Scholz & Friends, Tagesspiegel, Newspaper Stack, 2017 VS Jean-Paul Goude, "Slave To The Rhythm" Cover

KODITSCHEK’S LETTER TO GHOST’S CEO

Also the legged robots are cheap now

build-its-inprogress.blogspot.com

Mini Cheetah Clone Teardown

Not long after my masters thesis went online, clones of the mini cheetah actuators started showing up on AliExpress/Alibaba.  Within another

I don’t really have a point, other than this wheeled robot took 45min to bring me pizza and beer 1km because it can’t step off a kerb. It waits for orders where the cops hang out near the store

the year is 2045. municipal killbots roam the streets. they're all basically bomb disposal robots with explosives strapped on them, same as they are now. people have developed ancient aliens tartaria type conspiracy theories about the boston dynamics dogbots. like,

"look how advanced these things were, do you really believe these people could do things like that when right now we only have these mini tanks that look like they could have been made 100 years ago"

h/t https://twitter.com/ZJemptv

Well, the boomers did have a easier ride? this is GDP % change per person for the UK. Red lines highlight the early career of the youngest boomers, from ages 20 to 40. Analysis mine, so probably shit. Data ONS and World Bank.

Change per capita is a relevant metric as we want to determine how much of the wealth in a population someone can accumulate, and so working during a period of high growth per capita suggests a high potential for wealth accumulation.

Comparing to Millennials is hard, as we largely have not entered the workforce and those who have joined in the midst of the largest global downturn in modern history. But comparing to Gen Yrs born in the 1980′s suggests the boomers had 6.5x higher growth per capita averaged over the early career. This is a huge difference!

The rich millennials - I am going by Piketty here, inequality breads inequality. During the boomer years, the rising tide did lift all boats but as the pace of growth dropped, preexisting capital and new rent seeking structures have consolidated wealth into modern dynasties. This is compounded by the post 2008 new normal of maybe 1% growth making it impossible to compete with existing capital.

TL,DR: Boomers arn’t evil, just the most fortunate modern generation by a large margin. This leads to the typical structure where oppression is caused by the lack of understanding from power of the needs of the oppressed class.

AND plz correct for factual or analytic mistakes - this isn’t my field!

honestly though there are rich millennials? and there are poor baby boomers? like the idea that my grandparents are somehow of an oppressive class who’ve had life much easier than me is absurd to me?

Spent the past week making 🐡

Going to emf :D

on a personal journey to get hot again

getting deeper into tikz this time because of Trying To Make Stuff Reusable and really feeling the weight of the user manual being over 1300 pages long

Tonight, midnight UK time*...

is the first screening of my animated short film with Yuri Heart, The Tale of the Little Witch!

*[4pm PST, 7pm EST, 8am JST]

We've been working on it for the last week (pulling crazy hours lmao, rip 2 work) and I'm really excited to finally be able to show everyone.

The occasion: Yuri's a vtuber who's an old friend of mine, and she's been building up to this big 're-debut' stream for months and months. She's made herself an amazing new model which you'll get to see tonight, and updating just about everything on the stream. And alongside all that, we made a film together~

For this film, Yuri wrote and directed, and created the music and 2D art. My role in this project was all the 3D modelling, rigging, animation, and lighting etc. and video wrangling, and Roubharb provided excellent voice acting.

I won't say any more than that for now, but I'm looking forward to writing a big 'making-of' post next week. So stay tuned, and I'd love to see you at the stream ^^

"At the start of the year, foreigners held $20bn of Russian foreign currency debt, as well as  local debt worth more than 3tn roubles." FT.com; Lehmann in 2008 had $613 billion bank debt and $155 billion in bond debt.

Russian default is a structural risk, but decades of free money (QE) and capital reforms have deleveraged the west. This is best seen with the growth in treasury “reverse repo”

“NEW YORK, June 9 (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's reverse repurchase window on Wednesday took in $503 billion in cash, hitting a record peak for a third consecutive session, as financial institutions flush with liquidity flocked to the Fed facility to park their cash and secure Treasury collateral.”

sorry to bother u but i just came across ur post about europe cuting russia of swift and how that will killing their own economy in future, would u mind elaborating in that or maybe point me in right direction? i never hear of swift until today and i wonder if it kills europe economy why they do it? i think u also say it breaks global economy? sorry for my english, i hope u can understand me, it is okay if u do not or can not answer. thank u.

What is SWIFT and what happens if the Russians are cut off from it?

What is SWIFT? The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a high-security network that connects financial institutions around the world. It is used by different financial institutions to send and receive information, such as instructions for transferring money across borders.

Basically, SWIFT is the way international banking works. Cutting SWIFT off has only been done twice before, to Iran and the DPRK/‘North Korea’. Never with an economy like Russia’s - it’s like amputating them from the global financial system. Firstly, this means that import/export is near impossible, similarly with international services - destroying about 65% of Russia’s GDP already. That trade is important, though - the gas and grain Russia exports goes somewhere, largely to Europe. Without it, Europe has an extreme problem. Moreover, cutting off the banks also means that not only can trade not occur, but Russia can’t turn its invested capital back into cash to reinvest: it can’t liquidate its debt, which may lead to an even greater problem.

No trade, and no liquidation, means it will default on its debts. Some US banks defaulting on some debt caused the 2008 global financial crisis - this would effectively be a default on almost all of Russia’s debt. The holders of that debt aren’t Russia, either - they’re largely the west. Similarly, the freeze on the central bank’s assets means that its foreign currency reserves are basically null and void - and given that Russia’s foreign currency reserves are largely in Euro, this is as much a strike against the EU’s economy as it is Russia’s.

As for why they would do it… It will certainly destroy Russia’s economy. It is the nuclear option, economically. Just like regular nukes, though, it’s largely a mutually-assured destruction. The global economy can’t just cut off such a large aspect of itself without feeling it. However, the global economy was already in crisis. Historically, in times of crisis, the imperialist countries have been willing - or, rather, forced - to apply their most extreme methods of exploitation to themselves. If cutting off their own arm is what it takes to maintain global hegemony - which Russia was threatening - then they’ll do it.

The EU had previously refused to cut Russia off from SWIFT. The EU had also dragged its feet on shuttering the NordStream 2 gas pipeline with Russia - because these things will harm it just as much as they harm Russia. The US wanted escalation, and it wanted Russia and the EU to split - and a weaker EU is a benefit for the US, which is now starting to cannibalise its own allies. This will hurt the US, but not as much as it immediately hurts the EU. I suppose the US might have forced their hand, considering they now hold Europe’s lifeline, in the form of whatever gas exports they can muster.