“Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases."...
While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.
“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter,

theguardian.com/technology/202…

#AISalami

Esto de vivir en pueblos, dejando atras las grandes ciudades tiene sus pro y contras.

Aunque raro al principio, principalmente por el nuevo entorno, la zona rural tiene retos fisicos sacandote de la zona de comfort. Lo que antes era sencillo de conseguir, ahora no. Los servicios básicos como electricidad y agua. Es muy #diy, en el caso del agua y alcantarillado, tú mismo tienes que excavar la zanja, colocar tuberias y empalmarla a la red de agua "potable" (no son los mismos procedimientos de potabilización que en la ciudad, toca agregar filtros extras), lo mismo con el alcantarillado (que si no esta cerca, toca hacer un pozo ciego). La luz, otro reto, uno mismo debe colocar postes de 7 a 8 metros de altura, excavar y levantarlos, ademas de cumplir ciertos requerimientos tecnicos (distancia, sin otros arboles que se crucen en su camino. Si encuentras uno, a talar, etc).

Claro, todo esto no te garantiza los servicios 24 hrs, ya que hasta una tormenta puede hacer caer la red de suministros. Así que toca plantearse autosuficiencia energetica, alimentaria y sanitaria.

Ciertamente el ser humano puede acostumbrarse al medio, pero hay factores sociales que limitan tu espacio interpersonal. Pero aún asi, el poder aprender costumbres nuevas o dialectos, lo hace interesante.

El pueblo donde paso mis dias, es un punto neuralgico entre costa y sierra, así que desde ya hay mucha interaccion con pueblos originarios, lenguas nativas (quechua hablantes para ser exacto) intercambio de productos andinos y del mar, etc. Rodeados de muchos cultivos, zona agricola y crianza de animales menores y medianos desde su fundacion.

Todas estas experiencias son gratificantes, dando otro sentido y nuevas metas. Cultivar plantas se ha vuelto hasta terapeutico, para mi, no hablo de llevar un bonsai, el jardin de cada, si no un campo con mas de mil plantas. Ya que, muy a pesar del esfuerzo físico, le da otro sentido a tus dias, el tipo de stress (puesto que al final es un negocio), se percibe distinto. Inclusive, el café pasado en dias con lluvia o en algún sunset, dan otro tipo de placer rodeado de naturaleza y no, en un starbucks (La detesto. Aunque en Perú, sin su llegada, no se hubiera aperturado una cultura del café, con cultivos y cafeterias especializadas).

Hasta otra.

#rural #cafe #Peru

The US—they call it NATO, though it was primarily the US—bombed North Korea almost to oblivion. When there was nothing left to bomb, they targeted dams—a major war crime for which Nazi criminals were hanged. Official histories, like the Air Force Quarterly, exult over these bombings. Huge torrents of water flooded valleys, destroyed crops, and killed people dependent on rice for survival. It’s monstrous, the praise for massive war crimes.

jurist.org/features/2026/01/06…

#BombingWaterSupplies #USBombing #WaterSupplyWarCrimes #NorthKorea

... since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.
chomsky.info/20130604/
#BombingWaterSupplies #WaterWarCrimes #NorthKorea
#NoamChomsky

Community of Practice..

Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. ...
Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.

nytimes.com/2026/03/07/magazin…

#RebeccaSolnit #ThichNhatHanh
#CommunityOfPractice

#Hola

De regreso a Friendica. Admito que soy mas de microblogging, pero se me antojo volver.

Espero yo, que sea suficiente para mantenerme entretenido y darle el movimiento que se merece. A parte de la interfaz web, comence a usar #fedilab, para interactuar. En fin larga vida a las redes libres.

#Friendica #fediverse #fediverso

> It is worth noting that Jurgen Habermas and many of his disciples consider communicative structures as important as decision-making structures. When they assess the processes as well as results of social decision making, they find the fairness and efficiency of communication systems as important as the rules of decision making. The relevant questions are: Who has access to what information? What means for conveying information and opinions exist? How is the communicative interchange organized? These are some of the interesting questions the "modern" Frankfurt school has focused on. Remarkably, just by setting minimal goals for "humane communication," members of this school have elaborated guiding values for much of society.

znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…

znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…

#HumanCommunication #FrankfurtSchool #ModernFrankfurtSchol #JurgenHabermas

"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats

In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~

"The Future of Poetry"

p. 151~

Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.

Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.

#IAR #IARichards #WBYeats #PBShelley #PercyShelley #FutureOfPoetry #PoetLegislators #PoemLegislations #PoetryAsLegislation

"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats

In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~

"The Future of Poetry"

p. 151~

Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.

Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.

#IAR #IARichards #WBYeats #PBShelley #PercyShelley #FutureOfPoetry #PoetLegislators #PoemLegislations #PoetryAsLegislation

Anand Gridharadas on the Epstein Class:

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

Greg Grandin on Noam Chomsky:

... In 1970, he lectured at Hanoi’s Polytechnic University, a building half-destroyed by US bombs, and then went on to tour refugee camps in Laos. He also lectured in 1985 in Managua, Nicaragua, during Ronald Reagan’s contra war, and then in the West Bank in 1997. In late 1999, Chomsky flew to Timor-Leste, as the Indonesian forces were slaughtering thousands following a vote in favor of independence. In 2002, he arrived unannounced in Istanbul to stand side-by-side in court with his Turkish publisher, Fatih Tas, who was being prosecuted for publishing Chomsky’s essays, including on Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population. The state prosecutor dropped the charges rather than agree to Chomsky’s insistence that he be listed as a codefendant.

Noam was married to his first wife, Carol Chomsky—herself an influential scholar in the field of linguistic pedagogy—for 59 years. After Carol died in 2008, the inhabitants of two Colombian Andean villages, Santa Rita and La Vega, named a forest after her, El Bosque Carol Chomsky, in appreciation of her husband’s advocacy on their behalf in the fight to protect water rights. In August 2012, it took Noam two days traveling by jeep and on horseback to reach the high woods to attend the dedication ceremony. He sat in silence as villagers described violence, land theft, and water poisoning they suffered at the hands of ranchers, death squads, and gold miners. Chomsky tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. Later, he sent a note to the communities saying that he hoped that “Carol’s spirit” would help them fight the “predatory forces” they face.

And, throughout all of this time, Chomsky spoke to everyone. In 2004, he let the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, posing in character as Ali G, into his office...

The Epstein Class's uncaring attitudes and the list of Chomsky's caring actions brings to mind a 2012 article by Fred Branfman:^3

I was also struck by his self-deprecation. He had a near-aversion to talking about himself — contrary to most of the “Big Foot” journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand. He downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever in checking out Vientiane’s notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine intellectual, a guy who lived in his head. And I could relate. I also lived in my head, and had a mission.[/b]

[b]...One of the reasons I was so horrified by the bombing is that I had come to know the Lao as people by living in my village for the previous three years – particularly a 70-year-old man named Paw Thou Douang whom I had come to love as a kind of surrogate father. He was kind, wise and gentle, and I respected him as much as anyone I had ever met. I was particularly struck by how warmly Noam related to Paw Thou during our dinner with him and his family. He clearly felt an immediate affinity with them that I hadn’t seen in the many other visitors I had taken to the village. He also displayed a focused curiosity about the details of what was happening in Laos, to which I was more than pleased to respond.

But what most struck me by far was what occurred when we traveled out to a camp that housed refugees from the Plain of Jars. I had taken dozens of journalists and other folks out to the camps at that point, and found that almost all were emotionally distanced from the refugees’ suffering. Whether CBS’s Bernard Kalb, NBC’s Welles Hangen, or the New York Times’ Sidney Schanberg, the journalists listened politely, asked questions, took notes and then went back to their hotels to file their stories. They showed little emotion or interest in what the villagers had been through other than what they needed to write their stories. Our talks in the car back to their hotels usually concerned either dinner that night or the next day’s events.

I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul. And the visual image of him weeping in that camp has stayed with me ever since. When I think of Noam this is what I see.

One of the reasons his reaction so struck me was that he did not know those Laotians. It was relatively easy for me, having lived among them and loved people like Paw Thou so much, to commit to trying to stop the bombing. But I have stood in awe not only of Noam, but of the many thousands of Americans who spent so many years of their lives trying to stop the killing of Indochinese they did not know in a war they never saw.

As we drove back from the camp that day, he remained quiet, still shaken by what he had learned. He had written extensively of U.S. war-making in Indochina before this. But this was the first time he had met its victims face-to-face. And in the silence, an unspoken bond that we have never discussed was forged between us.

As I look back on my life I feel I was a better person during this period than I have been before or since. And I realized that at that time we were both coming from the same place: Compared to the unconscionable Calvary of these innocent, gentle, kind people — and so many others — everything else seemed trivial. Once you knew that innocent people were dying, how could you justify to yourself doing anything other than trying to save their lives?

And I realized in the silence of that car ride that beneath Noam’s public persona as the intellectual’s intellectual, who relied on facts and reason to make his case, there lay a deeply feeling human being. For Noam these Lao peasants were human beings with names, faces, dreams and as much of a right to their lives as those who so carelessly laid waste to them. But for many of these visiting journalists, not to mention Americans back home, these Lao villagers were faceless “unpeople” whose lives had no meaning whatsoever.^3

^1 archive.is/TbYs7
^2 thenation.com/article/society/…
^3 salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chom…

#TheDayNoamChomskyCried #WhenNoamChomskyWept #GrandinOnChomsky #BranfmanOnChomsky #FredBranfman #ChomskyInLaos #EpsteinClassVsChomsky
#NoamChomsky #BranfmanOnChomsky #FredBranfmanNoamChomsky

Kafka, an employee of a workmen’s insurance company and a loyal friend of many eastern European Jews for whom he had had to obtain permits to stay in the country, had a very intimate knowledge of the political conditions of his country. He knew that a man caught in the bureaucratic machinery is already condemned; and that no man can expect justice from judicial procedures where interpretation of the law is coupled with the administering of lawlessness, and where the chronic inaction of the interpreters is compensated by a bureaucratic machine whose senseless automatism has the privilege of ultimate decision. But to the public of the twenties, bureaucracy did not seem an evil great enough to explain the horror and terror expressed in the novel. People were more frightened by the tale than by the real thing. They looked therefore for other, seemingly deeper, interpretations, and they found them, following the fashion of the day...

#ArendtOnKafka in #EssaysInUnderstanding #HannahArendt on #FranzKafka
#ArendtOnBureaucracy #KafkaOnBureaucracy

第六章

原文
谷神不死。是謂玄牝。玄牝之門、是謂天地根。緜緜若存、用之不勤。

書き下し文
谷神(こくしん)は死せず。これを玄牝(げんぴん)と謂(い)う。玄牝の門、これを天地の根(こん)と謂う。緜緜(めんめん)として存(そん)する若(ごと)く、これを用いて勤(つ)きず。

英訳文
Valley goddess who produces all things never dies. I call her "mysterious motherhood". Heaven and earth appeared from her gate. Her existence is vague and obscure. But she is producing all things unceasingly.

現代語訳
万物を生み出す谷間の神は、とめどなく生み出して死ぬ事は無い。これを私は「玄牝(げんぴん) - 神秘なる母性」と呼ぶ。この玄牝は天地万物を生み出す門である。その存在はぼんやりとはっきりとしないようでありながら、その働きは尽きる事は無い。

mage8.com/magetan/roushi01.htm…

#老子6 #LaoTzu6 #LaoTse6 #谷神
#ValleySpirit #谷中の思想 #ValleyThought #ValleyThoughts
#ValleyPhilosophy

Tomomi Akasaka of Kyodo News is among several journalists who have complained about being harassed after covering hate speech against Kurds in Saitama Prefecture. Japan’s small Kurdish community, clustered in the cities of Kawaguchi and Warabi, have been targeted by rightwing groups seeking their expulsion. Reporters who cover the story can often expect a tsunami of abuse.

Hyogo Prefecture has a particular reason to be concerned about violence against journalists. In May 1987, a masked rightist murdered reporter Tomohiro Kojiri at the Asahi Shimbun Hanshin Bureau in Nishinomiya. His colleague, Hyoe Inukai, was badly hurt. The perpetrator has never been caught. “There’s a real possibility of escalation if we cannot put a break on what’s happening, especially when the line between the online world and the real world is so blurred,” Tanaka says.
Tanaka wants local politicians to do more to dampen campaigns against journalists in the interests of democracy. He says his newspaper has received a threat from a caller using the name, “Sekihotai,” the organization that claimed responsibility for killing Kojiri.

fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun-ar…

#DavidMcNeil #JapanesePressBashung

More than a statement, the Declaration is the fruit of an unprecedented collective process: shaped through years of local and regional assemblies, and translated into 18 languages during the Forum to ensure that every voice could be heard and every word shared in equality.
...

The Kandy Declaration calls on movements everywhere to act in unity, defend the commons, and transform global governance so that it serves people, not profit.
Born from collective wisdom and multilingual solidarity, it is a living roadmap for the years ahead – lighting the way toward peace, dignity, and life for all.

viacampesina.org/en/2025/11/th…

#KandyDeclaration #ViaCampesina

/HT
@🦣 ViaCampesinaBE

"The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an “apocalypse” in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical. He urged them to chill the hell out. It was an arrogant and manipulative oracle, uttered with all the privilege of the world’s 19th richest man. A symbol of monopoly capitalism, his individual net worth rivals the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic. And when he responded to #HurricaneMelissa, he did so (not surprisingly, I suppose) in the narrow sectional interests of the world’s wealthiest class in Silicon Valley.
tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of…
#JuanCole on #BillGates
#GatesOnHurricaneMelissa #TomDispatch

The scandals coming into view with Harvard Professors like Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence H. Summers in the Epstien Files have me going back to Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967!!) by Noam Chomsky... It's no surprise the money, power, and status has people lying with few consequences in support of USA corrupt policy for Israel and Wall Street Economics now.. For back then, I wonder if The Kennedy "Intellectuals" may just be lucky there wasn't unencrypted e-mail back then, so we won't know what sort of perverse rapey pricks they were in private life, if their private lives match up with their policy participation like they do for Dershowitz and Summers...

When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know.

... there is indeed something of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past.

Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities

chomsky.info/19670223/

#NoamChomsky #ResponsibilityOfIntellectuals with #DwightMacdonald and #ArthurSchlesinger #KennedyIntellectuals #EpsteinFilesMusings #AlanDershowitz #LarrySummers #LawrenceHSummers

Correction on Larry Summers. I mentioned that when I cited his paper on a tax on securities trading, he reacted angrily when a Nation factchecker called him—he didn't want his work used "politically." The way I remembered it, we ran it anyway, but in fact The Nation chickened out. Quoting a footnote from my book Wall Street:

"When he was still an academic, Summers did not like it that his paper tentatively promoting a transactions tax on securities to discourage pointless trading was going to be quoted in an editorial in The Nation; the editorial used his numbers, but was stripped of his timorous endorsement (Nation 1989)"

Citation:
Nation (1989). “Tax the Big Casino,” Nation 249 (August 21), p. 189.

facebook.com/share/p/1CzjAbfDi…

#DougHenwood on #LarrySummers
#TransactionTax #TobinTax
#LarrySummersAsDisciplinedMind

When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.

Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”

Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friends to rethink their opposition to gun control.

#CsncelCulture #CancelCultureCK #CharlieKirkShooting #LaurenVaughn
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB