Remember when Stephen Hawking was more worried about inequality under capitalism than artificial intelligence in a Reddit AMA and people started telling him to read an economics 101 book? Wild. Anyways rip Steve
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Me: *falling asleep to an audiobook on the science of the gut*
Book: saliva is actually filtered blood!
Me: ʕʘ‿ʘʔ
Me: ʕʘ‿ʘʔ
Book: saliva also contains a painkiller that is stronger than morphine, but we don’t produce a lot of it otherwise we’d be constantly high
Me: ʕʘ Д ʘʔ
Opiorphin is 6x stronger than morphine and actually contains an anti-depressant compound which is why some doctors believe it’s linked to comfort eating
holy shit i just learned about the “proxy strike” tactic in france in which radicals blockade or occupy a workplace, allowing workers to strike without losing their wages. that’s brilliant, wow
How does that work, exactly?
if you and your coworkers say “we’re striking” and occupy your workplace, your boss won’t pay you, but if your friends and your coworkers’ friends occupy it for you, you say “sorry boss shit’s occupied” and you still get paid because you’re not the ones striking
the 5,528 people who have reblogged this post as of right now could probably paralyze a decent chunk of a city’s economy using this tactic lmao
If you’re a woman of color in America, especially if you’re Asian American (East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, what-have-you), you might want to read this.
I took some time to gather the information for this report and now it’s up. Here’s what I found out and wrote about HR 147 – the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act – that can potentially render our choice as women of color to get abortions entirely obsolete. I spoke with Aliya Khan of NAPAWF who laid it out for me. And it’s not a pretty picture.
Last year I did a few write-ups and drawings about some lady fighters from history who fought openly as their gender (there are plenty of disguised-as-a-man soldiers and plenty of trans soldiers, but those are outside the scope of this series). This is by no means an exhaustive list; there were plenty of great figures that my schedule didn’t permit me to tackle (at least not yet). But as Women’s History Month gets started tomorrow, I thought y’all might enjoy reading about some of history’s toughest broads.
mongolia and kyrgyzstan introduced a universal child benefit system and the IMF made them get rid of it because it wasn’t means tested despite all evidence suggesting that universal systems are the most effective. as a result around 400,000 children will lose income support.
you’ll struggle to find a clearer example of neoliberalism in action.
WTF! Are Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan provinces of IMFistan? No they are not! So the IMF should get out of their domestic policy! And furthermore, *dons rules lawyer hat*, anything that’s for children is means-tested because children are at specific disadvantages relative to adults. Anyway, fuck these international bureaucrats thinking they can set policy for countries they don’t live in.
What are good angles of influence on the IMF? What does it look like to convince them that their mandate does not extend to making demands like this? Is it as simple as ‘publish lots of RCTs about how universal benefits work better’? Are there any examples of the IMF changing its mind about the policies it pushes? How do we fix this?
(Making loans contingent on good domestic policy isn’t inherently a horrible idea but it is unsurprising that when implemented it quickly goes downhill from “implement these accounting and anti-corruption best practices” to “run your domestic economy in exactly the non-evidence-supported way we like, regardless of whether this helps you actually meet any targets we could defensibly be concerned with”.)
A Middleground 