54 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Die großen US-Investmentgesellschaften BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase und State Street haben sich zu großen Teilen aus der Koalition Climate Action 100+ zurückgezogen, in der sich Unternehmen zur Dekarbonisierung verpflichten. Damit werden dieser Koalition 14 Billionen (14.000 Millionen) Dollar entzogen. Republikanische Politiker:innen versuchen schon länger zu verhindern, dass Investionen an Dekarbonisierungszusagen gebunden werden. Die Investment-Gesellschaften argumentieren jetzt, dass Climate Action 100+ nicht nur eine Offenlegung fossiler Investionen, sondern eine Steuerung verlangt habe. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/business/dealbook/wall-streets-climate-retreat.html

  2. Jan 2024
    1. when we're investing in the stock market, we're mostly just hoping that the value of those shares will rise. That money is not actually reaching companies and being used in productive ways. And that's true. We can see it with private equity too.
      • for: speculative investing - example

      • example - speculative investing

        • stock market
          • money is not reaching companies and being used in a productive way
          • part of it must be, but whenever shareholders take earnings, then it's extracted out
        • private equity
          • when private equity firms buy companies then layoff staff and cut back spending on services, they pocket all that money for the shareholders. It's a way for the rich to maintain their supremacy position
      • comment

        • In its simplest expression, it is greed in action
        • It is what maintains the 1% / 99% divide
      • epiphany

      • new meme
        • We need to replace WALL street with WELL street!
  3. Nov 2023
    1. in portland we've legalized the 00:12:50 transformation of street intersections into public squares as many as any residential neighborhood wants all of them if they like and then the streets that connect the intersections together are all available now for being recreated 00:13:02 and you are able to put things in this space between the sidewalk and the curb and between the sidewalk and your property line 00:13:15 free of charge and free of permit so really what you might say liberalized the community right of way to be reinvented based on the initiative of local residents who are right 00:13:32 there
      • for: question - ordinances for street intersection transformation

      • question: ordinances for street intersection transformation

        • how easy is this to do in other cities around the world? Check with city officials.
        • cars obviously still have to get to homeowner's garages so this does not stop automobile traffic
  4. Nov 2022
  5. Oct 2022
  6. Jul 2022
  7. Jun 2022
    1. FAANG is an acronym of five major technology stocks that include Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (now Alphabet). Jim Cramer coined the term in 2013 while giving accolades to the companies for being the dominant companies in their niches.
    1. That means many investors already have at least some exposure to them. Because the heavy weighting of FAANG stocks in indexes such as the S&P 500 gives them an outsize impact on the broader stock market, it’s worthwhile for investors to learn a bit more about them.
    1. In finance, “FAANG” is an acronym that refers to the stocks of five prominent American technology companies: Meta (META) (formerly known as Facebook), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX); and Alphabet (GOOG) (formerly known as Google). 
    1. In finance, “FAANG” is an acronym that refers to the stocks of five prominent American technology companies: Meta (META) (formerly known as Facebook), ...
  8. May 2022
    1. “It was 2017, I would say, when Twitter started really cracking down on bots in a way that they hadn’t before — taking down a lot of bad bots, but also taking down a lot of good bots too. There was an appeals process [but] it was very laborious, and it just became very difficult to maintain stuff. And then they also changed all their API’s, which are the programmatic interface for how a bot talks to Twitter. So they changed those without really any warning, and everything broke.

      Just like chilling action by political actors, social media corporations can use changes in policy and APIs to stifle and chill speech online.

      This doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors building bots to actively cause harm, but there is a class of potentially helpful and useful bots (tools) that can make a social space better or more interesting.

      How does one regulate this sort of speech? Perhaps the answer is simply not to algorithmically amplify these bots and their speech over that of humans.

      More and more I think that the answer is to make online social interactions more like in person interactions. Too much social media is giving an even bigger bullhorn to the crazy preacher on the corner of Main Street who was shouting at the crowds that simply ignored them. Social media has made it easier for us to shout them back down, and in doing so, we're only making them heard by more. We need a negative feedback mechanism to dampen these effects the same way they would have happened online.

  9. Apr 2022
    1. The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from the pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.'[3] Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■).[4]

      It's worth look looking into the structure of Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project as the numbering system that he used on his zettels is very similar to that of both Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten as well as the street numbers of 1770 Vienna.

      link to - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA - https://hypothes.is/a/lvGHJlNHEeyZnV-8psRNrA

  10. Jan 2022
    1. commercial enterprises like Alexander Street Press, which offers libraries beautifully produced collections of everything from Harper’s Weekly to the letters and diaries of American immigrants.
  11. Dec 2021
    1. Luhmann, for sure, had little (if any) awareness of this long tradition. His excerpting habits should not be regarded as a result of cultural inheritance. A direct contact with early modern excerpting systems is not demonstrable, and Luhmann himself never once mentioned them in his publications.

      Alberto Cevolini argues that Niklas Luhmann was unaware of the prior tradition of excerpting, however even his complex numbering system shows incredibly high similarity to the numbering system of houses used in 1770 Vienna near the time at which Konrad Gessner delineated his note taking system which also used excerpting.

      cross reference Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines, chapter 3, page 28:

      By 1777, the government of Lower Austria starts a renewed numbering of houses. “ As many new houses were built after the last conscription which have no number yet, this is also an opportunity for the rectification of the house numbers.” New entries are to be treated as follows: “If for instance three new houses are found between numbers 12 and 13, the first is to be 12a, the second 12b, the third 12c.”

      Given this evidence, it's more likely that Luhmann was taught this system, he researched it, or perhaps like the broader ideas, it was floating around so heavily in the culture of his time and place from centuries earlier that it was simply a natural fit. More evidence about the prevalence for street numbering may be needed from his time period to know how common this general numbering system was.

    1. Here, I also briefl y digress and examine two coinciding addressing logics: In the same decade and in the same town, the origin of the card index cooccurs with the invention of the house number. This establishes the possibility of abstract representation of (and controlled access to) both texts and inhabitants.

      Curiously, and possibly coincidently, the idea of the index card and the invention of the house number co-occur in the same decade and the same town. This creates the potential of abstracting the representation of information and people into numbers for easier access and linking.

  12. Nov 2021
    1. We said we were going to take ex-convicts and ex-addicts and teach them to be teachers, general contractors, and truck drivers. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to take 250 people who had never worked and had no skills and teach them to build a 400,000 square foot complex as our new home on the waterfront. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to partner with colleges and get people who started out functionally illiterate to achieve bachelor of arts degrees. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to run successful restaurants, moving companies, furniture making, and cafés and bookstores without any professional help. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to do all this with no staff, no government funding, and no professionals. They laughed and said it couldn’t be done.
    1. For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across disparate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example, mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academia from high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student recruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge, policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation of high-carbon practices.

      A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.

      https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localization https://medium.com/@joseramos_30450/the-cosmo-local-reader-invitation-to-participate-dbcb6248f54b

      In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.

      Graduated relocalization that begins to replace auto transportation with pedestrian and bike traffic can result in huge decarbonization impacts. This relocalization movement is also an economic reconfiguration, echoing what community economist Michael Shuman refers to as the movement from Wall Street to Main Street - decentralizing centralizing organizations when feasible, and creating more community wealth while decarbonizing unnecessarily long supply chains.

      https://michaelhshuman.com/store/

  13. Sep 2021
  14. Jul 2021
    1. BlackRock employs a stable of former policymakers, underscoring the importance the company occupies in both financial and policymaking ecosystems, in something akin to a shadow government entity.[157] Good government groups have documented 118 examples of “revolving door” activity by the company—cases in which a government official joined BlackRock’s roster, or vice versa.[158] In one particularly troubling example of how Washington’s revolving door operates, in 2017, a former BlackRock executive was put in charge of reviewing the FSOC’s work for the Treasury Department.[159] Unsurprisingly, the Department’s conclusion was that FSOC should “prioritize its efforts to address risks to financial stability through a process that emphasizes an activities-based or industry-wide approach,” the company’s preferred position.[160] This conclusion all but ensures that BlackRock will not be designated for greater regulation by the FSOC under the Trump administration.

      To Big To Fail? Above The Law? Shadow Government?

      The term "shadow government" comes up often when investigating Revolving Door partnerships between corporations and former government policymakers. One particular public corporation, BlackRock Investments is the poster child of revolving door activity and comparisons to a shadow government.

      BlackRock is front and center in the manipulation of todays Real Estate bubble.

      BlackRock should be marketed as;*The Largest Asset Manager and Keeper of The Neo-liberal Flame; We Kill Children to Make You Money and We Enjoy Doing It!*

    1. How a memory palace works When we’re learning something new, it requires less effort if we connect it to something we already know, such as a physical place. This is known as elaborative encoding. Once we need to remember the information, we can “walk” around the palace and “see” the various pieces. The idea is to give your memories something to hang on to. We are pretty terrible at remembering things, especially when these memories float freely in our heads. But our spatial memory is actually pretty decent, and when we give our memories some needed structure, we provide that missing order and context. For example, if you struggle to remember names, it can be helpful to link people you meet to names you already know. If you meet someone called Fred and your grandmother had a cat called Fred, you could connect the two. Creating a multisensory experience in your head is the other part of the trick. In this case, you could imagine the sound of Fred meowing loudly. To further aid in recall, the method of loci is most effective if we take advantage of the fact that it’s easiest to remember memorable things. Memory specialists typically recommend mentally placing information within a physical space in ways that are weird and unusual. The stranger the image, the better.

      This notion of using spatial memory to encode other concepts - or even the P-A-O sytem where a 2 digit number encodes a person performing an action is an interesting idea for someone like me who forgets quite a bit.

  15. May 2021
  16. Oct 2020
    1. As Matt Taibbi observed way back in 2009 in the midst of the previous bailout, “By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of CDS [credit-default swap] and CDO [collateralized-debt obligation], most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the [2008] crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system – transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.” [10]

      Great quote.

  17. Sep 2020
  18. Aug 2020
    1. Altig, D., Baker, S. R., Barrero, J. M., Bloom, N., Bunn, P., Chen, S., Davis, S. J., Leather, J., Meyer, B. H., Mihaylov, E., Mizen, P., Parker, N. B., Renault, T., Smietanka, P., & Thwaites, G. (2020). Economic Uncertainty Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Working Paper No. 27418; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27418

  19. Jun 2020
  20. Nov 2019
  21. Sep 2019
  22. Jun 2019
    1. This year, the Promise’s marketing has emphasized vocational college. Administrators hope marginal students will be less likely to drop out of such programs because they are shorter.

      Vocational programs are great for "Builders", who learn by doing stuff than merely reciting study material.

    1. Income share agreements could lower costs and improve outcomes by tying loan amounts to objective judgments of how much the student is likely to earn from her degree. Educational quality could also benefit: Investors would presumably advance students money only for schools that were doing a decent job of teaching them. The risks are that some borrowers could end up paying far more under such a scheme than the current plan and that investors might not lend to students they consider too risky.

      The author's counter arguments to Income Share Agreements are not convincing enough for me. They seem abstract and vague.

    2. His administration cut out the middlemen by killing off the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, the one created under Presidents Johnson and Nixon that relied on banks, in favor of a direct loan program, in which money came from the Treasury. But the government’s loose lending policy, with few questions asked, remained in place. The Obama administration also heavily promoted income-based repayment programs, which set borrowers’ monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income and then forgave a portion of their debt after 20 to 25 years of payments. This severed the link between the value of students’ education and how much they could borrow, providing a huge incentive for schools to raise tuition, since taxpayers would pick up more of the tab. Enrollment in these programs is one big reason that the government’s costs for student loans are exploding.

      Obama revisions to the original student loan program of 1970s started under Johnson and Nixon.

    3. The voucher system, combined with a lack of government oversight, created perverse incentives: Colleges could raise money quickly by admitting academically suspect students while suffering little or no consequences if their students dropped out and defaulted on loans.
    4. In particular, the system gave colleges an incentive to maximize the tuition they extracted from students and the federal taxpayer by boosting fees and enrollment, which meant relaxing admissions standards.

      Reason for inflation in tuition fees -

      1. Higher Enrollment
      2. Relaxing Admission Standards
  23. Jan 2019
    1. 援引《彭博社》消息,華爾街證券研究公司 Fundstrat Global Advisors 的聯合創辦人 Tom Lee 12 月 13 日向客戶發電郵時透露,已經厭倦人們不斷詢問目標價格,有鑑於加密貨幣的內在波動性,該公司將停止提供任何「實現公允價格」的時程表。 換句話說,這表示華爾街最著名的比特幣預言家,已經決定放棄對其價格進行預測。 原因很簡單,若回顧 Tom Lee 過去的研究報告,我們會發現他曾預測比特幣的價格將在 2018 年終達到 20,000 美元的目標價格;而年終的預測價格則為 25,000 美元。到了 11 月,他將目標價格削減至 15,000 美元,但比特幣當時的交易價格僅為 5,500 美元,隨後更跌至 4,000 美元左右。總體而言,比特幣價格全年下降超過 70%,而 Tom Lee 最近一次預測的「公允價格」範圍在 13,800 美元到 14,800 美元之間。

      <big>评:</big><br/><br/>出于加密货币与生俱来的独特性,其价格走势本不应该被人为地解读,而场外观众们也无需矫情地揣测低迷熊市与失守分析师之间的暧昧联系。比特币可谓区块链世界第一个广为人知的创业项目,考虑到它对现有金融体系的颠覆性冲击,这些华尔街拥趸们的「洋相」或许不失为一种班门弄斧式的保身明哲。

  24. Oct 2017
  25. Aug 2016
  26. Apr 2016
    1. Unfortunately, the new rule would leave out key banks with big international presences, like State Street or Bank of NY Mellon, ones that are clearly important global institutions. It would also roll back the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s “qualified mortgage” rules, which aim to cut some of the predatory lending practices from the 2008 crisis. It would overhaul the Federal Reserve governance system, possibly making the Fed less independent and more political, as well as undercut regulators’ ability to monitor “shadow banking,” the firms and institutions like hedge funds, asset managers, and money market funds that fall outside the normal banking system but are where many experts believe the next financial crisis will begin.

      This new attempt to roll back the Dodd-Frank reforms is being opposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Maxine Waters.

    2. Now it seems that using the budget bill to water down Dodd-Frank is becoming business as usual. Republicans are pushing a number of potential reform rollbacks as part of the usual end-of-year, closed-door haggling over spending packages. In particular, a bill sponsored by Senator Richard Shelby, S. 1484, has been attached to the 2016 spending bill.
  27. Oct 2015
    1. But forthose (such as the unemployed, housewives, and broadly the “informalpeople”) who lack such institutional power/settings, streets become acrucial arena to express discontent.

      Riots and defiant parades/organizational rebellions are led along streets... They're literally using their built environment in an abstract way that was probably never thought of being purposed in that way.

  28. Jul 2015
    1. a divorce from Wall Street, could help Democrats win back sizable segments of working class whites

      I don't see how this would help Democrats if a large segment of working class whites vote Republican. Republicans are already in bed with Wall Street, same as the neo-liberal Democrats. Why would the Dems moving away from Wall Street change that?

    1. How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

      Or Restorative Justice these days, I suppose. Yeah, there's something going on here. I need to just listen more.

    2. into the church

      What about school? Can school be a retreat from the culture of the street? Or does it just extend that culture?