Latest Posts by correlation-zone - Page 3

"At the start of the year, foreigners held $20bn of Russian foreign currency debt, as well as  local debt worth more than 3tn roubles." FT.com; Lehmann in 2008 had $613 billion bank debt and $155 billion in bond debt.

Russian default is a structural risk, but decades of free money (QE) and capital reforms have deleveraged the west. This is best seen with the growth in treasury “reverse repo”

“NEW YORK, June 9 (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's reverse repurchase window on Wednesday took in $503 billion in cash, hitting a record peak for a third consecutive session, as financial institutions flush with liquidity flocked to the Fed facility to park their cash and secure Treasury collateral.”

sorry to bother u but i just came across ur post about europe cuting russia of swift and how that will killing their own economy in future, would u mind elaborating in that or maybe point me in right direction? i never hear of swift until today and i wonder if it kills europe economy why they do it? i think u also say it breaks global economy? sorry for my english, i hope u can understand me, it is okay if u do not or can not answer. thank u.

What is SWIFT and what happens if the Russians are cut off from it?

What is SWIFT? The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a high-security network that connects financial institutions around the world. It is used by different financial institutions to send and receive information, such as instructions for transferring money across borders.

Basically, SWIFT is the way international banking works. Cutting SWIFT off has only been done twice before, to Iran and the DPRK/‘North Korea’. Never with an economy like Russia’s - it’s like amputating them from the global financial system. Firstly, this means that import/export is near impossible, similarly with international services - destroying about 65% of Russia’s GDP already. That trade is important, though - the gas and grain Russia exports goes somewhere, largely to Europe. Without it, Europe has an extreme problem. Moreover, cutting off the banks also means that not only can trade not occur, but Russia can’t turn its invested capital back into cash to reinvest: it can’t liquidate its debt, which may lead to an even greater problem.

No trade, and no liquidation, means it will default on its debts. Some US banks defaulting on some debt caused the 2008 global financial crisis - this would effectively be a default on almost all of Russia’s debt. The holders of that debt aren’t Russia, either - they’re largely the west. Similarly, the freeze on the central bank’s assets means that its foreign currency reserves are basically null and void - and given that Russia’s foreign currency reserves are largely in Euro, this is as much a strike against the EU’s economy as it is Russia’s.

As for why they would do it… It will certainly destroy Russia’s economy. It is the nuclear option, economically. Just like regular nukes, though, it’s largely a mutually-assured destruction. The global economy can’t just cut off such a large aspect of itself without feeling it. However, the global economy was already in crisis. Historically, in times of crisis, the imperialist countries have been willing - or, rather, forced - to apply their most extreme methods of exploitation to themselves. If cutting off their own arm is what it takes to maintain global hegemony - which Russia was threatening - then they’ll do it.

The EU had previously refused to cut Russia off from SWIFT. The EU had also dragged its feet on shuttering the NordStream 2 gas pipeline with Russia - because these things will harm it just as much as they harm Russia. The US wanted escalation, and it wanted Russia and the EU to split - and a weaker EU is a benefit for the US, which is now starting to cannibalise its own allies. This will hurt the US, but not as much as it immediately hurts the EU. I suppose the US might have forced their hand, considering they now hold Europe’s lifeline, in the form of whatever gas exports they can muster.

I interpret this as sound that produces a mix of Fission and disassociation

https://youtu.be/PStkd5vSkaQ

https://youtu.be/UDNWvbtoR_4

https://youtu.be/n-1V0zom0HU

https://youtu.be/Zu8cN5sMOHc

https://youtu.be/-lQqP5c5028

https://youtu.be/KRKD-kJ0kUU

Hopefully some are interesting?

need more songs on my wake up playlist that make me feel like an abomination

Hot take Engine: Bloodborne PSX

Bloodborne PSX is a fascinating work of fandom and dedication, demaking the first zone of Bloodborne into something that could fit on a PSX disc, and that looks and sounds the part perfectly. It’s an interesting technical feat, but is it the only way we’ll ever see Bloodborne on PC? Hot Take Engine is a collection looser videos, one-off streams, various experiments for my channel, and maybe one day even video-essays.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Youtube  -  Structured, researched, in-depth let’s play episodes Twitch     -  Unhinged blurs of live criticism and sex jokes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - https://twitter.com/SelfCritAuto https://www.patreon.com/SelfCriticalAutomaton https://ko-fi.com/selfcriticalautomaton - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Also, I started a discord server for announcements about when I’m streaming! https://discord.gg/WcKr48Mx - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -    

mccarthyism

Kwasi Kwarteng, the UK business secretary, has opened a new front in Britain’s culture wars by blocking the appointment of a leading academic to run a £200mn economic research body because he was supposedly too leftwing. An ally of Kwarteng said the business secretary was concerned the academic had been a member of the Communist Party in the past.

Original sin right there, what a joke country.

Worth noting the ESRC is a tiny part of the UK research budget; with STFC being comprehensively gutted (also to note STFC operates much of the big-iron experimental labs with fixed costs, so that drop is amplified in it’s effect on workers and project starts)

h/t https://twitter.com/ZJemptv

Maintain your means of being-in-the-world (I had a busy morning)

Grimes: I shall be ~so edgy~

Eyes: I dont even know them

I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.  So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for.  

NonononoONO

Reblog this to prove your blog was made before the February 2022 tumblr resurgence

CHERI is to Iron Dome as

Stuxnet is to CBRN as

Palantir is to the TLA’s

The Manticore, 2

from Enemy004

with regards to entities discovered in Enemy001, and Enemy003

Ghost*Fruits//Enemy

2021&2

The ??? Ordeal of being seen to steal from surfaces

I've got nothing to say on the MCM or AO3 - but in The Very idea of Consumption Graeber tries to tease out the necessity of marketed, individualised desire and consumption for the development of capitalism.

Graeber identifies a shift in the philosophy of desire. Medieval moralists constructed a conception of desire as an internal sensation that whilst motivating action, can never be fulfilled in the material world (a relation that sounds relevant to the cast of Zero). If acquiring power over objects of desire is futile, this precludes a development of a consumer class; "Economically, the Middle Ages were still the time of target incomes, in which the typical reaction to ... almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences."

Just as Red Dust tries to focus on the on-the-ground developments that force policy change, Graeber recasts the instigator of a philosophy of individual desire away from Descartes' division of "Imagination and experience" that could lead one to "try to satisfy one’s desires in what we have come to think of as the real world" and to MacPherson's "possessive individualism" where people "increasingly came to see themselves as isolated beings who define their relation with the world not in terms of social relations but in terms of property rights."

And this is perhaps how the enjoyment of media began to be cast as capitalist consumption, even as nothing is destroyed or consumed in any way. "When you eat something, you do indeed destroy it but at the same time, it remains included in you in the most mate­rial of senses. Eating food became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and gratification in a world in which ... all human relations were being reimagined as questions of property."

So is there any artistic production anymore that is not shaped by the environment of capitalism? Otaku or Trekkies; the act of writing shipping fic is the act of a person engaged in unanalienated production within a community and is hardly defined by its embedding in media produced for capitalist gain.

Insofar as social life is and always has been about the mutual construction of human beings, the ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us forget this. The misuse of consumption to refer to a range of activities from the destruction of the climate for games of speculative accumulation to a amateur rock band practicing in a garage makes it impossible to see how to build a better world; it blinds us to the possibilities @canmom​ suggests of using the social and physical infrastructure capital as left us to build a empowering and sustainable world, neglecting and forgetting those aspects tainted by capital.

I think the distinction between tropes/fanfic and "real literature" (which imo can be independently published and not part of the western academic canon and still be 'real') is not necessarily a semantic distinction but moreso one of quality. If it's something mass-produced or cliche or pandering it's a trope. If it's something meaningful it's an archetype. Of course there's a high degree of subjectivity there, but, there's that much subjectivity in this entire discussion as a whole since we're talking about high-brow vs low-brow art in the first place. But personally what I would consider low-brow is what's popular, but not popular as in 'well-liked', popular as in 'this was very obviously made for no other purpose than to generate profit and it did exactly that'. Artwork that's essentially just product, made for mass-appeal and marketability, and all the fan-works that simply reflect and reproduce those writer-slash-advertiser's same capitalist values. That's the connotation I get for 'tropes'. Just mass-appeal for the hell of it. Why is it fair that the zeitgeist of the old days contained characters and stories made for creative and expressive purposes whereas nowadays we have characters and stories made to sell toys and movie tickets.

here is something i'd like you to think about: like comrade Bela Belasz you use 'popular' and 'commercial' interchangably. Belasz argues (2010, pg 212) that the production of a film takes place on an industrial scale. it is the "collective achievement of the scriptwriter, director, cameraman, set designer and actors" along with the "producer's perpetual meddling" (today we'd add CGI animation studios and so on). because of the cost involved and because of the level of coordination in the production, for Belasz, a film relies on its "universal comprehensibility and popularity, in other words, [its] profitability" (pg 211). every (collective) artistic decision will be tempered by the injunction not to put this popularity in jeoprady. this is the extent to which popular and commercial are interchangable in mass culture; if a work is to succeed as a commodity it has to be capable of achieving popularity.

[1.2k words, obtuse]

but look here: for Belasz, this popular imperative snatched cinema from the bourgeoisie. "An art form that has grown into a major industry could not remain the privilege of the ruling classes. It is a dialectical feature of the capitalist economy that on occasion a privilege has to be sacrificed for the sake of profit" (pg 212). the commodification of cinema in some sense democratizes cinema; it is forced to move from a vehicle of élite valorization to a Volksgeist where several contradictory aspirations contest. so for Belasz this popularity is not irredeemable. while popularity, as he sees it, "inevitably lowers the level of expression initially," the audience is educated by the medium, is quickly bored of the safe and trite, and itself demands more challenging work. the audience and the medium develop together. soon the appetite for challenging work is placing strain on the limits of universal comprehensibility. the availability of niche cinema waxes and wanes (there was a time when Sony set a high watermark for sponsoring independent cinema, then quickly stopped supporting it; Netflix and Adult Swim both license a lot of small shows and give their creators an essentially unprecedented level of freedom to make television, at the same time as mass market toy-driven shlock like Disney's Marvel is reaching its zenith) the reasons for which deserve an adequate empirical explanation. but as i see it, commercial forces actually habitually clear the way for sophisticated art.

now it sounds like i'm defending the Value-form. that's not really what i mean. it's just that your criticism of art under capitalism is reactionary. to rescue art you would restore feudalism. then whenever Disney starts making films you actually like you'll stop complaining. but what is frightening about capitalism isn't what it takes from us, it's what it offers us. Orwell's 1984 of repressed and deluded prisoners isn't half as frightening as Skinner's Walden Two of free-range happy lemmings. the only question worth asking, to my way of thinking, is what emancipatory potentials are opened by the dynamic under discussion?

now here's where i really disagree with you, anon. according to you, fan works "reflect and reproduce" the "writer/advertiser's" "capitalist values." my disagreement is twofold. my first case is already obvious: even the original artistic commodity doesn't simply or exclusively contain capitalist values; it is forced by the conditions of its production to accomodate multiple aspirations, such that even completely uncritical fan work can express values antithetical to capitalist domination. but here is my second complaint: fan works are NOT commodities. further, they are not even mass culture; they are the immediate, personal expression of a single creator (or doujin circle). therefore, they are under no obligation to hitch themselves to universal comprehensibility, popularity or profitability. they are not determined by the same market conditions as the original work. this means that fan works have complete autonomy and can achieve any level of sophistication without anxiety. this is a luxury only enthusiasts have access to today. even Alexandre Dumas was paid by the word. and if you actually go and read any fanfiction you'll find out that their authors do not recognize any obligation to reflect or reproduce the values of the original work. in fact it's an absurd idea. most fanfiction authors tear the original to pieces; they ruthlessly criticize it and then submit their own corrected version.

but i think when we talk of fan works like this we're sometimes missing the point. perhaps all fan works are works of art, but they are often also other things too, and artistic values might not be the guiding values in either their creation or reception. fanart of a character often serves a devotional function; people have a favourite character who becomes something like an imaginary friend (or a waifu), and to satisfy this companionship such a person will surround themselves with fan art, draw it all the time or comission someone else to draw it for them. at other times the character appears in fanart as an ubermarionette, something like a stock character, not substantially different from other tropes(!) like the maid outfit. in this respect Touhou is comparable to Harlequinade: every character is reducible to a handful of memorable relationships and quirks and can be arranged in an endless number of comic situations. meanwhile most fanfiction seems to serve a function within the fandom community, establishing the writer's identity, satisfying, shocking or pleasuring their peers, and so on. these are uses of drawing and writing other than artistic expression that people find worth doing.

to you this will all sound horrifying. by absorbing characters as imaignary friends and mediating interpersonal dynamics with retellings of light novels these fans are brainwashing themselves with the Value-form! gasp! but it just isn't true. let me tell you something: commodities don't exist for very long. a use-value is a commodity insofar as it is being exchanged. when i am making it it is not yet a commodity; it merely expresses a potential to become a commodity. and after i have purchased it, when i get home and unwrap it, it is no longer a commodity. now i am embracing a use-value. its potential to become a commodity expresses an influence over its production (as we have expressed), and it might express an influence over how i interact with it at home (if i hoped to sell it later, for example). but when eating spinach, the commodity-form is not nourishing me, it is the actual protein that i'm consuming. when i fuck an onahole i am not reproducing capitalist values any more than i am the human species. it's a silly idea.

now let's apply it to characters from commercial properties: how often do i encounter Zero from Drakengard 3 as a commodity? in fact never; i cannot buy Zero, only a token of zero (a game featuring her, a 3d figure, some lewd fanart; or an NFT, the token on everyone's minds). characters can never actually even become commodities (with the possible exception of 'adoptables', characters associated with a customary form of ownership). i might encounter Zero as someone's property, for example if i tried to sell my own Zero tokens at a large enough scale that it attracted Square Enix's attention. but what is being limited is my right to make products derived from this character, not my access to the character herself. in fact, what is limited is only my access to elements of her specific design and so forth. the breathless moments i spend with her in my imagination are completely authentic, unalienated, impenetrable to the form of Value.

ForbiddenFruit

This ublock origin filter script will block ~EVERY POST~ tumblr hopes is acceptable to the fruit company! Enjoy the chaos; stare into the heart of darkness or just get suicide prevention tips Apple thinks would harm it’s ~brand~. Use it with Ublock Origin by adding this URL to your custom filter lists.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/coralmw/6e87b3b8aba7799c7ba946495508ce10/raw/0c180233c1f5ccdc6584501a1703d4368efc7c88/forbiddenFruit.txt

🥼

👁️‍🗨️

🌺

🌊

🎈

📮

“Why should a French or a German citizen be born with access to world-class services and well-protected rights (actual implementation on the basis of minority status may differ), while a Somalian citizen is not only denied those things, but also faces huge obstacles in becoming a citizen (or even a resident) of anywhere else? If you are born a citizen of Japan, there are 190 countries you can travel to freely without a visa; if you are a citizen of Afghanistan, there are only 25. If you are born a U.K. citizen, and feel like a change of scene, you can pay $7 for permission to go to Canada, hop on a flight, and stay for up to six months without anyone bothering you. If you are born in a refugee camp, it can take years before you even get a chance to live in a place like Canada. So how can we possibly consider ourselves to be people who care about freedom and autonomy, when thanks to borders our destinies are practically assigned to us at birth? Is it absurd to form your own state? Or is it more absurd to have states in the first place?”

— Aisling McCrea, No Man Is An Island?

Well, the boomers did have a easier ride? this is GDP % change per person for the UK. Red lines highlight the early career of the youngest boomers, from ages 20 to 40. Analysis mine, so probably shit. Data ONS and World Bank.

Change per capita is a relevant metric as we want to determine how much of the wealth in a population someone can accumulate, and so working during a period of high growth per capita suggests a high potential for wealth accumulation.

Comparing to Millennials is hard, as we largely have not entered the workforce and those who have joined in the midst of the largest global downturn in modern history. But comparing to Gen Yrs born in the 1980′s suggests the boomers had 6.5x higher growth per capita averaged over the early career. This is a huge difference!

The rich millennials - I am going by Piketty here, inequality breads inequality. During the boomer years, the rising tide did lift all boats but as the pace of growth dropped, preexisting capital and new rent seeking structures have consolidated wealth into modern dynasties. This is compounded by the post 2008 new normal of maybe 1% growth making it impossible to compete with existing capital.

TL,DR: Boomers arn’t evil, just the most fortunate modern generation by a large margin. This leads to the typical structure where oppression is caused by the lack of understanding from power of the needs of the oppressed class.

AND plz correct for factual or analytic mistakes - this isn’t my field!

honestly though there are rich millennials? and there are poor baby boomers? like the idea that my grandparents are somehow of an oppressive class who’ve had life much easier than me is absurd to me?

boys w/ nail polish. rb if u agree

Why on earth would you like herpesviruses? Don’t they cause STDs?

Herpes simplex virus 2 does indeed cause a sexually transmitted disease, but there are several other herpesviruses that infect humans, many of which are not sexually transmitted. Coldsores, chicken pox and glandular fever...

racism is over