Fallen Hamprince posted:

Condiv Link to Ozy posted:

The Meek Are Inheriting Wall Street

Can Atlas shrug it off? Alpha-male investment managers are losing their grip. Years of meager returns and the development of finance-savvy artificial intelligence bled $326 billion from actively managed funds last year, while $429 billion flowed into passively managed and algorithm-run funds. Even hedge funds took a $106 billion hit, partly from big investors like pension funds and college endowments opting to invest directly in privately-held firms, aka ”shadow capital” — a record quarter of all private equity investments — perhaps forcing Wall Street titans to share their burden.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

lol is that loving real?

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

etalian posted:

Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famously skillful player of board games and other similar contests, lives on Chiark Orbital, and is bored with his successful life. The Culture's Special Circumstances inquires about his willingness to participate in a long journey, though won't explain further unless Gurgeh agrees to participate. While he is considering this offer, one of his drone friends, Mawhrin-Skel, which had been ejected from Special Circumstances due to its unstable personality, convinces him to cheat in one of his matches in an attempt to win in an unprecedented perfect fashion. The attempt fails, but Mawhrin-Skel uses its recording of the event to blackmail Gurgeh into accepting the offer and insisting that Mawhrin-Skel be admitted back into Special Circumstances as well.

Gurgeh spends the next two years travelling to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud, where a complex game (also named Azad) is used to determine social rank and political status. The game itself is sufficiently subtle and complex that a player's tactics reflect his own political and philosophical outlook. By the time he arrives, he has grasped the game but is unsure how he will measure up against opponents who have been studying it for their entire lives.

Gurgeh lands on the Empire's home planet of Eä, accompanied by another drone, Flere-Imsaho. As a Culture citizen, he naturally plays with a style markedly different from his opponents, many of whom stack the odds against him one way or another, such as forming backroom agreements to cooperate against him (which is allowed by the game's rules). As he advances through the tournament he is matched against increasingly powerful Azad politicians, and ultimately the Emperor himself in the final round. The final contests take place on Echronedal, the Fire Planet, which undergoes a natural conflagration fueled by native plants that produce huge amounts of oxygen. The final game is timed to end when the flames engulf the castle where the event takes place, symbolically renewing the Empire by fire. However, faced with defeat, the Emperor orders his men to kill all the spectators, and then attempts to kill Gurgeh, but he is himself killed by a shot from his own weapon, deflected by Flere-Imsaho (who later refuses to tell Gurgeh if it was coincidental).

Flere-Imsaho reveals that Gurgeh's participation was part of a Culture plot to overthrow the corrupt and savage Empire from within, and that he, the player, was in fact a pawn in a much larger game. Although Gurgeh never discovers the whole truth, in the final sentences of the novel the narrator is revealed to be Flere-Imsaho, who had been disguised as Mawhrin-Skel to manipulate Gurgeh into taking part in the game.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/889142106513698818

Yinlock posted:

i like to do both those things!!!

HiHo ChiRho posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAuR5bkIlQ

Joementum posted:

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

i can see how zuck would relate with the main character (gurgeh) who is a bored guy, and who is basically uber-rich since he lives in a full-automated post-scarcity economy with unlimited resources.

then he leaves it for adventure which ends up, spoiler alert, destroying a society by becoming its emperor though mastery of political game-playing

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/889142106513698818

quote:

If Chapo Trap House and its political brethren are the rising stars of Democratic politics, they bring anxiety with them. The battle within party could echo the fights of the 60s, which pitted the New Left against cold war liberalism, contributed to the chaos of the 1968 convention and helped open a divide that ushered in nearly a decade of conservative government.

“The fear is we’re going to do ’68 over again and that’s the argument the Clintonists will make,” Mason said. “That a battle within the Democratic party will help elect a conservative militia that will then, despite being a sociological minority, craft the institutions so they can remain a political majority.”

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Inescapable Duck posted:

Isn't this basically Yu-Gi-Oh! In SPACE

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The Game of Azad is really a metaphor for meritocracy, and like real life "meritocracies" it relies on a lot of hypocrisies and institutional bias to maintain the dominance of the empire and its ruling classes, including racial prejudice against non-Azadians despite nominally being a game that anybody could participate in.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

i can see how zuck would relate with the main character (gurgeh) who is a bored guy, and who is basically uber-rich since he lives in a full-automated post-scarcity economy with unlimited resources.

then he leaves it for adventure which ends up, spoiler alert, destroying a society by becoming its emperor though mastery of political game-playing

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/889142106513698818

Venom Snake posted:

This is actually a good article

Inescapable Duck posted:

So pretty much, yeah. If you're not an eccentric dragon-obsessed billionaire, some degree of magically empowered maniacal supervillain, the literal maker of the game or possessed by an ancient ghost who has the superpower of cheating, you ain't winning poo poo no matter how good you are and how much you talk about friendship.

quote:

The phrase “bend the knee”, a historical gesture of deference, was interpreted by some critics’ terms of gender and identity politics – realms into which Chapo hosts often throw grenades.

“Bend the knee gets read as a sexual reference,” the New York magazine and All the Single Ladies author Rebecca Traister wrote in an email quoted by the New Republic. “Not because people think it is literally about sex, but because it conveys a hunger for dominance and submission, which is very quickly heard as gendered and sexual.”

Willa Rogers posted:

The New York senator said the new Democratic agenda, set to be unveiled on Monday, would include proposals to "just go after these drug companies when they raise prices so egregiously and people can't afford these drugs" and a plan to "change the way companies can merge," mentioning the cable, airline and gas industries.

flashback:

Question: On the Amendment (Dorgan Amdt. No. 2793 )
Vote Number: 377 Vote Date: December 15, 2009, 06:45 PM
Required For Majority: 3/5 Vote Result: Amendment Rejected
Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 2793 to S.Amdt. 2786 to H.R. 3590 (Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009)
Statement of Purpose: To provide for the importation of prescription drugs.
Vote Counts: YEAs51
NAYs48

SKULL.GIF posted:

this huckster should be pelted with rotten fruits

Fallen Hamprince posted:

how dare the guardian publish criticism of My Perfect Chapo Boys

Venom Snake posted:

A lot has changed since 2009; and I'm only saying that because chuck at the very least seems to realize that the party is going to get hosed if it doesn't wake up

Venom Snake posted:

A lot has changed since 2009; and I'm only saying that because chuck at the very least seems to realize that the party is going to get hosed if it doesn't wake up

SKULL.GIF posted:

this huckster should be pelted with rotten fruits

Fallen Hamprince posted:

i've never seen an instance of an otherwise reasonable article being given an inflammatory or provocative headline, having lived my entire life up to this moment in a damp, lightless cave

Raskolnikov38 posted:

also amusing is chuck's statement that single payer is "on the table" rather than an integral part of tomorrow's policy release

Fallen Hamprince posted:

how dare the guardian publish criticism of My Perfect Chapo Boys

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Schumer could also simply be stating the obvious so that he doesn't get primaried, while not seriously pursuing anything resembling justice.