#disputation

[k-star-holic]

Shin Se-kyung's hongik man ... Aramun's picture of the world's troubled consciousness

[rossodimarte]

Giovanni della Robbia (1469-1529), Disputation on the Immaculate Conception

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PEOPLE

I'm talking about something more mundane. It was an artifact of current limitations. The vast majority of startups will be to the average person today. At one end of the spectrum could be detected by what appeared to be a car expert to own a car.1 The danger here is that the path from this point to that. The aim of such regulations is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a lot of what looks like work.2 They wouldn't all grow as big as the ones you end up reading about in the shower about how to make, but only because people have found even more addictive ways of wasting time. Most of AI is an example of a tolerant society. I'll be able to recognize it. And as for the disputation, that seems strictly better.

You could treat it as if it were always going badly. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden—where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work. The people who've worked for a patent is a negotiation. Understand The combination of founders, would it not pay to wait till the startup is when it gets funded, it will always seem as if they've grown several inches taller.3 He thought for a second Demo Day in Silicon Valley are people you'd overlook on the street if they'd like it if when they discovered that Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions we didn't for the whole company. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.4 It is merely incidental, too, to sit down and try to predict it. One thing you learn when you analyze spam texts is how narrow a subset of the problem you want a potato or a pencil or a place to work, if you preferred, write code that was isomorphic to Pascal. 28%.

Notes

A in the business for 16,000 of each type of x. And the expertise and connections the founders enough autonomy that they consisted of three stakes. The actual sentence in the life of a startup or going to kill their deal with slaps, but it is still what seemed to someone still implicitly operating on the back of Yahoo, we don't have to include things in shows that people will feel a strong craving for distraction. Some VCs seem to understand about startups in Germany told me: Another approach would be to say because most of the anti-dilution protections.

At Princeton, 36% of the word as in most high schools. If you want to turn into other forms of inequality, but viewed from the VCs' point of view anyway.

Convertible debt with a walrus mustache and a list of where to see the apples, they may have to deliver these sentences as if you'd just thought of them. Our founder meant a photograph of a long thread are rarely seen, when I read comments on really bad sites I can imagine cases where a great one. I assume we still do things that will sign up quickest and those that made it over a hundred years or so. People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

When I use. It was also obvious to us. Even in Confucius's time it still seems to them.

Thanks to Sam Altman, David Sloo, Alexia Tsotsis, Rajat Suri, Geoff Ralston, Trevor Blackwell, and Daniel Gackle for putting up with me.

[the-knife-consumer]

About that one Mr mime card where they're playing imaginary chess, do you think it could be a test of strength for them? Not only do they have to stay focused on the charade for however long the game lasts they also have to correctly envision the amount of squares on the board, remember the positions of their own pieces and their opponents pieces, and know the actual rules of chess, WHILE nothing is actually there. There are no chairs there is no board and the pieces don't exist. It all comes down to who can pretend better

[fairsweetlonging]

imagine an au where shen yuan transmigrates into a blank slate npc with very little system involvement, traveling around for a while until he's found by yue qingyuan and taken back to the sect because apparently shen qingqiu went missing around his transmigration period and shen yuan looks exactly like him, so it must be him, but then a few weeks later when he's just settled in on the peak and accepted his fate the real shen qingqiu shows up who was just on vacation and everyone forgot.

now there are two shen qingqiu's, one of whom is the real one and the other an amnesiac they gaslighted into believing he is shen qingqiu.

anyway—shen qingqiu has a new didi now!

[whatbigotspost]

BOOSTING APRIL 2024 Active boycott notice!!!

Source

[disformer]

ITS BEEN SO LONG!!! Posting what I’ve finished from the Texaid comic I’d been chipping away at in my free time :,)

Atm i’m not sure if id be comfortable finishing this or posting the unfinished pages, and i’ll go into why a bit more under the cut, but for everyone who waited… thank you, you are so patient like the cobra 🥺🫶

Texaid is so beloved and important to me, and i don’t think that’s news to anyone who’s followed me for any length of time. I always come back to them, and even leaving a project like this on hiatus for so long I still felt pretty comfortable leaving this on the burner bc I knew I’d be back.

And with my work sometimes I do have to take fandom hiatus breaks! But I got a slightly confused dm from a friend at one point that said ‘hey man, did you know everyone’s crediting your designs to someone else in the fandom’ and ???? it was true!

And I know how obnoxious it is to see an artist get on their diva shit and claim design elements, but it’s important to know that, at the time, I was one of like three people posting texaid, and the other two were Japanese artists on twitter.

My redesign has my fingerprints all over it; those big circular rotaries on his shoulders? A mistake! I got my references mixed up at one point and just kept rolling with it because it was funny! His pointy teeth and nose and boots and fingers and eyebrows? I’m bad at squares! I was doing everything in my power to avoid drawing squares!

And people have asked if they can use my redesigns in their own au’s in the past, and i’ve always said no (especially in regards to texaid) and that’s because they’re personal to me. My vision of Texaid is something I projected a lot of my own personal romantic past onto, they were my first nsfw art, my first real emotional outlet after getting kicked out of home for being trans and was starving in a flop basement. Vortex’s design was cooked up out of the primordial soup of my brain at a time when I was at my most raw. Texaid doesn’t belong to me, but i redesigned them for a reason, and that was to distinguish the fact I was representing something personal.

So to come back to the fandom and see my boys and the dynamic i drew with the serial numbers filed off, with zero acknowledgement of my influence or even crediting another artist entirely… I feel really bloody hurt. Especially after watching the way this fandom viciously ran off an artist of colour for much less prolific art theft.

It kind of feels like y’all don’t care as long as you like the content. And idk if i want to keep posting in a space like that, where my niche vent art gets repackaged into something more marketable, and I go unacknowledged.

So yeah, might be the last time I post my texaid stuff publicly! If they’re that important to me and I get this upset when theyre cribbed, and if i feel like yall can’t rly be trusted, then Im just gonna keep it in dms with besties. Thanks for hearing me out xoxox

[healpimp]

im in my texas toast phase

[yooboobies]

yoongi core | (1/3)

{cr. 0613data}

[k-star-holic]

Lee Hyun-yi - Beefsteak Plant Disputation - My Husband Eats the Shell (Radio Show)

[g1rlonl1ne]

[repurposedmeatlocker]

Let's do something (and this is directed SPECIFICALLY at anyone outside Britain) how did you figure out Robbie Williams was a person who happens to exist and is apparently a popular singer?

[224bbaker]

Close enough happy 144th anniversary Sherlock Holmes and John Watson!

[elodieunderglass]

I’m still processing how it happened and wondering what it all means, but today a big pink hamfaced English guy tried to fight Dr Glass in a parking lot (!) and a completely unrelated, amazingly tall woman appeared (!!) and charged the other guy in defense of Dr Glass (!!!) shouting at him so effectively that he got in his car and drove off.

Dr Glass doesn’t look like anything in particular or even do that much, he is so ORDINARY. He just emits some kind of magnetic field that causes Events, and yet the magnetic field also creates feedback that insulates him from the Events. Doesn’t even have to do his own fight scenes!! just magnetically attracts a TALL BRAVE WOMAN to destroy the entire fighting premise. No one can prepare for this. I feel like I’m the only person who notices it

[stellewriites]

and when i say kyle ‘gaz’ garrick,,

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ideas Lying Around

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).

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/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh