#za thinks

Like: Google spent the first 20 years of this century selling advertisers on the idea that, if they gathered enough data on their users, they could target ads SO WELL that it'd practically guarantee a sell, and they invested massively in these HUUUUGE data-centers to support that info-gathering, and that obviously didn't work cuz Internet ads have consistently had some of the WORST conversion rates of all forms of advertising and that has never changed over the entire life of the internet(prob cuz a bunch of ppl switched from TV to the internet specifically to get AWAY from ads), and Google realized this was hopeless(which is why they entirely broke their ad-targeting by selling advertisers priority-placements ON TOP OF charging them for having ads in their search results at all) ~a decade ago, and that eventually, no matter how stupid corpo leadership is(and it IS very stupid), companies would have to realize this too, and they'd need another reason for companies to keep contracting with them, and investors to keep investing in them.

The Bible is a COLLATION of texts -most of which were written apart from the others, some of which were written without ANY KNOWLEDGE AT ALL of the others, some of which were written IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO others, and all of which sought to accomplish different things in different ways at different times among different peoples- put together differently by different communities, with different goals in mind, over the course of different spans of time(for instance: the final Catholic canonical council was the Council of Trent in 1546. There was not an officially agreed upon "Bible" in the catholic church until the mid 1600s. Protestants STILL dont universally agree on a single canon so, technically, it's incorrect to even TALK about "A" Protestant Bible. "Bible Believer"? Which One?? What are you talking about???).

By Definition, and due to Causality(which according to Christians is GOD'S Fault, so dont come complaining to me about it |:T), A Collation cannot come together or exist before the texts contained within it are written. None of these texts were written with the goal of them being collated together. Therefore, "The Bible" is itself a post-biblical innovation; a concept created AFTER the scriptures were written, imposed upon them by later generations who did NOT write the scriptures and thus had no direct access to their "intended" meaning; and so was never an intended "meaning" of the scriptures.

"Here, then, is the basic difference between all pre-capitalist societies and capitalism... Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct-producers... Because direct-producers in a fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production... is the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus labor without direct coercion"

Just as capitalism Creates Scarcity to Create Customers, capitalism creates poverty to create jobs, and the workers required to work them to avoid poverty, and the suffering and death it brings. Jobs aren't a solution to poverty: jobs are the PRODUCT AND PURPOSE of poverty. Capitalism is not simply the hoarding of property, but the transformation of "the hoarding of property" INTO a social form which perpetuates itself through the "enforcement" of suffering and death if you refuse or fail, and the "reward" of safety-through-constant accumulation if you "succeed"(which often these days simply means "being born to certain parents"). Capitalism creates itself through Theft and Deprivation. You must be denied necessities so that you will work to earn what you must give back to survive, to those who own property as a matter of course. Not that this is a secret or anything I mean: conservatives aren't even shy about it, it's their primary argument against social support: "if we give people any sort of help at all to stop them from dying, then they won't feel like getting a job to avoid dying!".

Gutsick Gibbon Lecture(it's gr8: Go Watch It) on youtube lately, it discusses genetic similarity/variability among Homonoidea, and an idea occurred to me entirely unrelated to that:

For the sake of clarity Erika does a little primer on DNA to start, and she explains how most of any species's genetic code are these long stretches of repetitive sequences that dont code for protein synthesis and so dont seem to do anything at all(some folks even call them "junk dna"). Outside of this video, the explanation for this I've most often seen is that these DNA sequences dont really harm an individual's ability to survive long enough to reproduce, so they've just sort of gotten carried along for the ride over the generations.

...But what if they ARE adaptive in a way entirely divorced from traits? Consider Cancer. Cancer is mostly the result of genetic mutation and genetic-transcription errors, and these mutations&errors occur more or less randomly, which is to say, they are statistically regular throughout individuals and the entire species.

In such a situation, having a huge percentage of your DNA taken up by sequences which dont actl DO anything proteinwise might actually be adaptive because, statistically, mutations&errors would be more likely to occur in these inactive regions than in active ones, purely because they take up so much of your DNA. So like: individuals with more "efficient" personal genomes might have a higher risk of suffering from mutations and errors which break something important, including a higher cancer risk, whereas individuals with highly "inefficient" genomes would be less likely to suffer meaningful mutations and errors during their lifetimes.

The HGTV aesthetic, Whites, Greys, and Blacks, those aren't just neutral colors: They're PRIMING Colors. They're colors you paint Other, BETTER Colors that you like MORE on top of.

What do I mean by that? In Part I Section 2, Marxist Debates, Meiksins Wood discusses Marx's definition of 'capital' as a social-relation(ie: that it isn't just wealth, but wealth deployed to create more wealth through the labor of others), and specifically how it drove competition in the example of "scientific agriculture" in the English countryside during and after the period of Enclosure, to wit:

landlords raise their rents to driveout the old holders(realistically this was a MUCH more coercive and violent process than merely rent-increases, and it was a big change for other reasons I'll get to at the end)

then sell the land to agricultural-capitalists who can pay those rents.

Then continue to raise the rents on those capitalists, in response to their yearly production; the better the tenants do, the more the rent goes up.

This forces the agricapitalists to constantly reinvest(and "reduce costs" by cutting corners and abusing their laborers) to continue covering their rents

and forces them into competition with EACH-OTHER(in any method they can think of) as one farmer doing better will raise rates for EVERYONE, and eventually lead to the landlord selling THEIR land out from under them to those better performing

So what does this have to do with contracts?

In the feudal period, your contract was unassailable. Sure: the local lord could come and take your stuff by force if they wanted and waving the contract around wasn't going to stop them, but if you survived, and kept the contract intact, and made it to a royal or circuit court, you could prove your ownership and that you hadn't violated the terms, and you'd likely receive compensation if not complete restitution, AND the lord would be punished for harming his tenants(since the only thing nobles loved more that stepping on their tenants was stepping on each other).

In practice, trying to expropriate your tenants was so troublesome that lords tended to just honor their agreements. A Freeholder and their descendants would stay forever freeholders(excepting a violation in terms, for instance refusing feudal service), a leaseholder would live secure in their land until their lease's term expired, if you held your land for life your lord could not take it from your family until you died(and often "for-life" contracts would stipulate terms of renewal), if you paid rent for your land that rent COULD NOT BE Renegotiated for the term of the title; even a Serf or a Ward was guaranteed 1)a place to live 2)land to generate food from and 3)food to survive on when either that land, or their bodies, could not produce said food, under their, essentially, slavery-contracts.

In the feudal period contracts could only be legally renegotiated when their terms expired, or on holder-violations, and a lord who violated those contracts ran big risks: from their tenants who could rightfully resist such violations, from their peers always looking to expand their holdings, from their overlords(ditto, and always strapped for cash), and from The Church since IT, along with overlords, guaranteed contracts.