Happy St. Patrick's day folks

Lol, lmao

<- Me watching tickets roll in at work

Babe wake up, new "at what cost" just dropped!

Yang is both a victim and perpetrator of this vicious cycle. With job prospects looking slim, she opened a cocktail stall earlier this year but had to close it just three months later. Discounts from food delivery platforms — drinks for a few cents — wiped her out. She considered going back to a factory job she had five years ago that used to pay about $980 a month, only to find it now pays just $630. With money tight, she spends $1.40 or less on meals, bought from the same delivery platforms that forced her out of competition. “I’ve become the kind of consumer who destroys businesses like mine,” she said.

Okay, seems reasonable I suppose. Wages are dropping along with dropping prices, I wonder if Bloomberg will pursue this thought further

The drop in prices is already weighing on company results. Recent filings show losses widening and margins thinning, with many firms citing weak demand and price wars. A Bloomberg News analysis of around 6,000 publicly traded Chinese companies points to a broad-based strain.

Oh yeah nevermind

The squeeze doesn’t stop at the balance sheet. It reaches paychecks — and loops back into demand. Erica Chen is a prime example. The 40-year old used to earn more than about $333,000 a year after taxes at a major internet firm in Beijing while her husband drew a comfortable salary from an international tech company. A second home brought in rental income while their 7-year-old son attended international school. Their three nannies kept the household humming — one to cook, one to clean, one to watch the child — a domestic payroll exceeding $49,000 a year.

Then came the layoffs. Chen’s entire team was cut as her company tried to stop the bleeding from price wars and sagging consumer demand. Her husband also lost his job. The family’s budget suddenly looked unsustainable. The nannies were dismissed, the private school dropped and she took on the cooking and cleaning herself.

You're laughing. These poor people had to fire their three nannies and pull their kids out of a 14k a year private school, and you're laughing.

Meanwhile, households have boosted their savings to the equivalent of around 110% of China’s gross domestic product last year, the highest ever, indicating consumers are expecting lower prices in the future and heightened economic uncertainty.

People having savings is bad, don't they know they should be in debt?

Consider Guo Fang, a 38-year-old former tech worker in Shanghai. Not long ago, she and her husband made more than $281,000 a year, spent freely on designer shoes and five-star hotels, and rarely thought about money.

But after she left work to have a child in 2020, the safety net she thought she had unraveled. She wants to get back to work, but colleagues who once promised her a job to return to have since been laid off. Her husband, an engineer in the auto industry, now fears pay cuts as price wars ravage his company.

“We’ve cut some family trips this year as my husband feels more worried about his job,” she said. “When I book hotels now, I think about whether we should choose the cheaper one. That’s the first time in years that I started to think it’s better to cut some spending.”

We had to stay at the Best Western instead of the Ritz this year

Prolonged deflation would also be virtually unprecedented for a major economy since World War II, with the lone exception of Japan, which just this year escaped its own painful battle of over a decade of weak prices and deflation. It’ll also become harder for China to climb into high-income status sustainably, or to surpass the US in economic size. Years of rising incomes and property gains had fueled dreams of upward mobility, but now deflation is quietly hollowing out the confidence of China’s once-aspiring middle class.

As always, it comes back to the nebulous middle class. Who cares how many people are lifted out of poverty? The only freedom I care about is the freedom to open a small business

I am trying to get a local org I am in set up with a domain and website just to have a place to point people for everything. We would like to keep it as cheap as possible. I figure we need the following:

-Domain name (going to use namecheap probably)

-VPS host (I haven't done this before, it looks like racknerd may be way to go?). I assume I will probably only need 1GB of memory as it will just be a static webserver but that may be too little, not 100% sure.

-Email host. This is one of two real reasons I want to own the domain, we have multiple uses for email but currently everything is under one gmail address and a lot gets lost in the clutter. A few people in our org would like to stick with gmail but I am open to other suggestions. Definitely do not want to deal with self hosting on this.

-Website builder. I plan to use an Ubuntu server with the LEMP stack on the VPS, should I just use Wordpress? I am definitely not experienced in website building so it's not realistic to do my own HTTP. My only concern is using Wordpress will result in a poorly optimized site that may strain my limited resources, but there are also a few people in our org that have experience with it so that would help.

While I have a decent amount of tech experience generally, these are mostly uncharted waters for me. I know this comes across as kind of half baked, but really I am just looking for general advice!

Glastonbury/Bob Vylan has me thinking about another time British media censored artists for speaking up against the crimes of empire.

The song is named after the Birmingham Six, a group of six Northern Irish men who were falsely convicted for the 1974 Birmingham Pub bombings after being tortured into giving false confessions. The song also references the Guildford Four, another group that falsely confessed to the Guildford pub bombings in 1974. This post is only going to touch on the Birmingham Six.

While the confessions of the Birmingham Six were ludicrously thin, including no details and contradicting each other in almost every respect, including the pubs that the bombs were left in, they were allowed as evidence in the case. The men were not evaluated for injuries after signing their confessions and were promptly thrown in prison where they were badly beaten by prison guards, ruining any chance of establishing evidence of their torture. All of the prison guards were later acquitted of all charges.

Despite all of these inconsistencies, the Six were convicted on the back of their confessions and questionable forensic evidence. Amidst mounting public pressure, the convictions were ruled to be "safe and satisfactory" in a January 1988 appeal and the men remained in prison.

All of this set the stage for the Pogues, an Irish-English band well known for their politically outspoken nature. Their album If I Should Fall from Grace With God was released in September 1988, only eight months after the failed appeals. While Terry Woods' contribution to the song, Streets of Sorrow, is a beautiful reflection on living in Ireland during the troubles, the real star of the show here is Shane MacGowan's Birminghan Six. This song expressed the anger many people felt towards everyone involved in the case in no uncertain terms:

There were six men in Birmingham, in Guildford, there's four
That were picked up and tortured and framed by the law
And the filth got promotion, but they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time

During a live performance on Channel 4, the band performed this song and were cut off by the program cutting to commercial mid-song. The song was subsequently banned for violating a law restricting the broadcasting of Irish Republican groups and was accused of supporting "convicted terrorists".

In a (less than) happy ending, the Birmingham Six were released in 1991 on appeal. While they were rewarded anywhere from £800,000 to £1.2 million, they were also forced to pay between £80,000 and £100,000 for the "room and board" fees while they were locked in prison. While a commission in 1997 charged the police superintendent and two other officers with perjury, nobody was convicted and nobody involved in the false conviction were ever charged. If I may quote the Pogues one last time:

A curse on the judges, the coppers, and screws
Who tortured the innocent, wrongly accused
For the price of promotion and justice to sell
May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell

Feel like shit just want them back

The Grammy campaign is in full swing and Doechii is fucking eating. Her performance on Colbert last night was also incredible: https://youtu.be/Ggg45-e4oj0

More reviews:

I like the album, what does that say about me

Go to good vibes song for me.

I even got them both to look at me

The answer is