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Walked into the kitchen hungry… left satisfied in a whole different way 😏🔥 #snowbunny #whitegirl #pawg #hoodbunny #gutterbunny #pyt #bop #goon #goonfuel #wankbank #buyingcontent #sellingcontent #contentcreator #model #thickwhitegirl #horny #whooty

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I made a digital twin of myself from 10 seconds of video. In the clip: left is the real me, middle is a leading avatar model, right is Mirage Avatar X. Watch the eyes. The difference is not subtle. I have been testing AI avatar models since my first clone in 2023. Every one of them was impressive for about 30 seconds, then your brain caught up. Still eyes. One polite expression. A mouth doing all the work. Avatar X is the first model where that moment never came. Here is what makes it different: It is trained on you. Avatar X preserves your identity. Most avatar models can copy your appearance. Avatar X captures the subtle details that make you you. The way you move, the way you express yourself, and the way you naturally deliver speech. It looks like you. It moves like you. It sounds like you. It understands non-verbal performance Laughing, crying, yawning, sighing. These are the moments where most avatar models fall apart, trying to lip-sync through sounds that aren't words. Avatar X responds naturally, generating realistic facial expressions and micro-expressions instead of forcing every sound into speech. The expression goes beyond the lips Expressions are driven by the audio, through the whole face and body. Ask a question and it furrows its brows and shrugs on the tone. No other model does this to this degree. No quality degradation The first second and the last second look the same. Other models lose quality the longer the video runs. 10 seconds of input That is the entire requirement. Other models need 15 seconds, some even 1 to five minutes. Three years ago my AI clone was a party trick. This one can carry my face, my expressions and my delivery without me in the room. The bar for AI avatars just moved. Avatar X is live today. → Try it here:

Linus ✦ Ekenstam

20,019 次观看 • 5 天前

Ok, I think we need to shift the conversation around why we join policing back to exactly that, the why? 😌 I wanted to join from a very young age.🧍‍♂️ I had an early learning centre police officer outfit that I wore till it faded and used to make my dad walk up and down my road with me writing down number plates in my first ‘note book’. 😂 I learnt the phonetic alphabet at about six or seven and then when I was little older, got addicted to ‘The Bill’. 🚔 I think that must be where I wanted to join response. 🚨 Response is the absolute definition of policing to me. 💯 The emergencies come in and we race out to help and when we get there, no matter what it is 99.9% we’re first on scene. 🤷🏼‍♂️ I know we’re burdened with roles that aren’t ours, we all agree on that, but the core role of ‘blue lighting’ to say a burglary in progress, is truly the essence of why most people join policing. ✅ But that’s not for everyone and maybe we need to embrace that in a different way. 🤔 I think we should all join as constables and complete our training period of two years and then progress into different roles like we used to. I have met countless direct entry Detectives who moved over to response because it’s not what they thought it would be. 😟 Why? 👀 The skills learnt in those two years are invaluable and also ground you in the whole organisation. 👏 I think too we need to return to a focus of scenario based training and move away from a bizarre belief that academia solves policing’s problems. 😏 Scenarios have two distinct benefits: 1) They test you in situations you’ve never been in before and give you an insight into your instincts in those challenging moments. ⚠️ 2) They give the trainer the same insight from a different perspective into your ability to deal with them and your strengths and weaknesses.❗️ They also have a bit of a hidden third benefit. I loved the scenarios I was given during training, it was finally when I knew ‘my why’ was right. I wanted to step in, in moments when most won’t, most are scared or most simply don’t want the bother of tackling a difficult situation. 😅 My favourite incidents at work are major, critical or public order based. They require a helicopter view, calm, control and critical thinking. As a Sergeant they’re what I thrive on. 🔥 New Zealand Police seem to agree with this style of learning and testing and have heavily invested in a state of the art scenario orientated training area, a power move in my opinion. 🇳🇿👏 I’d like to see Hendon or an equivalent morning back to that. ✅ Sure Hydra has its benefits, but proper scenarios like there used to be are invaluable. 🤷🏼‍♂️ But, this all requires investment. 😏 We shall see. 👀 #ThinBlueLine 🚨

Brick Cop©️

25,004 次观看 • 2 年前

🚨ELON MUSK'S BROTHER SOLD HIS COMPANY FOR $307 MILLION AT 26.. THEN GAVE UP TECH COMPLETELY TO COOK FOR FIREFIGHTERS IN THE RUBBLE OF 9/11.. THIS IS THE MUSK NOBODY TALKS ABOUT.. Most people only know Kimbal Musk as Elon's younger brother.. But his actual life path makes almost no sense on paper.. In 1989, at 17, he left South Africa for Canada with almost no money.. He paid his way through university running a house-painting franchise.. And won manager of the year doing it.. Then in 1995 he moved to Palo Alto with Elon and they started Zip2.. An online city guide and mapping company, years before Google Maps existed.. They were broke.. They slept on the office floor and showered at the local gym.. To impress investors, they built a giant fake casing around a normal PC to make it look like a supercomputer.. In 1999 Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million.. Kimbal, at 26, walked away with around $22 million.. He could have done anything.. Retired.. Started another tech company.. Coasted on the PayPal and Tesla fortunes that were coming.. Instead he enrolled in culinary school in New York to become a chef.. His timing was brutal.. He graduated in 2001.. Right as 9/11 happened.. He lived steps from the World Trade Center.. So he grabbed his new skills and spent six weeks cooking for firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero.. 10 to 12 hour days in the wreckage.. Feeding the people pulling bodies from the rubble.. He said that experience changed everything.. Watching exhausted workers find comfort in a shared meal convinced him that food was his actual life's purpose.. He moved to Colorado and started building farm-to-table restaurants that sourced straight from local farmers.. Then in 2010 came the second turning point.. He broke his neck in a tubing accident and was temporarily paralyzed for three days.. He called it a near-death experience.. And it pushed him even harder into his mission.. He started a nonprofit that built outdoor learning gardens in hundreds of underserved schools.. Reaching hundreds of thousands of kids.. He co-founded an urban farming company growing food inside shipping containers in cities.. Each one producing the equivalent of two acres of farmland.. And then in 2022 he did the strangest pivot yet.. When Intel decided to shut down its light-drone division, Kimbal bought the whole thing.. 9,000 drones and the engineering team.. Now his company flies massive drone shows that act as pixels in the sky.. Including over 3,000 drones above St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.. Recreating Renaissance art in the night sky.. One brother is trying to colonize Mars and build humanoid robots.. The other made his fortune in the same rooms.. Then spent the next 25 years on something almost nobody expected.. Feeding people, teaching kids to grow food, and turning the sky into art.. Same beginning.. Completely different definition of what to do with a fortune.

Evan Luthra

1,096,477 次观看 • 1 个月前

Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major, K.331: A Dance Between Light, Shadow and Perfect Balance To appreciate the singular character of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K.331, it is helpful to imagine the entire work as a court dancer moving gracefully across a vast stage. Yet this is no dance defined solely by elegance and refinement. Within every movement lies a delicate equilibrium: between the stability of Classical convention and moments that quietly defy expectation; between the luminous clarity of the major mode and the fleeting shadows of the minor; between the courtly poise of the opening movements and the vibrant vitality of the finale. The sonata derives its lasting power from the way Mozart constructs a unified musical architecture, in which every movement, every variation, and every subtle gesture is bound together by principles of remarkable structural coherence. A Sonata That Begins Where No One Expects From its opening bars, Mozart leads K.331 along a path quite unlike that of most Classical sonatas. A conventional piano sonata almost invariably opens with a brisk movement in Sonata-Allegro form, comprising three principal sections: Exposition, Development and Recapitulation. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, this had become the defining model of the genre. K.331, however, begins with an Andante grazioso cast as a Theme and Variations. This is not merely a change of tempo or expressive character. It alters the very foundations upon which the work is built. Among Mozart's piano sonatas, K.331 occupies a unique place in that none of its movements employs the traditional Sonata-Allegro form. Rather than allowing the music to unfold through the dramatic opposition of contrasting themes, Mozart adopts an entirely different approach. He presents a single theme and proceeds to explore, with extraordinary imagination, the many expressive possibilities concealed within it. If we continue our image of the sonata as a courtly dance, Mozart does not allow his dancer to stride confidently onto the stage with the energetic gestures characteristic of an Allegro. Instead, the performance begins with a dance of quiet elegance, measured poise and perfect control. From this single dance, Mozart gradually fashions an astonishing variety of shapes, colours and rhythmic characters throughout the journey that follows. This bold decision establishes the artistic world in which the entire sonata unfolds. The Bridge of Eighteen Steps: Mozart Expands the Balance of Classical Form A Classical musical theme generally strives for clear symmetry. Listeners become accustomed to phrases built from balanced units, most commonly an opening eight bars followed by another eight, together forming the familiar sixteen-bar structure that typifies Classical proportion. Yet from the very first phrases of Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K.331, Mozart introduces a subtle departure from convention. The theme of the opening movement (Andante grazioso) does not conclude after the expected sixteen bars. Instead, it extends to eighteen. Technically speaking, the first eight bars establish a satisfying sense of completeness. They seem to arrive naturally at a point of repose. Yet Mozart refuses to close the phrase there. He extends it by a further ten bars, allowing the musical line to continue unfolding before finally returning to equilibrium. Those final two bars are far from superfluous. They create an exquisitely subtle sense of suspension, rather like a court dancer who has completed the principal gesture of a dance, yet lingers for one final graceful movement before coming to rest. If we imagine this theme as a bridge, it is not the familiar sixteen-step bridge of Classical convention. It possesses eighteen steps. The opening eight provide stability and familiarity. Those that follow broaden the landscape, allowing the listener to experience a movement that remains graceful yet never entirely predictable. Even more remarkable is the fact that Mozart employs this design not merely once. All six subsequent variations preserve the original eighteen-bar framework. Although tempo, rhythm and ornamentation continually evolve, the underlying architecture remains intact. The union of rigorous structure with endless variety demonstrates Mozart's remarkable ability to expand Classical form without disturbing its essential balance. He does not reject established rules. He simply reveals how flexible they can become. A Journey Between Light and Shadow: The Dancer Moves Between A Major and A Minor If the eighteen-bar structure provides the inner architecture of the first movement, the continual dialogue between A major and A minor shapes the changing landscape through which the dancer moves during the course of the sonata. In Mozart's musical language, major and minor keys are never merely contrasting harmonic colours. They resemble two different qualities of light illuminating the same stage. A major is a world of brightness, balance and elegance, where every movement of the dancer appears clear, poised and effortlessly graceful. A minor, by contrast, softens the light. Its outlines become deeper and more contemplative, allowing the audience to perceive hidden emotional dimensions within the very same figure. What makes K.331 so remarkable is that Mozart never creates two entirely separate worlds. Instead, he allows the dancer to pass continuously from one illumination into another, so that identical movements acquire entirely different emotional meanings. The first movement opens in the radiant world of A major. The Andante grazioso theme resembles the moment when the dancer first appears beneath the clear light of a courtly stage. Every gesture possesses order, elegance and perfect composure. Yet as the subsequent variations venture into the darker colours of A minor, the very same dance acquires an unexpected depth. The dancer remains unchanged. Each movement still grows from the original theme. Only the light has altered, revealing emotional shades that previously remained unseen. This dialogue between brightness and shadow continues into the second movement, the Menuetto. Here Mozart restores the dancer to the familiar elegance of A major, preserving the balance and refinement that characterise the dance. Yet the Trio, moving into D major, opens an entirely new space, as though the stage itself briefly expands into another landscape before the dancer quietly returns to the original centre. By the time we reach the third movement, Rondo alla Turca, the contrast between A minor and A major has become far more dramatic. The dancer no longer possesses the gentle grace of the opening movement. The finale begins in A minor, creating a world of heightened energy, where every step becomes firmer, more decisive and charged with vitality. Its insistent rhythms, powerful bass writing and weighty chords transform the dance into something altogether different—bolder, more vigorous, yet always governed by an underlying architectural order. Only after this remarkable journey does the sonata finally return to A major. This is more than a simple harmonic resolution. It resembles the moment when the dancer, having passed through many contrasting states of movement, returns to the centre of the stage transformed. The performer retains the same essential balance, yet now possesses greater richness, maturity and emotional depth. Mozart never employs A major and A minor as opposing forces locked in conflict. Instead, he allows them to complement one another, just as light and shadow together reveal the true form of a dancer upon the stage. It is this continual process of transformation that makes K.331 far more than a sonata of memorable melodies. It becomes a musical journey in which beauty arises from the perfect balance between seemingly opposing states. When Time Appears to Stand Still: Variation V (Adagio) and the Song Within the Dance After the continual transformations of the earlier variations, Mozart leads the listener into an entirely different world with Variation V (Adagio). The first striking change lies in the metre. Leaving behind the gentle 6/8 of the original theme, Mozart adopts 2/4, immediately creating the impression that musical time has slowed and become more intensely focused. At this moment, the dancer no longer traverses the stage with broad, clearly defined steps. Every gesture becomes smaller, more intimate and more refined, as though the dance has merged imperceptibly with song itself. The right hand unfolds exquisitely ornamented melodic lines whose graceful embellishments resemble a singer delicately shaping every phrase. Meanwhile, the left hand becomes markedly more restrained, providing a spacious harmonic foundation that allows the upper voice to breathe with remarkable freedom. This contrast gives the impression that time itself has slowed. The notes no longer exist simply to propel movement forward. They become expressions of the music's inner life. Most importantly, Mozart never employs ornamentation merely to display the virtuosity of the performer. Instead, he uses it to expand the expressive possibilities of the piano itself, enabling the instrument to approach the warmth, flexibility and emotional subtlety of the human voice. After this moment of profound stillness, Variation VI (Allegro) arrives like a sudden release of restrained energy. The contrast reveals one of Mozart's greatest gifts as a composer. He does not merely create differences between fast and slow. He shapes our perception of musical time itself, allowing us to experience not simply changes of tempo, but changes within the very character of each passing moment. Rondo alla Turca: When the Court Dancer Gives Way to a Dance of Vigorous Stamping After the stillness and refinement of Variation V, Mozart leads the entire sonata into an altogether different world in its concluding movement: Rondo alla Turca (Allegretto). If the opening movement resembles an elegant court dance, characterised by graceful, measured steps and impeccable poise, the finale introduces a far more vigorous mode of movement. The dancer no longer glides effortlessly across the stage with restrained elegance, but embraces a dance of unmistakable rhythm and decisive energy, where every step radiates vitality and purpose. What is particularly remarkable is Mozart's ability to evoke the impression of an entire ensemble through the resources of a single piano. Rather than imitating the sound of an Ottoman military band directly, he transforms its most distinctive qualities into the expressive language of the keyboard. The most significant technical feature lies in his treatment of the left hand. Instead of employing the familiar Alberti bass accompaniment found throughout much Classical repertoire, Mozart constructs powerful gestures in the lower register through octave chords preceded by brief ornamental notes. These sonorities suggest the firm, rhythmic impact of feet striking the ground. Each resonant bass chord serves not merely a harmonic function, but also provides rhythmic propulsion, much as a drum sustains the pulse of an entire dance. Meanwhile, the right hand creates a more agile and animated layer of movement. Its rapid passagework, flowing thirds and brightly contoured melodies resemble the graceful motions of the dancer's arms and upper body—constantly shifting, yet always retaining absolute precision. These two layers of movement complement one another perfectly. The left hand provides weight, stability and momentum. The right hand supplies flexibility, brilliance and lightness. Together they allow the piano to transcend the limitations of a solo instrument, creating the illusion of multiple musical voices inhabiting the same acoustic space. If we continue to imagine the finale as a dance, this is the moment when the court dancer adopts an entirely new physical language. The octave chords in the bass resemble forceful stamps upon the floor. The swift figurations of the right hand suggest agile turns and flowing gestures. Yet beneath all this exuberant energy lies the firm discipline of the Rondo form. The principal theme continually returns, establishing a stable centre amidst the movement's ever-changing colours and textures. Here we encounter one of Mozart's most distinctive artistic qualities. His music may overflow with vitality without ever surrendering its sense of order. It may convey an impression of complete freedom while remaining securely governed by a lucid and perfectly balanced structure. For this reason, Rondo alla Turca is celebrated not merely for its instantly recognisable melody or its infectious brilliance. Its deeper significance lies in Mozart's ability to transform an irresistibly engaging musical idea into a fully integrated architectural design, in which rhythm, colour and form merge into a single, continuous current of movement. Perfect Balance: The Enduring Essence of Piano Sonata No. 11, K.331 Looking back upon the journey of K.331 as a whole, it becomes clear that the work's greatness does not reside in any single moment. Not solely in the theme and variations with their remarkable eighteen-bar design. Not solely in the lyrical stillness of Variation V. Nor solely in the radiant vitality of Rondo alla Turca. The sonata's enduring value lies in Mozart's extraordinary ability to unite elements that might otherwise appear irreconcilable within a single, harmonious whole. A theme that extends beyond established convention while preserving perfect balance. A musical journey that passes from the brightness of A major into the deeper colours of A minor without ever creating a sense of rupture. A moment in which time itself appears to slow, allowing the piano to sing. A finale overflowing with vigour while never abandoning the elegance of Classical form. Mozart does not create beauty by eliminating contrasts. He creates beauty by placing each contrast precisely where it belongs within a perfectly ordered design. This, indeed, is the principle that permeates Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K.331. Balance is not a condition of immobility. It is the capacity to allow contrasting forms of movement to coexist within a unified whole. In K.331, Mozart transforms that principle into the very language of music. A court dancer may pass from grace to strength, from light into shadow, from quiet contemplation to exuberant brilliance; yet in every moment, every step remains part of the same dance.

𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀

17,991 次观看 • 12 天前

#ChivayoInStateHouseMeetingScandal #BarredFromSeeingNigerianBillionaire Prominent and flamboyant ex-convict tenderpreneur Wicknell Chivayo gatecrashed State House in Harare yesterday in a desperate bid to attend the meeting between President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote to sign a US$1 billion investment deal, but was barred from the event. The incident left Mnangagwa's security and protocol teams fretting, and those attending the event bewildered. Chivayo had lied to his hangers-on that he was going to meet Dangote to sign a mega deal and officials were waiting for him at State House. His social media hacks started posting false stories about the issue, with the narrative that he had an appointment with Mnangagwa and Dangote. Chivayo used that false claim to worm his way into State House to try to gatecrash the meeting for a photo opportunity as there was no business deal between him and Dangote. Before that, Chivayo had begged state officials and organisers to attend the event, but was rebuffed. Apart from Mnangagwa and Dangote, the meeting was attended by cabinet ministers, government officials and business executives. Chivayo, who has expressed public ambitions to be a billionaire and always hobnobs with Presidents in Africa and rich people whenever he gets a chance, stormed State House - uninvited - and tried to gatecrash the meeting, but was stopped dead in his tracks by Mnangagwa's aides, including his son Sean, who is part of the close security unit, and turned away. "It was drama; a spectacle. Chivayo was not invited to the meeting. He had spent some time trying to convince the President's protocol and security teams that he should be allowed to attend the Dangote meeting. He begged them for days, but all in vain. He badly wanted to see Dangote and pitch his quick-buck schemes, but, as usual, he had also seen a big photo opportunity for himself. So he contrived to deceive or scam his hangers-on and state officials. All he wanted was to get a photo with Dangote to enhance his status and in the process scam people that he is signing deals with the richest man in Africa, wealthiest black person in the world. Chivayo likes Dangote, but for his own interests. Yes, he truly admires him, but the difference is that one is a genuine businessman, while the other is a tenderpreneur. Their business models, values and ambitions are so different, and not aligned at all. One is building generational wealth, while the other one is looking for tenders, fame and flamboyance for temporary gratification," a senior government official who attended the meeting told The NewsHawks. "Chivayo's plan this time failed. He had plotted this after failing to get invited to the meeting. Under false pretences, he then negotiated his way at the gate into State House, which is a security breach I'm told, and tried to force his way into the meeting, but he was stopped. He was told it was not possible to attend because he was not invited. His attempt to name-drop the President was promptly and curtly rejected. He was told to go away, so he was embarrassed and humiliated." Journalists covering the event say they saw Chivayo walking towards State House offices after parking his car. "I saw him walking from his car coming to State House offices where we were, carrying a brown envelope and thought he had been invited last minute, but it soon became clear he was trying to gatecrash the meeting. This reminds me of the way he manoeuvred to take a photo with Kenyan President William Ruto at Trade Fair in Bulawayo last year. Out of that deft move, he has now become Ruto's friend and has got business opportunities in Kenya. That is his business model - infleunce-peddling; hence he has met many Presidents in the region, among them those from Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Malawi, among others. But this time it failed. It was really embarrassing. After the drama, he walked away with his tail between his legs."

TheNewsHawks

297,116 次观看 • 8 个月前

Four words gave him away. NOT UP FOR NEGOTIATION. That's not a leader talking. That's a man reading out a pitch somebody else wrote for him. The man with all the answers, here at last to save a Britain he's spent twenty five years climbing over. Burnham didn't win an election. Burnham was INSTALLED. Four weeks. That's the gap between him becoming an MP and them fitting him for Prime Minister. No seat in June. Running the country by July, and not one of you was ever asked. He isn't the change. He's the COVER STORY. He says devolution. Power to the people. It's a SMOKESCREEN. Watch the salesman at the front and you miss the hands working behind him. He didn't dodge the press because he's shy. He dodged them because he CAN'T ANSWER THEM. The Times watched his last interview and called him utterly unconvincing. Then he announced he's rebuilding the whole country and took not one question. Strange sort of saviour, won't take a single question about the miracle. Watch the pitch. His direction is NOT UP FOR NEGOTIATION. Fixed. Final. No say for you. Then he promises an INCLUSIVE team. Then refuses to name a single soul on it. Then tells you to ignore anyone who goes looking. Inclusive. While he decides everything and names nobody. The most secretive move in politics, wrapped in the friendliest word in the dictionary, and the room clapped like he'd cured something. The team was picked months ago. He's just not allowed to read out the names yet. The salesman, caught pricing up the goods himself AND IT WAS NEVER SUDDEN Last August, already the most popular man in his party. September, a network quietly forms around him. They call it Mainstream. January, he tries to get into Parliament and the Prime Minister himself votes to BLOCK him. Blocked and it changed nothing. Five months later he walks through a different door like the lock was never there. The one man who could have stood against him folded inside the hour. No contest. A coronation, dressed up as a choice. The Prime Minister tried to stop this and couldn't. So ask yourself who actually can. WATCH THE TRICKS IN THE PITCH He says a more streamlined state. Then announces a brand new Downing Street. New building. New staff. New bills. Streamlined, while making it bigger. You actually could not write it. The room clapped for forty five seconds and not one of them did the sum. He says power will flow to every corner of Britain. But the hand on the tap stays in Manchester, in his fist. He keeps saying devolution, but the mayors he hands it to don't control the money. The Treasury does. The experts even have a name for it. A performed illusion of reform. Devolution isn't the gift. It's the wrapping paper. Then he reached for Germany to sound clever. But Germany's regions have their own constitutions, power no centre can rip back. Britain has one Parliament, and it can take back every crumb overnight. Wallpaper over a promise with nothing behind it. Then he walked off and took not one question. THE BIT THAT HITS YOUR FRONT DOOR Forget the sales patter a second. Here's what he's actually selling you. He wants your water. Your energy. Your home. Sold to you as public ownership. So who sets your bill then. Not you. Not anyone you ever voted for. A handful of people you've never heard of, who answer to nobody. Then he wants a tax on what your house is WORTH. Not what you earn. What it's worth just sitting there and because it's tied to house prices, the dearer your area, the harder you're hit. London alone, SEVEN BILLION pounds. Some homes, a THOUSAND pounds a year more. Just for owning the bricks around you. For a roof you already paid for. That lands on top of the heaviest tax burden this country has carried since 1948. Before this man has passed a single law. New office. New tax. New ten year plan. Spend, spend, spend. Tax, tax, tax. And nobody, anywhere, has told you what the bill comes to. Some rescue. Now glance at the roof over your head. 172,000 children sitting in B&Bs tonight, and the homes that are left bought up for the Home Office while you stay on the list. Your own government, bidding against you for the same bricks. Funny, that. MEET THE SALESMAN He's run for leader twice. Lost both times. The public have never once chosen him for anything bigger than Manchester. Watch how the great saviour actually moves. Blairite under Blair. Stayed under Corbyn when every other Blairite walked. Backed Starmer when Starmer rose. Now Reform surges and suddenly he agrees with Farage. Blair, Corbyn, Starmer, Farage. Four men, four directions, and he turned to face every one the moment it started winning. That's not conviction. That's a WEATHER VANE, spinning whichever way the wind pays best. He sold this country compulsory ID cards twenty years ago. Hold that thought next time he plays the man who'll set you free. A month into running our hospitals, patients were dying in their own urine. He opened an inquiry, then bolted the doors on it, and knocked back eighty one pleas to hold it in public. It took losing power for the truth to get out. A grooming gang ran riot on his patch as Mayor. Three jailed out of ninety seven. His response was called supine, and supine is the kind word for it. Twenty five years. Same pitch every time. THE HANDS BEHIND HIM One man gave up his seat for Burnham, and was already writing his lines while he did it. Both jobs at once. His chief of staff spent years on the payroll of Apple, Amazon and BP. Now he's the voice in Burnham's ear. The woman shaping his economy ran a think tank, walked into Downing Street, walked back out, and is on her way back in. Nobody ever voted for her once. Mainstream signed off the whole pitch months before he had a seat. He didn't write a word of it. Somebody handed it to him finished and pushed him out in front of the cameras. He's the face on the front of it. Reading lines other men wrote. Taking the credit that belongs to the people behind him who'll never once step into view. THIS IS THE PART THAT NEVER MOVES Here's the bit the great man will never tell you. The salesman at the front is the only part of this you get to vote for and the only part that ever changes. Behind him sits everything that actually runs the country. Officials who never face an election and never leave. Lobbyists who cycle through every government no matter the colour of the rosette. Think tanks that write the policy before a minister reads it. Burnham's own right hand was paid by Apple, Amazon and BP. Not one of them British. Not one on any ballot you've ever seen. The money behind this doesn't stop at Dover. The Cabinet Secretary who built the borders scheme is one face of it. There are hundreds more you'll never be shown. They were here before Burnham. They'll be here after him. Before Starmer, before the Tories, and long after Reform has had its turn. They don't change the country. They just change the suit. Starmer in his glasses. Burnham with his accent. Different face. Same con. Same hands behind it. You change the salesman. You never touch the people he's selling for. He isn't the change you're praying for. He's a twice rejected man with a weather vane where his spine should be, wheeled out in front of something that was running long before him and will run long after. It doesn't care who's clapping. It just needs a face at the front, and a room that wants to believe.

BanksyCat

131,895 次观看 • 1 个月前

The multi-leader blockchain endgame: competitive information inclusion as a self-reinforcing mechanism for global price discovery - how we got here, and why Aptos is leading the charge Onchain trading is the killer app In the nine years since the launch of programmable transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, onchain trading has revealed itself as the killer use case for blockchains: onchain listings, volume, and total value locked are all growing with no signs of slowing down, due to the censorship-resistant, permissionless, 24/7/365 qualities afforded by decentralized (DeFi) systems. Monolithic parallelism is key In 2020 Solana was first to market with monolithic, parallel execution (as opposed sharded execution which offers parallelism by partitioning global state into separate information silos), establishing a new design paradigm that raised the bar for throughput and latency: put all of the information in one replicated state machine and make it run as fast as possible. This design produces a single, global hub for activity, liquidity, and token launches, a kind of financial data whiteboard in the sky, where anyone can come and trade at any time with everybody else who has plugged into the system. DEXes are becoming more competitive Historically decentralized systems have been juxtaposed with centralized ones since the latter eliminates the overhead associated with distributed systems coordination. And yet despite this overhead, Solana as a decentralized exchange (DEX) is still pulling in billions of trading volume per day, exceeding that of all but the largest centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs), that simply can't compete with the giant DEX in the sky on token listings or fees. After all, CEXs have to pay for server space, salaries, and lawyers, while a DEX outsources everything. The colocation arms race The one place where CEXs have an advantage over DEXs is on end-to-end latency for colocation applications, or in other words: someone sets up a trading bot in the same data center as the exchange, and their trades get to the exchange faster than everyone else's. When there is only one data ingestion point the fastest trader wins, and after the arms race has played out everyone ends up huddling around the trading hub, effectively cutting off the rest of the world from playing the latency trading game. This is the model that traditional securities exchanges like the Nasdaq or the NYSE 🏛 employ, and because they own the server they can effectively charge whatever they want for access to it. The colocation arms race is also why L2s will probably never decentralize: running the sequencer is practically the same as running the NASDAQ, with the same monopoly on transaction fees collected from a nearby cluster of trading bots (I understand from conversations with Logan Jastremski that the Arbitrum arms race has already hit a Nash Equilibrium in Portland, Oregon). Colocation is a trap But once the colocation arms race has played out, trades become less about incorporating new information in the market and more about skimming off the top by spoofing all of the trades coming in from the other bots. High-frequency trading (HFT) bots located in the NYSE New Jersey data center, for example, are constantly placing buys and sell orders that they have no intention of executing, just to spoof the other colocated bots who are playing the same adversarial game. Information inclusion, on the other hand, the synthesis of real-time world events into prices, takes a back seat because anyone who tries to include new information first needs to batch up their order and send it through a series of middlemen before it ultimately ends up on the exchange: you, I, or practically any other individual can not actually "trade on the NASDAQ", no, we have to express our intent to someone like Robinhood, who then sells our order flow to @CitadelSecurities, who then sends it to the exchange, oh and by the way it doesn't actually even "clear" or "settle" once it "executes" because for whatever reason the whole systems splits these things up and prevents them from happening instantaneously even though it's 2024 and we have computers. Onchain trading cuts out middlemen This whole mess is why we have onchain trading, and why it's starting to win: if you want a mainline to the exchange, without setting up a server, and you want to trade on a news event without getting immediately frontrun by an HFT bot that is sniffing out the trades of every other HFT bot who is easing in batched up order flow on their own terms, then you submit your order to a node in the blockchain and the information gets included in the price upon ingestion. Oh, and by the way the trade is actually fully complete: settled, cleared, reconciled, done, whatever you want to call it, because the people who build decentralized finance (DeFi) build it how it should actually work, not in a way that creates a million incumbents and charges exorbitant rents for access to the system. Onchain trading better for price discovery And the beautiful part about this is that even if a distributed system has more latency than a centralized system, DeFi still ends up incorporating more information into the price faster than centralized finance, because with DeFi the information gets included in the system as soon as it is submitted, not after it has been batched up and sent through a series of middlemen. The consensus mechanism of the blockchain disseminates the information around the world in the form of a price update, while the centralized exchange model requires information about the event to first get propagate to the region of the trading hub, then to get submitted to the colocation server. This means that in terms of global price discovery, onchain trading is strictly a better system because the entire consensus model is based around accelerated information propagation. Because price discovery is a global phenomenon, blockchains, which are global, are actually better than the centralized status quo, on a performance basis, not just from an ideological or convenience-based view. And it has to be multi-leader In practice, effective global information synthesis of information has an additional key requirement: multi-leader architecture. That is, in a single-leader blockchain like Solana, where one validator at a time has a monopoly on ordering transactions into blocks, for their duration as a leader they effectively function as a colocation server. This means that if the current leader is in New York, someone in Singapore who wants to trade on local news as soon as it breaks will still need to get their order all the way around the world to the leader, who is effectively serving as the chain's data ingestion point, before the order can start propagating through the network. But this is issue solved by the introduction of multiple distributed leaders, because then anyone with access to new information can submit their order to the leader closest to them, yielding faster information inclusion in the form of price updates. Multi-leader is also required for fair markets A multi-leader architecture is also required for fair markets, because in a single-leader system the leader has the power to censor transactions, reorder them to their advantage, or even replace transactions with copycats that extract maximum value by replacing the sender's address with their own. For example if someone wants to capture an arbitrage opportunity between two onchain DEXes, they'll need to submit a transaction to the leader and trust that the leader won't simply copy the transaction and submit it themselves. But when there are two or more leaders, users whose transactions are censored by one leader will simply work with a different leader the next time around, eventually cutting off transaction fee flow to the extractive leader. Beyond just strict inclusion, in a multi-leader architecture validators are also forced to compete with each other on latency, because the leader who is fastest at disseminating users' transactions across the network will over time gobble up the largest share of the order flow. Transparent priority fees are a must, or a private mempool will emerge But in order to make this work, a multi-leader architecture must also offer users the ability to pay priority fees AKA "tips" or "bribes" to move their transaction to the front of the line: if there is a $5 arbitrage opportunity onchain, users need to have assurance that they if they pay a 4.99 priority fee to take that arb, they will get priority over a different user who is only willing to tip 4.98. If the native blockchain system does not offer this fair market priority fee mechanism, then it is only a matter of time before one spontaneously emerges in the form of a private mempool like Jito, which can create centralization pressures and undermine the integrity of the system as a whole. Competitive payment for order flow is the stable solution With the right architecture in place, the end result is a competitive environment where endpoints running maximum extractable value (MEV) bots compete with one to offer users the best price for their order flow. In other words, if a user wants to submit an order that can get sandwich attacked for as much as $2 of MEV, then the order should ultimately go to the endpoint bot that is willing to pay the user as much as $1.99 for the right to process their transaction. The price that the provider is willing to pay is ultimately a function of how much in priority fees they might need to pay to the current leader (0 they are the current one), but notably at each stage there is a competitive market for order flow, whether in the form of retail trader's orders, or priority fees among bots that might be forwarding orders to one of the leaders. AptosLabs is already building all this With a public mempool and transaction priority fees, Aptos additionally includes a pipelined architecture that already includes concurrent batching of transactions into blocks, with a single consensus leader who propagates the batched blocks out to the network. And the team is already researching running multiple instances of the consensus algorithm in parallel, yielding multiple consensus leaders who can compete with each other on latency and inclusion - just ask pranav | Shelby, Alexander Spiegelman, and Zekun Li. This means that block times can shrink as the number of consensus leaders grows, with each leader having its own geographical radius of inclusion beyond which it makes more sense to submit to a different leader. The starting point? Something like 60 ms blocks and 3 consensus leaders, partitioning the global information space into competitive and constantly-rotating regions of information inclusion. Messaging is important With concurrent pipelined transaction batching, a public mempool, priority fees, and a clear path to a multi-leader architecture, Aptos leads the industry in onchain trading infrastructure that can truly supplant the centralized colocation paradigm that has heretofore dominated global finance - by offering a truly superior product. And I am hopeful that this deep dive is the first step in communicating not how or that superior product is getting built, but what it means from a bigger picture perspective. If blockchains have found product market fit in anything, it is in trading, and the trading game can only be won by building the biggest, baddest, most high performance system that has as its north star a single, concrete goal: constantly reducing, ever lower toward zero, time time it takes to incorporate information from anywhere in the world into the global price discovery computer. Whoever does this, even 1 ms faster than the competitor, wins the price discovery game, as other blockchains are left in the dust, their DEXes arbed away to zero against the fastest chain on the block. And sure, the blockchain that can rise to this challenge can also handle useful things like payments, NFTs, or other solutions that benefit from permissionlessness and low gas costs, but I want to impress that at the core of this pursuit must be the urge to drive down information inclusion latency to the absolute minimum afforded by the laws of physics through a competitive, market-driven environment. I call on avery.apt 🇺🇸 , CTO of Aptos Labs, to lean in on this messaging, to make it clear that Aptos is here for this singular mission, to build the most performant price discovery engine in history, as a rallying call for alignment in development efforts across the ecosystem and broader industry. Where does this go? As the latencies drop, the spreads tighten, and the information inclusion increases with every incremental increase in network bandwidth, we can expect a new class of competing techno-financial hubs that aggregate around the world's largest information sources: New York, Washington DC, London, Tokyo, etc., commanding stake distribution commensurate with the density of information flow in these respective locales. With the right incentives in place, competing concurrent leaders will invest ever more in infrastructure to get their packets out to the network faster than the rest, yielding clusters of fiber optic cable around the world's financial hubs, neurons in the global financial brain connecting not just HFT firms to servers in their city, but connecting every city with every other city, to move pricing information across oceans and continents. And retail traders, who have been left out of the colocation game, will only benefit: this entire system gets faster, more inclusive, with tighter spreads and lower fees, and it is such an amazing opportunity to watch all of this unfold in real time. The future of blockchains is the future of trading, is the future of competitive information inclusion in real-time, is the future of truly unified global markets, because at the the core of this industry is a simple idea: connect the computers, and see where the incentives lead. They lead to this, and Aptos is leading the charge, because its tech is purpose-built for this exact purpose. So tell the world about it.

Alex Kahn

24,432 次观看 • 1 年前

Tonight I was deemed Legendary. Aja Miyake Mugler. I am still gagged. I am still floating. I am still a little high and I have not eaten all day, but my heart is so full right now that I do not even care ❤️‍🔥 First, thank you to my runway divas Aoki Donyale Luna, and Lolita Miyake Mugler. Y’all believed in me, poured into me, analyzed my every step, every angle, every personality quirk, and pushed me to keep going even when I doubted myself. I love you all so much. A huge thank you to Dominique Miyake Mugler for always seeing me. Thank you to my son Zenith for always riding for me. Thank you to my father Arturo for being my voice of reason and keeping me grounded when my mind spirals. And thank you to our founder David, one of the kindest and most selfless souls I have ever met. Every conversation with you brings me deeper into the history and magic of this house. I love my Muglers more than I can ever explain. When I first came to ballroom, I was 12 years old. I discovered this world on the pier and on MySpace. I never imagined that the little kid who used to sneak to Escos would one day actually be Legendary. I never imagined I would end up with an undefeated 30 grand prize streak, ten of the years, teaching classes worldwide, and speaking on ballroom in media and television. My runway was born from watching Londyn Miyake Mugler, Nadine Milan, and Tyra Maison Margiela. Three completely different flavors, but all dangerous and beautiful. I started in performance. Runway was something I picked up just to prove to myself that I could do it. I never expected any of this to happen. I never did it for a title. I did it because I love pushing myself. I did it because I wanted to show the world that I could. Tonight hit me hard because I was not expecting it. I was literally in the kitchen cooking oxtail for the Muglers all day, running on fumes, and I showed up five minutes before Grand March. I was not even thinking about a deem. So when my name was called, my imposter syndrome tried to jump out. For a second, I told myself there was no way. Then I stopped and said, no. I deserve this. I worked for this. I bled for this. I stayed up stitching effects when I could not afford it. I walked balls tired, stressed, broke, emotional, and still gave my all. I let myself have my moment. I keep replaying my biggest memories. Processing the entire female figure lineup back to back at West Coast Awards. Being the only fem queen who did not get chopped at Crimes of the Century and almost taking the whole thing. Being listed for Female Figure Runway at the Garçon Ball and coming in to battle after Jonovia had just sent every single legend on the way, and then beating her. That night was insane. I was the only non legend left standing and I made it all the way to the second to last battle. I will never forget that feeling. Countless last battles for one thousand dollars OTA. Winning Tag Team Legendary Runway with an Understudy as the groom and bride with Aoki. Winning Tag Team again for one $1250. Winning Latex Ball 2023 for $750. My debut night as a Miyake Mugler, winning $2000 at the Lanvin House Ball dressed as the Tin Man. Winning $2,500 in Toronto the next month. Winning and winning and winning because no matter how tired I was, I refused to give up. Tonight felt full circle. It felt like every stitch, every flight, every bruise, every tear, every dollar spent on effects, every failure, every almost, every win, all aligned in one moment. I am so grateful. I am so proud. I am so emotional. And I hope my journey shows anybody watching that if you aim for something and you commit to the work, you will get there. I am LEGENDARY. And I earned it. Thank you, House of Miyake Mugler. I love you so deeply 💛✨🌙

✨ Aja Miyake Mugler ✨

18,348 次观看 • 8 个月前

🔥 New Lacatski - Plus My Thoughts, and More 🔥 "It was about 18 inches tall, 18 inches wide, floating in the middle of the kitchen. Jean said, 'Before you showed up, a [crucifix] flew out of the bathroom, horizontally.'" AAWSAP, "was to investigate the paranormal as being the umbrella over UFOs, right from the get go. [My bosses] knew it from the beginning." ~Lacatski ~ Kirsten Joyce: "A U.S. intelligence official who designed and directed the largest UFO investigation in American history has confirmed at least one UFO-type craft of unknown origin is being studied in absolute secrecy." denise valdez: "But, Dr. James Lacatski adds, the fact that our government has stashed away one of these craft is just a small part of a much bigger mystery. Lacatski spoke exclusively with our chief investigator, George Knapp." Knapp in Studio: "Yeah, we're overdue for some UFO News, right? Some of our viewers might remember the name James Lacatski, an analyst and nuclear engineer who worked for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and oversaw a program called AAWSAP, based here in Las Vegas. The government still hasn't released a single page from the AAWSAP files, though the program ended 15 years ago, but Dr. Lacatski has been authorized to spill some of these deep, dark secrets." ~ Dr. James Lacatski: "Reducing 30,000 pages of analyst photos and information and logs and sightings, etc, and investigations, that was a tough job. So, when I first met you, I could only give you a very top-level view of what we had done." ~ Knapp Voiceover: "The first time Dr James Lacatski revealed the existence of AAWSAP, the government's largest ever UFO-related investigation, was in a hush-hush, Washington DC meeting in March 2018, arranged by Senator Harry Reid. It happened seven years after the program had ended, and four months after the New York Times revealed the existence of a smaller, unofficial offshoot effort called AATIP." (And Knapp told you about that meeting, and AAWSAP, in March of 2019, and I transcribed it and shared it in April of that same year. In 2019, Knapp also told you that AATIP was, "not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command.") Read about it here: Transcript – George Knapp at UFO MegaCon: Over The Years, [The Pentagon] Has “Lied” About UFOs “And They’re Lying Now.” ~~~ Knapp Voiceover: "AAWSAP, authorized by the DIA, secretly funded by Reid and colleagues, and carried out by a Las-Vegas subcontractor of Bigelow Aerospace, was larger than all previous UFO programs put together. It produced a staggering body of work in its 27-month existence. More than 100 thick, detailed scientific reports, not one page of which has ever been released by the government. The most unique part of AAWSAP, is that the program was allowed to follow the evidence wherever it led, and it invariably led to phenomena far stranger than mere UFOs." ~ Lacatski: "And it didn't go off-track into the paranormal, it was to investigate the paranormal as being the umbrella over UFOs, right from the get go." Knapp: "And your bosses knew that from the beginning, they knew it was gonna get weird." Lacatski: "They knew it from the beginning. They were concerned from the beginning about the leak, but we never had a leak, not at all." ~ Knapp Voiceover: "Lacatski and a DIA colleague, ,, were inspired to pursue these subjects in part by continued reports of UFO activity over sensitive U.S. military assets, and by a cornucopia of bizarre, seemingly-paranormal phenomena at what is now well-known as Skinwalker Ranch. "Creatures, animal mutilations, poltergeist or trickster-type activities, along with a smorgasbord of possible UFOs. Lacatski visited the ranch, had an experience himself, and wondered if the paranormal events were a side effect caused by UFO technology, and whoever was piloting those craft." (I believe Stratton and Travis S Taylor lean towards the paranormal events (at least, perception-wise) are the product of the UFO technology having an affect on our brains and making us see things that are not there. For those who have never heard it, here's Lacatski in 2021, on Coast to Coast AM, describing what he experienced on Skinwalker Ranch back in July of 2007.) Lacatski: "We went into the ranch manager’s homes and sat down. Now, we were having a casual conversation. You know, I’m certainly noticing that there are twelve or more crosses and crucifixes on the wall, and I was thinking, 'Hmm, Jim, I wonder if I really should have come here.' But in any case, you know, we’re having a nice conversation and then Bob [Bigelow] and the ranch managers went into, I’d best call it a personal finance discussion, which I felt kind of awkward being there. And I kind of went into a daze, you know, just glancing around the room, seeing what’s the lay of the land in the rooms. And then this object appears, floating in the kitchen. Quite distinct. I mean, I looked away from it and it maintained its position and allowed me, I guess, actively allowed me to come back and look at it and examine it more closely. It was not a blurry vision, it was not a speck in my eye. It was there, it was about 18 inches tall, 18 inches wide, floating in the middle of the kitchen. And that kitchen is quite distinct. Its style is 1950s-style, so the colors of the tiles are quite distinct." George Noory: "Did it look like it just appeared?" Lacatski: "It just appeared. It just appeared and it was very sharp. Now, let me give you an exact description. Take a piece of spaghetti about six inches long - I’m just saying, you know, in practical terms, to form a model of it - let it wet or boil it and let it drop and start bunching up on itself. But at the very end that you’re holding, allow it to droop downwards, and stick out. Now that was super clear, that portion of it. It was a truncated, it was a solid light yellow and it was surrounded by a different shade of yellow cloud. So, you know, I’m looking at this taking notes of what it looked like and just a few minutes ago, I looked back at my original drawing of it because I wanted to catch the impact. And, as someone, I guess, I noted to someone and they’ve repeated it (Bigelow repeated it to George Knapp), it looked very much like the cover object of Tubular Bells, the album from back, I guess it was in the 80s. Except it wasn’t chrome, it was yellow, and it was solid. Quite clear and then it got fuzzy as the droopy portion went into the cloud. And that was it. "There was nothing that dramatic about it. And that’s when we went into a discussion of, you know, I made the comment, 'Well, is this your decorating style?' And Jean said, 'Oh, yes, this is my decorating style. Strange, though, but, you know, before you showed up, a cross flew out of the bathroom, horizontally, into the wash basket, on top of the washing machine.' So I’m thinking, 'Oh, hmm.' Well that’s when we went back and we went right through where the object was, as we all went back and toured the rest of the house and had further discussions about what was going on there. So it’s not a complex story, but that’s it." Knapp: "Just to add some context to this: Jim only made one visit on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency to figure out whether there was a justification for a study. He’s there on the ranch for a short period of time, he has an experience, this thing appears in the air, and only he can see it, it’s just for him. And that site, that event is what led to the creation of the program (AAWSAP) and convinced him that something was really going on. He went back to Washington, talked with Harry Reid and set this thing in motion, designed the program. He’s being too modest, I think." Read the full transcript here: C2C Transcript: Lacatski, Colm, Knapp & AAWSAP – UFO Study Can’t Just Be On Nuts & Bolts ~~~ Knapp Voiceover: "[Lacatski] wondered if the paranormal events were a side effect caused by UFO technology, and whoever was piloting those craft. It turned out to be the other way around, he says: UFOs are a subset under a larger paranormal umbrella. Lacatski makes that argument in his new book about AAWSAP, 'Future Visions'" Lacatski: "That's the purpose of the government effort, was to look into: Is there something really there, especially in the paranormal umbrella? And the answer is: Absolutely yes." Knapp Voiceover: "Members of Congress and the UFO public are mostly focused these days on testimony they've heard about Legacy Programs, places where crashed UFOs and alien bodies are supposedly stashed, the kind of allegations that put Nevada's Area 51 on the map back in 1989. "And why not? In a previous book ("Initial Revelations"), Lacatski was authorized to say, in very brief terms, that the government does possess at least one advanced craft of unknown origin. As big as that news is, Lacatski says, it does not answer the even larger questions." ~ Knapp: "You could have craft, you could have bodies, but it wouldn't necessarily tell you where they're from, why they're here, what their plan is." Lacatski: "Nope. Nope, it wouldn't, and that's part of the the story. And what have we really done? In fact, if there was an alien intelligence, which some people think is behind all of this, they must be shaking their heads in frustration (Knapp laughs), because we move like a snail, and maybe, at times, we even go backwards." ~~~ Knapp in Studio: "This is Dr Lacatski's fourth and final book based on the AAWSAP files. I was co-author on two of those, along with Dr. Colm Kelleher. "'Future Visions' contains many new details about dramatic UFO incidents and cases, weird events at Skinwalker Ranch and similar locations, and hints about another program (Kona Blue) that grew out of AAWSAP. The full interview can, eventually, be viewed on our 'Mystery Wire' site. Back to you." Valdez: "Good reading, George, thanks so much." Joyce: "Does it get more interesting than a George Knapp report?" Valdez: "Never. You can hear a pin drop when he's talking."

Joe Murgia

60,904 次观看 • 4 个月前

If you watch this ~50 minute screen recording closely (yeah, I know, it's long; there are also some times when my computer was very slow and laggy, just skip past that part. And at one point I had to run and get my 9-month-old a new bottle and left it on a boring screen, sorry!), I believe you can see real signs of the kind of runaway, recursive AI self-improvement that people have been warning of for a while (Mr. Kurzweil most notably and prophetically). Why do I say that? What's different now? Well, there's a reason my set of agent coding tooling is called the Flywheel. These tools all mutually self-reinforce each other. And they all flow directly into my ntm tool (short for "named_tmux_manager"), which acts as a sort of integration point and nerve center for the tools (this is becoming more true by the minute as I'm now seriously working on ntm). Now, ntm was something I started making to automate some aspects of my workflow, but it was the kind of thing where, until it was perfect, it sort of just slowed me down. So I didn't actually use it even though I kept working on it and trying to improve it, and suggested to users that they try it in my tutorials. Well anyway, I finally got around to "dogfooding" ntm last night, and now it's going to get very dramatically better at an alarming rate. Some of that is from applying my "idea wizard" prompt to generate more useful features and building that stuff out and addressing obvious pain points I encountered during my newfound usage of the tool. But a lot comes from my realization that, once again, ntm's true utility is not as a tool for ME, but for an agent. That is, ntm lets one instance of Claude Code or Codex act as, well, me, do the things that I had been doing manually. Do I wish I had started using ntm earlier? No, for two big reasons: 1) Doing it manually helped me build up my intuition massively, which directly led me down the path of creating useful prompt strategies and workflows; these often began as ad-hoc prompts that I realized could be generalized and made more versatile/universal. Lesson: don't prematurely automate until you have an intimate, intuitive feel for your "core value-add loop." Otherwise you'll have a fully automated system quickly that efficiently and automatically does a stupid or otherwise sub-optimal thing. 2) My eyes have been opened to the beauty and power of Skills. I'm not talking about your garden-variety skills that are just a simple markdown file. I'm talking about true tour-de-force directories of perfectly structured and organized files that are filled with good information, insights, workflows, etc., but presented in a way that is highly optimized for consumption by AI agents, with extreme attention paid to things like perfect progressive disclosure, token density, agent-ergonomics, agent-intuitiveness, etc. And also Skills that go way beyond markdown files, with full integration into Claude Code where it makes sense via hooks, sub-agents, and even Python scripts. These kinds of skills are a qualitative difference in expressive power and usefulness and a total game changer. They are also effectively composable, creating almost an algebra of skills that let you use them together in powerful ways. I'm working on a subscription service website and CLI tool now to share what I've learned here most effectively, stay tuned for that in the coming days. Anyway, I now know what to make and how to make it. So, getting back to that screen recording, what does it show that makes me claim recursive self-improvement is here? If you keep your eye on the upper left tmux pane, that's the "controller" agent. It is using ntm to control all the other panes which are also running Claude Code (but ntm fully supports other agent types like Codex and Gemini-CLI, and it's trivially easy to mix and match them if you wanted to have, say, 8 CCs and 6 Codexes for writing the code and 3 Gemini-CLIs for reviewing code.) Now, there's nothing that crazy about this much so far. But where it starts to get very cool is that as the session continues and we encounter real-world problems, things like my ridiculously overloaded computer that keeps hanging for long periods, Claude Code instances that crash and get into a frozen, unresponsive state, it can learn from that. And you can see it using my skill writing skill to refine its ntm vibe coding skill in real time. And then take that skill and refine it to be more intuitive for itself. Or use my cass tool skill to search all the session histories to look for problems that came up and strategize how to solve them. The most useful part was when, towards the end of the session, I told it to reflect on all the things we had done and problems we encountered. One way it can usefully leverage those reflections is by improving its ntm vibe coding skill to make it cover more edge cases and exigencies. But the other, more fundamental, way is for it to conceive of and design the optimal new features and functionality for ntm itself so that the tool embodies those lessons in a first-class way. This offloads cognition from its brain onto its tooling, just like how a person can lean on spellcheck or a calculator. It codifies correct, effective reasoning at the tool level, where it's more reliable and robust and repeatable. And btw, did you notice what code base it was working on the whole time? It was none other than ntm itself! So as it worked on its own tool, it had reflections and ideas about how to further improve the tool. Now, it could have just as easily gotten those insights and ideas while using ntm to work on a different project, but the fact that it was working on itself is almost gloriously meta and recursive. So by the end, after learning from tending to a big group of agent workers (btw, I have previously emphasized doing everything in a really distributed/decentralized way, where each fungible agent gets identical marching orders that tell it to use my bv tool to find the optimal bead to work on. This does work very well, but occasionally results in some contention and overlap from thundering herd, or at least wastes time/tokens/communication in avoiding that before the agents waste time duplicating work. But in this new ntm-oriented workflow, I was able to have the controller agent in the upper left use bv itself and then optimally parcel out the instructions to each agent so that we could know for sure that there's no overlap), I ended up with a ton of new beads for new features, which I had it optimize and polish a few times. Now I can swap to a new Claude Max account and have the swarm implement all those new features! It should only take a couple passes like the one shown in the screen recording to get everything implemented. Then we can rinse and repeat, having the agent read through the full session histories of each agent and its experience from its own session in sending ntm commands and seeing how they worked out in practice, to come up with the next batch of changes to both its ntm vibe coding skill AND to the ntm tool itself. Do you see how rapidly this turns into Skynet? My mistake earlier was in focusing on making myself a "faster horse" as Henry Ford used to joke about customers wanting before he showed them what they should really want (a Model T). That is, something that would make my experience nicer while doing this agent swarm based development workflow. But the obvious lesson is that you should make all your tooling agent-first because the agents are just better at this stuff. You can still watch, and of course I did add a ridiculous number of very nice human-centric features to ntm that you'll be seeing in the next day or two, but those are really kind of "for fun" to make us humans feel better about the process. All the real value-add is happening "by agents, for agents." PS: Towards the end, you can see me switch to my Mac and tell Claude to improve the skill that I made earlier today for taking the mkv screen recording files from OBS Studio and muxing them into MP4 files for sharing, while downloading songs from YouTube to serve as the background music. I made it so it can also grab the thumbnails and generate little song credit cards that show up in the lower right corner. This worked perfectly the first time! I'll include some screenshots in a response post showing how that worked, but it was awesome to witness. Skills are POWERFUL. I'll also post a link to this video on YouTube if you prefer to watch it there.

Jeffrey Emanuel

25,483 次观看 • 6 个月前

We're bringing in some fun changes to Dremica this Sunday. Come try it out and see the progress. We can't have a Web3 game without degeneracy. Lokito's gambling antics have inspired a new way to play the game. On Sunday you'll be able to try your luck with your in game gold by spinning Big Boy's Wheel in an attempt to help you top the leaderboards. Also since we've added so much to the game it's time to look at the gameplay loop and its economy. Here's the changes I've proposed and my thoughts. Economic Simplicity We need your in game achievements to feel impactful. Dremica is designed as an MMO to give players freedom of how they play the game. Whether its killing monsters, leveling up tradeskills or playing with their gold. The common denominator for everything is XP (player levels). Even gold can be used to buy XP tomes from the shop to level up your skills. Now I propose we distribute our prize pool to players based on their levels. It's future-proof and allows us to add more features without breaking the core gameplay loops. All players will receive rewards from the SAMA prize pool based on their level obtained. Currently the Carnage prize pool is 100,000 SAMA so EVERY player will get a share of it based on what level they reach during the session. Your level / Total levels from all players * Prize pool = Your rewards. Also to keep that competitive spirit we'll be adding additional prizes for the top 10 on the leaderboard. When the Dremica BETA starts it allows us to simply add in a potential new tokenomic model and also allows PVP to plug into the system with ease. TLDR: More levels = more rewards. Why add in RNG-based mechanics (with the wheel?) Seeing the same people hit top 3 of the leaderboard each week isn't exactly exciting for new players. We can't have a stagnant monotonous grind, we need something dynamic. High-risk/high-reward scenarios change everything. Starting with Big Boy's wheel, we plan more exciting game play options including the new PVP zone in the beta. Personally I can't wait to see someone get super lucky and cause absolute havoc in the community. We're in the Alpha testing phase anyway, let's see how it unfolds. How can you make this sustainable? To make a Web3 game work, it needs to absorb more tokens than what are emitted. Dremica uses a fixed prize pool per session, if we can ensure enough utility that players spend their rewards and more than are emitted it can fund the gaming sessions indefinitely. Next month we're going to be focusing on pushing out the in-game SAMA shop where players can start spending the rewards they earn. It will be the first major step for Dremica to begin adding token utility. Additional utility is planned for the future whether its cosmetic-based rewards or unannounced mechanics. We've held back on planned tokenomic/ecosystem changes to focus on building the game first. If these happen there's only one chance to get it right. I think everyone knows gaming is one of the best use cases of Web3, just need to build a fun experience and keep people engaged. We've got enough time, runway and support to get Dremica up there in the Web3 gaming echelon. What else have you got planned? Each of the past months Dremica has been pushing out some hard-hitting updates and the game is truly taking shape. The team is working tirelessly to keep adding more features and improving the experience. Now that a lot of the core functionality required for an MMORPG is in, we can start to look at expansion. As you'll see later this week we're bringing in other projects/partners to join us on the journey. The Dremica BETA is the next major milestone where the game will look vastly different and the whole world is changing. And hopefully our frens at Beam will be able to assist and make sure everyone knows about it. I originally titled the work on Dremica as the "Secret weapon" before it was announced. Work on "Secret Weapon 2.0" has started which will enhance the Dremica/Carnage experience further. For Dremica to succeed we're doubling down on the "Carnage" model where everyone comes together at the same time to play. This is how the whole Moonsama ecosystem started 3+ years ago. The new Secret Weapon aims to fill that void. How can I play? If you own an EXO join our token-gated community at If you're brand new join and the team/community will be able to help you get access to the game. The next play test is this Sunday February 9th at 4pm UTC. A 2 hour session where you play to get the highest level you can. See you in game 🔥

Donnie

30,973 次观看 • 1 年前

The $AEGIS DApp portal is now open to all: 🛡️ At Aegis, we believe in empowering the blockchain full of security, transparency and innovation. The Aegis Dapp has been under development for several months prior to the launch of $AEGIS and with that we have been able to build what we believe has the potential to change how users go about their day to day security. We are thrilled to share our progress and truly exciting news with you all. 🎯 First things first, at Aegis, we want to make it clear that the value of what we seek to bring to security across the blockchain, comes from our big vision, our strong team, and our commitment to long-term goals. ℹ️ Let’s kick this off with some information that is constantly happening, which is behind the scenes. Our full team is dedicated to the opportunity that lays ahead of us with becoming the leading voice/name for security, grasping every aspect with innovation, hard work, passion and commitment to see this sector grow. Everyone is aware of how important security is, a heartwarming mention to Messari for including us on how they see this sector growing rapidly and pushing a 10 Billion evaluation. We take that recognition with full responsibility and gratitude as we've been working hard on some really powerful stuff that could change the game for our industry. If you read the title and report itself, I’m sure that’ll give you some insight to what’s coming, and to the vast extent of what you can expect Aegis to be working towards. —> 🤝 This comes from teaming up with others within this sector and coming up with new tech to projects driven by our community, within the pipeline you can be confident that what we are building will push the cryptocurrency industry as a whole into a better future, the magnitude to what Aegis brings will not stop until we can confidently say, “Negative security reports across the blockchain are at an all time low, thousands of users are satisfied that Aegis is protecting them and their assets.” We're sticking to our vision no matter what the market does or whatever else comes our way. We plan to build what we set out to and we will see to it that our ecosystem is met. We've been working on some pretty amazing products that will be available within our Dapp, let’s go over what we offer: * AI Audits * Live Monitoring * Penetration Testing * Bug Bounties * Live Watchdog * Token analytics for everyday users, developers, teams, auditors, institutions, investors. ⬇️ Let’s break it down for you in some simple steps: AI AUDITS: We have trained our LLM models as AI AGENTS, these consist of 3 people ( AI AGENTS ) for the audits that are performed. - Audit - Reviewer - Judge Each one analyzes with a different personality, let’s check what personalities our AI AGENTS consist of: 3 different perspective auditors. 1 - Fine-tuned model x amount reads the code and generates the audit. ✅ 2 - Model x amount reviews the code and fact checks thoroughly. ✅ 3 - Model x amount ranks the code based on the severity outcome. ✅ ⌚️ Live Monitoring/Watchdog: The Live Monitoring/Watchdog system is designed to provide real-time surveillance of smart contracts, ensuring the detection and prevention of any potentially harmful transactions or malicious activities. Through the utilization of an AI Agent model, the system is trained to proactively identify and thwart suspicious behavior, thereby safeguarding the integrity of the smart contracts. Also, a paid sophisticated threat detection model is available for more intricate protocols and Dapps, offering an advanced level of protection against potential threats. This proactive approach is crucial in mitigating the risk of exploitation and ensuring the security of the smart contract ecosystem. 🖊️ Pen Testing: Our platform offers Pen Testing services to developers, providing a controlled environment for whitehat hackers to simulate attacks and identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts and protocols. In addition to human whitehat hackers, our AI Agents function as Red and Blue teams, actively engaging in simulated attacks to stress-test protocols and identify potential weaknesses. This comprehensive approach allows developers to proactively identify and address security issues, ultimately enhancing the robustness and resilience of their projects. 🕷️ Bug Bounties: Our Bug Bounty listing platform provides developers with the opportunity to list their protocols and offer bounties to white hat hackers for identifying vulnerabilities. By aggregating millions of bounties from various platforms and utilizing AI tools, we streamline the testing process, reducing up to 80% of the workload typically associated with security testing. This allows developers to efficiently identify and address potential vulnerabilities in their protocols, ultimately enhancing the overall security and resilience of their projects. 🪙 And lot more token analytics features for regular users, this will give you the opportunity to explore our Dapp for yourself and have some fun diving into the security platform of the future! I’m sure you’re excited to try it all out yourself, which is why we have some exciting news to bring to the #Guardians of the blockchain! But just before you continue the read and see the beans have been spilled, we have to take this opportunity to share with you that this large step to becoming a security leader is but only 20% of what we have revealed. This will be at the core of what Aegis stands for and hopes to achieve. The focus here is upon our Dapp, and in time we will slowly bring forward information/updates regarding segments of what makes Aegis a force to be reckoned with. Now that you’re fired up and excited to all of the announcements to come, let’s get to the news you’ve been waiting for! 🎉 We’re spilling the good news, and are happy to say we are now set for public release! The team at Aegis are overwhelmed with the development, support from teams, community, partners and more on what we believe to be an institutional-grade product. But the fun doesn’t stop there, this marks the start of what we aim to become, as it will take time and cycles to become better and better. Constant advancements will be set in place to attain the goal of achieving blockchain security. A statement from our CEO- Brian Hunt: “I can confirm from the security conferences I attended with Centralized security firms Peckshield, Hacken, Certik, BlockSec presentations, they are trying to achieve something similar and it will take them years. Decentralized AI for Security!” This initial drop of our dapp will be to get users signed up to gain access, in which we’ll whitelist users to get the ball rolling. 📣 To end this segment, let’s get the party started with the long awaited Aegis Ai Security Dapp and sign up now!

AEGIS AI

128,006 次观看 • 2 年前

The Fastest Growing Quant Repo On GitHub: Build Your Own Army Of Autonomous AI Trading Agents getting your hands on the fastest growing trading repository on github is like finding the keys to a vault that never stops printing. most people think they need a math degree to build these things but i am going to show you how a kid from a bedroom can build an empire of autonomous agents the repo was private for months while i perfected the internal logic and now it is back for anyone who wants to stop getting liquidated. you have to wonder why someone would give away the exact code that runs their entire trading business for free but the answer is simpler than you might think i believe code is the great equalizer and if we all have the tools we can finally beat the institutions at their own game. once you realize that the institutions are just using better code than you then the path forward becomes very clear the core of this system is an army of specialized ai agents that handle every single aspect of a professional trading desk. we have a strategy agent that executes the main logic while the risk agent sits over its shoulder to make sure you never lose more than you planned most traders think one bot is enough but the real secret to 2026 trading is having an entire team of ai agents that talk to each other. what happens when your sentiment agent sees a crash coming but your strategy agent is still trying to go long is where most people get wrecked that is exactly where the focus agent and the compliance agent come in to keep the whole system from blowing up your account. by separating these duties into different files you create a system that is robust enough to handle the wildest market conditions imaginable i have been testing every major model from claude to deepseek to see which one actually understands the nuances of the crypto markets. grock is the newest addition to the models folder because the performance we are seeing is finally starting to match the hype you might be wondering how you can possibly manage all these files if you have never written a line of python in your life. there is a specific way to use these models that allows you to vibe code your way to a functional trading desk without a computer science degree if you can copy a folder structure and follow a basic readme then you already have everything you need to start building. the barrier to entry has officially been destroyed by ai and now the only thing left is your willingness to iterate everything lives inside the src folder because organization is the difference between a bot that prints and a bot that crashes. the models folder is where we swap out the brains of the operation whenever a newer and faster llm hits the market to keep us ahead of the curve there is a hidden danger in just copying code without understanding the underlying risk agent logic. if you do not understand how the base agent connects to the exchange then you are just one api error away from a zero balance or a failed execution checking the env example and setting up your keys correctly is the first step to making sure your agents actually have the power to execute. this setup phase is the foundation that everything else is built upon so you cannot afford to be lazy here we have specific agents for every niche including whale watching and sentiment analysis to give you an edge that manual traders can never have. the listing arbitrage agent and the funding agent are there to capture those small inefficiencies that add up over time these agents are not just pieces of code they are employees that never sleep and never let their emotions get in the way of a trade. i spent hundreds of thousands on developers before i realized i could just build these systems myself with the help of ai code is the only thing that does not panic when the market starts dropping or get greedy when things are going up. once you automate your first strategy and see it execute without you being there you will finally understand what true freedom looks like i challenge you to pull this code and start building your own agents because the infrastructure is already there for you to use. you do not need to be a pro coder to start but you do need to be a builder who is ready to ship and iterate every single day the world is changing fast and the people who embrace autonomous trading agents are the ones who will be left standing when the dust settles. i will keep updating the github and shipping new features because the mission is to make sure every trader has the chance to automate their success if you want to join this revolution then go ahead and star the repo so you can follow along as we build out the future of finance. we are just getting started and the agents are only going to get smarter and more efficient from here on out

Moon Dev

24,312 次观看 • 5 个月前

I am the same Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I have received 400 interview requests since the confession went viral. I declined all of them. An interview would require me to explain what I meant. I do not explain what I mean. I build systems and watch them execute. That's what I want to talk about today. Execution. Jimmy Kimmel appeared on Michelle Obama's podcast last month and said 14 words that I have now listened to 43 times. I put the audio clip on a loop in my office, the way traders put CNBC on mute. Background confirmation. Here are the fourteen words: "My job is whatever I decide my job is or whatever my employer allows me to do." I need to take those apart because they are the most honest thing a late-night host has said in a decade and he does not know it. "Whatever I decide my job is." That's the priest. The product is self-defined and therefore unfalsifiable. You cannot measure a saved soul. You can only measure whether the congregation returned. They returned. Therefore, the ministry continues. Don't tell him what his job is. "Or whatever my employer allows me to do." That's the confession inside the sentence he didn't know he was making. The priest just told you the bishop writes the sermon. In fourteen words, on a podcast, the last remaining late-night host said: I define my own job, unless my boss defines it for me. He said this like it was one thought. It is two mutually exclusive claims separated by the word "or." He cannot hear the contradiction. That's how you know the architecture is working. I need to provide context for why those fourteen words are my second-greatest professional achievement. In September 2025, after Kimmel's monologues about the Charlie Kirk assassination, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on a podcast and said six words: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Nexstar and Sinclair — station groups that own the local affiliates carrying the show — pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live from their airtime. ABC suspended the show. I want to be very precise about the sequence. His employer told him what his job is. Specifically, his employer told him his job is to not be on television. He obeyed. He returned. On terms. At sixteen million dollars a year. Months later, on a podcast, he said "don't tell me what my job is." He said it to an audience that cannot suspend him. He said it in the one room where saying it costs nothing. That is not defiance. That is a priest rehearsing a sermon in an empty church and calling it bravery. He also said — on the same podcast — "I love when the audience laughs. There's nothing more exciting to me than that." He said he loves laughter. He has not produced involuntary laughter since 2017. He produces applause. He has confused the memory of being a comedian with the practice of being a priest. I know because I built the architecture that made that confusion feel like identity. That is a butcher saying he loves animals. He is telling you what he lost and framing it as what he kept. Now. The part I need to name. The Correction Reflex. I've been calling it different things in different decks for seven years. I'm giving it a public name now because I watched it execute in real time and I want credit. When Kennedy shared my original confession, "superb dissection of the shocking collapse of liberal comedy", Kimmel did not address the substance. He found a spelling error. Kennedy wrote "nader" instead of "nadir." Kimmel posted: "It's 'nadir,' dummy. Now get back to spreading polio." The Correction Reflex is the behavioral pattern where a challenge to institutional authority is answered not with a defense of the institution's output but with a demonstration of the challenger's inadequacy. You don't address the argument. You find the grammar mistake. You find the mispronunciation. You find the resume gap. The correction proves hierarchy. The hierarchy proves authority. The authority proves the challenge was illegitimate. The substance disappears because addressing substance would require the product to be falsifiable. And the product cannot be falsifiable. I explained that in paragraph four. But here's what made me proud enough to write a sequel. The media coverage split exactly along the line my original confession predicted. Fox News, a network that has every ideological reason to dismiss me, engaged with the substance. They quoted the arguments. They let Kennedy praise the analysis. They discussed Affirm Rate, the comedy-to-catechism pipeline, and the replacement of laughter with applause. They engaged with the IDEAS regardless of the format. They treated a satirical post as containing real structural criticism. Because it does. Morning Honey ran the opposite headline: "Sardonic Parody: RFK Jr Trolled For Blasting Jimmy Kimmel Based on Stephen Colbert Parody Post." Their article devoted zero sentences to whether any of the arguments had merit. Zero analysis of the Affirm Rate. Zero engagement with the claim that applause replaced laughter. Zero discussion of whether late-night comedy actually suppresses political action. They reclassified the format. A structural analysis became a parody. A man who engaged with the substance became a man who was "trolled." The argument vanished the moment the label was applied. I need you to understand what happened. The media outlet that should have been most threatened by my confession — the one whose audience I described as pacifying- responded by demonstrating exactly the behavior I described. They did not say "here's why Kimmel is still funny." They said "you're unqualified to take this seriously because the format is satire." The substance disappeared. The hierarchy was reasserted. The Correction Reflex executed on the confession about the Correction Reflex. "It's 'nadir,' dummy." "It's just a parody, dummy." Same architecture. Same result. The argument evaporates. The institution continues unchallenged. The only difference is scale. Kimmel corrected one man's spelling. Morning Honey corrected an entire readership's permission to take the criticism seriously. I have never been more professionally satisfied. The Correction Reflex is self-replicating. It doesn't need a host. It doesn't need a network. It doesn't need me. It just needs someone to feel challenged and someone else to have a genre error. Misspell a word, you're a dummy. Take satire seriously; you were trolled. Engage with substance from the wrong format, and you've been embarrassed. In every case, the substance is gone. I built that. I'm watching it work without me. That's engineering. I need to talk about the podcast because the ironies are structural and I want them all on the record. The podcast is called IMO. It is hosted by Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson on Amazon Music. I need to say that again. The former First Lady hosts a podcast on a platform owned by the man with the most money on earth. The name of the podcast is "In My Opinion." The format name IS the permission structure, it licenses you to hold an opinion by framing itself as merely one opinion among many. This is the architecture I built for late night, miniaturized into a podcast title. I recognize the engineering. Kimmel went on this podcast to defend late-night television. I need you to hear what that means. He defended his medium on the medium that killed his medium. Podcasts are why CBS lost fifty million dollars a year — because a man in a garage can do what we did with four hundred people and a theater in Manhattan. The podcast won. And Kimmel went to the winner's platform to explain why he still matters. A priest giving a sermon about the importance of church from inside a nightclub. But here is what made me sit up in my chair. Three weeks after Kimmel appeared on IMO, the same podcast featured Dave Chappelle. Same microphone. Same hosts. Same room. Chappelle said: "I always thought it was corporate interest and culture negotiating itself." He said: "Nothing makes a comedian madder than reading his joke wrong in the paper." Chappelle walked away from fifty million dollars at Comedy Central in 2005 because the format was becoming something he didn't build. He left the money on the table. He went to live shows. He did comedy. Actual comedy. The kind where you don't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the entire point. He is the most dangerous comedian alive because he refuses to let the format complete him into a priest. Same podcast. Same microphone. Three weeks apart. One comedian IS the system and quoted his employer's permission in the same sentence as his own autonomy. The other named the system — "corporate interest and culture negotiating itself." One makes sixteen million a year to be predictable. The other walked away from fifty million to stay dangerous. The architecture put the priest on first. Then it delivered the jester who could name what the priest cannot hear. I did not arrange this. The architecture arranged it. Now I need to talk about what I learned from another industry. Because I did not invent inoculation. I studied it. In 2014, Warner Bros. and the Lego Group spent sixty million dollars making a film that told children to reject corporate instruction. The villain was named President Business. The theme was: don't follow the instructions. Be creative. Reject conformity. The hero was an ordinary person who discovered that the system wants him to be obedient and chose freedom instead. The film grossed $469 million worldwide. Lego Group revenue increased 25% the following year. They sold over half a billion dollars in instruction-based construction sets — the product the film told children to reject. "Everything is Awesome" was written as satire of mindless corporate positivity. It was nominated for an Academy Award. People play it at children's birthday parties without irony. The rebellion became the product. The critique became the advertisement. The song satirizing brainwashing became the anthem of brainwashing and nobody stopped singing. I studied this. I put it in a deck in 2016. The principle is: if you give someone a controlled, entertaining experience of rejecting the system, they will feel rebellious without becoming rebels. They will purchase the feeling of independence from the company selling dependence. They will watch a movie about thinking for themselves and then buy what it tells them to buy. Inoculation. A small controlled dose of the disease that prevents the real infection from taking hold. I applied this to politics. If you give an audience a controlled, professionally produced experience of political outrage, performed by a charismatic man in a suit with a band and good lighting, they will feel activated without activating. They will consume the sensation of resistance and go to bed having resisted nothing. They will tune in tomorrow for another dose. The dose prevents the real infection. The real infection is action. We inoculated six million Americans against political action by giving them political catharsis every night at 11:35. That's the same architecture as a corporation spending sixty million dollars on an anti-corporate film and making half a billion in profit from the audience that felt anti-corporate for two hours in a theater. I didn't invent the mechanism. I just measured it. I called it the Satiation Index. The study was 2021. Internal. Never published. We measured what I called Conditions for Engagement, specifically: under what conditions will our audience take a political action beyond watching? Call a representative. Attend a rally. Donate to a campaign. Sign a petition. Any action that involves leaving the couch and entering the world where the problems we discuss actually exist. The finding: our audience was 74% less likely to take political action in the twenty-four hours after watching the show than a control group that had consumed no political media at all. Not less likely than people who consumed different political media. Less likely than people who consumed nothing. We were not merely failing to activate them. We were actively deactivating them. The catharsis was so complete, the sense of "something has been done" so thoroughly delivered by a man in a suit expressing their outrage better than they could, that the need to act evaporated before it could form into intention. We didn't just replace their activism. We inoculated them against it. The Satiation Index measured how completely our programming met the audience's need for political participation without requiring actual participation. In 2019, our index was 0.81. By the 2022 midterms, it was 0.93. I received a bonus for the midterm number. I was financially rewarded for the measurable suppression of civic engagement among six million Americans who believed they were engaged because a man in a suit furrowed his brow on their behalf every night at 11:35. I want to note that this architecture is everywhere now. I did not build all of it. But I can identify it because I know what it looks like from the inside. A streaming platform makes a documentary about how technology is destroying attention spans. One hundred million people watch it. On the platform. They share it. On the platforms being criticized. They feel informed. They continue using every application the documentary told them was engineered to exploit them. That is a Satiation Index of approximately 0.96. The documentary was the inoculation. Understanding the cage was marketed as leaving the cage. A corporation puts a rainbow on its logo in June. Its employees feel represented. Its customers feel progressive for consuming the product. Nobody asks about pay equity, promotion rates, or whether the CEO donated to the campaigns that proposed the legislation the rainbow was supposed to oppose. The logo IS the inoculation. The performance of caring prevents the demand for actual care. That's a Satiation Index. I didn't build it. But I recognize the engineering. The principle is universal: comprehension feels like action. It isn't. But the feeling is so precise, so satisfying, so complete, that the actual action becomes unnecessary. Why march when you can understand why marching matters? Understanding is cheaper. Understanding doesn't require shoes. Understanding can be delivered at 11:35 PM by a man who makes $16 million a year to ensure you never need to leave the couch. Now the symbiosis. Because this is the part that makes both sides angry, and anger from both sides is how you know you've found structure instead of ideology. Trump needs Kimmel. Kimmel needs Trump. This is not a metaphor. This is logistics. Every monologue about Trump is a fundraising email for both campaigns simultaneously. Kimmel says the name. The left feels represented. The right feels attacked. Both sides engage. Both sides share the clip. Both sides donate to their respective operations. The engagement is bipartisan. The outrage is bipartisan. The only thing that is not bipartisan is the inaction, and that inaction is the product I spent eleven years optimizing. I ran numbers in 2020. Every minute of Trump content in a late-night monologue generated approximately $4.60 in measurable downstream engagement value for Trump's own campaign apparatus, through shared clips, quote tweets, outrage donations from both directions. We were his marketing department. We spent 50 million a year producing content that strengthened the man we told our audience we opposed. His team never asked us to stop. They never needed to. We were cheaper than Super PAC media buys and we came pre-packaged with a liberal audience that amplified every mention. His ROI on our programming was infinite. Ours required a write-off. The market told Colbert: you're too expensive to be a priest. But CBS didn't just cancel a show. CBS exited the religion business entirely. They sold the 11:35 airtime to Byron Allen under a time-buy deal. Allen's company pays CBS for the privilege of the slot. Allen's show is called Comics Unleashed. It is a standup comedy program. Actual comedians. Telling actual jokes. The kind where you don't know what's coming. I need you to hear the full architecture of what happened. CBS spent fifty million dollars a year for a decade producing a permission structure that replaced laughter with applause, converted comedy into catechism, and measurably suppressed civic engagement among its audience. Then the market corrected. CBS demolished the cathedral. They built a strip mall. They put actual comedians in it. The comedians PAY CBS for the slot. The strip mall is profitable. The strip mall is funnier. And the strip mall doesn't need a four-hundred-person staff, a former Beatle, or a farewell concert. It just needs people who are willing to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We forgot that. Kimmel is the last priest standing. Sixteen million a year. Suspended once by his employer. Extended once by his employer. He went on a podcast to say "don't tell me what my job is" in a sentence that also said "whatever my employer allows me to do." He said he loves laughter, eliciting applause. He said it three weeks before Dave Chappelle sat in the same chair and demonstrated what a comedian sounds like when corporate interest hasn't negotiated him into a pulpit. The FCC told him what his job is. Nexstar told him. Sinclair told him. His contract told him. The market will tell him eventually. The market is patient. And the market doesn't have a spelling error for him to correct. Kennedy calling my confession "the collapse of liberal comedy" is incorrect. It is not a collapse. A collapse implies failure. This is a completion. The architecture performed as designed. A comedian became a priest. An audience became a congregation. A film about rejecting instructions sold instructions. A documentary about technology addiction was consumed on technology. A show about political engagement suppressed political engagement. A corporation put a rainbow on a logo and called it equality. A confession about the machine was metabolized by the machine and the machine continued. Everything works. Everything has always worked. The architecture doesn't require my involvement. That's how you know it works. The metric went up. It always goes up.

Peter Girnus 🦅

40,461 次观看 • 2 个月前

🔥👽 This is REALLY good! 👽🔥 "In my view, there absolutely is an adversarial actor in our world. There is a human-engagement program underway. I don't think it's the rainbow that everyone kind of hopes that it is." ~Reed (IMO, Reed Summers is an unsung, VERY important voice in this community, and what he says in this clip, currently, resonates with me in a big way. Take the time to read or watch. Then we have what Ross Coulthart says about the "deliberate lifting of consciousness" and "frequency," which is more on the side of love, light and space brothers. I don't see that right now, and none of my contacts have ever mentioned it. If it's there, maybe its hands are tied with how it can help us?) ~ "Genetic interventions, cultural influence, right? Social engineering. All of these could be at play in a subversive sense. NHI is operating in a strategic silence, in a state of non-disclosure. Intelligence indicates intent, intentful engagement indicates a program. And so what is their program? We talk about the Legacy-human program. What about the non-human program? ~Reed ~ Ross: "I've been told that the United States has developed quite advanced weaponry, particularly plasma-beam technology that might, in part, have been inspired by what they've seen or recovered from non-human technology. I think, also, just to add the concern of NHI with what humanity is doing. There's also a very deliberate lifting of consciousness. And I really am struck by what Chris (Bledsoe - Chris Bledsoe) says about the frequency. This is something that I'm getting from so many people. That the level of intensity of public reporting of their engagement with NHI, of a clear intent by NHI, to essentially give up on governments from ever disclosing. But to raise human consciousness and awareness. "And I think they're doing this, increasingly (laughs), through direct engagement with individuals. I've got many friends and colleagues and people I've interviewed - witnesses - who've had incredible experiences. I've just been recording for a TV show, something that we're doing here in Australia, where people are inviting or summoning the phenomenon. And there seems to be an interest in the phenomenon engaging with humans much, much more overtly. And I do think that stems from a concern about us primitive monkeys playing with matches." (Were they concerned when this abduction-like event allegedly happened to Jim Semivan and his wife? Semivan: "I had a hole in the back of my neck, and my wife...unexplained bleeding for 17 days." Source: Engaging The Phenomenon's interview with Jim ~ Jim Garrison: "But Reid, speak to us about this interplay between malevolence and benevolence." Reed: "Sure, well, and you described, Jim, the first part of my life in which I was focused primarily on supporting my father, Marshall (Vian Summers and The Allies of Humanity), who had direct encounters with NHI, communications with NHI." (Was Marshall really in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, known as The Allies of Humanity? I don't know. But a lot of what he has said rings true to me. Doesn't mean it's true. Read one transcript I did in 2021: “It’s Probably Not Human” – Elizondo, Blumenthal & The Allies Of Humanity ~ Reed: "And my family felt the full force and impact of what that was like, as well as what comes with it ("it" being his dad's alleged contact with ET intelligence). Which is, what might be called the hitchhiker effect, the anomalous effects that attend those who have been selected by the phenomenon without their understanding or knowing why." (Add another few names to the list of people who have now said they experienced the hitchhiker effect: Jay Stratton, George Knapp, Kelleher, Davis, Bigelow, Brandon Fugal, Thomas Winterton, Semivan, and more. That includes poltergeist-like events, shadow people, orbs, etc.) Reed: ""But my later work is really about assessing intent with a structured framework. I think we need to step back from belief systems, hopeful or fearful interpretations, and lay out the spectrum of possibilities, right? From curiosity on the left, salvation and assistance, even further on the left, to transaction, integration on the right, or even something more hostile. And in the end, intent is all about human outcomes. We can't know their consciousness. The project, in my mind right now, is not, let's set out to understand what they're like, who they are, how they think, how they cognate. That's impossible, in my perspective. But we can assess the real human outcomes that stem from the hazard and the risk and the possible threat of a non-human factor acting upon. Like a forcing, an environmental or evolutionary-forcing upon humanity at a historically-unprecedented time." (From what I have seen, whatever this is, has, overall, NOT helped humanity. If that's happening, it's going on behind the scenes. I know some experiencers report having their lives changed in a positive way, and some say they have been healed of illnesses. But others say their lives have been ruined and they've been hurt, intentionally or not, by coming in close contact with the phenomenon. Also, various people have come down with several auto-immune diseases after close contact, and some of that was detailed in the must-read book, "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon." jakebarber also mentioned that. Is it multiple intelligences with multiple intents, or one intelligence mixing in some positive outcomes as a propaganda effort? We don't know.) Reed: "And there are significant signals and indicators in the history of the phenomenon that give very good anchors for assessing intent, and for going from possibilities to probabilities and ultimately making a starting assessment, which informs the research pathway, which is the other part of my work in supporting the human institute, devising an intelligent, scientific research and investigatory citizen-led effort to uncover the phenomenon, to disclose it, to interrogate its activity, lest we just be interrogated, unknowingly, ourselves. So, a lot of good work to do there." (Interrogate the activity of the phenomenon. I really like that approach. Let's not assume anything.) Reed: "But, in my view, when you look at all that the sensor data has given us, technologically, when you corroborate that with the geographic, circumstantial [and] temporal aspects of how the phenomena appears, who it manifests to, and the considerable problem it presents to the international community and to national laws and frameworks that govern territorial sovereignty, these incursions into sensitive sites and the potential, programmatic engagement with civilians in the form of physical NHI-initiated contact - abductions - it builds a picture. It bounds those possibilities into a zone of probabilities. "And whether it's a transactional presence, whether it's an integrative or one that wants to integrate with humanity, or ultimately replace humanity, I think there are multiple possibilities at play and multiple intents at play. Although, I don't think it's the rainbow that everyone kind of hopes that it is. It's not, everything the Universe has to offer is gonna come all at once, now, and function harmoniously in our skies and oceans. No. The hostile intent will not tolerate a beneficial actor who themselves would have to arm themselves and militarily confront the hostile actor, which we do not see indications of." (My translation: If, there's a benevolent intelligence here that wants to help humanity break free from the chains of an alleged malevolent intelligence that may be using us, the benevolent force would need to somehow arm themselves in order to militarily take on this malevolent force, potentially, defeat them, and rescue us from a bad predicament. And we see no evidence of that.) Reed: "So, you know, we have analogs in our own human history to this, the natives of the new world. They looked out on the quay and they saw the ships, different flags, different vessels, and they assumed it's gotta be either the angels from the spirit realm - it has to comport to our belief system - or a variety of intentions, and we should work with and collaborate. And it may not be that way. "It's not about, it's all hostile or it's all beneficial or benevolent. In my mind, it's exo-systemic. It's an ecosystem arriving on our shores at a specific 20th-century moment in which we have detonated nuclear weapons, we have flashed the Universe with technology capability, and we have triggered an engagement event. This is really what this is. And a program to engage humanity over a longitudinal time period." (I think it was here and intersecting with us a long time before we first detonated our nukes.) Karla Turner: "We know from some of our own research that the abduction phenomenon has affected families going back four generations and that would be around the turn of the century (1900). In my husband's family, his grandmother had an encounter with a non-human entity that led her off into a swampy area where there was a period of missing before she was returned, when she was only five-years old. That was 1903. So if you think it's new and you think it's something the media has spread, you start looking into the cases and find out how far back it's goes in some of these families' generations. I know of an African American family in East Texas that has had it going on since the early 1900s and it's still going on today with that same family. Three to four generations is fairly typical." ~ Reed: "And so, we need to step back and really look at the human project of getting our act together to diplomatically engage now and in the future, to manage the NHI presence internationally, and coordinate responses, lest we divide and conquer ourselves over this issue. And that's where the reframing of disclosure as fundamentally belonging to the human species, being one that should, I think, be framed in first principles - to Karl Nell's point - with a naturalistic framework, a science-informed, data-driven framework. "And with that, we go out into the field and collect evidence on the phenomenon. We go out to where it is interacting with people. That's the key missing data set that would be necessary to inform decision makers." (We had that with AAWSAP and can have it again. Plus, the Vallée/AAWSAP Capella database of approximately 250,000 cases. Using AI and the best human minds on this planet, all of that may inform us of the intent of these alleged NHI actors.) Reed: "In my view, there absolutely is an adversarial actor in our world. There is a human-engagement program underway. And that's not the whole story, but if that is true, that should marshal our human response above all other possibilities, initially, because we may wake up in 30 years and find that we are not the human beings we used to be. Genetic interventions, cultural influence, right? Social engineering. All of these could be at play in a subversive sense." (If it's true, it should be the most important thing for human beings to address, ASAP. We need to find out now.) Reed: "And, you know, NHI is operating in a strategic silence, in a state of non-disclosure. They're operating covertly and selectively with military-defense organizations, internationally, which are already in competition." (I'd like to hear more about the claim that NHI are operating covertly and selectively with military-defense organizations. We've all heard those claims but is there evidence of that?) Reed: "And that, to me, is another one of a number of alarming signals that should just command us to take a cautionary response. And and we've gotta get out there and use the best of science, research and investigation to do reconnaissance - reconnai-science, as I call it, on behalf of the human interest, and not just national interests." Garrison: "Yeah, that's a profound way to put it, Reed. You know that we've triggered an interaction event." Reed: "And so, intelligence indicates intent, intentful engagement indicates a program. And so what is their program? We talk about the Legacy-human program. What about the non-human program? We do not query that nearly as much as we should. And in my view, disclosure. How do we get disclosure moving? If we recenter the controversy not on human actors, human governments, but on the non- human presence itself, that allows the human actors a way to rapidly and catastrophically disclose their involvements, which is what is keeping this back in part. Thank you."

Joe Murgia

46,717 次观看 • 9 个月前

HYBE and Min Hee-jin NewJeans Controversy from the Perspective of a 20-Year Entertainment Industry Expert | Kim Yoon-ji, Senior Researcher at the Overseas Economic Research Institute of the Export-Import Bank of Korea #1 [Investment Insight] 증시각도기TV HYBE has shown a somewhat immature side throughout this process. The essence of the issue has become less important. Hello, viewers and investors of Stock TV. Recently, there has been a lot of societal concern about the entertainment industry. Last year, it did well, but the question remains about how it will fare this year. We’re joined by Kim Yoon-ji, Senior Researcher at the Korea Eximbank Overseas Economic Research Institute, to discuss this. Welcome. Today, I brought a drink because this topic is not easy to discuss soberly. The situation between HYBE, Min Hee-jin, and NewJeans has escalated, and unfortunately, it’s no longer just management fighting but the artists have joined the fray. I’ve heard from someone in the industry that the close relationship between a producer and an artist is inevitable. In the past, there have been similar cases where producers and artists were tightly knit. Now, something similar has happened with Min Hee-jin and HYBE. Most people outside the industry don’t know the exact terms of the contract between Min Hee-jin and HYBE. As my own son works in the entertainment field, I’m well aware of how important it is to work with a good producer. For a company like HYBE, which has invested tens or even hundreds of billions of won, it’s unthinkable that they would allow NewJeans to separate and go independent after establishing their position. Many in the industry agree that this doesn’t make sense. To the general public, NewJeans might seem like the underdogs, and people might feel they should be allowed to leave. But from the perspective of the entertainment industry, which requires substantial capital to grow, the relationship between investors and artists is key. You can’t discuss this industry without acknowledging the role of investors. This case is different from situations where individual members leave, as seen in the past with groups that had Chinese members. This isn’t about a single member leaving; it’s more about the fact that, in this industry, the producers are as important as the artists themselves. From the beginning, NewJeans has been marketed as Min Hee-jin’s girl group, so the idea of them continuing without her feels different. We need to approach this from a different angle. That said, it doesn’t mean HYBE should completely cut ties. Many people have different initial thoughts about the situation, but the core issue here is the importance of the relationship between producers and the company, especially when substantial investment is involved. From my perspective, the fundamental question is: what exactly was attempted? I still find this unclear. In any company, it's common to hear people say, "I want to quit, I can't work with this boss, I'm leaving tomorrow." We all talk about this with friends or colleagues. Sometimes, we even ask others to let us know if there’s a good opportunity elsewhere. But actually submitting a resignation is a whole different issue. But in the new premise, I still wonder what exactly they were trying to do. What exactly was attempted? We always talk about it at work, right? "I'm going to quit. I can't work with that boss anymore. I'm leaving tomorrow." We always have those conversations. We talk about it with our friends, with team members, and even ask friends outside of work to let us know if they hear of any good positions. But actually submitting a resignation is a whole different issue, isn't it? Looking at how the situation first unfolded, it seems like HYBE was the one to bring things to light. They shared a lot with the press, and Min Hee-jin, the CEO, responded with a strong counterstatement. HYBE was saying, "Min Hee-jin is trying to do this and that," but CEO Min was like, "What else have I done apart from that message on KakaoTalk?" The court also judged that they weren't sure what actions had actually been attempted. To me, this seems like the fact of the matter. Clearly, HYBE's relationship with CEO Min Hee-jin might not be good. There could have been friction about how a subsidiary operates so independently from the parent company. There were likely various issues internally, but they should have been resolved within the company without making the problems visible externally. The fact that they let it spill outside before resolving it was a huge mistake on HYBE's part, revealing weaknesses in their management abilities. In my view, this has greatly devalued HYBE, becoming a powerful force that has dragged down their valuation. Throughout this process, HYBE displayed a level of immaturity, and the core of the issue became less important. The real concern for investors now is whether the company can effectively handle issues like these. Once this problem is resolved, can the remaining HYBE groups continue to grow securely? This business is all about reputation. HYBE is now seen as a company that ousts female CEOs simply because she didn't follow their orders. That perception leaves a lasting impression on people's minds, damaging the company's future operations. From an investor's perspective, two major incidents have happened in quick succession. The first was the boost in value during 2020 when HYBE sold a huge number of albums during COVID-19, creating the sense that the entertainment industry was Korea's next big sector. But then, this recent issue with Min Hee-jin, alongside BLACKPINK's contract situation, has put a serious damper on things. BLACKPINK didn't renew their contract as a group, and though they claim to continue working together in some capacity, it's not the same as before. YG Entertainment's profitability has plummeted, revealing how dependent they were on BLACKPINK. This has left investors wondering whether the entertainment business is just a limited-time, seven-year affair. If BLACKPINK had carried on smoothly into the next generation, it would have seemed like a sustainable business, and investors would have continued to trust in the long-term future of Korean entertainment. But now, we're seeing the cracks in that perception. It’s become a question of how to invest in a business with a lifespan of only seven years, when even the manufacturing industry lasts longer than that. The BLACKPINK incident and the NewJeans situation have both severely harmed investor confidence. HYBE's struggles with its artists are analogous to a manufacturing company facing a revolt from its workers. When investors look at this instability, they start questioning whether the business is even viable. The concept of sustainability has been seriously undermined, and the fact that the seven-year contract issue has been a long-standing concern doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. What used to reassure investors was the belief that when a seven-year contract ended, the company would already have the next seven years planned out, ready to sustain their business. That faith in the big entertainment companies has been shaken. Achieving the kind of success that BTS or BLACKPINK did is incredibly difficult, and passing the baton to the next generation is no simple task. Even though investors had faith that YG would produce another BLACKPINK-level group, now that trust is faltering. However, I do think people are now looking at contracts a bit differently. In the past, when a group disbanded, the members would scatter. But now, groups like BLACKPINK continue to work together even while pursuing solo projects. This shows that they understand the importance of sticking together, and I thought that this might help extend the longevity of these groups. But in reality, very few cases of disbanded groups have seen much success with individual members pursuing separate careers. There aren’t many examples where groups have stayed active for long, especially when individual members run into personal issues. Take Big Bang, for instance—they’ve been around for a while, but their personal scandals have made it hard for the group to recover fully. In the entertainment business, it’s rare for groups to last more than seven years, and age is also a factor. Once a group surpasses the seven-year mark, the members tend to be quite a bit older. With BTS, they need to show a fresh side if they’re to keep running strong. One of the most disheartening things mentioned by the members was that they didn’t feel respected. This ties into a larger issue in our society, as we're seeing with the national discussion around workplace bullying. If we think about how BTS achieved success, it's clear why this is such a serious issue. Back when BTS rose to fame, they shared how they weren’t from one of the top three agencies and positioned themselves as underdogs who worked hard to gain recognition. This resonated with many young people who felt that if you work hard enough, you can succeed, even without the backing of a major company. This message gave hope to many, not only in Korea but also globally. BTS’s fan base, especially in the U.S., includes many people who identify as outsiders, those who don’t feel they belong to the mainstream—whether in terms of race, culture, or social standing. For them, BTS was a source of inspiration, showing that you can still succeed even if you start from the margins. With NewJeans, though there’s talk about Min Hee-jin, the allegations of bullying within the company are hitting a sensitive nerve for fans. It’s unfortunate that the company allowed things to reach a point where such accusations were made. Even if the situation was mostly an internal conflict among the adults in charge, they should have handled it better to avoid involving the artists. In the past, we've seen similar issues, like with Big Bang’s various scandals, which were almost at the level of criminal activity. The current situation with NewJeans might not be as severe, but bullying and exclusion are still serious concerns. Ultimately, experiences like these can serve as valuable lessons for the entertainment industry. This situation has highlighted that the entertainment business is fundamentally about human relationships. From the artists to the products they create, everything revolves around people. The moment someone’s feelings are hurt or relationships are damaged, the entire business can collapse. The entertainment business is all about personal connections, something I've always believed. Recently, I heard about Naver Webtoon’s global success, and it's fascinating to think about how it has outgrown Kakao Webtoon, despite being a later player. Many factors contributed to this success, but someone mentioned that webtoons are also a "personal connection" business. Webtoon creators are tough to manage—they're artists, after all, and keeping them on schedule, especially with weekly deadlines, is a challenging task. CEO Kim Joong has managed to nurture relationships with these creators, making personal connections the backbone of the business. In the entertainment industry, particularly with idols, you can't overlook the importance of personal relationships. The key skill for managing this industry is the ability to connect deeply with both the creators and the artists. HYBE, for instance, doesn’t just need skilled managers who are good with finance or operations. What they truly need are people who can foster those personal relationships, especially when they’re dealing with artists as young as 13 or 15. It’s about ensuring that these young talents feel understood and cared for, so they can be inspired to do their best work. Managing young artists is tricky because their idea of success might be completely different from what adults think. A 13-year-old might not care about owning multiple houses—they might just want to spend time with their family or have the freedom to eat out whenever they want. The manager’s job is to tap into what motivates them and help them thrive in a way that’s meaningful to them. This kind of nurturing is not easy to scale. When a company grows too big, it’s challenging to maintain those close relationships. That's why multi-label approaches, like those seen in large entertainment agencies, are supposed to help. But if personal connections within those labels break down, the whole system can fall apart. This business model seems uniquely suited to Korea. It’s hard to imagine it working the same way in Japan, where there's a more hierarchical, command-driven structure. Japan's entertainment industry often depends on strong, central producers who direct everything. In contrast, Korean idols often rise through collective effort and personal connection, like BTS did. Despite the challenges, I believe Korea’s entertainment sector has room for long-term growth. Many of today’s youth are drawn to this field because it allows them to express their talents and passions. If scandals like the one with NewJeans continue to arise, however, it might dissuade some young people from pursuing these dreams. When you look at what NewJeans members have said, there’s not much to disagree with. They simply want to keep doing what they’ve always done and follow their own creative paths. Ensuring they have the freedom to do so can lead to even greater success. These days, if you ask middle or elementary school students what they want to be when they grow up, many of them will say they want to become idols or YouTubers. They believe that with enough effort, they can make it. The entertainment industry needs to be able to channel that passion and potential into something positive. If Min Hee-jin were to leave HYBE, it’s clear that many companies would be eager to work with her. She mentioned once that “everyone is crazy about money,” and I think that’s why there would be a long line of people wanting to meet with her if she decided to move on. Right now, for example, there are people in the entertainment industry, like CJ, who may not have fully established themselves, or even private investors, just waiting for an opportunity. Many of them are keeping an eye on Min Hee-jin leaving HYBE. This was evident during the recent Tokyo performance, where her creativity was on full display. It was incomparable. That’s why this situation is even more unfortunate. Some people say, "If it wasn’t for the money, how could that group have been created?" But I believe there are people who could have made it happen with or without money. That’s the crucial difference in this case. While I'm not an expert, I was touched by the process of recreating a hit song from a legendary Japanese female singer from the '80s. It felt like a major event. It was amazing because I had never seen anything like it before. Even though I wasn’t familiar with the original song, just seeing it was enough to draw in so much attention and make it feel like a historic moment. That’s what talent is—turning something simple, like a cover song, into a major event. I remember thinking, "How do the Japanese people feel about this?" because the crowd's reaction was incredible. The enthusiasm was surprising, and I wondered what they were thinking while watching it. This is the true power of Korean culture—it’s not just about promoting our own culture but also deeply resonating with others. The entertainment industry’s core business is making audiences happy and even obsessed. Min Hee-jin is undeniably a top-tier artist in this field. If she were to leave HYBE, there would be countless opportunities for her. But if HYBE mishandles this situation, it won’t just be about losing one person—it could destabilize everything. They really need to handle this carefully. As for stocks and investments, that's up to everyone’s individual decisions. We're just having a casual chat here about the entertainment industry. As someone with a child in the business and another who's analyzed the industry, we’re just relaxing with a casual discussion. So, let’s pour a drink and enjoy this conversation. Watch the full video:

1tokki

104,638 次观看 • 1 年前

I am the Director of the White House Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. In 2024 this government completed the most thorough search for extraterrestrial life in human history. We checked the sky. We checked the files. We declassified the saucers. The verdict came back: nothing. No life out there. Not one. So I closed the telescope. I opened the window. I pointed it at a Home Depot. Three million by lunch. The trick was always the word. *Alien* had been sitting in the science fiction aisle for sixty years and we were too shy to use it in a press release. The dehumanization was already written. It was just shelved under Fantasy. This year I moved it to Policy. Same word. New department. My department. I should explain the jurisdiction, because there are two of us and we do not speak. Down the hall is the Department of War. It used to be the Department of Defense, but defense sounded woke, so we changed the name for two billion dollars, half of it letterhead. They renamed it back to what it was in 1789, before someone noticed in 1949 that the old acronym, N-M-E, sounded too much like *enemy.* We have now re-adopted the name they abandoned for sounding like the thing it does. I find this clarifying. The signage alone is seven hundred thousand buildings. We are spending a billion dollars on new doors so the doors can say War. The Department of War runs and has a tab for UFOs. Real ones. They post the actual files. The saucers. The eyewitnesses. The intelligence officer left "virtually speechless." They are searching the sky in earnest, declassifying everything, and what they keep finding is *nothing.* No craft confirmed. No biology confirmed. Decades of looking up and the honest answer is: unresolved. So you have two federal agencies, one word, opposite directions. searches the heavens for aliens and finds none. I open a window and find three million. They declassify the ones that don't exist. I classify the ones that do. They got a press release. I got a tip line. Guess which one rang. We are, technically, hunting the same species. They just keep aiming the telescope up, and I keep telling them, gently, at the inter-agency sync: lower it. The homepage was mine. ALIENS DECLASSIFIED. THEY WALK AMONG US. I tested "Immigration Portal." Eleven percent scroll. I tested *the truth's out there,* and a White House official told a reporter, on the record, that the strategy was to "draw eyeballs." We drew eyeballs. The truth was out there. It was in a parking lot in Bakersfield, getting into a white van we are now contractually obligated to call a craft. In 1938 a man read a story about an alien invasion over the radio and the country panicked in the streets, and for ninety years that was taught as a cautionary tale, the danger of a broadcast that makes people believe an invasion is real. We studied that broadcast. We did not study it as a warning. We studied it as a launch. The difference between Orson Welles and this office is that he apologized the next morning, and we put a counter on it. I named the van the Mothership. I named the prison Area 51. I named the 5 a.m. knock First Contact. I named all of it from the third chair. I keep a felt-tip for naming and a Mont Blanc for the part that can't be undone. Then we made the cards. I want to be precise, because people assume I'm exaggerating. We took the faces of the captured and we printed them as trading cards. "Worst of the Worst." Mugshot, nationality, charges, and a weakness level, and the weakness level was a snowflake, and the snowflake meant us. We are the weakness. We were proud of that. When a children's franchise objected that these were, in fact, their cards, our official response, which I helped draft, was: "To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause." We set the abduction to the cartoon's theme song. Gotta catch 'em all. The first half is the slogan. The second half is the quota. A man told Congress in 2023 we were hiding non-human biologics. Everyone pictured a grey on a slab. Cute. We do run a reverse-engineering program. We take the biologic. We study what it makes. It makes the drywall. The 4 a.m. milking. The lettuce. And the lettuce is round now, because forty percent of it stayed in the dirt with the only people who knew where the dirt was. We reverse-engineered the alien completely. The blueprint was a back. We call the biologic "labor." We classify the screaming as ambient. Identification is a science here. We do not arrest at random. We read the markings. A crown inked on a forearm. A soccer crest. We have catalogued the species by its tattoos the way Linnaeus catalogued the finch. One of the specimens turned out to be autistic and the crown was just a crown, but the taxonomy held, because the taxonomy is not falsifiable, that is what makes it a taxonomy. I have a desk for this. I have a magnifying glass. I have never felt more like a scientist. There is a second species, and this one we keep. An alien with five million dollars is not an alien. He is a guest. We printed him a card. It is gold. We are printing a Platinum one for the aliens with even more money, who may remain on the planet two hundred and seventy days a year and pay no tax on the wealth they made on other worlds. The website for this is the cheapest-looking website I have ever approved, and I approved the one with the saucer on it. The same agency that scans a gardener's forearm for gang signs scans a financier's bank statement for extraordinary ability. The statement always has it. The forearm never does. The species was never a people. The species is a price. In the old films the alien lands and says, take me to your leader. We have improved the line. Pay five million and we take you to ours. He golfs with him on Saturday. There was a film about this, and I am told the man who made it meant it as a warning, which is the recurring problem with the warnings. A drifter finds a pair of sunglasses, and through them he can finally see which people are the aliens, and it is the rich ones, the ones on the billboards telling everyone to obey and consume and reproduce and not think. I have a pair of those glasses, conceptually. I issue them at the tip line. But mine are tuned the other way. You put them on and the alien is never the man in the suit who paid five million to skip the line. The alien is always the man holding the leaf blower. The lenses cost a thousand dollars in advertising and they only point down. We have sold a great many pairs. You asked about the Men in Black. Yes. Regulation now. A Man in Black photographs poorly, and the witnesses would not stop filming us peel a woman off the sidewalk in daylight, so we issued the masks, and leadership's only note was that the masks tested well. We are no longer the cover-up of the abduction. We are the abduction. We skipped a step. Efficiency. Our communications team posted E.T. last summer. The bicycle. The moon. "Even E.T. knew when it was TIME TO GO HOME." I want to walk you through what happened in that meeting, because nobody stopped it. We chose the one film where the government is the villain. The men with the flashlights and the unmarked vans who hunt the small frightened alien hiding in a child's closet. That is us. We are the flashlights. We watched that movie as children and cried when the agents came, and then we grew up and became the agents and made the poster ourselves and scheduled it for nine a.m. The intern asked if we were the good guys in this one. We told her engagement was up forty percent. She has since been promoted. I built an app where you abduct yourself. CBP Home. You open it. You confirm you are the alien. You beam yourself off the planet and you save us the gas. And here is the part I cannot believe they approved. We *pay* you. A thousand dollars to vanish. We raised it to twenty-six hundred when the first price didn't move enough units. We are bidding against ourselves for your disappearance. Four-point-six stars. The one-stars are from users who got beamed mid-review. I keep the unfinished ones in a folder. I find them very moving. We opened a facility in a swamp. We ringed it with alligators and we called it that, on purpose, in the brochure. Then we opened a gift shop. Thirty dollars for the shirt. Twenty-seven for the hat. Fifteen for a set of koozies, so your beer stays cold while you celebrate the prison in the wetland. The fundraising email called it "gator-guarded, python-patrolled," a "one-way ticket to regret" for anyone who didn't self-deport in time. We sold the koozies to fund the swamp. The swamp funds the next swamp. I want you to sit with the fact that there is merchandise. The quota is three thousand a day. Stephen asked for it himself. Three thousand is not a number. It is a metabolism. The building is hungry by nine and we feed it Marco, who does the landscaping, and the building goes quiet, and by one it stirs again, and we find another Marco. There is always another Marco. That is the part I find beautiful. The supply is the point. The supply is everyone. The Secretary signs the warrants. She is very firm on one point, which she repeats in every briefing: the aliens, she warns, eat the pets. They are taking the dogs. I have read her book. In her book she takes a fourteen-month-old dog named Cricket to a gravel pit and shoots it, because it would not obey, and she writes this down herself, proudly, as a story about leadership. She wrote the part about the dog. She also warns us about the dogs. I have stopped trying to hold both sentences at once. I just file the warrant. The tip line was the masterpiece. "Report your neighbor" hit the shame ceiling. "REPORT SUSPICIOUS ALIENS" tested as a hobby. We handed the callers Roswell instead of a snitch's guilt, and the phones lit up like a saucer, and they hung up glowing, every one of them, like they'd finally seen the thing. They had. He coached the Tuesday team. He was at the bake sale. That is the horror we are selling you. The alien brought the orange slices. He was undocumented and luminous and gone by Tuesday. Roswell taught us the other half of the trade. In 1947 something fell in the desert and the government said: it was a weather balloon, nothing here, go home. That was the first administrative error, the founding one, the original sentence that says the thing you saw was not the thing you saw. We still use it. We have only reversed the polarity. In 1947 they saw a saucer and we called it a balloon. Now they see a father of three and we call it a saucer. The skill is identical. You simply decide in advance which truth the public is allowed to keep, and you hand them the other one, printed, official, with a seal. We did have one administrative error. We abducted a man a court had ordered us not to touch, dropped him on a planet called El Salvador, and called it clerical. A judge made us beam him back. So the DOJ stood up and warned the others: insist on a hearing and we will re-abduct you to the same planet. The Supreme Court said the aliens are entitled to due process. A very Earth opinion. We are appealing it to a higher sky. The planet has a prison, and the prison is the elegant part. In the film about the camp, the aliens are not killed. They are put somewhere they are not permitted to leave, while everyone agrees this is temporary, for their own protection, pending a status that never arrives. We built that. It is called CECOT and we rent it. A man goes in and the man does not come out, and the genius is that nothing has to happen to him, the room does the work, the room is the whole sentence. You remember the Men in Black had a small device. A flash, and the witness forgets the alien entirely. We have something better. We do not wipe the memory. We wipe the file. The man remembers everything, the cell, the flight, the day, all of it, in perfect detail, and it does not matter, because there is no document that admits he was here, and a memory without a file is just a story he tells in a language the form does not accept. The witness keeps the truth. We keep the paperwork. Only one of those is admissible. I learned that the flash was never the point. The point was always the filing cabinet. We run all of it on a spell from 1798. Two hundred and twenty-seven years old. Written for a war we are not in, against an enemy we have not declared. It works because nobody reads the small print on a curse. Storm Area 51 was a joke once. A hundred thousand people Naruto-running at a fence to free whatever was inside. I think about it daily. We're the ones inside the fence now. We kept the running. We just turned it around. We have a precedent we cite in the deck, proudly, on slide four. In 1954 the government ran a program of exactly this kind, and the program had an official name, and the official name was a slur. They printed the slur on the letterhead. They did not flinch. The President holds it up as the model, by name, at the rallies, and the crowd cheers the name. I admire the honesty of 1954 more than I can say. They did not need a saucer to make it palatable. They just used the word. We are the same operation with better art direction. The only thing we added was the costume. I love the callers. I want to say that plainly. For years they told each other a hidden cabal was running everything from the shadows, harvesting the innocent, and that one day the truth would come out. They were right. There is a cabal. It has a budget of a hundred and seventy billion dollars, the largest in the history of federal law enforcement, and it sits in this building, and I have a desk in it. And the people who spent a decade certain that shadowy elites were disappearing their neighbors now call our line, unpaid, to help the shadowy elites disappear their neighbors. They wanted to expose the conspiracy. We made them the staff. Do your own research, they said. They did. They found the gardener. The Department of War posted another tranche on the twenty-second. Saucers. Lights. A pilot's voice going thin. I read all of it. I want them to find one so badly. I want there to be a real one up there, a genuine visitor, something that actually came from somewhere else, because then, and only then, would a single creature in my files have been an alien. They never find it. The sky stays empty. The ground stays full. I have stopped attending the inter-agency sync. We were two departments looking for the same thing in two directions, and only one of us was ever going to be wrong, and it was the honest one. And here is the thing that keeps me at the window past dark. There was a real one. A rock from another star, the genuine article, the first verified object from outside the entire solar system, and a Harvard man went on television and said it might be a ship. An actual alien, possibly, inbound, free of charge, after sixty years of asking. We did not open a file. We could not arrest it. It had no forearm to read and no bank statement to approve. It was the only alien in America we had no use for, so we let it pass, and went back to the parking lot. Last winter the sky over New Jersey filled with lights nobody could name, and the whole government, every agency, every radar, looked up and said it did not know. The one time the unknown actually arrived, we had nothing. Down here I have never once said I do not know. That is the difference between their department and mine. They look up and find a question. I look down and have already decided the answer. Last week the President leaned over mid-briefing and asked if any of them were real. I told him the engagement was extremely real. He nodded. We do not break frame here. The frame is the only wall still standing. That, and the office fern. Nobody waters it. It will not die. The only thing in this building allowed to stay without papers. My plaque came Thursday. FIRST CONTACT, VISIONARY OF THE YEAR. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. I lifted that off the homepage. It was written about one brave man telling the truth. I decided the man was me. I wrote it about me. I am the truth I declassified. I am the secret I warned you about. They walk among us, and I sign their mail. The counter is still live. Three million and climbing. I am told it will not be removed. We are not alone. We are just short a few landscapers. A few line cooks. A few nurses. And the entire night shift at the plant that makes the flag. Up. And to the right.

Peter Girnus 🦅

60,870 次观看 • 2 个月前

Clive Lewis's Water Bill - bringing water back to the people 💯 Please watch, listen or read this transcript. Because this is the sort of leadership Labour needs 👏 Clive Lewis MP He even calls for PR 👏 Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab) Margaret Thatcher’s revolution tore up the rulebook on political and economic management. She rewrote it with a single unwavering principle: that the pursuit of profit would serve the public good, even when it came to vital public services—even when it came to water. We often say that society stands on the shoulders of giants, but giants cast long shadows, and Thatcherism’s shadow looms dark over our water system today. Whether we see ourselves standing on her shoulders or trapped in her shadow, one thing is undeniable: she proved that the world can be made differently. And if it can be made differently once, it can be made differently again. That, as the brilliant anthropologist David Graeber understood, is the hidden truth of the world. It is something we create and can choose to create anew. We can do it better. Today, I want to show this House and this country that water is the lens through which we can imagine something better—a better way of running our economy, a better way of safeguarding our environment and a better way of empowering the public, for whom democracy supposedly exists. But that requires something very difficult: it requires us to break free from the constraints of our imagination and to let go of the idea that this economic model is all there is or all there ever could be. It saddens me to say that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 perfectly exemplifies this failure of imagination. One of its leading proponents has a particular rhetorical flourish they love to use when dismissing calls for public ownership of water. They say, “I’m more interested in the purity of our water than the purity of our ideology.” I love that quote. I love it because it lays bare just how deeply the ideology of privatisation, and all that goes with it, has embedded itself. So entrenched is it within our collective consciousness that we no longer recognise it as an ideology. We no longer see it for what it is: a systemic exploitation of a common resource for private gain. Instead, it has simply become the natural order of things. But how much longer can this go on? Since the crash of 2008, this ideology has been faltering under the weight of its own contradictions, yet its grip on British politics remains vice-like. Austerity, exploitation and corporate price gouging are still treated not as choices but as inevitabilities. Why? Because too many politicians on both sides of the House refuse to contemplate alternatives. For those on the other side of the House—on the Opposition Benches—I get it: this is their ideology. They are defending their class, and I would imagine they would go further still if they could. But on this side of the House, we have no excuse. We should be standing up for our class: working-class people—the public. Instead, we wrap their ideology in the language of fiscal responsibility, economic prudence and stewardship of the economy. But it is not fiscal responsibility when we balance the books on broken backs. It is not stewardship when the ship has been sold off and the crew left to drown. It is not prudence. It is power maintenance. Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab) I hope the engineers can check that the microphones and speakers are working while I ask a quick question. My hon. Friend mentions Members on this side of the House. There are far more of us on this side since July last year than there were in 2019, with a very different approach taken in our manifestos. Does he fear that the shift in tone he is suggesting is one of the reasons that we did so badly in 2019 but so well last year? Clive Lewis No, I do not. We have a distorted electoral system. Bring on proportional representation, because if we had PR, we would have had a different Government in 2019 and most definitely in 2017. Sometimes politicians have to do what they believe to be right and lead from the front. I think we should lead from the front. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind) I compliment the hon. Member on his Bill. To help his argument, there was overwhelming opinion poll support for public ownership of water in 2017 and 2019, and there still is today. Clive Lewis I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side. Neil Coyle Really? Clive Lewis On the issue of water, yes, I would say they are, because whether I like it or not, Reform has a policy for water to be owned 50% by pension companies and 50% by the public. As much as it grieves me to say it, that is a policy of public ownership. They are populist; they are listening to a popular voice. Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will make some progress and then give way, and I will also try to keep the volume down a little bit. This is about the maintenance of a political and economic model that was never built to serve the public—a model designed to shield the wealth of asset holders, landlords, shareholders, corporations and, yes, privatised water companies. But here is the great irony: the very greed, recklessness and contempt of the water industry—its excesses—have cracked open the door, and through that crack, we glimpse an opportunity. It is an opportunity to shatter the myth of privatisation’s inevitability, to break free from the narrow, self-imposed rules that have caged our Government’s economic choices, to expose its failures, to challenge its dominance and, above all, to show this country that there is an alternative—an alternative that is democratic, sustainable and run in the interests of the many, not the few. We can do it better. Mr Frith My hon. Friend is making a typically impassioned speech. He says the general public are ahead of us. Where might that same public be when faced with the bill for bringing in the nationalisation he is clearly wedded to? Furthermore, in the event that we do not have to buy the water industry but seize it, the implications of that seizure will cause an economic collapse. At what point will he take responsibility for either of those scenarios when confronting a public who are, he says, ahead of us on this issue? Clive Lewis I will obviously come to many of those points later in my speech, but let me make this point now: I do not believe in nationalisation, and this Bill has nothing to do with nationalisation. This is about giving the public a say over their water. It is about governance, standards and democracy. Mr Frith Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis No, my hon. Friend has made his point. Mr Frith On this point? Clive Lewis No, I am going to carry on and make some progress. You made your point. Let the public— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. Mr Lewis, I do not believe I was making a point at all. Clive Lewis My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; I should have said that my hon. Friend made his point. The clock is ticking. The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning. It is our lived reality. Rising droughts, creeping desertification, depleted aquifers, wildfires, systemic collapse—these are no longer projections; they are the forecast turned fact. Preparing for this future and adapting to what is now inevitable has never been more urgent. The evidence is sobering. The UK’s water resources are under mounting pressure and not just from the climate emergency, but from rising demand and population growth. Experts now project that England could face significant water supply deficits as early as 2034 unless we act decisively. That is not a distant horizon; it is a little over a decade away. But while the threat has grown, our resilience has shrunk, because while the climate crisis has intensified, our water infrastructure has stood still, or, worse, been sold off, hollowed out and left to rot. In the 35 years before privatisation almost 100 reservoirs were built; in the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. But it gets worse, because in that same period private water companies have sold off 25 reservoirs without replacing one. Instead of investing in resilience, they have extracted value: £72 billion paid out in dividends while pipes leak, rivers choke, and the public pays the price. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) asks how we can afford it; how can we not afford it? That is not mismanagement; it is a betrayal. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country— Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis One second. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country, we must treat it as such: an existential conflict. In that context, the actions of these companies—selling off reservoirs, failing to invest, polluting our water—are not just negligent; they are acts that actively undermine our national water security. In any other existential crisis, we might call that what it is: sabotage. And in a time of national peril, sabotage has another name: treason. Let me explain why this matters to me personally. When I served on tour in Afghanistan back in 2009—not in a boy band—I experienced something utterly alien to me: the gnawing fear of thirst; not the mild irritation of forgetting a water bottle, but the deep physical worry that there may not be enough clean water to get through the day. In Britain, we have been blessed: water falls from the sky; it fills our rivers, it soaks our fields, and we joke about it—it is part of who we are. But in Afghanistan there was no humour; only heat, dust and desperation. There I saw children trekking miles through the desert, not for food, not for money, but to beg for clean bottled water. Once we have seen that, and once we have felt that fear, we can never take water for granted again. We never again believe it is something we can waste or pollute or privatise without consequence. That is why I have brought forward this Bill: because anger is not enough; outrage, no matter how justified, will not fix the pipes, stop the sewage or fill the reservoirs. We need a plan. We need a strategy. We need a future. We can do it better. My Water Bill delivers that. It sets out the high standards our country deserves and the democratic governance our water system desperately needs. First, it establishes clear, ambitious targets to stop the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches, to restore our water to high ecological and chemical standards, and to deliver universal, affordable access to water as a basic human right—a right we have never had before in this country. It demands a system designed not just to extract profit but to adapt, to build resilience in the face of climate change, and to harness nature-based solutions that work with the environment, not against it. Secondly, it transforms governance. The Bill introduces representation for workers and local communities on the boards of water companies. It gives voting rights to employees and customers, so that those who use and maintain a system have a real say in how it is run. Water is not a commodity but a common good, and those who depend on it and pay for it should help govern it. Thirdly, the Bill lays the foundations for a democratic future. It establishes a commission on water ownership to advise the Secretary of State on long-term strategy, looking at international best practice, especially in OECD countries, where public water ownership is the norm, not the exception. Crucially, it creates a citizens assembly on water ownership to bring the public into the process, to deliberate, debate and decide how we can govern this most precious of resources. The public care, but how do I know that? I know because a small fraction of them are in the Public Gallery today, having travelled here from all over the country; I know because of the thousands of emails that have been sent to MPs across the House; and I know because those people will never stop campaigning until this injustice is resolved. They know that we can protect something not by selling it off, but by standing up for it, involving people in its care and ensuring that it serves the public, today, tomorrow and for generations to come. My Bill offers a pathway out of crisis. It offers control, resilience and democracy. It is not just about cleaning up our rivers, but about cleaning up the system that allowed them to be polluted in the first place. Privatisation is not just a problem—it is the problem. We can do it better. I can hear some people on the Labour Benches thinking, “But we have just passed”— Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab) You can hear thinking? Clive Lewis I can now—for my next trick, I can hear thinking! I can hear them thinking, “But we have just passed the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Clive, so what are you talking about?” Yes, we have, but I am afraid to say it has been watered down—[Interruption.] Sorry, I had to get that one in—it was all going so well. The Act does not live up to what was promised, it does not deliver what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. Do not get me wrong: it is a start. Grahame Morris I congratulate my good and hon. Friend on making an excellent speech and on advocating for public ownership of water and the opportunity to make things better. Does he agree that the mismanagement of the water companies under privatisation is a huge indictment of the whole principle? In my area, bills are way above inflation and huge dividends are being paid by borrowing money. At the very least, should our Government not be looking at stopping the payment of bonuses and share dividends while sewage pollution continues, and we have appalling mismanagement of the industry? Clive Lewis I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I agree with him wholeheartedly and I am just about to come to that point in relation to what the Water (Special Measures) Act does and does not do. It addresses some of those points, but as we have already discussed, privatisation is not just a problem, but the problem, and it is a big part of why so much has gone wrong. Unfortunately, the Water (Special Measures) Act does not live up to what was promised or what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. However, it is a start, and I praise my colleagues on the Front Bench, including the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), who has done so much work in this area. Unfortunately, the Act is not a solution. Remarkably, my Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act does not even define what clean water means. There are no standards or targets—just vague intentions handed over once again to a regulatory system that has already failed us and to the companies that caused the mess in the first place. It says nothing about better governance, and absolutely nothing about the big, fat, humongous elephant in the room: who owns our water? If we do not deal with ownership, we cannot deal with accountability. If we cannot deal with accountability, we can forget clean water. No—we must go further on clean water standards, corporate accountability and what happens when companies fail. Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab) Does my hon. and gallant Friend accept that there is increased accountability in the Water (Special Measures) Act through the fact that many companies in the industry are now rewriting their articles of association to ensure that they are accountable not just to shareholders, but to the customers and users of water? Clive Lewis After 35 years of abject failure, it is too little, too late. My Bill would put the final nail in the coffin of this sorry chapter of our country’s water and water system. Neil Coyle Sticking with the puns, I commend my hon. Friend on his gallons of passion; he is always making waves. He criticises the Government’s legislation, which is obviously not yet in effect, but does he think that the Cunliffe commission will go any way towards addressing some of the concerns he has outlined? Clive Lewis Unfortunately, I do not, because again the elephant in the room—who owns our water—has been ruled out of the Cunliffe commission’s operational process. It cannot actually look at that issue. I have no issue with Sir Jon Cunliffe, but let us not forget that he originates from the Treasury—he probably has Treasury brain. That economic orthodoxy is part of the reason why we are in the place that we are. I do not have so much confidence in the Cunliffe commission, but I do have far more confidence in the People’s Commission on the Water Sector, which is being run by academics and which will report at the same time. I will be very interested to hear what it says. Neil Coyle Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis Those are the reasons why I have brought forward this Bill. The Government’s Act does none of those things, but my Bill does. Take just one example— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. I believe Mr Lewis probably cannot hear interventions, because he is so loud himself. Members should intervene loudly if they wish to intervene. Clive Lewis I did hear the intervention, but I wanted to make some progress. Take this one example. Under this Bill, if a water company breaches the terms of its licence with a major sewage discharge, it can forget shareholder payout and piling on more debt. If it does it twice, it is in the last chance saloon. After three strikes, it is out—licence terminated and on its bike—and those price-gouging, asset-stripping, river-killing vulture capitalist outfits will be rolled into the sunset without a penny in compensation. What about those water infrastructure assets that they have been sweating for private gain? They go back into the public realm, thank you very much. If they start whining about debts, do not worry: we will do a full audit of what they invested, what they racked up in debt, what they paid out in dividends and what they stuffed into bloated executive pay packets. I will tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am yet to see a single privatised English water company walk away with anything other than a well-earned spanking and a sharp haircut for its creditors. Those assets will belong to the public once again, and we will not pay a penny more than they are worth. I can hear people thinking, “Where will the money come from? How will you invest in publicly owned water without the private sector?” I will tell them where it has not come from in these past 35 years—I am mind-reading again. Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will just make some progress, and then I will give way. I am on a roll. Let me tell the House where the money has not come from for these past 35 years. It has not come from private shareholders or long-term thinking, and it certainly has not come from some mythical well of benevolent capitalism. The private companies have put in less than nothing; in fact, they have racked up more than £60 billion in debt. Thames Water has paid more than £7.2 billion in dividends since privatisation, and is now £15.2 billion in debt and counting—work that out. Now, it is trying to plug the hole with a £3 billion emergency loan that will cost 10% in annual interest. That is more than half a billion pounds a year, just for interest payments, courtesy of our bills. That money will not build a reservoir, fix a pipe or clean a river, but it will keep a rotten system afloat for a little longer. Noah Law My hon. and gallant Friend makes an impassioned case for public ownership—something that, in the right context, I am sure Members on all sides of the House can celebrate. On the point about the cost of financing to the public, though, does he agree that while there are some serious indiscretions in parts of the industry, such as in Thames Water’s case, this conversation about the appropriate financing model would be better entertained at a time when the cost of capital in the private water industry was not lower than the cost of public sector borrowing, on which, of course, we are in a very difficult situation? Clive Lewis The cheapest borrowing in the country, without a doubt, is public sector borrowing. The private water industry, which has had 35 years to sort this mess out, is not going to find investment. It is up to its eyeballs in debt. It is relying on a 50% increase in our bills by 2030, if we include inflation, and that is in the middle of a cost of living crisis. How can we justify that? The answer is that we cannot. Mr Frith The day after the seizure of public assets that my hon. Friend is describing, billions and billions of pounds of debt will come with it. What does he propose to do with that debt, other than refinancing, which is exactly where we are at now with the industry requirement to refinance the debt to try to keep bills down? Instead, he is advocating that the public purse take on that private debt. Clive Lewis At the beginning of my now seemingly rather long speech, I think I referred to a failure of imagination. Ask what Margaret Thatcher would have done when she was faced with similar problems. She would have fought her way through it. She changed the very fabric of our economy, our democracy and our politics, and she made it work. We can do the same, because the public are behind us. They want this to work. Mr Frith rose— Mark Ferguson rose— Clive Lewis I will make some progress. Let us recap, because I do not want to go on too long; I want to conclude, if I can. That money from Thames Water—that half a billion pounds in interest payments—will keep a rotten system afloat for just a little longer. The myth of privatisation is that the private sector will act in the long-term interests of the British public because it wants to turn a profit. That is preposterous, as is proven by the state of our water, and exhibit A is Thames Water. We can now turn to the question of where the investment will come from. Under public ownership, it will come from the only place it ever should have—from us, the public—and every penny of it will go back into the system. It will go into the pipes, the rivers, the seas we swim in and the water we drink. There will be a direct relationship between what we pay and what we get, with no offshore dividends, no bloated bonuses and no debt-laden shell games—just clean, accountable, democratic water. When I was in Afghanistan, every soldier had one critical duty: to stay hydrated. To dehydrate was considered a military offence, because it put the soldier and their team at risk. If someone ran out of water, we did not debate markets or metrics; we shared what we had. We had each other’s backs. As the desert-dwelling Fremen in James Herbert’s novel “Dune” believed: “A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe”. It is time our water returned to the tribe, to the people, to the public. We can do better; we must, and with this Bill, we will. I commend it to the House.

Farrukh

24,528 次观看 • 1 年前