Curious observer of the funny business of Life (and the many ways humans are trying to cope with it).
Joined March 2009
- Tweets 11,081
- Following 658
- Followers 4,748
- Likes 21,202
599 Photos and videos
Jun 8
A new article with @matslats about Collaborative Finance (#CoFi) is now live on the Growing the Commons Substack:
growingcommons.substack.com/…
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May 26
The clever marketing of the Nazi party still seems to work like a charm some 90 years later.
The name "National Socialist German Workers' Party" was deliberately chosen to simultaneously appeal to two very different constituencies (remember that the Nazis legally accessed power through winning the 1933 elections):
– "National German Party"
– "Socialist Workers' Party"
People simply dropped/ignored the words they didn't identify with and voted for them. The rest is history.
Oh, and unlike Elon insinuates, one of the very first acts upon getting into power was to imprison, torture, and kill actual socialists.
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May 13
One of the projects I've been working on for a while now – go check it out and let us know what you think!
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May 13
I'll be sharing more about @CommonsLabUK in the coming weeks, but in the meantime have a look at the new website we just launched. 🙂
It's still early but the site now brings together a clearer picture of our mission, programme areas, and overall approach, including some initial material introducing the Commons for people less familiar with it – covering, among other things, its history, manifestations, and common myths.
I'm genuinely excited about this project and look forward to diving into the actual work now!
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May 11
“When we want to learn a body of academic knowledge, we go to college professors. When we want to learn about living, we need to go to those who have done it the longest and learned the most about it.
In a culture that worships high technology, the teachers become younger and younger because we place the greatest value on the latest technological advances. As a result, we are looking more and more to those who have less and less wisdom and are instead relying on "information" to guide our lives.
All Native people value their Elders as the repositories of wisdom, not only about a way of life but also about living our lives.“
— Anne Wilson Schaef (1995) Native Wisdom for White Minds
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Apr 17
What a strange headline from the FT. You don‘t need to be an MMTer to notice the absurdity.
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Apr 17
Though, as MMTers would say, it‘s precisely the theatre around public finance — duly performed by central banks and finance ministries to obscure the fact that taxes don‘t fund governments of countries with monetary sovereignty — that leads to such headlines.
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Apr 17
Then again, the headline *is* factually correct; the FT is merely reporting the ongoing circus.
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Apr 16
Or, they should be completely ring-fenced from the real economy and essential financial services.
If I may suggest, gambling seems to be the right sector.
Apr 16
If financial "products" have no public purpose (they redistribute income instead of adding value), they should not exist. giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…
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Apr 15
Quirky detail about the Luxembourgish school system, for those interested.
Apr 14
Also, we start learning French in third grade. While all other non-language subjects continue to be taught in German during primary school, this changes to French in high school – so for anything from history to mathematics, you basically have to re-learn all the vocabulary from scratch.
A nightmare for pupils, but it pays dividends!
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Michel Rauchs retweeted
Apr 14
I've seen children in Luxembourg that routinely speak 7 languages in primary school already. Generally they have parents from two different countries (say Italy and Poland), go through the national school system (based on the three official languages, Luxembourgish, French, and German), and casually pick up English (thanks to Youtube) and Portuguese (the unofficial fourth language of Luxembourg) on the side.
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Michel Rauchs retweeted
Apr 13
It feels like a quick recap of 2,000 years of history crammed into a few weeks:
- The Pope and the King are squabbling
- Persia is fighting its existential war
- (New) Rome has a mad king
- There’s a naval blockade
- There’s bloodshed around Jerusalem
- The Ottomans are flexing
- Small Arab states are squabbling with
each other
- Hungary has just overthrown its ruler
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Apr 14
Henry Ford already understood more than 100 years ago that capitalism cannot work without the plebs having sufficient means to actually buy your products.
I wouldn't be surprised if our new tech overlords are already planning to replace humans altogether with machines as the new consumers.
Apr 14
This is called the 'value crisis' and the P2P Foundation analyzed this problem at least 15 years ago. Check our wiki for this concept.
"here is what every CEO celebrating margin expansion has not thought through for five minutes. Gawdat:
< “Even if you can have all of the productivity gains in the world, by firing people consistently, nobody’s able to buy what you’re making.” >
That single sentence should end every strategy meeting on the planet. Capitalism is a closed loop. You pay workers. Workers become consumers. Consumers buy products. Revenue funds the next payroll. Cut the worker and you do not just eliminate a cost. You eliminate the customer."
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Apr 11
Everything you thought you knew about the world is falling apart.
Indeed, what a time to be alive (for better and for worse, I guess!).
French gov moving faster than most companies
we now have a skill to do taxes, what a time to be alive
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Apr 10
His Holiness is on 🔥 today. Since Francis, the Roman Catholic Church has been gradually recovering lost sympathies for its clear moral stance.
Apr 10
Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty. Yet, disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few. It is an unjust scenario, in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth, to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.
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Apr 11
Witnessing the crazy responses from outraged – often American – Christians is really a sight to behold.
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Apr 11
Kind of hilarious asking Claude for strategies to optimise token efficiency:
Opus: after a lot of back-and-forth, suggests a plausible strategy.
Sonnet: after some back-and-forth, says Opus got it all wrong.
Pressing Sonnet further: "oops, I was actually making things up".
Result? Lots of tokens burned. Jeez.
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Apr 11
Lesson: don't trust, verify.
(or in other words: make sure prompt specifies authoritative source material – in this case Anthropic's own documentation. And then, because it's LLMs, still verify).
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