meth_dragon

oh you meant the scramblers, yeah for some reason i cognito filtered them out

i think the ai is an actual ai in blindsight, the generative ones played more prominent roles in starfish trilogy and sunflower cycle (imo chimp counts as not quite agi)

bessent was the architect of the 97 asian financial crisis acting through soros, many geopolitical analysts in china consider him to be the main 'antagonist' within the trump admin and many believe him to have a bone to pick with china as it was hong kong and the chinese government by proxy that put down his rampage almost 30 years ago

i asked it to make some simple modifications to a few (extensively documented) physics models for me and it was able to tell me which moving parts were important for me to modify and gave me a generally correct direction in which to modify them. the code it gave was garbage but i also didn't bother being that specific so idk. i figure system integration still needs to be done by a human but for things like mature algorithms and stuff it can do a decent amount of heavy lifting

bytedance is 60% foreign owned lol

china has an opportunity to really commit to the bit and force majority ownership of bytedance for that 50% tiktok jv the american state so desperately craves

how much of bytedance is tt, like 20% max? lmfao

id help but i got permabanned by the reactionary content moderation system for posting lukewarm 911 memes a while back

mfing americans invading xhs now that tt's getting the hammer

where do people even find out about these apps lol

iirc theyre not actually rare, theyre actually everywhere in relative abundance, its just that they are conventionally obtained as byproducts of stuff like zinc and aluminum processing which the us is not known for doing as of late

maybe a meteorite of pure germanium will hit dc next week though, one can wish

i was going to suggest this but stopped myself because 1. lots of real life shit and 2. i wanted to write a review of both his books but then you said it so i'm gonna put in my two cents in a rambling condensed form in lieu of the review:

i think the majority of arrighi's main two books are useless for most people here; the development of capitalism in a western european context has been a highly complex (not in the difficult to understand sense, but rather in the something with many many moving parts sense) phenomenon spanning several centuries to the present and arrighi for his part attempts to distill (what ends up being mostly) braudel's third book down to what he thinks are the biggest contributors to capitalism as we know it today. the way it comes out is as a long as fuck list of absolutely pedantic shit about groups of white people doing this or that heinous thing over the centuries that is actually incredibly difficult to contextualize even after arrighi kindly arranges it all in sort of chronological and causal order for us. which makes most of the books really hard going and kind of bad for reading club retention numbers.

that being said, there are two segments in L20C that i think are worth going over despite the sad state of our collective attention spans: the introduction, and the fourth part of the third section called 'reprise and preview', which is a sort of breather segment where he (relatively) quickly summarizes the main takeaways from the previous parts. there is also one cool and useful figure in the postscript. added together they constitute approximately ~70 pages of content that provide a compact and comprehensive overview of the main thrust of his thesis, i will summarize what i think have been the most useful personally:

1. capitalism occurs in successive cycles of accumulation
2. said cycles consist of an initial (industrial) MC phase and are forced into CM' (financial) phase due to competitive pressures (TRPF), with turbulent transitional sections (wars)
3. the nature of these cycles of accumulation are cyclical as well, going from expansion to consolidation and back

general criticisms of L20C include:

1. eurocentric
2. teleological and deterministic
3. cherrypicking

to which i respond:

1. of course it is, it is a history of western capitalism
2. periodicity != teleology; patterns, not prophecies
3. motherfucking p values leaking into my shitposts fuck off

lastly, i believe L20C is a good candidate for the reading since it provides much needed context to our current systemic state. marxism is a science after all, and science is nothing without data. as we are dealing with events that have timescales reaching into decades or centuries, i think it is only logical to try and make sense of data that we have at hand, flawed though they may be. many doomers here enjoy reading catastrophe into what is effectively historical noise, resulting in less informed or opinionated comrades either being compelled into dooming themselves, perpetuating the cycle, or, with no other emotional outlet, having a meltdown online. neither of these outcomes are conducive to positive action or mental health (one might even call them unserious) and so it is necessary to arm ourselves with the requisite information to combat doomerism, one of the most comprehensive repositories of which are this book and its sources.

as to why i think it's a better candidate than the other suggestions so far, i think most of them operate at, for lack of better wording, 'tactical' or 'operational' levels that are too limited in scope to induce revolutionary optimism. it is good to understand and enumerate the minute intricacies of how capitalism inflicts upon us daily horrors beyond comprehension, but after a certain point this crosses the line towards navel gazing and, dare i say, intellectual masturbation. in this L20C differentiates itself to some degree because rather than offering us ephemeral glimpses towards a possible future, it instead directs our attention to the failures of hegemons past, showing us that these eldritch terrors bleed like the rest of us.

i wanted to upload the titillating important figures from the book here but i'm on the wrong device so i will upload them later.

edit: as promised, the cool figures. completely meaningless without context, but they are cool:

yeah he's a cringe lib but gotta give him props for keeping in shape

bro is built different

it's kursk/kherson all over again, people think russia and iran are going to give up their long term strategic interests and regional aspirations, throwing away of years of effort just because some jumped up proxies grabbed some land and are really loud on social media about it. might as well just roll over and if that was the case. imo this is just the americans throwing bibi a bone and we probably won't see any real reactions from the axis until after initial overtures from the trump admin. would be rash to make big moves just as biden's on the way out and potentially give someone as unpredictable as trump leverage without knowing more precisely how he plans on executing this time around.

bro survived 2 assassinations, ran for 40 minutes and jumped a 2 meter wall in negative 3 degree weather livestreaming the entire time at like 2 am to defeat an incel coup attempt

the only logical conclusion is that we are npcs living in lee jae myungs isekai fantasy