Fuck Trump but it wasn’t Trump who “destroyed the international rules based order” it was the Palestinian Genocide and the refusal of countries like the US and Germany to stop actively fueling it that catapulted us into a new era of violence and blatant power grabs.

No

Exhibit A people are beginning to describe empty, hollow mass produced corporate slop as AI, it has become an adjective to describe worthless trash and I love it.

Israel will move the goalposts, they have to in order to continue the Genocide of Palestinians.

I have said it before and I will likely say it again, Sam Altman is the Rasputin of Silicon Valley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin

In late 1906, Rasputin began acting as a faith healer for Nicholas’ and Alexandra’s only son, Alexei Nikolaevich, who suffered from haemophilia. He was a divisive figure at court, seen by some Russians as a mystic, visionary, and prophet, and by others as a religious charlatan.

The extent of Rasputin’s power reached an all-time high in 1915, when Nicholas left Saint Petersburg to oversee the Imperial Russian Army as it was engaged in the First World War. In his absence, Rasputin and Alexandra consolidated their influence across the Russian Empire. However, as Russian military defeats mounted on the Eastern Front, both figures became increasingly unpopular. In the early morning of 30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by a group of conservative Russian noblemen who opposed his influence over the imperial family.

Historians often suggest that Rasputin’s scandalous and sinister reputation helped discredit the Tsarist government, thus precipitating the overthrow of the House of Romanov shortly after his assassination. Accounts of his life and influence were often based on common rumors; he remains a mysterious and captivating figure in popular culture.[1]

I love it when adults decide to punish kids for the fuck ups of adults by taking shit away from the kids and saying “that will fix it!”.

It will not.

Economics in general can be defined as a set of narratives hunting for evidence, which makes it fundamentally NOT a science “hard or soft” since the pursuit of truth is compromised at the very beginning of conducting any would-be science.

If you go hunting for evidence by forcing abstract definitions and pre-constructed mental structures onto reality and repeating the process until you get promising results, even if you somehow come out with the right answer you aren’t doing science.

A genuine science would welcome these alternative perspectives and subject them to rigorous testing against orthodox theories. The fact that economics maintains competing schools that fundamentally disagree on basic questions—and resolves this through institutional power rather than evidence—reveals that it functions more like competing ideologies than scientific theories.

…

The 2008 financial crisis illustrates this problem perfectly. The crisis did not occur because people suddenly became irrational or because of external shocks. It emerged from systematic interactions of rational actors operating within particular rules and institutions—exactly the kind of systemic phenomenon that mainstream economics struggles to understand because of its reductionist focus on individuals.

https://chevan.info/economics-is-not-a-science/

So is all of Economics and US-style MBA education and “Management science” corporate fluff.

I know it hurts for some people to admit, but Economics is a belief system, a religion without a god but full of cryptids such as “rational economic actors”. It is not a hard science concerned primarily with pursuing the truth but rather a social exercise of maintaining and supporting specific narratives that benefit the ruling class by seeking out evidence for them.

There are people who push back from within Economics and do actual science but they will never be empowered enough to challenge status quo beliefs held by the broader Economics/business community. I consider the few scientists in Economics doing good work to be held hostage within a larger host that is hostile to them.

As far as I am concerned, shut down Harvard Business School, it has hardly done anything but hurt the world by trying to convince us it has answered difficult, meaningful scientific questions with junk work resting on hollow foundations.

This comment on the article from Alex L about sums it up

From my experience in social science, including some experience in managment studies specifically, researchers regularly belief things – and will even give policy advice based on those beliefs – that have not even been seriously tested, or have straight up been refuted. Especially when it fits their prior and/or preferred narratives and/or when it’s just a nice story (I guess ‘companies that do csr stuff outperforming those that don’t’ ticks all those boxes for a lot of people). In that sense, a single study is already a strong basis, comparatively speaking, depressing that may be. Agreed that serious researchers wouldn’t do that, though.

Or this quote from another commenter

incentives don’t work that way in business schools, where career success depends upon creating a clear “brand.” People do not care about science or good research, they care about being known for something specific. So in the case of the junior author on EIS, his career has been built entirely on being “guy who has shown that corporate sustainability is profitable” rather than “guy who does good work on corporate sustainability.”

Plus there are (bad) outside incentives that exist in business schools. As the word “brand” suggests, there are also very lucrative outside options to be gained from telling people something that they want to hear (“sustainability is profitable!”) and very little profit to be made from telling people something inconvenient (“sorry folks, there is no clear relationship between sustainability and profitability, if you want to be more sustainable you’ll have to find some other argument to convince your shareholders”).

I mean that is kinda it, it is a simple body motion I never learned until yoga that clearly I was supposed to be doing because my body just digests/does all the gassy stuff better, this whole time I just didn’t know.

No one told me “Do downward facing dog, your tummy will feel better!” I just discovered it from doing it so I feel like I wish I discovered that way sooner.

Downward facing dog -> upward facing dog -> child pose

My lower stomach and digestion work so much better when I remember to do this.

No, I would say it is the “minimum evil” framing, as in at minimum they failed to stop it and that is already damning enough to disband the whole thing regardless of how much more evil the reality is.

which is saying a lot!

UK are you high?

What made you look at the FBI and think “yeah, we need that”!!?

Let me remind everyone because the haze of chaos has made it easy to forget, January 6th was organized IN PUBLIC ON FACEBOOK and the FBI still completely failed to stop it.

There is no failing bigger than that, and that was before children’s book author Kash Patel took over.

yes this is real, I am sorry to say…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/07/trump-fbi-pick-kash-patel-childrens-books

I mean holy shit pick any other entity to compare yourself too, have some damn standards!

When I say Texas is the stupidest state don’t get me wrong the people there have normal, intelligent human brains just the same as anywhere, rather it is the worms Texans willingly choose to let into their brains that makes Texas the stupidest state and I refuse to not make fun of Texas for fucking it’s future up so unbelievably hard.

I can’t imagine how suffocating and depressing suburban car sprawl hell is in Houston, it has got to be a grim life living in that degree of normalized dehumanization.

This year’s list placed Houston at No. 127 out of 149 U.S. metros, which were evaluatedon 17 metrics in three categories — socioeconomics, location and community, and quality of life.

“Overall, our research shows a metro that functions effectively as a labor market but struggles with day-to-day living conditions,” said study author Adina Dragos in an email.

“Shut Up, Stop Asking For Better & Work Until You Die” - Texas Strong!

Wait I got a better one, Texas should update their state motto to a riff on New Hampshire’s with “Live Unfree THEN Die”.

Lol nope, out of principle I will never pay for this even if I didn’t already hate Google.

It feels so condescending to the user, so unconcerned with their agency that I could never bring myself to support this choice with even a tiny amount of money.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

fucking idiots

Way to make your AI as useless as possible just so you can feel right Elon.

Fantastic article with great figures tho it is grim…

I feel so sad, but at least I feel less crazy now for thinking science as a career in the US had gone off a cliff, people are being forced to reckon with the fact that this cannot be undone with a flick of a wand and that the damage will reverberate for decades… for one it will lead to there being no early career scientists or engineers to train into more experienced workers in the US because we all left or changed careers. This is an alarm younger people have been ringing for years now while older people condescendingly ignored it and now the consequences have become existential not just to younger people trying to enter a career…

This is the collapse of science in the US, the general public will not care or understand adequately how to rebuild a robust culture and funding structure for science after conservatives have annihilated it and thus this is inevitably the beginning of a period of stagnation in US culture where the centrist, moderate position is halfway between a basic understanding of gradeschool level science and MAHA quack nonsense pseudoscience.

…

…ughhh

Don’t know how many times people told me not to worry and that at the end of the day that valuable science will be funded blah blah blah…

To those people fuck you for telling me to calm down and be less worried.

One of the core reasons neoliberalism inevitability leads to fascism and collapse is as an ideology it is entirely negative about the possibility of systematic forces of evil having any kind of systematic solution. All we can do is try to individually be better individuals ourselves and do our part.

In neoliberalism we are the noun and corporations, the ruling class, money, endless growth and unfettered greed are the verbs that change us. If we begin to organize and behave like a verb, neoliberalism acts with existential hostility and labels this “unnatural” in some way.

yeah but what if instead we just try corporate social media again but this time we punish kids more?

Finance people are honestly so willfully stupid and blinded by their beliefs about economics, the writing has been on the wall for awhile now for AI.

Yes and my point is that the architecture that is most conducive to countering that tendency in physical acoustics suggests the opposite conclusion people come to about echo chambers in abstracted metaphorical application to communities and systems of people in conversation.

I genuinely think it muddles discussion around human topics when the phrase “echo chamber” is used as the association people make is so backwards it hurts more than it helps.