#mechanic winnipeg

[wintersautoservice3]

To maximize the life and performance of your vehicle, here is a list of items you should check depending on the time and season. Some of these parts of your vehicle should be checked regularly, and others only in the long run. For specific questions about your car’s maintenance or for auto service in Winnipeg, MB, contact Winter's Auto Service today.

#auto shop winnipeg #auto mechanic winnipeg #car suspension #mechanic winnipeg #auto shop

[winterscollisionrepair1]

Winter's Collision Repair - Auto Repair Center in Winnipeg

When your vehicle is involved in an accident, you need to know that your repair work is being done by trustworthy professionals who care. Winter’s Collision Repair has achieved I-CAR Gold Class status. I-CAR is the recognized standard for industry training in North America. Choose Winter's today and drive with confidence. Call Winter’s Collision Repair now at 204) 786-6695.

#Winter's Collision Repair #Auto Shop Winnipeg #Mechanic Winnipeg

[cars24x7]

Keep Your Vehicle Running Smoothly: Car Mechanic Repair Services Winnipeg

At Cars 24x7, our priority is ensuring your vehicle runs smoothly and safely. As your trusted car mechanic in Winnipeg, we offer reliable and efficient auto repair services tailored to meet your needs. With our experienced mechanics and state-of-the-art equipment, we provide comprehensive solutions for all your car maintenance and repair needs. Routine maintenance is key to keeping your vehicle in top condition. Car 24x7 services include oil changes, tire rotations, and brake inspections to ensure your car performs at its best. We also offer engine and transmission diagnostics to identify any issues early on and prevent costly repairs down the line.

Vision: The Go-To Destination for Trusted Expertise

Our vision is ambitious yet attainable. We aspire to become the go-to destination for drivers seeking trusted expertise and unparalleled car maintenance and repair quality. At Cars 24x7, we aim to set the standard for automotive services, delivering results that consistently exceed expectations. By upholding our values of integrity, reliability, and superior craftsmanship, we strive to earn the trust and loyalty of every customer we serve.

Comprehensive Automotive Services at Cars 24x7

At Cars 24x7, we offer a wide range of automotive services to meet all your vehicle's needs. From repairs to maintenance and upgrades, our skilled technicians are here to assist you every step of the way.

Quality Parts Supply

We provide a diverse selection of new and used quality parts for various vehicle makes and models. Our extensive inventory ensures you find the perfect fit for your vehicle and budget, ensuring longevity and performance.

Engine and Transmission Services

Specializing in engine and transmission repair and replacement, our experienced technicians diagnose and resolve any issues to restore your vehicle's performance and reliability.

Head Gasket Replacement

Addressing overheating issues caused by faulty head gaskets, our team performs head gasket replacements to prevent further engine damage and ensure optimal functioning.

HVAC Repair and Maintenance

Car Mechanic Winnipeg ensure your interior climate remains comfortable with our HVAC repair and services, maintaining your air conditioning and heating systems for an enjoyable driving experience. Wheel and Tire Care

Our comprehensive wheel and tire services include replacements, alignments, and balancing to ensure your vehicle's safety and performance on the road.

Trust Car 24/7 for exceptional automotive services. With skilled technicians, quality parts, and a commitment to customer satisfaction, we keep your vehicle running smoothly and safely. 

Exceptional Car Mechanic: Cars 24x7 in Winnipeg

Cars 24x7 is your premier destination for top-quality car mechanic services in Winnipeg, Canada. Dedicated to delivering unparalleled automotive solutions around the clock, we prioritize reliability and customer satisfaction above all else. Our specialization lies in providing expert diagnostics, maintenance, and repairs for all vehicle makes and models.

With a team of highly skilled technicians, we have the knowledge and experience to tackle any automotive issue with precision and efficiency. Whether it's a routine inspection, complex repair, or emergency service, we are equipped to handle it all. Our commitment to excellence is apparent in every facet of our work helps us to provide the best possible service. From thorough diagnostics to meticulous repairs, we go above and beyond to ensure that your vehicle receives the care and attention it deserves. We understand the importance of keeping your car running smoothly, which is why we strive to provide prompt and reliable service at all times. 

Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction  

At Cars 24x7, customer satisfaction is paramount. We prioritize your needs by taking the time to listen attentively, address concerns promptly, and provide transparent communication throughout every step of the service process. Our Car Mechanic Winnipeg aim to cultivate enduring relationships with our clients, built on principles of trust, integrity, and superior craftsmanship.

Whether you require routine maintenance or extensive repairs, you can rely on Cars 24x7 to deliver exceptional results. Our team is committed to ensuring that every job is completed to the highest standards of quality and precision. We understand the importance of your vehicle's performance and longevity and we are committed to upholding those standards.

 We strive to create a welcoming and informative environment where you can feel confident in our expertise and trust in our recommendations. Your satisfaction is our ultimate goal, and we will strive to surpass your expectations in every way possible. 

Our Philosophy: Striving for Excellence

At the heart of Cars 24x7 lies a philosophy rooted in excellence. We believe in pushing the boundaries of what's possible, both technically and in terms of customer service. Our team is committed to surpassing expectations in every interaction, from the moment you walk through our doors to the completion of your service. By delivering exceptional results and building lasting relationships with our clients, we aim to set ourselves apart as leaders in the automotive industry. With our unwavering commitment to safety, satisfaction, and superior service, Cars 24x7 is poised to redefine the automotive experience for drivers in Winnipeg and beyond. Experience the difference for yourself, contact us today to schedule an appointment or learn more about our comprehensive range of services.

#Car Mechanic Winnipeg #Car maintenance Repair Winnipeg #Vehicle Repair Services Winnipeg #Automotive Repair Shop Winnipeg #Rust Repair Services Winnipeg #HAVC Repair Services Winnipeg #Autobody Services Winnipeg

[pritchardautobody]

Transmission Adjustments & In-Car Repairs

Seven Oaks Transmissions is a full-service automotive transmission repair business that has been serving Winnipeg since 1980. Our Certified technicians are professionals and use the best automotive diagnostic equipment to troubleshoot and fix customers' car problems quickly and efficiently. This ensures our customers are repaired correctly the first time, saving them unnecessary auto repair costs down the road. Seven Oaks Transmissions values our reputation as being the best transmission and auto repair shop in Winnipeg, we offer only the highest quality automotive service & repair for each and every customers' vehicle. Please feel free to call us to book an appointment and get your vehicle back on the road.

Transmission Adjustments & In-Car Repairs

The technicians at Seven Oaks Transmissions understand that problems with your vehicle's transmission can often be resolved with adjustments or a minor repair. In fact, a simple adjustment can be done without even removing the transmission from the vehicle. When a late model transmission is failing to shift correctly, it can often be due to a faulty sensor receiving incorrect signals from the computer. Additionally shifting problems can arise when a transmission is not responding to the computer correctly due to a bad connection or a defective solenoid pack. These types of repairs can be fixed without having to remove the transmission from the vehicle saving you a considerable amount of money when compared to a complete overhaul.

In situations where a non-computer-controlled transmission is either shifting too early or too late, the throttle cable may need to be adjusted. Seldom will a throttle cable go out of adjustment on its own or because of wear and tear, but rather most wrong adjustments are a result in other repair work or due to damage from an accident. When a vacuum modulator is used in lieu of a throttle cable, an adjustment screw can be used to correct a transmission problem. When a vehicle uses a modulator instead of a throttle cable it is crucial that there be no vacuum leaks and the engine is performing at peak efficiency. The vacuum conditions of an engine are very sensitive and significantly impact the performance of an engine. Our technicians will quite often use a vacuum gauge when diagnosing a vehicle's performance problem and state of tune. Many of the problems a vehicle's transmission may present will disappear after a thorough tune-up or other engine performance related repairs are completed.

Transmissions in older model vehicles can experience what is called "slipping". Slipping is a condition that results in an engine racing briefly when shifting from one gear to another. Often times a transmission band adjustment is all that is required to correct slipping conditions.Call us to schedule an appointment for a road test

Reseal Job

Spotting of red oil on the ground underneath your vehicle is usually indicative of your transmission needing a reseal job. Reseal jobs are done in order to repair external transmission fluid leaks. Checking for leaks involves one of our technicians placing your vehicle on a rack to examine the transmission for signs of oil leaks. If while examining your vehicle our technician notices leaks near any of the external gaskets or seals and your transmission is otherwise performing well, our recommendation will usually the transmission be resealed. While most external seals can be replaced without needing to remove the transmission, a front seal replacement requires the removal of the transmission in order to gain access to it, resulting in a more expensive transmission repair.

Accessible Part Replacement

The transmission in your vehicle has numerous parts that are accessible without requiring the removal of your transmission, including the majority of the electrical parts that are serviced simply by removing the oil pan. Repairing a transmission's external parts may result in limited warranty coverage as it is not possible to see if there is any additional problems with the parts inside the transmission that are only accessible with the complete removal of the transmission.

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#Transmission rebuild Winnipeg #rear axle services Winnipeg #Differentials Winnipeg #Auto mechanic Winnipeg #Transmission problems Winnipeg

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"LEARNING USE OF POWER MACHINES," Weekly Free Press & Prairie Farmer. February 5, 1913. Page 10. --- Tractioneering School at Winnipeg, which was held by A. C. Eisenach in the premises of the Rumely Co. The next school opened at Regina on Monday, and 1,000 names have been entered. The interest taken is the best indication of the growing use of motor tractors in the Canadian West.

#winnipeg #tractors #farm school #tractor school #mechanization of agriculture #farming in canada #canadian praries #scientific farming

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #automation #humans in the loop #centaurs #reverse centaurs #labor #ai safety #sanity checks #spot the mistake #code review #driving instructor

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Eight Manitoba First Nations have filed a lawsuit against the City of Winnipeg, as well as the provincial and federal governments, seeking billions of dollars in compensation for a massive sewage spill earlier this year.

A pipe in south Winnipeg burst on Feb. 7, spilling more than 200 million litres of untreated sewage into the Red River before the leak was stopped weeks later. It was the second-largest spill in Winnipeg's history. 

The eight First Nations — Brokenhead, Black River, Poplar River, Kinonjeoshtegon, Berens River, Hollow Water, Misipawistik and Sagkeeng — filed a statement of claim in Manitoba Court of King's Bench Tuesday, accusing the city of dumping raw sewage into the waterways for decades.

They're seeking $500 million each for breaches of their Charter rights, as well as $100 million each in punitive damages, for a total $4.8 billion.

The lawsuit accuses the city, province and feds of failing to maintain the wastewater management system, "implement or enforce adequate regulatory mechanisms," warn the First Nations about the spill, or remedy the discharges. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

#cdnpoli #First Nations #Indigenous politics #Winnipeg #Manitoba #environmental racism

[pawborough]

February 2023 Check In

[ID: A banner with a nature background. Winnipeg, a longhair in a wheelchair who is holding a frypan, is to the left, and a gray female shorthair is to the right. The Paw Borough logo is in the middle, with a button that says “FEBRUARY 2023” under it. End ID.]

Greetings

Thanks for sticking by! We’ve got a batch of assets to share!

First off, we need to apologize for not having the Guild breakdown this month. One of our leads in charge of its primary design and presentation, Blue, had his moving truck broken into, losing thousands upon thousands of dollars in property theft. He had nearly all of his possessions stolen, including his work computer with progress files, and he was left without any clothing.

This was an emergency situation, and it left us scrabbling in the midst of our work. More information can be found from him here. He has posted a few recent updates on the situation as well as community efforts to restore the damages. 

We didn’t want to rush the final Guild design while this was happening. We would rather deliver you a polished product, so we decided to allow Blue recovery before getting back to it. We hope you can understand! And we thank you all for your patience. After recovering for a few days, Blue is getting back to work this month.

That all being said, we do have some progress to share!

The Bovine Kit

First off, we mulled over some of our current assets. A few of the early pieces of breed art, we feel, have not been congruent in style with our later breed renders. We are currently ruminating upon efforts to update our breed assets–before launch–for style consistency. The first of this undertaking is a full redo of the Bovine kit.

[ID: A rendered image of the Bovine kit. It is a short-furred breed with a cow-like nose, ears, and tail, with hooves on the back legs. It is laying down. End ID]

In addition to more style consistency, we altered the pose to more uniquely suit the breed! We hope everyone enjoys the upgrade! 

There will be further ruminations on our part for what early renditions to tweak to best suit the game's style. So, watch out for potential further updates! 

Introducing the Wolf 

A few months ago, we teased the inclusion of a domestic breed in our lineup; a breed based on the beloved lykoi (colloquially known as the "wolf cat.") 

[ID: Finished renderings of the Wolf breed. It is a wiry-furred breed with a hairless muzzle and front paws. End ID]

Mars, kit, and venus poses respectively!

The Wolf will be released to the player base at an undesignated time, and will not be available immediately upon launch.

NOTE: Coloring and placement is for testing purposes and is not necessarily indicative of the final colors.

We hope you all enjoy these scruffy furballs! We as the team have been having a blast seeing the mechanics of an A2 colored face come to fruition! 

The Fyret

Lastly, here is a peek at what's to come next month: the Fyret!

[ID: Concept sketches for the Fyret breed. It is a long-furred breed with a long body and tail. The venus pose has a large, spiky mane. End ID]

Mars, kit, and venus concepts respectively!

The Fyret is a special breed which has been designed by our Kickstarter backer. Their request was a mystic breed which merges the ragdoll and a ferret! 

We’ve worked with them on sketching their concepts and then curating a proper design for Amelia to bring to life. The results have left us charmed and very pleasantly fond of this furry mystic!

The Fyret will be available to all players at launch!

Thank you all for tuning into this update!

To summarize: Grand theft of one of our leads stunted this update, but we’ve shared an updated Bovine kit, the final Wolf art, and Fyret concept sketches.

What to expect next month: The intended Guild breakdown, the final Fyret art, and any Kickstarter designs or assets that are finished this month.

#paw borough #art update #kickstarter update #pet simulator #pet sim #virtual pet #indie game #indie dev

[eusuntgratie]

fuck it friday

tagged by @onward--upward who is working on an amazing rwrb au that’s making me lose my mind a little.

fuck it friday = post whatever you want. ideas, snippets, art, not fic, whatever. fuck it! post whatever you want!

i haven’t had much time to write, but i always have a million ideas running around in my head, so i thought i’d share a few ideas and a few things i’m working on. if you have ideas/thoughts or want to scream at me about which i should work on, please feel free to share, because my brain is currently a big ol’ mess and i’m not getting anywhere with anything.

dumotanger abo college au... snippet shared here. where am i going with this? who could say.

tknp patty retires fic which i have been working on for *checks notes* A YEAR. lots of snippets in #patty retires fic

sid and geno read thirst tweets bc i had too much fun doing tknp. sid is unphased by blatantly sexual commentary about his ass and thighs because he’s so used to it. geno is impatient with too many sid tweets and tries to steer the conversation back to him and how hot he is.

geno and tanger hook up on the dads trip bc i love pain and sadness

firstprince college au... alex finds tightlaced, obnoxious henry drunk off his ass at a party and takes care of him. how’d this get in here? shhh back to hockey but rwrb maybe ate my brain a little.

tangerkarlsson freak4freak... maybe from sid’s pov. he is alarmed he is concerned he does not get it but also... it’s kinda hard to look away.

a sequel to liar i’ve been dreaming about since i wrote it where geno makes tanger write their numbers on sid with a sharpie.

i’d have to rewatch the episode, but i’d love to write a badwrong buck/kameron hookup from the episode where she runs away to his loft. all buck wants is to be chosen, to be needed. he feels like everyone finds him wanting, but kameron is carrying HIS baby and when she panicked and didn’t know where to go she came to HIM. the man has some feelings about that and some unhealthy coping mechanisms. and uh. sex is a great way to induce labor. so. yeah. i’m thinking some thoughts.

i haven’t touched it in AWHILE but i want to write some mess about this mess. why are you trying to kill the tiny man, pld? maybe bc the guy you’ve been hooking up with in winnipeg and accidentally fell for can hardly look you in the eye because he’s still so hung up on somebody who he never even had. DELICIOUS. 

i have more, but yeah. i got that 5 million wips at a time disease real bad. this is only three fandoms, so that’s pretty good. SIGH.

tagging anybody with something to share but also no pressure tagging @voxofthevoid @jbarneswilson @lostcol @ghostgeno

[chen-chen-chen-again-chen]

15 Questions | 15 People

Rules: Answer these 15 Questions, then Tag 15 People 

Hello hello! Thank you for the tags, @cutestkilla, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe, @yellobb, @raenestee, @artsyunderstudy! I have loved reading what you've shared and getting these neat little glimpses into your lives (also taking notes for who I can ask when I have research questions about travel planning, designing clothes, swimming, etc... y'all are such a talented and interesting bunch!).

I'll skip on tagging this time, since I think most of the folks I would tag have been tagged already, LOL.

1. Are you named after anyone? Yes! My paternal grandfather is named Gregorio, as is my dad, and my both of my brothers' first names are Greg, so I wound up with "Gretchen."

My aunt tutted and said that people would think I was a blonde and blue-eyed Heidi of the Alps type, so my family and friends have always called me Chen, or Chen-Chen. I have a cousin who is named after me, and when I was holding her as a baby, I'd refer to us as "Chen Squared."

2. When was the last time you cried? Oh, yesterday. Writing poetry for a therapy assignment, LOL!

3. Do you have kids? Non. This was something my spouse and I debated for YEARS, and went back and forth on. We settled on not having kids, but being more involved with the little ones in our lives. The kids we are closest to are my spouse's half-brother and sister (they are nine and five), and my godchildren (who are nine and four). For Filipinos, the relationship between godparents and godchildren is really special, and I love being "Ninang" (godmother) to my beloveds.

(It will probably not be a surprise to anyone who has read "Jelly Babies" or "Baker boxer teacher grief" that my spouse's relationship with his younger sibs influenced my depiction of Baz with his sibs).

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot? LOL, more so when I was younger and more barbed! I've embraced the joy of being more maudlin and earnest as I get older.

5. What’s the first thing you notice about people?  Clothes. I think it's a writer thing, where I like clocking what people are wearing so I can use the details as story fodder, haha. But as part of my job, I work with people face-to-face a lot, so I also try to gauge what mood people are in and how open they are to talking.

6. What’s your eye color? Dark brown!

7. Scary movies or happy ending? Happy endings! My best friend is a horror fiend, which is hilarious because I'm the biggest baby when it comes to scary movies.

8. Any special talents? Hmm... I can type around 100 WPM (Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was one of the first computer programs we had in my house). I've been told I have a nice phone voice, so I used to record all the voicemail messages for our office. I've also been told that I put together kickass care packages. 👍🏽

9. Where were you born? Winnipeg, Manitoba.

10. What are your hobbies? Gardening, cross-stitch, cooking, baking, painting (poorly), video games, reading, fountain pens, anime/manga. I think like others, my gardening sort of falls off in midsummer and I just try to grab every zucchini before they grow huge. 😆 I love to sing though I'm not very good at it ("Try the Worryin' Way" by the Fabulettes is a FANTASTIC song to belt in the shower).

Oh, I also find it very soothing to clean and fiddle around with my mechanical keyboard (I used a Das keyboard with Cherry Blues for a long time, and just switched to a Nuphy Halo 75, with delightfully clicky Gateron Blues).

11. Do you have any pets?  NO, SADLY! I'm allergic to cats and my spouse to cats and dogs (which is a shame, because animals adore him). I just cuddle other people's dogs and admire their cats from a distance. We have a neighbourhood cat that likes to roll in our catmint in the summer.

12. What sports do you play/have you played? Badminton, swimming, rollerblading. I am also asthmatic and uncoordinated, so organized sports were a trial growing up; in 8th grade, I skipped gym as much as possible by helping out my Art teacher after class.

13. How tall are you? 5'0" (I'm a shortie, it's just how Filipinos roll)

14. Favorite subject at school? In high school, English Lit, and in uni, Film Studies. I learned more about writing from Film Studies than I ever did in English.

15. Dream job? For the longest time, I wanted to be an English professor. Then I dropped out of grad school because of Depression, went back after a year, graduated, got a closer look at the job prospects and work culture for academics and said "No thank you."

Reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert really changed my expectations. Instead of wanting to make it as a professional writer, I switched to wanting a stable job where I would have the work-life balance and resources to pursue writing in my free time. And now I have that! So I am living the dream!

#long post! #tag game #about me #personal

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[pumancer]

Robbie Ftorek replaced Jacques Lemaire as Head Coach & was very successful during the regular season

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On the other hand, he was frightened to them because as the 5 Editable RED Blue Canva Graduation Template Shirt of Tang Dynasty showed, when these military elites controlled and divided the regions by their owns, it would be a matter of time for them to rebel against the dynasty. So he had to develop lots of countering mechanisms, including to further these elites into the landlord class who had a stable income, as well as placing his leftover Mongolian army to check the military elites, dividing the military officers into sections. As the history has showed, these mechanism only worked in the short time. When the Yuan dynasty had no money but Mongolian slaves to pay these military-landlord elites, and the Mongolian army was corrupted by 2–3 generations, these military elites turned against the Mongolian and stayed away when the peasant uprising took place such the rule of the Yuan dynasty became to an end. So to address your question, the structure of the Yuan dynasty can’t be simply summarizrd by the demography on the top but the backbone in the middle. Also I think it’s absurd to emphasize on ethnicities because these Han military elites became landlords and treated the Han peasants like trash, and the Mongolian rulers on the top also had no problem of selling the Mongolian slaves to these elites. So it’s not just simply Han vs Mongolian, which is the nationalist understanding and a over simplified history.

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Robbie Ftorek replaced Jacques Lemaire as Head Coach & was very successful during the regular season, but after repeated early exits from the Playoffs Devils GM Lou Lamoriello fired Ftorek on March 23, 2000 with the Devils in 1st place in their division & only a few weeks remaining during the Custom Bootleg Rap shirt . Assistant Coach Larry Robinson was promoted to Head Coach & was nearly eliminated by the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1st round of the Playoffs. After the embarrassing road loss, the quiet & usually reserved Robinson went into the visitors locker room & screamed at the team for wasting an opportunity. This team was special, the 1999–00 Devils boasted a “Triple Threat” of (1) the “A-Line” composed of Patrik Elias, Jason Arnott, & Petr Sykora who were by far the best top line in the NHL in terms of offensive production & their defensive ability to shut down the opponent’s top lines. (2) The best top defensive pairing in the NHL in Scott Stevens & Scott Neidermeyer. (3) The best goaltender in the NHL – Martin Brodeur. Legend has it that Coach Larry trashed the Philadelphia locker room & even kicked a garbage can. This will be forever known as “Larry’s Tirade” that enspired the Devils to win the next 3 games & defeat the Flyers in 7 games to move onto the next round.

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The current NHL leadership will only consent to moving one of the existing teams as an absolute last resort. Winnipeg only got the Thrashers when the situation in Atlanta became untenable and the Álvaro Díaz Sayonara Metallic Logo Shirt needed a last-minute landing site. This is why the Centre Videotron was constructed in Quebec City: to have an NHL-ready arena if and when another team needs to relocate. The NHL insists that it is committed to keeping its current franchises where they are: this is true until it suddenly isn’t. There may come a point when a club like the Arizona Coyotes has no option but to relocate, and Quebec City could indeed wind up with a new version of the Nordiques.

()

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My mother confirmed later, that when she worked for the state’s Arkansas Razorbacks 2024 SEC Baseball Champions Shirt office, these properties were held for generations by families whose ownership couldn’t be easily determined due to inbreeding. I also met a man a couple of years later who worked for the department of public works. He told me he had to go out to these properties occasionally and had observed some outrageous behaviors among the Pine Barrens families that seemed to reinforce what my mother had said – that it scared him to the point that he told his boss that he wouldn’t go out there any more, even if it meant losing his job. He told me this before I even mentioned the camping trip incident. True or not, it creeped me out for certain! Either that, or worse, we could have run into the ‘Jersey Devil’! Never made another trip to that part of the state again…

()

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The Jersey Devil was supposedly ‘born’ more than a century ago, when old Mrs. Leeds gave birth to an unwanted, thirteenth child at home. According to legend, as soon as it was brought forth into the world, the Mookie Betts Los Angeles Baseball T Shirt shrieked and rushed out of the chimney into the night. And while I’m skeptical that that’s the way it really happened, I think there’s a grain of truth to the Jersey Devil phenomenon. Whether it is an uncatalogued cryptid or some sort of earth-roving demon I’m not sure we’ll ever know, but it has been reported by such a wealth of trustworthy sources (policemen, lawyers, attorneys, and the like) over the years that I find it hard to believe the whole thing us just contrived. I tend to think that the Jersey Devil is from a different realm; Buddhist Cosmology describes countless different garudas, nagas, demons, and other beasts. If that is the case, I think we have little to worry about, but it’s fun to speculate just the same.

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He unified the Mongol tribes by force of charisma, starting with nothing, creating the Free Scottie Scheffler Unisex Garment Dyed T shirt empire through conquest after conquest of many old established empires. That included 2 Chinese realms, the Kwarezmian empire (in the area of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan & Persia), Kievan Rus, and parts of the Caucasus, culminating in one of the largest empires in history, which his son and successor Ogedei expanded to the largest. Genghis never lost in battle, and personally participated in many. Kublai Khan took his grandfather’s legacy in China, ruling the Yuan dynasty that was constructed of Genghis’ northern Jin and Western Xi-xia conquests, completing the conquest and unification of China by conquering the Southern Song dynasty. He also conquered the Goryeo kingdom, modern day Korea. However, he lost to Japan in the famous Kamikaze, partially due to poor planning and overconfidence. And a large portion of his energies were consumed in the Toluid civil war between himself and his brother Arik-Boke (their father was Tolui, Genghis’, 4th son).

()

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Franklin was angling to make a Florida Panthers 2024 Time To Hunt Redemption 2024 Playoffs Shirt for himself as a publisher. As a publicity stunt, Franklin — in the guise of “Poor Richard” Saunders — claimed that astrological calculations showed Titan Leeds would die in 1733. When the prediction didn’t pan out, Leeds called Franklin a fool and a liar. Never missing a beat, Franklin claimed that, since Titan Leeds had died, his ghost must be doing all the shouting. Leeds tried to defend himself, but Franklin kept a straight face and argued that Leeds had been resurrected from the dead. The Leeds Devil was a resurrected Titan Leeds. The plan worked. Poor Richard’s Almanac became famous while the pioneering Leeds Almanac dwindled. Leeds was forced to convince people he was actually alive. Titan Leeds actually died in 1738. As revolutionary fervor grew in the mid-18th century and Americans looked for targets to exercise their anti-British feelings, the Leeds family made easy marks. They supported the Crown. They had sided with the empire and the hated Lord Cornbury and had been charged with somehow being involved in the occult. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the “Leeds Devil” stood as a symbol of political ridicule and scorn.

()

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In my mind, it is complete, and is one of the Official Body By Lawn Work T shirt poems. Every reviewer, save one, thinks it has no meaning whatsoever. Quoting from the best analysis of this poem from the late John Spencer Hill, “The first and, for over a hundred years, almost the only reader to insist on the intelligibility and coherence of Kubla Khan was Shelley’s novel-writing friend, Thomas Love Peacock: “there are”, he declared in 1818, “very few specimens of lyrical poetry so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et unum from first to last”. Perhaps wisely, Peacock concluded his fragmentary essay with these words, thereby sparing himself the onerous task of explaining the consistency and meaning of so plain a poem as Kubla Khan.” (John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion).

()

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Don’t get me wrong, plants are an important part of Its not a dad bod its a father figure beer bear 2024 shirt climate change. Forests, mangroves, wetlands, grasslands, peatlands, etc, are all important storage sites of carbon. Flora in these places take up carbon to produce their structure. However, the largest reason why they are important to protect has less to do with storing additional carbon, and more to do with keeping more carbon from leaving the surface. If a forest is cut down, then the carbon that was once stored in the trees is freed up to renter the atmosphere (especially if burned). For this reason, many studies suggest protecting what is left is priority number 1, planting more is priority number 2. Either way, more must be done to allow for plants to be an effective countermeasure against CO2 increases.

()

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Your question contains some false assumptions. The CCP is not a monolith, and Xi Jinping can not just decree that these problems get fixed with a ruffalo est shirt of his hand. Village cadres, regional political leaders as well as rivals on a national level within the party, government and business spheres can and do opposed initiatives laid down by Beijing. Chinese politics is very much a full contact sport as well. When I got here, Bo Xilai was very much the man to watch, and if you ever go to Dalian you can see how he turned what once was a sleepy coastal town into a 2nd tier city (plus they’ve got good looking female horse cops!). Now, he’s serving a life sentence (I’m an agnostic on whether he’s “guilty” or not, I’m not looking to discuss that). It’d be the equivalent of say, Dick and Lynne Cheney disappearing from the political scene on life without parole charges. After the Sanlu scandal, the Health Minister Zheng Xiaoyu paid for his fuckup with his life.

()

#succession #welcome home #wally darling #across the spiderverse #taylor swift

[bitase]

On the other hand, he was frightened to them because as the Flash Back Tiger Golf Mugshot Shirt

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On the other hand, he was frightened to them because as the Flash Back Tiger Golf Mugshot Shirt of Tang Dynasty showed, when these military elites controlled and divided the regions by their owns, it would be a matter of time for them to rebel against the dynasty. So he had to develop lots of countering mechanisms, including to further these elites into the landlord class who had a stable income, as well as placing his leftover Mongolian army to check the military elites, dividing the military officers into sections. As the history has showed, these mechanism only worked in the short time. When the Yuan dynasty had no money but Mongolian slaves to pay these military-landlord elites, and the Mongolian army was corrupted by 2–3 generations, these military elites turned against the Mongolian and stayed away when the peasant uprising took place such the rule of the Yuan dynasty became to an end. So to address your question, the structure of the Yuan dynasty can’t be simply summarizrd by the demography on the top but the backbone in the middle. Also I think it’s absurd to emphasize on ethnicities because these Han military elites became landlords and treated the Han peasants like trash, and the Mongolian rulers on the top also had no problem of selling the Mongolian slaves to these elites. So it’s not just simply Han vs Mongolian, which is the nationalist understanding and a over simplified history.

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In the 70s, my then-boyfriend and I took a camping trip to the Wharton State Forest – the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. We would see truckloads of odd-looking people drive into the Free Scottie Scottie Scheffler PGA Championship shirt (not on paved roads – sand and dirt) and never come out that we could see. We figured there must be roads leading out of the campground, maybe shortcuts, so late one afternoon decided to see where one of these went. We had my mother’s Oldsmobile, a rather heavy car, and went for what seemed like miles, never finding anything, except smaller, more narrow paths off the main road. It was getting late, so we turned around to go back and got stuck…the car dug into the soft, sandy road and we couldn’t get out. John decided he would walk back to the campsite and contact a ranger, leaving me with the car.

()

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He unified the Mongol tribes by force of charisma, starting with nothing, creating the Megan Thee Stallion Cosplay T shirt empire through conquest after conquest of many old established empires. That included 2 Chinese realms, the Kwarezmian empire (in the area of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan & Persia), Kievan Rus, and parts of the Caucasus, culminating in one of the largest empires in history, which his son and successor Ogedei expanded to the largest. Genghis never lost in battle, and personally participated in many. Kublai Khan took his grandfather’s legacy in China, ruling the Yuan dynasty that was constructed of Genghis’ northern Jin and Western Xi-xia conquests, completing the conquest and unification of China by conquering the Southern Song dynasty. He also conquered the Goryeo kingdom, modern day Korea. However, he lost to Japan in the famous Kamikaze, partially due to poor planning and overconfidence. And a large portion of his energies were consumed in the Toluid civil war between himself and his brother Arik-Boke (their father was Tolui, Genghis’, 4th son).

()

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The current NHL leadership will only consent to moving one of the existing teams as an absolute last resort. Winnipeg only got the Thrashers when the situation in Atlanta became untenable and the Official Sutter California’s Own Logan Seavey T shirt needed a last-minute landing site. This is why the Centre Videotron was constructed in Quebec City: to have an NHL-ready arena if and when another team needs to relocate. The NHL insists that it is committed to keeping its current franchises where they are: this is true until it suddenly isn’t. There may come a point when a club like the Arizona Coyotes has no option but to relocate, and Quebec City could indeed wind up with a new version of the Nordiques.

()

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As a consequence of this, the majority of his army became Han, who not only stayed on the All Good Scottie Scheffler Shirt but also leveled up to the middle and high ranking military officers. If you’re familiar with the Roman Empire politics and certain parts of Eastern Asian history, this means that the Emperor can no longer became the Emperor and even the general cannot be the general without the military officers’ supports. These officers became the most important interest group and backbone to back up kublai and the Yuan dynasty. Of course, they were also extremely arrogant and annoying and not afraid of murdering their generals or started a rebellion if they were paid less. Their pattern of behaviors brought down the Tang Dynasty, such that the Song Dynasty had to oppress them in order to maintain the unity and power, which resulted in the extreme weak military forces against others including Mongolian. Ironically, the way of the Yuan dynasty and the Mongolian kept their dominance was as same as the Tang Dynasty’s strategy by granting these military leaders the great power and benefits. The history basically circled back at that moment.

()

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Kublai Khan’s military was in large part made up of Comfort Color Vintage Graphic 90s T shirt Chinese quislings who served primarily as grunts while the Mongols were the officer corps. Kublai also managed to dragoon a number of Chinese and Koreans to serve in his navy. GK did manage to conscript a number of steppe peoples into his army but never felt the need for a navy. KK also wasn’t as destructive in his conquests as his grandpa was. i am also unaware that Kublai ever thought to embark on a mission of world conquest like granddad did. centuries later when the Japanese attempted the same trick in their conquests in China they had little success in finding enough quislings to serve in their occupation forces. Indeed it was even before it was officially the Yuan Dynasty. The proclamation of the Yuan Dynasty was the inevitable result** of Genghis Khan’s earlier conquests which started with the radical and comprehensive restructuring of Mongol society. This was also the reason he could rise to power. He was the son of a tribal chief, but due to misfortune and treachery his father died and he grew up with little status and at his lowest became a slave.

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Old World was Lunar. Most early civilisations have a Official Bring Back Tommy 2024 T shirt based calendar because it was so much easier to plot and make sense of time. It is not just China, even Scotland mesolithic era (8000 BC), in Hindu, in Islam and possibly most lost civilisations. Chinese have the lunar calendar since ancient times, and delineate as 60 years cycle. And used 12 years Zodiac and created very sophisticated system, numerology, astrological concepts around it. Almost all East Asia adopted Chinese approach, so they have in effect a common calendar and fortunately they followed China so it was so much easier for all to co-exist in synergy. Much like the whole of Europe logically followed Rome. Solar. A few like Japan after modernisation dropped lunar and adopted Western solar calendar, the Gregorian. Most Japanese don’t celebrate lunar new year anymore. For some traditional and religious festivals and rituals, I believe lunar calendar may still be referred, certainly for Buddhist rituals. Likewise Gregorian is the universal standard for the whole world and all in Asia to interact and run all the world affairs, work and business.

()

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In my mind, it is complete, and is one of the Retro Personalized Pet Shirt poems. Every reviewer, save one, thinks it has no meaning whatsoever. Quoting from the best analysis of this poem from the late John Spencer Hill, “The first and, for over a hundred years, almost the only reader to insist on the intelligibility and coherence of Kubla Khan was Shelley’s novel-writing friend, Thomas Love Peacock: “there are”, he declared in 1818, “very few specimens of lyrical poetry so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et unum from first to last”. Perhaps wisely, Peacock concluded his fragmentary essay with these words, thereby sparing himself the onerous task of explaining the consistency and meaning of so plain a poem as Kubla Khan.” (John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion).

()

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On the other hand, he was frightened to them because as the custom photo shirt of Tang Dynasty showed, when these military elites controlled and divided the regions by their owns, it would be a matter of time for them to rebel against the dynasty. So he had to develop lots of countering mechanisms, including to further these elites into the landlord class who had a stable income, as well as placing his leftover Mongolian army to check the military elites, dividing the military officers into sections. As the history has showed, these mechanism only worked in the short time. When the Yuan dynasty had no money but Mongolian slaves to pay these military-landlord elites, and the Mongolian army was corrupted by 2–3 generations, these military elites turned against the Mongolian and stayed away when the peasant uprising took place such the rule of the Yuan dynasty became to an end. So to address your question, the structure of the Yuan dynasty can’t be simply summarizrd by the demography on the top but the backbone in the middle. Also I think it’s absurd to emphasize on ethnicities because these Han military elites became landlords and treated the Han peasants like trash, and the Mongolian rulers on the top also had no problem of selling the Mongolian slaves to these elites. So it’s not just simply Han vs Mongolian, which is the nationalist understanding and a over simplified history.

()

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The current NHL leadership will only consent to moving one of the Illinois Fighting Illini Big 2024 Baseball Champions Shirt teams as an absolute last resort. Winnipeg only got the Thrashers when the situation in Atlanta became untenable and the team needed a last-minute landing site. This is why the Centre Videotron was constructed in Quebec City: to have an NHL-ready arena if and when another team needs to relocate.The NHL insists that it is committed to keeping its current franchises where they are: this is true until it suddenly isn’t. There may come a point when a club like the Arizona Coyotes has no option but to relocate, and Quebec City could indeed wind up with a new version of the Nordiques.The league is bullish on Houston, which has a local NBA owner who is eager to become part of the NHL. So the Texas city is often considered the top candidate for a relocated franchise. But it is more likely that Houston would enter the league via an expansion franchise (Seattle paid $650M to join and the other owners will be wanting another cash injection in the future). Quebec would probably get the next team that needs to relocate.

#welcome home #succession #across the spiderverse #taylor swift #ted lasso #the mandalorian

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #shorts #short sellers #news #private equity #private prisons #securus #prison profiteers #the bezzle #anything that cant go on forever eventually stop #steins law #hamilton nolan #Platinum Equity #American Securities #viapath #global tellink #debt #jpay #worth rises #insurance #spacs #fcc #bond rating #moodys #the appeal #saving the news from big tech #hunterbrook media #journalism

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A community just outside of Winnipeg will soon be home to a safe place for people to surrender their infants anonymously.

The Landmark Fire Hall is the second location in Canada to install what's known as a Hope's Cradle, an initiative started a few years ago by Gems for Gems, a Calgary-based organization that works with survivors of domestic abuse.

Allan Rau, fire chief for the Rural Municipality of Taché, said the support from people working at the fire hall has been huge.

"Everybody within the fire department has embraced it. They all look for updates," Rau said Friday.

"They're very, very happy that it has been put in place. But also, they don't want to see it used."

The installation was completed this week, and the cradle is going through a two-week testing phase to make sure all its components — including heating, a camera, an alarm system and door locking mechanisms — are working properly.

Gems for Gems founder Jordan Guildford said the Hope's Cradle initiative was a response to cases of infants being found abandoned in places like garbage bins. The first location opened in Alberta in 2021.

"We don't know what it's like to be in anyone else's shoes.… All we can do is try to understand what we see and try to be there for the people that are in need," Guildford said. [...]

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Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #child neglect tw #child abuse tw #infant surrendering #Manitoba #Taché