time any of you have lived away from home let alone with SO MANY people your age and it's terrifying and exciting and randomised to boot so it's generally carnage for a whole year in the best and worst ways, and then second year you pick who you're living with and it feels like for the first time you're doing this adult thing PROPERLY. you have a place of your own now. these are the people you've chosen to live with. studying gets serious etc. but it's still fresh. it's still new. you still don't know how to navigate it. but final year? final year is when you actually get it right. you know how to manage your time better. you know what works for you and what doesn't. studying is the main focus and you've been out in the world for three years now and it's not loud and boisterous like it was in first year and you're not exciteable and awkward like you were in second year. you're comfortable. every single one of my flatmates has their own friend group and we mainly keep to our own social circles, but we'll still meet each other back at the house after a night out and sit in the kitchen or my room to do the debrief. sometimes i'll go days not seeing either of them despite sharing a house but every now and then someone will softly call up the stairs that 'the heating's on!' or one of us will sneeze and the other two will yell 'bless you!' through the walls. the lack of interaction isn't interpreted as dislike in ways it would have been even last year, because we're all just old enough to be past that now and settled enough in our friendship not to worry about it. idk. uni is very loud and unsettling a lot of the time so it's been really sweet to see how almost boringly comfortable final year is.

"In a mere 30 years, Singapore has become a leading economic power in Southern Asia. Recently, I asked some visitors from Singapore to what they attributed their country's dramatic rise. The visitors responded simply, "You have to realize that we have nothing - only ourselves". With no natural resources and with modest endowments of physical and financial capital, the people of Singapore realized that the country's only real asset was its people.

They thus invested in accordingly in their education system and in a host of related social infrastructures aimed at safe, healthy living conditions and economic opportunity for all members of their society. This [...] realization that people are our only real asset illustrates the core of what will probably determine which countries and which organizations will thrive in the 21st century."

- Human Dynamics, Sandra Seagal & David Horne

Also you should all watch Spice & Wolf

Okay, but for everyone already hating on Frye bc "forehead big", I honestly feel like she's my favorite because of this one interaction here. From everyone's arguments, you get a feel of what they're like

Shiver is artsy and poetic, yeah, but "rock is a foundation" is an overused sentiment. And Frye literally calls her out on this, saying "bro is that all you got?" It's like she's trying to come off as artsy, rather than actually being so

Big Man... I love you so much, but all you got for scissors is that they're sharp. That's about it

But Frye? Her reasoning for paper is its versatility--that it can be folded into anything as sharp or soft as you want it to be, AND can be used to write some slamming poetry (which is something you'd expect someone artsy like Shiver to say, huh?)

At the wrap up, when Shiver says "this is in the bag," Frye then says "bro bags are MADE of paper," she's got the strongest comeback out of everyone. She's already proving that, while maybe a little airheaded, she's no slouch in the group when it comes to wit

Anyways, I'm going team Paper this splatfest and Frye's already my pick for favorite member of the group

We know. We been known before the evidence came out 💅🏽 listen to your friendly neighborhood communist that you write off as crazy when they tell you USA is behind the most crazy recent world event. Hersh also broke the My Lai massacre. US divers conducted a NATO drill 3 months prior to the explosion and planted bombs on the pipeline, detonated it months later to cause Russia $20 billion dollars in loss & make sure that Europe didn’t rely on Russian gas.an act of terrorism

Foreign direct investments (FDI) inflows jump almost 90% in February 2024

The data released by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) confirmed that foreign direct investments (FDI) net inflow went up by almost ninety percent in February 2024, according to a Philippine News Agency (PNA) news article. In terms of Dollar amount, the estimate was over $900 million. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the PNA news article. Some parts in…

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once again sitting with my head in my hands thinking about web weaving with de quotes + trigun. an act of complete self indulgence but i am so deeply unwell about these two things

A European promoter I spoke to recently said that only the blockbuster shows in Europe this year and next are likely to sell out, citing legacy acts like Bob Dylan and pop megastars like Harry Styles as being immune from market pressures. For the rest, especially those in the middle, staring at lacerations in venue seating plans will be the norm as ticket sales struggle to even cover their overheads and profits become a pipe dream.

The recent introduction of “dynamic pricing” by Ticketmaster might generate even more money for the likes of Bruce Springsteen on their tours, but all this is doing is taking any extra money that might have been spent on tickets for Springsteen et al + some other acts and re-routing it back to the tour gross of Springsteen et al. Live music within this model might just prove to be a next-level pioneer in trickle-up economics.

Some acts are responding by seeking to make tickets affordable for audiences, trying to lower their touring overheads and praying the equation keeps them in the black.

Hot Chip’s recent residency at Brixton Academy in London had tickets magnanimously frozen at £20 each. “[W]e know how hard things are financially for many people at the moment,” they said, “but we also know people want to go out to gigs and enjoy themselves.”

Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott recently announced that their upcoming UK arena tour would have tickets capped at £30 each.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Heaton said, “It’s really important through the coming months, and possibly years, that we tell the fans, ‘We’re getting paid enough and we want to keep it low for you.’ I think people are delighted. I’m very much against greed within the industry because I feel as though there is quite a lot. So we’re trying to just battle and say, ‘Look, we’ll do it for as low as we can,’ and set a bit of an example.”

It was a fine and noble gesture, but many acts – even if they harshly stripped things back at a production level – would still not be able to make such prices work. This is a beautiful option for some, but it is not a workable option for many.

- Eamonn Forde, Music Business Worldwide, on the economics of live music

@archaalen i’m breaking this out as its own post bc it’s a huge digression that doesn’t really bear on the main thread, but I wanted to say something about this:

Poverty reduction and improving Healthcare are resisted with almost equal fervor in this country. A concerted effort has been made so that ANY political reform away from baseline is now fraught and prone to collapse without unsustainably-large voting mandates.

in that I think it depends on the strategy and depends on the era. Opposition to poverty reduction, esp. through welfare, is mostly tied to racial anxieties and is mostly a Reagan and post-Reagan thing, thanks to the myth of the welfare queen and the stereotype of poor, urban, black poverty that goes hand-in-hand with the shift in urban economics after white flight (itself a consequence of desegregation). which is to say, I don’t think you’re wrong per se, just that this is an artifact of the present political moment, and one that’s not inescapable.

One reason Sanders is comparatively successful as a politician is that his economic platform is framed in terms which IMO hearken back to pre-Reagan debates on poverty and welfare, and are more akin to early 20th century socialism in America and Depression-era anti-poverty policy. Note I mean his rhetoric, and not the content specifically; I think Sanders has some cross-party appeal that identical or nearly identical policies don’t have under similar politicians that are closely aligned with him, because Sanders, mostly unintentionally, is less off-putting to people who are worried about the undeserving poor benefiting from social programs. it helps that he’s white and old and fuck, ofc, in the same way that if AOC never mentioned race or gender and owned a whole arsenal of small arms she’d probably still be depicted as a swivel-eyed lunatic, just because some voters are inevitably going to judge you on your appearance.

Economic issues are an intensely racialized dynamic in the US--the undeserving poor are stereotyped as the lazy, drug-addicted urban blacks, the deserving poor are stereotyped as the hardworking rural or small-town whites who can’t catch a break, and this whole dynamic is derived from, modulo 160 years of metamorphic processes on the original social division, a need by the land and propertyholding class to foster a division that prevents solidarity among the peasant classes to weaken their political power. Because this enduring division produces politics in America that are just insanely, fractally racist, it is possible to find examples of what @afloweroutofstone​  usefully calls “red state socialism:” social programs and anti-poverty measures popular even in red states, because either they were originally aimed only at whites (common for Depression-era and post-WW2 social programs in the US), or are framed/thought of as primarily benefiting whites.

Now, I am not arguing that ignoring the relationship between race and poverty is honest, morally correct, or tactically correct. Nonwhite voters matter, their interests are legitimate, and voters who are reluctant to support policies that would benefit them, because they’re worried a racist caricature in their head might also benefit, are assholes. And while there are strains of political thought that IMO focus so intensely on race as a dividing line in American politics, without considering either its origin in a system of oppression with economic ends or ways it could be indirectly mitigated through focusing on more equal wealth distribution (because racist rhetoric is most effective alongside economic misdirection--i.e., you are poor because they are getting the wealth that should be yours), in ways which end up being tactically counterproductive, but I think these are not actually very important in the grand scheme of things, and mostly come to general attention when being used as a cudgel against those who have the temerity to mention racial injustice in a political context.

and looking at things from a recent perspective, I think there’s even more reason to be optimistic, because racial dynamics around economic discourse in the US are only part of the story. the other part is the degredation of the consensus of the 80s, that social programs are bad and a “frictionless” (i.e., precarious) labor market is good, and economic growth goes lockstep with how deregulated the economy is. that whole picture blew up hard at the end of Bush’s second term, hard enough that the policies of the 80s and 90s have been retroactively completely discredited in large sections of the political discourse, and the subsequent period of recovery has not really improved the picture what with the pandemic and great resignation and real estate and crypto bubbles that can be seen from space.

in short, I think that while it’s true that right now you need supermajorities to do something about economic justice right now in the US, the arrow is trending favorably generally, bc in the 90s the overwhelming consensus was that the best way to reduce poverty was to end welfare, the 2008 recession was a huge shakeup to the post-Reagan consensus that dominated even the Democratic party (as under Clinton), and further challenges to that consensus continue to mount, although intermittently. IMO the pandemic checks were kind of a watershed--suddenly we had a context where not only was the idea of the government literally just mailing everybody money a possibility, but it was overwhelmingly popular not just with voters but with politicians.

the heavily gerrymandered and gerontocratic nature of the American political system continues to slow progress, but so far only slow it. hopefully enough progress is made to circumvent a really big explosion.

recommended tumblr post: economists are unethical and evil and we should just kill them all

me, an economist: