Πίνδαρος

A mere bystander @HKUniversity ; Native Cantonese & Konglish speaker; Learning 🇩🇪🇫🇷🇬🇧🇷🇺🇬🇷🇺🇦; Soon: Gàidhlig, Gaeilge;
#standwithhk

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

"Σταλαγματιά σταλαγματιά
το μάρμαρο τρυπιέται
κι αγάπη που δεν παίρνεται
δεν πρέπει ν' αγαπιέται

Θαλασσα θαλασσάκι μου
και φέρε το πουλάκι μου
Θάλασσα κι αλμυρό νερό
να σου κακιώσω δε μπορώ"

[Chenggang Xu 许成钢 @ChenggangXu2024]

中共热衷于把美中关系说成"修昔底德陷阱"，这让一个极权主义制度的对外扩张看上去只是一场寻常的大国竞争。接受这样框架的代价极大。下文剖析它的后果，并以此简单回应之前几篇关于《制度基因》的书评。 https://t.co/oY9GsZJg7J

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

Σώσε με
δώσ' μου να πιω το δηλητήριο
Θα 'ναι η ζωή μου ένα μαρτύριο
Τώρα που πια δεν μ' αγαπάς

https://t.co/sAAku8mS35

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

I am tired. And the words and ideas available to me are exhausted too.

[R.Сам 🦋🐏 @Logo_Daedalus]

This is just the natural consequences of the cueing system of literacy pedagogy in which people are trained to “guess” what something says piece by piece rather than grasping the gestalt through repeated exposure. Nobody “talks like Dickens writes” nowadays— so they have no knowledge base from which to “guess”— the only way to learn how to read a Victorian novel’s figurative language is to read many things that are similar to a victorian novel. No matter how much Steven’s Universe you watch, none of it will equip you with the skills to read the Pickwick Papers et al

[Zachary Bleemer @zbleemer]

We all know that the humanities are shrinking. It turns out that most of that decline is coming from rich students.

Possibly for the first time ever, poor students are now more likely to be humanities majors than rich students.

That's bad for economic mobility.

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

I hope tech optimists can come up with a scenario where AI and robotics can bring about a net increase in decent-paid jobs and reverse the trend of a shrinking middle class and a growing size of the working poor.

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

There are abundant resources available for laymen to capitalise on the latest tech advancements. Teach yourself X! You can devour them as much as you can, but if you do it without getting a credential from a reputable organisation, it hardly leads to any major career shift.

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

So I guessed the meaning of ed-tetainment is more than simply to passively consume educational content in your spare time, but as a form of investment with both a low and uncertain return. It still reinforces the idea that you're poor because you don't work hard enough.

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

Before LLMS people had an obsession with accuracy & precision. Every discipline and its methods are subjected to the pressure to sound more like hard science. Now with LLMs ppl somehow feel like imprecision and a larger margin of error of the generated results are good enough

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

The more it goes, the clear it becomes that this administration is totally unprepared and they are literally making it up as they go.

Those who follow know that I have been very open minded about both the approach and the goals.

But now MAGA is starting to look like MAFA

1/5

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

So to be clear, the current Trump administration plan is now to let China do advanced electronics manufacturing while we “reshore”…textiles and coffee production?

[@jason @Jason]

Who did this?!?

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

Given yesterday’s fake news antics from the @DeItaone, it’s time the market started questioning how news aggregator accounts like the below one have proliferated on X? Who controls them and how do they get such prominence in the “algorithm”? To what degree are they operating like long con sleeper cells? Faithfully repackaging real news until people assume they’re trustworthy, until one day, boom, they can be activated to engineer fake news deflection chaos. A zero day exploit hidden in plain sight.

[Tatarigami_UA @Tatarigami_UA]

When you work with lengthy, in-depth materials from countries like the Central African Republic, you quickly see a desperate central government that essentially gives up control over natural resources like diamonds, gold, and timber - to foreign states and entities in order to maintain power or to expand its geographic control.

This setup doesn't create real security - it produces isolated pockets of safety around production sites, while the rest of the country remains dangerous, unstable, and chaotic - a battleground where local rebels and foreign powers compete to exploit resources.

The US mineral deal to Ukraine, though presented in a more polished and "civilized" form, is fundamentally no different from what happens in some African countries. It rarely, if ever, brings genuine long-term stability.

[Ho-fung Hung @hofunghung]

i guess those experts saying the tariffs will bring global disaster would have been more convincing if they had not been the same group of ppl who said free trade could bring more good jobs for workers, trickle-down benefits, democracy in china, and world peace 3 decades ago.

[Πίνδαρος @fukuyamara]

"permanent modern digital records" other than magnetic tapes for archiving data 🤡

[Department of Government Efficiency @DOGE]

The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.

[Robert E Kelly @Robert_E_Kelly]

I would qualify this👇: MAGA is an ideology of US decline

- It is explicitly backward-looking for its model (America was great in the past but is not now).

- That past greatness was rooted in a fading economic sector - blue-collar factory work - which no amount of tarriffs

1

[Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen]

When they say transparency they mean secrecy.

When they say efficiency they mean corruption.

When they say gold standard science they mean grifter quackery.

When they say MAHA they mean they don’t give a fuck if you live or die as long as they retain power & profit.

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

I wrote the below-linked post (link at bottom) in a cavalier way and realize now it could have been worded more thoughtfully.

So let me reiterate the thrust of my argument (which is still in the process of being refined!).

1. US dollar dominance is not just an “exorbitant privilege,” but a unique global public good that the U.S. manufactures and exports — effectively at cost, since it's backstopped by fiscal deficits the U.S. must pay interest on.

2. Other nations benefit from exposure to this “good” for free — and often exploit the arrangement to their own advantage.

3. If you think of the dollar as a powerful “trust technology” that America produces and exports, it starts to seem wild that the U.S. doesn’t charge more explicitly for this service. The dollar doesn’t just facilitate global trade — it reduces transaction costs, enhances global financial stability, and anchors the entire offshore financial system. And no one has built a better alternative.

4. The fact that U.S. Treasuries and dollars don’t price in this “trust premium” for foreign holders incentivizes both free-riding and excessive hoarding — not for trade and commercial purposes, but for currency suppression, rent extraction, or capital storage. The result: a global imbalance that disadvantages U.S. taxpayers.

5. In effect, America is renting out its sovereign balance sheet — just like banks rent theirs in financial markets — except it’s doing so for free.

6. This mispricing means U.S. goodwill is routinely abused by countries seeking to maintain trade surpluses or engineer competitive devaluations — distorting fair trade and reducing productive dollar use.

7. This is bad for America and the world. It leads to the overproduction of dollar assets for non-productive rentier purposes. And since U.S. taxpayers still fund this overproduction, it amounts to a misallocation of public resources. Worse, it risks collapsing the entire “dollar-as-a-service” model. It’s unsustainable.

8. The U.S. can counter this by recognizing its role as a provider of global trust infrastructure — and begin charging appropriately for it.

9. One way: tax interest/coupon payments to foreign holders of USTs. This would act as a kind of demurrage fee (inverse Regulation Q), discouraging passive dollar hoarding and rent-seeking behavior.

10. This would fundamentally shift the incentive structure around holding dollar-denominated assets in a risk-free way abroad. In the long run, it would make it uneconomical to passively accumulate or hoard USTs for purposes other than generating additional returns through more productive channels such as trade, investment, or commercial activity. In essence, the practice of holding dollar assets purely as a store of value — or using them as idle collateral to underpin trust without active circulation — would become financially disadvantageous.

To conclude: It’s entirely reasonable that the U.S. should charge for access to its "trust-generating" dollar technology. This would transform global dollar float from “rentier capital” to working capital, in service of actual commerce and mutual prosperity.

Would the U.S. still need to run a fiscal deficit under this model? Probably — but the quality of that deficit would change. Instead of subsidizing unproductive global hoarding, the U.S. would be financing a system that pays rent, disciplines freeloading, and channels trust toward growth. It’s not about ending deficits. It’s about earning returns on them and creating a positive sum financial system that generates growth.

https://t.co/tRtwXOPV2K