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I loved her first two albums, and I can not wait for the full release of The Electric Lady.
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And you were wondering where all the cyberpunk had gone.
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Minimal Posters - Five Great Mathematicians And Their Contributions.
I would hang these, well all of them other than the newton one. Oh, and if he gets one where is Leibniz’s?
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In case you do not hav the time to rewatch Star Wars every other month, as prescribed by your doctor, let me present you with the Star Wars speedrun.
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When computers bleep, bloops, and boop.
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The Voice of Alexander Graham Bell
I really hope that the fidelity on his telephone was better than this recording.
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I get the distinct feeling that the defacement and destruction of surveillance cameras is going to become the type of game a lot of us are going to start playing soon. Probably the most fun one can have in the Panopticon.
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“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She’d remain outside the public sector. She’d be an anarchist, she’d travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She’d fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She’d really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She’d have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”
―Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead -
The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to-GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argument on a spreadsheet error. The premise behind the cuts turns out to be faulty. There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession.
Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes and poor students to forgo college, all on the basis of a mistake? It seems unlikely. After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality. We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement. True, it’s never been particularly clear exactly what the original sin was: some combination, perhaps, of tax avoidance, laziness, benefit fraud and the election of irresponsible leaders. But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy.
The morality of debt has proved spectacularly good politics. It appears to work just as well whatever form it takes: fiscal sadism (Dutch and German voters really do believe that Greek, Spanish and Irish citizens are all, collectively, as they put it, “debt sinners”, and vow support for politicians willing to punish them) or fiscal masochism (middle-class Britons really will dutifully vote for candidates who tell them that government has been on a binge, that they must tighten their belts, it’ll be hard, but it’s something we can all do for the sake of our grandchildren). Politicians locate economic theories that provide flashy equations to justify the politics; their authors, like Rogoff, are celebrated as oracles; no one bothers to check if the numbers actually add up.
David Graeber writing on how the sado-masochistic politics of austerity was all based on an economic argument that was all based on a spreadsheet error and is now refuted, he continues on to discuss a possible solution to the austerity cycle in which some Eurozone countries currently find themselves stuck. -
My goal in life is to never do something as poorly as this penalty was taken.