roxanedrawing

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Apparently there was some kind of race scheduled at a local park or something so I've been trying to avoid the main trail but a little while ago when I had to cross near it I overheard the following shouted exchange

Higher feminine voice: woo, look at you go! You're jogging! Keep it up!

Lower masculine voice (panting): you know it! Last place is still a place, baby!

And goddamn if that didn't rewire my brain a little bit.

Last place is still a place, baby.

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Hey man, ahead of this heatwave I'm gonna go ahead and rip the veil off of something for you:

The reason American Southerners have the luxury of saying that 90 ain't that bad and it's not unbearable until it's 100 is 1) prolonged exposure to high temperatures over multiple decades 2) our mindset for these living conditions.

You don't have number 1, and you can't just acquire it, so I need you to adopt number 2 immediately. How do you live like a Southerner in the heat?

Don't be a hero.

Stay inside. Buy a box fan, put it next to a bucket of ice, and wrap your arms around it like a lover. Do not leave the shade under any circumstances. If a dude makes fun of you for getting out of the sun, don't get mad, just think of a funnier insult to call him while you flip him off and go stand under a tree.

Southerners love nothing more than to exaggerate and lie to each other. Like I think we got off on the wrong foot when you walked in on us saying things like "It was only 110, I didn't even take my damn jacket off" when really, last week it was 95 at 10 PM and we were on the bed buck nekkid in front of the fan moaning incoherently and praying to die. So yeah, we can take extreme heat. We also want you to think we can take ludicrous heat. You must learn to talk shit and then be a hypocrite and a coward in your actions, because this will serve you best.

It sounds like I am joking but I cannot express to you how much I am not. Do not fuck with Mother Nature, because that bitch will kill you. Take every opportunity to lower your body temperature and drink water, because that is what all of us in hot climates are doing all the time, and that is why we are not dead, even when it seems like we should be.

(And yeah, we do go through like two and a half ugly weeks in April every year where everyone wants to absolutely just goddamn drop dead because none of us have our heat tolerance back, but we must go to work anyway, which must be a crime. And yes, when it gets below 70 we really all do short circuit and cover ourselves in seven jackets, except for Shorts Guy.)

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The goal of ICE is to permanently target non-white people with harassment/disrespect/terror.

Guess what? You will never stop immigration. You are never going to have a country run by dumbass white racists.

The last days of MAGA fascism will be met with overwhelming righteousness.

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A digital painting from a while back, some kind of peace, some kind of clarity

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Hey Americans I cannot stress this enough: CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. TODAY. House and Senate. The bill about to be voted on is one of if not the most awful legislation in American history.

DEMAND your reps vote against Trump’s horrible so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”.

Whether your reps are republicans or democrats, call them! Even a ton of republicans are spooked by how many Americans hate this bill and how it could damage their election chances. Make them afraid!

You can find your representatives and there contact info by searching your zip code on this website:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

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Like to charge reblog to cast

How much (little) are the AI companies making?

I'm in the home stretch of my 24-city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in LONDON TODAY (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER TOMORROW (July 2).

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[roxanedrawing]

has everyone forgotten how happy they look when their beaks are open

they are like beautiful tropical birds to me

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hey sexy. I can tell by the frequency of your blog updates that you are once again avoiding it all

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Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

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for a weird second i thought this was a photograph

Edmund Dulac

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“We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.”

— Hildegard von Bingen, from ‘Selected Writings’ (via letheane)

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this is also the case for [my] ADHD meds; I avoid taking them when the weather gets hot

Just a little PSA for all our mental health (and chronic pain*) spoonies out there! A lot of doctors neglect to mention this little side effect, which means a lot of us are suffering extra from the heat without knowing why.

*Many psych meds are used to treat chronic pain as well, if you didn’t know!

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and people don't get why you're having so much difficulty, every step of the way

common occurrences with #adhd

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i think the reason we’re all in a constant state of feeling like we need to look at our phones just to “do something with our hands” is because of the mechanization of textile production i’m so serious