Receipts Only

Engineer/Technologist. Science, culture & policy takes. | LA

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@SpikeCalls Why not share the link to the actual author of this content instead of lying to people?

https://t.co/mOr2e51mVE

[Magatte Wade @magattew]

People keep telling me that Africa can't develop because of foreign meddling. 

The West interferes, they say. The colonizers won't let us rise.

Let me tell you about Vietnam.

The United States bombed Vietnam for nearly a decade. 

They dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs, which is more than three times what was dropped during all of World War II. Entire provinces were flattened. 

They sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange that poisoned the land and the people for generations. 

After the war, America broke its promise to provide reconstruction aid and pressured international institutions to deny Vietnam any loans or assistance.

The country was left isolated, embargoed, and devastated. In 1986, Vietnam was on the brink of collapse. 

Inflation had hit 700 percent and farmers were starving.

If any nation had the right to blame foreign powers for its misery and give up, it was Vietnam.

Instead, they changed their policies.

They launched reforms called Doi Moi that legalized private enterprise, welcomed foreign investment, gave farmers land rights, and opened up to global trade. 

Within a decade, the economy was growing at 7 percent per year and poverty was cut in half. 

Today, Vietnam's GDP per capita has grown from under $100 in 1990 to over $4,000. Poverty dropped from 60 percent to under 5 percent. Major companies are now moving their factories from China to Vietnam.
This is a country that was literally bombed flat by a superpower, poisoned, and abandoned. 

And they still found a way to prosper because they were willing to change their economic system.

So when I hear Africans say we can't develop because of meddling, I want to ask: what meddling post-colonialism compares to what Vietnam went through? We weren't bombed like that. We weren't poisoned like that. We weren't embargoed like that. 

What we have for the most part are governments that refuse to create the conditions for entrepreneurs to thrive, and leaders who benefit from keeping us poor and dependent.

Foreign meddling is real, and it happens to every poor country on earth. 

It's not unique to Africa.

It's what the powerful do to the weak, and every major power plays that game. 

The only escape is to become prosperous enough that you can stand on your own feet, and that requires economic freedom.

Wake up Africa!

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@jibtie @paulctan @cremieuxrecueil @HRH_Ted Go to his profile. You won't be shocked.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

What changed in 1948?

The Jews stopped being Palestinians.

May 14, 1948. Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence. The next morning, the residents of the Yishuv wake up as Israelis. The label they'd carried for decades was simply vacated.

The Palestine Post → Jerusalem Post (1950).

Palestine Symphony Orchestra → Israel Philharmonic.

Palestine Electric Company → Israel Electric Corporation.

Anglo-Palestine Bank → Bank Leumi le-Israel.

Palestine pound → Israeli lira.

Jewish Agency for Palestine → just the Jewish Agency.

"Palestinian" passports → Israeli ones.

Within 24 months, "Palestinian" had been stripped off every Jewish institution that had worn it.

Now the Arab side. Arabs did not rush to claim the empty label in 1948. They didn't claim it for another generation.

In 1948, the Arabs who fled or remained still called themselves Arabs. The Arab League's war wasn't fought in the name of "Palestine" as a nation. It was fought to prevent partition and absorb the territory into existing Arab states. Transjordan took the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in 1950 simply annexed them; the residents became Jordanian citizens with Jordanian passports. Egypt took Gaza and ran it under military administration. No citizenship, no nation, no "Palestine."

The one institutional use of "Palestinian" that survived 1948 was a refugee category: UNRWA, created December 1949, defined "Palestine refugees" as a humanitarian classification. Not a nationality. It kept the word alive in international bureaucratic language while the Arab world itself wasn't using it nationally.

Then came the long appropriation.

1964. Nasser sponsors the founding of the PLO in Cairo. The original charter (Article 24) explicitly disclaims any sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza, or the Himmah area. Read that again. The founding document of the Palestine Liberation Organization renounces claims to the West Bank and Gaza. Because in 1964, those were Arab lands belonging to Jordan and Egypt.

The PLO's purpose was to liberate the part Israel held, not those parts.

1967. Israel takes the West Bank and Gaza in six days. Suddenly Jordan and Egypt no longer hold the territory, and the Arab residents there are no longer Jordanians or under Egyptian rule. The pan-Arab framework had just been humiliated on the battlefield. A new identity was needed.

1968. The PLO charter is rewritten. Article 24's disclaimer disappears. The West Bank and Gaza are now central to Palestinian national claims. The label has been fully transferred.

Sequence:

1917–1948: "Palestinian" = Jewish institutions and self-identification; Arabs reject the term and call themselves Arabs / Southern Syrians.

1948: Jews drop the label and become Israelis. The word goes dormant on the Arab side, surviving mainly as a UN refugee category.

1948–1967: Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians. Arabs in Gaza are stateless subjects of Egyptian military rule. "Palestinian" is not yet a national identity.

1964–1968: The PLO transitions the label into a national identity but only after 1967 makes pan-Arabism politically untenable.

1948 didn't create a Palestinian Arab nation. It vacated a Jewish label and left a 20-year identity gap that Arab nationalism took until 1968 to fill.

[interrobang @interro_9]

"but im a white guy working on ai"

you can only fucking lol at something so incomprehensibly ignorant and out of touch

let me get this straight–

you were born and raised in quebec, and had the good fortune to study at mcgill - literally one of the world's best universities - for less than $5000 a year.

then you did graduate studies at waterloo - canada's top school for computer science, and earned a masters in maths and a phd there.

you then went on to move to America, work for Google, and later started your own ai company.

and the narrative you want to weave around your upbringing and training is that you ESCAPED canadian socialism?

so the socialism was good enough for you to grow up safe, have healthcare, receive a literal world-class education that helped you into one of the top technology firms in the world, but is also so bad that america has a moral imperative to ensure you, a technologist working there, should be granted permanent residency.

and if your lack of gratitude for your upbringing wasnt enough, you were promoting a presidential candidate who was vehemently opposed to immigration – while you, an immigrant, were staying in their country with a temporary visa.

i guess you can be smart enough to work on ai and quantum computing but still be dumb enough to not only think these things, but actually post them on twitter expecting sympathy

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@DeskAgent7 @CNN You'd have to know the difference to have a preference.

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@DeskAgent7 @CNN Democratic law abiding countries do not persecute individuals - criminals or otherwise.

To characterize this as a persecution of Raul is a funny way of scoring an own goal.

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@AlexBerenson "Gender reassignment surgery" and "gender-affirming surgery" are treated as semantically equivalent concepts because one became the dominant contemporary term for the same medical category. That's literally what search engines are *supposed* to recognize.

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

How is the title of a Wikipedia search result Google's responsibility? What did you want them to do... manually override Wikipedia's own terminology because you don't like semantic drift in medical language?
Maybe spend some time looking into how search indexing, entity mapping, and synonym resolution actually work before hallucinating political conspiracies out of autocomplete behavior. Sheesh.

[Bill McGuire @ProfBillMcGuire]

An excellent and sobering piece flagging the results of a new study published in Nature

Especially as - in the real world - there is no chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to 2C

https://t.co/q8HrVkfGry

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

RT @siaxares: Speaking an Iranian still inside Iran, writing this through Starlink while my hands are literally shaking with rage and grief…

[Bill Maher @billmaher]

I don't need to chase every one of your manufactured buzzwords down the rabbit hole.

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

Jensen is one the smartest and most far seeing folks the world.

"If an AI scientist warns people that AI is going to permeate across radiology and radiologists are going to get wiped out, it might seem helpful but it's hurtful. If we convince everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society.

"It is hurtful to convince all the young college graduates not to study software engineering because we are going to need more software engineers than ever.

That's hurtful."

"Scaring people with nonsensical things, which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat, there's a 20% chance that is is existential, that's ridiculous.

"That it's going to wipe out 50% of college level jobs.

"That is it going to completely destroy democracy.

"These kinds of comments are not helpful. They are made by...CEOS. And you become a CEO, maybe you adopt a God complex and somehow you know everything."

Brutal.

And right.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

Help hold @AJEnglish responsible for its support of child rapists, and wrongful erasure of their victims.

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Even if it takes me 20 years I'll follow back anybody who reposts this thread

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

👀

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank.

It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits.

Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception.

The country was lied to.

Here is what the study found.🧵

[Chris Stringer @ChrisStringer65]

Neanderthal brain and cognition reconsidered | PNAS https://t.co/mabsQq4JPX

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@wil_da_beast630 @Aella_Girl A thing a person who does not understand probability might say.

[Receipts Only @BuzzLightworth]

@thatchthoughts @DastDn @ode_to_fyodor If you're referring to "the End of History?", this is the take of someone who never read the book and just regurgitates the claims of others who also didn't read the book.