Tootfinder

I've been reading Ray Dailo's "Principles for dealing with the changing world order" in which he charts the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms and dynasties.
The main cycle, he reckons is:
1) Winner of a war consolidates power, unites the population (often through oppression)
2) A smart cooperative equitable educated society with meritocracy means good societal progress and wide sharing of the wealth.
3) Long period of peace, building good tech and military and financial systems.
4) Leadership corrupts: Excessive debt, money-printing, inequality, financial ruin, no sense of solidarity, then a natural disaster pushes it over the edge
5) The fall: Escalating rebellions, very bad inequality, internal conflicts
6) Civil war, revolution, eventually a strong leader proves the winner and back to 1.
We in the western civilization are very clearly in the late states of this kind of cycle, and it's frankly terrifying with the weapons we have these days when it comes to a war.
The leadership is too corrupt to try and fix the inequality or invest in that well educated, equitable, cooperative society.
He explicitly agrees with Marx and implicitly with me a lot more than I'd have expected from the rabid capitalist that Ray Dailo is.
It's interesting to hear his emphasis on inequality and how a prosperous society depends upon sharing the gains of prosperity widely. You tend to hear hyper-capitalists mostly emphasizing that capital's gains should go to capital, and Ray is certainly suggesting the opposite here. That if that happens, it corrupts the leadership and ends with cronyism and debt and revolution.
We seem to basically agree what creates good prosperous peaceful civil society, and that capitalism in the Anglican world isn't doing it, and that fucked up corrupt government is why we aren't doing it.
We'd offer fairly different prescriptions though I think.
#reading #books #economics

Me: Hmm, maybe I should look into Bun again and see how its Node.js compatibility is coming along.
Also me: I wonder who makes Bun…
Me, yet again: Ah, it’s a venture-capital funded startup called Oven (see what they did there?)
Finally, me: rm -rf ~/.bun
(Remember, kids: Venture capital is the fart that precedes enshittification. It’s best not to linger once you’ve caught a whiff of it.)
#bun

#ThrowbackThursday #RockyMountainNationalPark #ElkOfMastodon
Yearling elk bull in Moraine Park. September 2006.

Grateful Dead from Tue, Apr 1, 1980 at Capitol Theatre
#GratefulDead #TIGDH #LiveMusic

Grateful Dead Live at Capitol Theater on 1980-04-01
Set I Promised Land * Promised Land Candyman Me & My Uncle > Big River Friend Of The Devil It's All Over Now Don't Ease Me In Looks Like Rain > Deal Set II Feel Like A Stranger China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider Estimated Prophet > He's Gone > The Other One > Drums > Space > Stella Blue > Around & Around Shakedown Street   Comment April Fool's Joke: Bob on Keyboards, Brent & Jerry on Drums, Billy on Bass, Mickey & Phil on…

Despite a crypto rally, VC funds focused on crypto are struggling to raise money, as limited partners prioritize tangible gains after the 2022 wipeout (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Crypto Venture Capital Funds Under Pressure to Produce Returns
Judging by a record Bitcoin rally that fueled a $1 trillion jump in the digital-asset market this year, crypto fever is back. But look beneath the surface to trends in venture capital and a far more sober picture emerges.

Frustration-induced quantum criticality in Ni-doped CePdAl as revealed by the $\mu$SR technique
I. Ishant, T. Shiroka, O. Stockert, V. Fritsch, M. Majumder
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01917

Frustration-induced quantum criticality in Ni-doped CePdAl as revealed by the $μ$SR technique
In CePdAl, the 4$f$ moments of cerium arrange to form a geometrically frustrated kagome lattice. Due to frustration in addition to Kondo- and RKKY- interactions, this metallic system shows a long-range magnetic order (LRO) with a $T_{\rm N}$ of only 2.7\,K. Upon Ni doping at the Pd sites, $T_{\rm N}$ is further suppressed, to reach zero at a critical concentration $x_c \approx 0.15$. Here, by using muon-spin relaxation and rotation ($μ$SR), we investigate at a local level CePd$_{1-x}$Ni$_x$Al …

Questo sembra interessante:
*VIII zona. Pratiche di resistenza e reti clandestine a Roma*, curato da Riccardo Sansone e Anthony Santilli (Edizioni Annpia–associazione Bella storia–Narrazioni di strada): racconti e testimonianze sul “nido di vespe”, la borgata del Quadraro tra il 1943 e il 1945 e, più in generale, sulla lotta contro l'occupazione nazifascista nella VIII zona partigiana della capitale (Pigneto, Tor Pignattara, Villa Certosa, Centocelle, Quarticciolo e Quadraro):

Quadraro, la memoria antifascista ritrovata di una borgata ribelle | il manifesto
(Cultura) «VIII zona. Pratiche di resistenza e reti clandestine a Roma», a cura di Riccardo Sansone e Anthony Santilli, Edizioni Annpia. A 80 anni dal rastrellamento del quartiere, un libro e un festival per non dimenticare. Di Alessandro Santagata

Romney: "You Don't Pay Someone To Not Have Sex" - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2024/04/romney-you-dont-pay-someone-to-not-have-sex/

Romney: “You Don’t Pay Someone To Not Have Sex”
Mediaite reports: “I think everybody has made their own assessment of President Trump’s character,” Sen. Mitt Romney told CNN’s Manu Raju outside the Capitol on Tuesday. “And so far as I know, you don

I was in the Arizona National Guard between 2004 and 2010, and my unit would often do ceremonies at the Arizona state capital on December 7th. I met a lot of the survivors over the years. It was sad to see fewer of them each passing year.
https://mstdn.social/@knittingknots2/1

The last lift lady guarding Tbilisi’s brutalist skybridge
In a one-room apartment behind a lift shaft, 70-year-old Mzia Sabanadze continues an almost extinct occupation,
manually operating one of the lifts at Nutsubidze.
The pay-to-ride elevator she operates
– the only one of the four in the blocks open to non-residents
– is for those living in the flats, local people taking a shortcut to the top of the hill, and tourists who come to see this monument to bruta…