Vote for the best song from Lucerne in 2023. Some hidden gems there. https://3fach.ch/voting/kick-ass-award-2023

TIL about the great African American migration. Between 1910 and 1970, 6 million black Americans moved out of the rural south to urban northeast, Midwest, and west due to segregation and discrimination in the south. [source, comments]

Der US-Waffenlobby laufen Mitglieder und Geld davon – die NRA ist in «desolater Lage» https://www.watson.ch/!221854739

TIL when Bob Dylan first heard the Animals' version of “House of the rising sun” on his car radio, he stopped to listen, jumped out of his car and banged on the bonnet. It later became one of the reasons why he went electric [source, comments]

Song of the day 🤔❓: https://open.spotify.com/track/6UyI6iKB6UoVehiKNeIyRz?si=hS3NRin1R9yP9GF7aDGDng

"Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

— Ursula K Le Guin

TIL that NYC’s drinking water contains tiny shrimp, making it technically not kosher [source, comments]

In 2015 it looked like this

In 2024, please switch to Firefox
Article, Comments

TIL the black hole, TON 618, is so big (66 billion solar masses), a new term was invented to describe it: ultramassive black hole [source, comments]

Good Idea: organize your reading materials

https://playtext.app/doc/clj1b548r0000md0f4s62n8t7

Practical tips on organizing and managing the vast amount of reading material available online. It focuses on three main areas: organizing regular reading sources, managing one-off articles, and taking detailed notes.

unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage.

Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy.

Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

This pattern remains entrenched despite the fact that, with the rise of neoliberal globalization in the 1980s, manufacturing has shifted overwhelmingly to the global South, to the point where Southern countries contribute the vast majority of the world’s industrial labour and industrial production (Smith, 2016).

Northern appropriation from the South comprises resources and labour embodied not only in primary commodities but also in manufactured goods, including high-technology products such as smartphones, computer chips, cars, designer fashion, etc., along with intermediate parts.

Most of this appropriation occurs through global commodity chains, wherein Northern firms deploy monopsony and monopoly power to depress Southern suppliers’ prices at every node, from extraction to manufacture, while setting final prices as high as possible (Suwandi, 2019, Clelland, 2014).