A proper exploration of the concept of Black, or blackness, inevitably leads any historian who has paid attention to this concept to an encounter with capitalism. When we look at capitalism from the vantage point of continental African and African-American history, we realize that capitalism evokes a number of things. It is, of course, an economic system, an apparatus of capture, a regime of signs. But it must also be understood as a certain kind of compulsion, that is, a certain mode of organization and redistribution of power: the compulsion to put things in order as a precondition for extracting their inner value. It is the compulsion to categorize, to separate, to measure and to name, to classify and to establish equivalences between things and between things and persons, persons and animals, animals and the so-called natural, mineral, and organic world. - Mbembe
Tetris (Russian: Тéтрис [ˈtʲɛtrʲɪs]) is a tile-matching video game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 for the Electronika 60 computer. It has been published by several companies, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s.
Canada and the USA are Nuclear Weapons Endorsers and have not signed the treaty to end them. Mexico has as have 55 other nations.
Playing Tetris can help mental health - study suggests
Amish Covid: 'No hospitalization, isolation or vaccines = herd immunity': Lapp: It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more important than dying. But to shut down and say that we can't go to church, we can't get together with family, we can't see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working? It's going completely against everything that we believe. You're changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we're not going to do it.
Lapp: We have this joke: when everybody else started walking, we started running. We made more money in the last year than we ever did. It was our best year ever.
When analyzing modern propaganda, it is essential to pay attention not only to what is being said, but also to what is pointedly not being said. After all, antisemitism and modern sinophobia bear a lot of similarities, which is precisely what the insistence on a supposed China-Nazi link is intended to deflect from. - Redsails
An Incredible Clear and Cogent description of the Global Economy> Ignore it at your peril:
Throughout history, there have been two truly major innovations in “financial technology” and in the actual mechanics of how the monetary and banking system operates: double-entry accounting and the establishment and evolution of the modern international wholesale Eurodollar banking system. Both of these innovations were invented and implemented to solve what was basically a liquidity problem.
The wholesale Eurodollar banking system, connecting the world’s economies using a single operating framework of protocols for the first time in human history, took this to a whole new level. Moreover, the wholesale Eurodollar banking system also opened up and freed banking operations from the ledgers of a few large Italian merchant banks to include dozens to hundreds of financial institutions that provisioned balance sheet space to facilitate business transactions. As the world became increasingly interconnected, we went from having only a handful of wealthy banking families being capable of providing capital to would-be entrepreneurs and growing enterprises to hundreds of thousands of small, medium, and large banks all being capable of providing capital to almost anybody. Along the way, we also developed a true international securities market, which further broadened effective balance sheet space upon which credit could be provisioned – but at a cost.
The problem with the development of the securities market is that it transformed the risk equation to focus less on the actual outcomes of business operations (as it would with a loan or illiquid equity investment) and more (almost exclusively) on capital gains. In the process, this behavior distorted and perverted incentives to fund/finance businesses. However, for as long as the financial system, especially banks, are able and willing to expand their balance sheets, a lot of these problems can be temporarily papered over. Economic growth tends to fix most problems after all.
However, in the post-GFC period, the wholesale funding/financing model of large banks, which has developed on borrowed time over the past 60-70 years, has proven, once and for all, to be fundamentally fragile in its very existence. Now, there is no more profit to be made, since the entire thing is essentially equivalent to a spinning top that maintains an illusion of stability so long as it spins fast enough for it to not fall over. The choice that banks must make now has become very clear: use a little bit more short-term wholesale funding/financing to police and arbitrage spreads to make a little bit more profit or just hoard liquidity and stay solvent.
The informal interbank networks that form the backbone of the modern monetary and banking system have slowly started to back away from their crucial roles as the ledger keepers. Consequently, the outcome is a broken monetary and banking system and an economy that remains stubbornly stunted and incapable of growth.
In my personal opinion, the transition from the present financial system to whatever form of it awaits us in the future will be far more revolutionary than simply changing which global hegemony within the same (dangerously crippled) monetary and banking system happens to hold the claim to the “world reserve currency.” The transition from the pound sterling to the US dollar during the interwar years was nothing more than this – a simple changing of which national currency gets to play the dominant part within the same monetary and banking system.
Fertilizer Prices Hit Record Highs, May Pressure Food Inflation Even Higher