amazing pic of a momma lion eating her baby after she found out he used her credit card to buy Vbucks without permission. nature is brutal, yet beautiful
theres a popular brand in canada called no name brand and it manufactures everything you can imagine in a grocery store and it kind of makes me feel like im in a world no one bothered to do much world building for
I know its a joke but “Poob has it for you” annoys me so much because Poob is region locked. Poob does NOT have it for you if you’re outside of the US and Canada. I’m not using a VPN and virtual debit card just to sign up to Poob.
Poob is removing the show in 7 days. Poob only streams 480p if you use a computer. Poob has Season 1 but seasons 2 to 8 require a Gopaz+ account. Poob has it, but not in stereo. Watch it on Poob, but there aren’t any captions. Poob is currently experiencing an issue, try again later.
artist in denial of being depressed: omg this 2 month long art block has been crazy… sorry i haven’t updated any of my fics in a long while! it’s just been super difficult to daydream! so weird that i’ve lost a little bit of passion for my current comfort character and ocs… this couldn’t possibly have any implications or alternative explanations
people saying some variation to “oh no” in the notes of this post are very funny but at the same time. i wish you a very Feel Better
never related to authors being like “childhood is such a blessed innocent time”, catch me with that jane eyre shit like “such dread as children only can feel” and “I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room”
CHILDHOOD IS MARKED BY FEAR WITHOUT THE WORDS TO EXPLAIN IT
“Sex is what makes us human” is stupid. Almost every species fucks. Humans are the only species that jumps motorcycles over school buses that are on fire. Some other things too probably
i’ve been told by various european friends that the most american sentence i’ve ever said is “sophomore year of college, some friends and i road-tripped thirteen hours to florida for spring break.”
and now i can confidently say this is the most guy-who-lives-in-paris sentence i’ve ever said: “today i was cycling to meet a friend at buttes-chaumont and i went over some cobblestones and my baguette got launched out of the bike basket into the middle of the roundabout”
there were like a billion and a half people in 1900 (wolframalpha), all dead now, many pretty cool, some who wrote stuff that’s worth reading, probably some who understood some particular issue or were capable in some particular art in a way matched by nobody currently alive. Often because it became irrelevant but still
love saying “ich krieg die krise” for i’m losing it / i’m freaking out / etc because it translates directly to “I’m getting the crisis”. you know the one. THE crisis. the one and only baby. ye ol reliable
i’m really thrilled about the resurgence of bad luck brian memes but when i tried to make one i sat there staring at the canvas like an apprentice surrounded by his master’s work and i was unable to pick up the brush
China’s Two Sessions meetings have ended, and it would be a real stretch to say that they mark a major change in Beijing’s economic policies. Beijing set a GDP growth target for 2025 of 5%.
This of course wasn’t a surprise, especially as the weighted average of the provincial GDP growth targets set in February came in at around 5.2%. That is why most analysts assume that this target was effectively decided months ago.
Li Qiang noted that this would be an especially difficult year. In most countries, we would expect GDP to be higher when conditions are good and lower when they are bad, but his point was that whatever the conditions, China had already determined its economic growth rate.
This shows how different the concept of GDP is in China than elsewhere, where GDP growth is an output measure, calculated at the end of the period after the economy has done what it has done.
In China, it is an input measure, determined at the beginning of the period.
One way of understanding this is by considering that to the extent the part of the economy that operates under hard-budget constraints (i.e. cannot sustainably engage in non-productive spending) is unable to achieve the growth target – and it clearly can’t – an increasing amount of economic activity will shift to those parts of the economy that don’t operate under hard-budget constraints, which means that economic activity is increasingly transferred to government and to favored sectors that receive unlimited funding from the banking system.
This in turn means that a meaningful part of economic activity this year will again be in the form of non-productive investment funded by debt, and that is why for all the recent talk of reviving the private sector, activity in the Chinese economy must continue to shift away from the private sector. This excludes favored sectors, of course, whose ability to access cheap credit is implicitly or explicitly guaranteed by local governments or SOEs who want to see production expand even if this results in losses.
And because non-productive investment by definition cannot generate sufficient growth to service the debt, we should expect to see another sharp rise in China’s debt-to-GDP ratio this year.
China’s economy in 2025, in other words, will look a lot like its economy in 2024.
I would add that Trump’s tariffs will likely have no impact this year on reducing the US deficit, and so will also have no impact on reducing China’s surplus. We should consequently expect a lot of confused stories this year about the “resilience” of China’s export sector.
Pettis makes some predictions based on the recent two sessions
when he says this:
This excludes favored sectors, of course, whose ability to access cheap credit is implicitly or explicitly guaranteed by local governments or SOEs who want to see production expand even if this results in losses.
reminds me of what people used to say about fracking during ZIRP. Or social media I guess. Drill more wells, get more users, even if you’re losing money on each one, investors would throw money at whoever was losing money on the most units. Hard to say how this worked out. The US is supplying Europe with fracked gas now, probably whoever expanded production back net is making money now, but bankruptcies in between may have meant that the investors who funded it never got any return.
favored industries include solar panels and batteries, and as Tooze has commented, it feels weird to say there’s too many solar panels, from a certain perspective clearly there aren’t enough. But obviously you have overcapacity if there’s more production capacity than sales. The world needs to phase out coal, and many countries including China need to drastically increase per capita energy use. THe way to do that right now is AMerican gas and CHinese solar panels, way to do it in the future is Chinese batteries, CHinese solar panels, and nuclear plants that are probably also Chinese though I’m hoping the American companies can get their shit together.
So it’s kind of weird to think that this can still be part of the “non-productive investment” that Pettis is talking about. Because, yeah, the price people are able to pay for these things may not really be paying for the investments that are being made to produce them.
But it’s easy to take the Chinese planner’s perspective, and say obviously this is the future so it has to be made in China.
right, only question is whether the rest of the world accepts that or decides to compete in a race to the bottom.
Man, I love it when getting recognized for my skills has benefits
For the record, this is about me being so bored at a family high tea in a restaurant I decided to actually enjoy myself, ordered half the tea card over the course of the meal, and made extremely detailed notes about each and every tea’s aroma, flavor, and aftertaste profile at various steeping times, with or without the teabag remaining in the pot, ect.
This got to the point where it got our waiter’s attention, and, despite knowing next to nothing about tea himself, intrigued him to the point of regularly dropping by our table just to check on the progress of my experiments, my report, and to ask questions about it all, as well as answering cheerfully to my interrogation about all the steeping conditions I couldn’t control for in the kitchen (tea amount per pouch, water temperature, time from pouring the water until it gets to the table to estimate how much it had cooled before adding the teabag, ect.)
In the end I, a complete stranger, offered to send him, a complete stranger, the finished report after he expressed interest in using it in the future to improve his customer service and recommendations, and he enthusiastically accepted, as well as offering to present me some tea of choice at the end of it all.
Which is how I walked out of the restaurant with a takeaway box containing several extra servings of jasmine green tea at the cost of only two “extra pots of tea” with compliments from our waiter.
Let no one ever tell you bartering isn’t alive and well.
LMAO HE SENT ME AN EMAIL ASKING ME IF I’VE DONE MORE THOROUGH TESTING ON THE GREEN JASMINE AND WHAT THE RESULTS WERE
This sounds like the plot of a rom com
Okay you say this but the email actually also said he hoped I’d come back some time so???? I guess???? He’s cute enough for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the end I, a complete stranger, offered to send him, a complete stranger, the finished report after he expressed interest in using it in the future to improve his customer service and recommendations, and he enthusiastically accepted, as well as offering to present me some tea of choice at the end of it all.
“Every language is valid, regional dialects are a normal and natural part of the evolution of language even on a national scale, the names that other English-speaking countries give things are just as valid as yours” I say to myself through gritted teeth as I listen to Americans describe breakfast foods
Biscuits
Derin you people say blimey instead of holy shit, you’re not allowed to be mad at us.
Do you think I live in England??
No, but I do think I drove four hours today and I’m very tired, and said blimey instead of crikey. Which my phone doesn’t even recognize as a word.
That’s fair, Australians do say ‘crikey’ in movies
This happened to me a month ago and it’s terrifying because the email comes from them spoofing your emails.
It’s also antisemetic and plays into it at one point. (It claims the spyware used was developed by Israel). No, the “hackers” bought your information from databank lists.
Also it claims to know you’re porn history and will use it to ruin your life unless you pay them. With anti-porn laws coming into place, this will get worse.
Please talk about this scam and help people stay safe. It’s pretty new.
This absolutely is scary because these are perfect conditions for a kangaroo to come right out of those trees and fulfill its life’s mission to fuck up your car
I don’t know what country this is in but I’m sure there’s some similar wild animal there just waiting to give the driver a savings-eliminating mechanic bill
medical literature about intersex people be like “there are problems that can be caused by forcing surgery on babies. luckily we are solving this by forcing surgery on even younger babies. it is vital that this baby CANNOT be left alone to develop normally. here is our 36 step guide on which surgeries you should force on which babies. also some people have said that forcing surgeries on babies might be "harmful” so consider that too I guess"
and the paper is from 2024 and it’s tiny sliver of acknowledgement of decades of intersex activism is considered modern. truly the state of intersex healthcare is fucking dire. worse than you are thinking.
ALT
