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AnasAbdin

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Today's Document
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Peter Solarz
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@the-organic-dynamic
I know that usamerican schools get a lot of flack but I really need to drive home how bad it is. The primary function of schooling in the usa is to gauge how effectively you can repeat lies. The history we were taught, in my liberal city, included such gems as:
Rev. Martin Luther King was a patriot who was gunned down by a lone racist who was anti-american.
Malcolm X was basically a more extreme evil version of MLK and while his views are understandable he was practically a domestic terrorist whose eventual assassination wasn't surprising or even maybe it was kinda deserved because of his violent rhetoric?
After union organization and the gilded age, everything was fixed and now you live in a fair society which will pay you what you're worth because of government regulation.
Communism never worked. Yes it sounds great in theory, but you'll see that we did our best to kill it and this is an indictment on them not on us.
The Korean and Vietnam wars were inevitable and the US only intervened to help its freedom-loving people stay sovereign against those evil commies. Yes there were unfortunately some atrocities but that's war. Sorry about that.
The United States of America were the reason that WWII ended. The Nuclear holocaust inflicted on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to this end.
The Soviets practically were only in the war because Hitler betrayed them, and otherwise would have been an Axis power.
The Black Panthers were a terrorist organization.
This is the sort of thing that your average usamerican believes uncritically. Doubly so if they don't have a college education. I want to drive home the point that this was a liberal school district. Our superintendent was black. Where to even begin fixing a problem like this?
Like listen, I didn't mention it up there because I genuinely have no idea where to start on the subject of what we were taught about Native Americans. At eight years old they had us white ass kids in redface doing a thanksgiving play. This was the early 2000s. It wasn't "a different time," I think you will find as you learn more and more, there is no such thing. The times are all quite similar.
all USA college shows remind me of high school and the characters behave like teenagers what the fuck kind of colleges are you attending
USA college conversation of two 22 year old students: Tyler cheated on me with Mackenzie from premed, this is going to ruin my chances of getting a good grade in my math exam to go to law school
Normal conversation between a 45 yo, a 20 yo and 18 yo college students in latam: Jesse they refused to raise the budget we need to go bomb the parliament tomorrow
Sincere answer: Rich people colleges.
Upper-middle-class Americans conceptualize and largely experience college as "13th-16th grade for 18-22 year old children," as well as a kind of secular rumspringa where 20 year olds have a bit of social license to dabble in things like sex, drugs, progressive politics, and queerness, as long as they put it aside when they "grow up." And because upper-middle-class Americans have a stranglehold on media, this is represented as the platonic ideal of what college is.
Regular working-class American college students are age-diverse (most are over 25), usually have jobs, often have children and/or spouses and/or other family responsibilities, and are there to pursue a specialized career.
Be careful saying this, though, because criticizing the upper-middle-class framework of college will get 900 people on this website calling you an anti-intellectual who hates the very concept of learning.
Neither demographic is organized or committed enough to do a direct action, though, that much is true. That's more a nationwide cultural flaw than anything college-specific.
American colleges becoming more accessible was at one point a big disruptive factor in our politics. SDS and the anti-war movement, the Weather Underground -- whole slews of groups organized around protest and militant direct action came out of that period, so whether we're measuring by efficacy or simple willingness to break the law, there was a time when the demographic of working class college students had some the chutzpah you're talking about. How we got from there to here is a long story that I don't know all of, but the need to react to dissidents coming out of colleges shaped the modern FAFSA system, the prison system, labor markets -- major structural changes occurred in the 70s, 80s and 90s that were all at least partly informed by a perceived need to gatekeep college education so it would continue to be a class marker instead of the tool for organizing that it very quickly became when it was briefly more egalitarian.
Practical things to do on Fair Day, 2006
Goddamn. Okay
Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.
There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.
As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.
A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.
He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.
"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.
— Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"
in a rare moment of "huh i can maybe contribute to this", i was reminded of this exerpt from Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing, a collection of his essays.
this one was written about a deceased friend of his, Skelly, who was known to spin tales about his life to hide the shameful parts from others. at his funeral, when all the secrets inevitably started to unfold, Kreider writes:
The worst part, for me, is imagining how alone he was. This is the most poisonous thing that secrets do to us—they isolate us from everyone around us and make us feel even lonelier than we already are. I wish he could’ve somehow brought himself to talk to us. I sometimes fantasize about how I would’ve reacted—what I would’ve said to him, how I would’ve tried to help. As Kevin once complained, “I wish he coulda just told us so we could’ve mocked him for it!” But not everybody gets to be free. Some have to stand guard at their own prisons for life. Some secrets we must take with us, as the melodramatic old idiom has it, to the grave.
happy glorious 25th of may
It’s like walking around a big city or vast wilderness where you have to avoid dangerous criminals and apex predators, but there are spectacular sights(and insights) to behold that you’ll never see if you don’t go there.
“What if poor people abuse the system?”
The system intrinsically abuses poor people.
Hope this helps.
"What if poor people abuse the system?"
Rich people abuse the system far more and out of pure greed, not necessity or desperation so idrc about that
If a system needs to be abused for poor people to get the help they need, I don't think poor people are the problem.
via bree newsome bass on twitter:
“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era.
“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”
https://twitter.com/breenewsome/status/986427881680228354
This second picture is MUCH more accurate!
I had the exact same experience the second time I looked at this picture as the first time. I was looking like "what is this green line? Like suddenly everything is OK? It's not. Racists are still trying to push us back to 1619. Nothing has been fixed. We still need to fight. Hard!
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
I will absolutely tell you that ChatGPT is not better than Google - even in this day and age where Google sucks. And there are other search engines that will do you better than Google. I will absolutely tell you if you stop using your brain to think, your ability to think will grow weaker. I will tell you there is an environmental, and economic and human cost to using AI that we don't have any full scope of yet. I don't want to partake in any GENAI generated material.
And while it's less important than the environmental and human costs, you shouldn't use ChatGPT for looking things up because on a lot of fringe subjects IT LIES.
Because when it can't find something, instead of saying "I couldn't find that" or "zero results found," it confidently hallucinates an answer.
Which is so much worse.
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.
To everyone who thinks "wow this is so violent, gross" - consider that this happens to multiple REGULAR people every day when they're diagnosed with cancer. Oh, not the shark part, but the having to throw all their worldly resources at the equally rapacious predators of the medical billing and insurance industries or they'll die in pain, drowning or both.
I am dead fucking serious. A serious car accident or a major illness is how a lot of the "working" homeless get that way. They played payment roulette with the wrong bills that subsequently snowballed while they were too sick to work/in the 'donut hole' of spend-down before you qualify for medicaid and lost everything.
Bankrupting 3 billionaires to keep literally hundreds of thousands of people housed, fed and part of the social safety net? yeah. don't threaten ME with a good time.