@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-05-16 10:45:55
To dig slightly deeper here, I think that there's a feedback loop between "fall in love/wait for your perfect match (and by the way girls the only career you should aspire to is the literally unattainable 'princess'" Disney stuff and this "my characters are complex I'm so sophisticated; they suffer but it's not intolerable and their lives are good enough despite the imperfections" crap that gets praised as so evocative of the human condition. In fact, I think it merely evokes the condition of its authors & fans who were poisoned by the Disney in their youth and who have remained bad as relationships ever since, though this is not exactly their fault. In any case, their white middle-aged wisdom-shaped-but-quite bitter and intricately-constructed-so-it's-hard-to-see-the-really-untrue-character-facets work ends up keeping their audience within the "romance is luck" cult by way of reassuring them that a middling romance with lots of doubt and complications is "just life" even though the author doesn't actually have any broader perspective on what life is than anyone else.
This has turned into a bit of a rant, but I think I'll just add that reading Mama by Nikkya Hargrove just before Dream State helped immensely to see how the distant & awkward parent-child relationships of the latter are not a product of human nature but instead of white western culture & capitalism.
(The defeatism about climate change is a whole nother dimension of wrong about Dream State, by that's a separate rant.)
@losttourist@social.chatty.monster2025-06-14 08:23:17
Of all the many crimes against the English language committed by people from the USA, I think the only one which I'd make a capital offence is that of refusing to pronounce the "L" in "soldering".
@arXiv_econGN_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-14 08:20:12
Long-term Health and Human Capital Effects of Early-Life Economic Conditions
Ruijun Hou (Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Leicester, School of Economics, University of Bristol), Samuel Baker (School of Economics, University of Bristol), Stephanie von Hinke (School of Economics, University of Bristol, Institute for Fiscal Studies, Institute for the Study of Labor), Hans H. Sievertsen (The Danish Center for Social Science Research, VIVE, Institute for the Study of …
@ayn@trunk.lol2025-06-03 23:48:06
With the upcoming lounge access changes for guests and authorized users, we might move spend back to the AMEX.
https://www.capitalone.com/credit-cards/disclosures/airport-lounge-terms/
@servelan@newsie.social2025-06-06 15:12:18
" Trump directed the Attorney General to seek the death penalty in every case in which a “capital crime” is committed by an undocumented migrant. By tying the harshest punishment the state can impose to the identity of the accused, the order signals that some people—by virtue of who they are—deserve to be killed. "
How Trump’s Death Penalty Order Codifies Dangerous Speech
https://www.justsecurity.org/114155/trump-death-penalty-codifies-dangerous-speech/
@arXiv_mathOC_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-10 09:41:01
Portfolio optimization in incomplete markets and price constraints determined by maximum entropy in the mean
Argimiro Arratia, Henryk Gzyl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07053
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-04 20:14:31
Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.
@arXiv_econGN_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-10 08:22:32
Do conditional cash transfers in childhood increase economic resilience in adulthood? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic shock in Ecuador
Jos\'e-Ignacio Ant\'on, Ruthy Intriago, Juan Ponce
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06903
@arXiv_econGN_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-11 08:01:35
Industrial Flexibility Investment Under Uncertainty: A Multi-Stage Stochastic Framework Considering Energy and Reserve Market Participation
Amund Norland, Lasse Skare, Ole Jakob Viken, Stian Backe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08638
@arXiv_qfinMF_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-05-22 07:38:12
Liquidity provision with $\tau$-reset strategies: a dynamic historical liquidity approach
Andrey Urusov, Rostislav Berezovskiy, Anatoly Krestenko, Andrei Kornilov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15338
