You have a civil duty to keep people like him out of office and away from power. Vote him out MAY 4TH.

Post Synopsis

This write-up will discuss LittleBigPlanet’s humble origins, its place in the market in 2008, its unique features and mechanics, and a brief summary of the games, impact, and news following the first game. It will be broken down into five sections listed below.

• I. Introduction
  
• II. Origins of Media Molecule
  
• III. General Game Overview
  
• IV. Post-LittleBigPlanet 1
  
• V. Closing
  

I. Introduction

With the advent of the Internet, user-generated content has become an increasingly common phenomenon, and in the last ~20 years in particular, it has propelled entire platforms to become major media centers and empowered users to explore and express their creative side. In 2006, Time named “You” as their person of the year, referring to the millions of users who had contributed user-generated content to websites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, and others, and Business 2.0 and ABC News gave similar accolades to "You" in 2006. In the realm of video games, user-generated content has practically become a genre in itself, with modern examples like Minecraft, Roblox, and Super Mario Maker amassing millions of players and building dedicated communities around them that have persisted for years.
LittleBigPlanet was one of the earliest examples in the console space built around the concept of user-generated content. The tools available were top-of-the-line and the best available for a console game at that time. But its appeal as a game went beyond just its robust level editor: the multiplayer and network features, the customization options, and the inviting art style and family-friendly image filled a much-needed niche in the early PS3 library. Its broad appeal enabled it to become one of Sony’s flagship series.

II. Origins of Media Molecule

Rag Doll Kung Fu, The Room, and the Formation of Media Molecule
Media Molecule was founded in January 2006 by four former employees of Lionhead Studios – the studio behind Fable and Black & White. Before forming Media Molecule, members of the team worked on Rag Doll Kung Fu in their free time, and even starred in live action cut-scenes for the game. After presenting the game to a crowd of 300 people at GDC 2005, Mark Healey was approached by both Valve and Nintendo to bring the game to their platform, and ultimately worked out a deal with Valve to put the game on their then new digital platform Steam. Rag Doll Kung Fu was the first third party game on the platform.
Around this same time, the would-be Media Molecule founders built a tech demo called “The Room.” The Room featured elements of creation that would later form the framework of LittleBigPlanet – players could mold objects out of clay and move objects around the room. Valve was interested in hiring them to develop The Room or another project, but it never came to fruition. The Room also featured portals the player could move between. Coincidentally, Valve would hire the students behind Narbacular Drop – which used a similar portal concept as its central game mechanic – that same year (2005) to expand their concept, and eventually create Portal in 2007.
Soon after their work on Rag Doll Kung Fu and The Room, Mark Healey and three other Lionhead Studio employees – Alex Evans, Kareem Ettourney, and David Smith – resigned on the same day to start up their own company, which they called Media Molecule. They turned in their notice to Peter Molyneux, one of the founders of Lionhead Studios, and a man Healey had worked with for around 15 years, between both Bullfrog Productions and Lionhead Studios. While he was disappointed to lose four talented developers on the same day, he wished them well and was happy that they were striking out on their own, rather than taking jobs at Valve.
Initially, the team didn’t have a clear vision of what they wanted their game to be outside of a few general principles. In a 2007 interview with GameSpot, Healey had this to say:

“The idea was to make the most ambitious game we possibly could," Healey said, "and most importantly, get somebody else to pay for it.

Healey went on to talk about the tumultuous nature of working on a creative project:

"What we're aiming to do with the game we're making is somehow give that to people and take away the tedium," Healey said.

Meeting with Sony and Development of LittleBigPlanet
In the initial talks with then President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios Phil Harrison in January 2006, Media Molecule presented a demo called “Craftworld” starring Mr. Yellowhead – who would later be featured as a collectible costume in LittleBigPlanet. Craftworld was a physics-based side-scrolling platformer, with no button presses – the character’s movement was wired to the exact physical movements of the analog sticks, which was a novel idea at the time. Instead of using PowerPoint, Media Molecule made a live demo play within their presentation. Alex Evans recalled the meeting at the Develop 2011 Conference in Brighton:

“Our first meeting with Phil was meant to be a 30 minute pitch for our idea for a game called Craftworld that soon turned into a 3 hour brainstorming session,” explained Evans. “Phil said all sorts of buzzwords that hadn’t really hit yet. He said it should be driven by DLC and that it should be free-to-play, have a social core and premium, paid-for content.

This is interesting, because this model didn’t really exist yet on consoles back in January 2006 – the infamous The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s horse armor DLC (today it’d be called a microtransaction) was still three months away. However, Sony was working on PlayStation Home around this time which shared these core tenants and was being pushed by Phil Harrison. Despite these initial talks, LittleBigPlanet ended up releasing as a $60 USD game rather than a free-to-play title, though microtransactions in the form of costumes and DLC level packs did make it into the game. Sony would revisit the idea of a free-to-play LittleBigPlanet title in the form of LittleBigPlanet Hub, which was planned to launch in late 2013, but the project was canceled, and presumably the work for it was carried over to LittleBigPlanet 3, which was also sold as a $60 USD game.
Soon after their meeting with Phil Harrison, Sony agreed to fund the project for six months, after which they’d need a playable prototype ready to demonstrate. This was later extended by another three months, as the demo after the initial period was reportedly “unfocused and unplayable.” Alex Evans recalls debugging the game the night before the presentation because the game slowed to a crawl when a fourth controller was added. The game was revealed at GDC 2007 for two reasons, according to Phil Harrison:

“Firstly, I wanted to demonstrate the future of games, which was service-based projects: always on, no end to them. And secondly, to communicate the idea about the user being the creative manager of content. LittleBigPlanet and Home were perfect examples of that.”

Media Molecule would go on to release LittleBigPlanet in October 2008. In less than three years, the team went from a vague premise to a landmark title for the PS3, as well as the second highest rated game of 2008, according to Metacritic. It’s interesting that the team didn’t really have a clear idea of what they wanted to create before their leaving their jobs when LittleBigPlanet feels like such a spark of creative energy, which coincidentally is the premise for the game itself.

III. General Game Overview

The Market in 2008 and LittleBigPlanet's Unique Appeal
As the 2000s wore on, and particularly with the arrival of the HD consoles, it seemed AAA platformers were being phased out. Studios known for their platformers in the 1990s and early-mid 2000s, like Rare, Naughty Dog, and Sucker Punch, were moving away from them, leaving Mario and Ratchet & Clank to carry the genre in the late 2000s. A platformer wasn’t exactly what people thought of as a “next-gen” experience on the HD consoles at the time (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360). It seemed more studios were focused on bringing about more realistic experiences, typically ones that had guns and/or cars. LittleBigPlanet released in a year with games like Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Resistance 2, etc. – games that prioritized realistic graphics, gritty settings, and cinematic set-pieces.
However, if there was a way to make a platformer feel next-gen rather than iterative of the design we had seen for over a decade at that point, LittleBigPlanet achieved it, by utilizing network features and user-generated content as its central focus. The story mode acted as both a fun adventure to play through as well as a showcase of what was possible with the extensive level editor, which allowed players to share levels online and access a database of levels from users all around the world, and even use user-created objects as collectibles in one’s own levels. Its appeal was broadened beyond just the scope of a conventional platformer though, as users would utilize the level editor to create more experimental levels - like this museum level featured in Mm Picks. LittleBigPlanet 2 would expand on this concept further.
The handcrafted art-style was an excellent complement to the game’s vision as a vehicle for level creation, and it allowed parts to be glued together without looking amiss. The idea of customization was extended to the player's character: Sackboy acted as a blank canvas that could be customized, but his knitted nature didn’t look out of place on marketing with nothing on. The soundtrack featured licensed music and spanned all different eras and cultures yet somehow formed a cohesive package – much like the nature of putting together a level using various parts and materials.
Curation Tools and Mm Picks
Sharing and playing community levels was a seamless experience held up by some awesome curation tools. You could play levels off the game’s servers without going through a download process. Additionally, levels featured tags for categorizing types of levels, hearts for bookmarking them, a five-star rating system (later changed to a thumbs up/thumbs down), a comment section, and the ability to view the profile of users to see their levels and favorites. These features are all ubiquitous now and were likely inspired by YouTube’s curation tools, but it was by far the best infrastructure in a game with online level sharing on consoles at that point. Additionally, LittleBigPlanet benefitted from the rise of outside media platforms, namely YouTube, as a way to showcase levels on message boards.
Adding to these curation tools was Media Molecule Picks (Mm Picks), which were community levels branded with Media Molecule’s emblem, signifying their exceptional quality or experimental ideas. This was before Twitter became ubiquitous and developers – and businesses in general – had less direct interaction with their users. Mm Picks were instead posted to their website and even included embedded YouTube videos of the levels, though they did join Twitter seven months after the game’s release, in May 2009. It was a novel thing to see the developer of a game take part in the community of a game in that way, and it was personally the first instance I recall seeing of something like that (as primarily a console gamer at the time). Media Molecule went a step further by including 18 users to create bonus levels for the Game of the Year Edition of the game in 2009.
Additionally, Media Molecule added water in the Pirates of the Caribbean level pack in December 2009 after much clamoring for it in message boards. It’s possible this was already in the works since they had to work out the licensing with Disney in advance, but the trailer seemed to acknowledge that Media Molecule had heard the requests for water in the game. Unfortunately, it and many other cross-promotional level packs are now unavailable to download due to licensing agreements expiring. At the time, DLC seemed liked a great fit for the game, as every added item to the game multiplied what was possible with the game’s level editor, and the frequent level kits would regularly reinvigorate interest in the community. However, many are now inaccessible through practical means (not all level kits were included in the Game of the Year Edition).
Multiplayer
LittleBigPlanet made no concessions with its multiplayer – it was four-players locally, online, or a mix of the two – in story mode, community levels, and creation mode – it featured both cooperative and competitive elements, but the game could still be experienced as a single player experience if desired. Other games usually come with a caveat – either they’re local or online only, provide multiplayer only in certain designated modes, and/or limit the number of players to just two. There were some camera issues in local play in certain fast-paced and/or vertical levels, but the widescreen helped make the game feel less crowded than it otherwise would have (widescreen had just recently become ubiquitous on the HD consoles during this time).
LittleBigPlanet also incorporated a lot of elements that amounted to just goofing around, like slapping your friends, painting them with stickers, grabbing them, and making smiley faces after watching them fall to their death. As inconsequential as these qualities might seem when typing them out like this, people got a ton of mileage out of these.
The competitive play didn’t really work in favor of the platforming levels, but the more experimental, survival-based levels did lead to some fun competition. Chasing leaderboards, collecting all prize bubbles and keys, completing a level with no deaths for rewards, and completing optional co-op puzzles led to a great deal of replayability among the story levels, so there was plenty of reason to jump back into them with someone new, especially since the game had plenty to reward you with in the form of objects, stickers, costumes, and bonus levels.

IV. Post-LittleBigPlanet 1

General Overview of the Series' Games
Sackboy became Sony’s family-friendly mascot and was featured in many advertisements during the Kevin Butler-era. He has been featured as a playable characteskin in games like ModNation Racers, Minecraft, Fall Guys, and Sony’s platform fighter PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale. The series has regularly showcased the new features of Sony’s hardware: the PlayStation Eye and network features in the original game, the PlayStation Move controller in Sackboy’s Prehistoric Moves, and the touchpad in the PS Vita game – although in recent years, it seems Astro Bot has been positioned to showcase these features more than Sackboy’s games (the VR headset and DualSense controller).
There were eight LittleBigPlanet/Sackboy games released between 2008 and 2014, plus a ton of DLC content – since then there have been just two (the last one was a 2023 mobile runner title), neither of which include the creation tools the series was founded on. However, Sackboy: A Big Adventure did retain the cooperative multiplayer, which I believe is an important part of the series’ legacy and isn’t as easy to transition to a 3D platformer.
Media Molecule and the Series' Evolution
Media Molecule stepped away as the main developer after LittleBigPlanet 2 (2011), acting as support for some of the later games. It really shows, as LittleBigPlanet 2 was a major evolution over the first game and expanded the tools and what was possible with the level editor to such a degree its identity as a platform game became blurry: you could make a retro-style arcade game with unique physics, a turn-based battle system, a top-down racer, in-game movies, etc. The possibilities felt endless.
In contrast, LittleBigPlanet 3 was the buggiest game I had ever played at launch, though most of the game-breaking bugs were ironed out over time, it lost its momentum and was still a pretty buggy experience in the end. It did bring some new tools to the table - namely the new characters with unique abilities - but the improvements were much more modest/complementary to the original design, than the massive evolution that was LittleBigPlanet 2. Media Molecule has since developed Tearaway and Dreams, though many of the studio founders have since left the company.
Server Shutdowns
LittleBigPlanet 2 and 3 carried over levels from the previous mainline game(s) - it was nice to know users' works were being preserved. However, there were many bugs in LittleBigPlanet 3 when accessing levels from the first two games so it really wasn't the ideal way to experience them. Sony had shutdown the servers for the PS3 games in September 2021, so it was the only way to play a lot of these old levels for awhile.
Unfortunately, the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers – and therefore all uploaded community created levels from the first three mainline games – were just recently shutdown after being compromised by hackers in January 2024. While the story levels remain, it’s disappointing to know you can only re-experience part of a beloved game, and not the game in its whole. Many of the levels people remember the game by are now lost to time, after 15 years. The ending of LittleBigPlanet even highlights the community levels, as if the ending of the story mode is just the beginning for the rest of the game.
Showing future generations LittleBigPlanet will always come with the caveat that there was much more to the game than they’re able to experience, unlike other classics like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, as there are custom servers that have retained some of the more popular levels. It goes to show the love the community has for the game.

V. Closing

LittleBigPlanet's slogan of “Play, Create, Share” was superbly executed on all fronts – falling short in even one of these areas would’ve been enough to taint the whole experience: without good gameplay, it wouldn’t be worth making levels, without good creation tools, it wouldn’t be worth sharing levels, without good sharing and curation tools, it wouldn’t be worth keeping a vested interest in playing the game and engaging with the community. But it went even beyond that, with a great art-style that complemented the game's vision of creation, excellent and all-encompassing multiplayer, and active engagement from Media Molecule with the community, through Mm Picks and DLC. It really seems like the type of game that would’ve taken a second game to get right, but instead they got the first game right and made an even more incredible sequel. It brought something uniquely its own to the PS3 in 2008 and earned its place as a flagship PlayStation series.

**Pardon for the grammar mistakes, im not a native english speaker.
I'll explain why.
​
I first heard about this SakiSanobashi thing on 2021 during the pandemic. At first it was very interesting thing. I watched tons of anime/hentai on the past 15 years after all. On my early teens i was quite hyped when me and my classmates discovered deep web stuff, ya know, boys trying to be "the strong one" like "i watched guro on deepweb bro", trully stupid, but was a thing back then. But well, even myself that watched hundreds of old hentai, guro included, back on 2009-2011, i never saw anything similar to the described on SakiSanobashi. The lack of information on the original post is disapointing, but theres somethings that i can tell. If the original post its a fake, it is what it is, you cant trust everything you find on internet lol, but if it trully exist:
First of all, "Go for a Punch" its probably a fansub slogan. It was uncommon for fansubs to translate hentai/anime names 14 years ago, normally they put the sub name or a sub slogan on the place.
​
Certanly it was Doujin, if it was a mainstream anime, early 90s animes are pretty known, doujinshi for early 90s on the other hand, are almost everything lost. VHS thing, ya know.
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It was probably one site downloadable only. If you are like myself and watched tons of wreid stuff back then, you should known that most of sites at the time just copy each other. So if it was on any "big" hentai/guro site, it should be on a few more.
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A weak ago, one guy posted about this and reforced my theory, thats why i'm writing it.
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Even if Saki Sonabashi anime is real, this is certainly not the true anime name, it was probably a early 90s minor production, a doujin group, thats probably why it lacked music, opening and credits. And it means it was probably a VHS that make few sells. Fansubs don't usually translate gore hentai, that means it was a commissioned sub, so it'll hard to find even if we knew who translated it.
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So, at this point i dont think anyone of us have the means to do any further search.

I was wondering if we could compile all the marketing slogans in one place: I have entered in the info as i can remember and find
Season / Playoff?
1989-90 -
1990-91 - The Magic Jams!
1991-92 - Season of shooting stars
1992-93 -
1993-94 - Feel The Magic / It’s Time To Play
1994-95 - Are you ready for This / Why not us, why not now
1995-96 - The Magic Continues...
1996-97 - New Season, New Reason to Believe
1997-98 - One Team, One Dream
1998-99 - A Magical Decade
1999-00 - Heart and Hustle
2000-01 - Heart and Hustle
2001-02 - Believe
2002-03 -
2003-04 - Total Team Effort
2004-05 - Total Team Effort
2005-06 - Commitment / Code Blue
2006-07 - Commitment / Code Blue
2007-08 - The Time is Now / Blue and White Ignite?
2008-09 - Be Magic / Blue and White Ignite?
2009-10 - Be Magic / Blue and White Ignite?
2010-11 - Be Magic / Blue and White Ignite?
2011-12 - Be Magic / Blue and White Ignite?
2012-13 - We Will
2013-14 - We Will
2014-15 - PURE MAGIC
2015-16 - PURE MAGIC
2016-17 - PURE MAGIC
2017-18 - PURE MAGIC / Blue and White Ignite?
2018-19 - PURE MAGIC
2019-20 - Magic Above All
2020-21 - Magic Together
2021-22 - Magic Together
2022-23 - Magic Together
2023-24 - Kingdom on the Rise / F*** Eddie House? / Everybody In

Human rights: Food for an intolerable thought ‘HR and poverty’
HRR 719
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about why only tinkering with the root causes of poverty and its resultant HR violations leads us to dead-end streets. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducitraduire los/les Readers; usautiliser deepl.com
--“If you have no choice, you get screwed”.
Why do so many people live in poverty? Well, because so many rich people benefit from it

1. Employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunities for themselves. For example, the rental market is just utterly brutal, especially for the poorest. (Landlords in poor neighborhoods make more than landlords in affluent neighborhoods). And then, we have all these anti-poverty programs that only accommodate poverty without really disrupting it; they are not even remotely tackling poverty at its real roots.* Let’s face it: A lot of us benefit from poverty; we consume the cheap goods and services that (an often exploited) working class produces for us. (Matthew Desmond) [I could rest my case here, but data are even more overwhelming].

*: In the midst of the globalization process, the fight against poverty is an exercise in futility: The root of the problem is not poverty, but affluence. (Theo Ruyter)
The world could have several more dollar billionaires in less than a decade, but it would take more than 200 years to eradicate poverty (Oxfam International).

1. The current world economic system is a gigantic machine for taking wealth from below and moving it up the social pyramid in the most brutal class warfare on record --and the owners' side is mercilessly beating the workers (and destitute migrants). Reality incontrovertibly refutes the neoliberal myth that economic growth automatically translates into reductions in poverty and, therefore, it is enough to let market forces work to solve all the world's ills. The reality is that the benevolent hand of the free market is a fiction fed by the privileged and their mouthpieces --the transnational media-- in order to keep the immense majorities asleep, impoverished and precarious, in order to finance the plutocracy. Enrichment is not, as orthodox economists maintain, the result of innovation and process optimization, but of plundering. (Isabella Arria) Swallow that and you may become a human rights (HR) advocate (or activist?).

For centuries, capitalism has given a minority the profits while leaving millions of others destitute.

1. The moralistic idea that we are all partly to blame for this ignores the systemic causes of poverty. Yes, we benefit from poverty primarily through the labor exploitation that gives rise to cheaper consumer goods. There are many ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. Take, for example, tax breaks and tax evasion…**

**: Keep in mind that illicit financial flows do not just include criminal elements, but also include the unethical or immoral elements where the well-to-do use loopholes in tax systems.

1. There is thus a lack of attention to the nature of capitalism and its inherent contradictions in the genesis and perpetuation of poverty with its myriad HR violations. This implies that there are still hundreds of thousands among us that are anti-poverty and yet pro-capitalism while, if we accept the preceding sentence, the real matter is to push for a movement of anti-capitalists instead of the quite more frequent poverty abolitionists.
   
2. Mind you, the welfare state has never been about eradicating poverty. Rather, its primary function was and is to create the social conditions necessary for capital accumulation to proceed uninterrupted. To create a system whose primary goal is mass poverty eradication simply necessitates the overthrow of the capitalist state --hence the need to be anti-capitalist in order to be meaningfully anti-poverty. (Clark Randall)
   

Misery, when endowed with an idea, is a most powerful revolutionary force. (Victor Hugo)
--It is true that those rendered poor have little money, but there are so many poor who ought not wait forever for the definition of what the rich impose as a decent wage. (Louis Casado) [Remember the slogan: Divided we beg, united we demand].

1. Solutions will finally come only when claim holders in the world wake up, unite and move forward despite the foot-dragging pseudo-solutions implemented by rich duty bearers and/or their defenders. Particularly claim holders in the South ought to proactively move forward with or without the ‘progressives’ in the countries in the North.***

***: “Even the US plutocrats will realize that it is better to pay the modest price of fighting poverty and climate change than to face a world that rejects their greed and belligerency”. (Jeffrey Sachs)
Bottom line: Necessary but not sufficient, economists must return to serving society
7. The discipline has become detached from its own basis, which is the study of human welfare. But the 'great economic minds' (the libertarian monetarists) of our time have silenced those who think differently. There is a firm libertarian belief that inequality is not an appropriate field of study for economists, so politicians and right-wing economists crunch the numbers so they can claim that the war on poverty is being won.

1. But consider: The way poverty is measured means that the war on poverty can never be won by sending money to the poor. Put another way, the war on poverty has become a war on the poor. Our governments often do not protect ordinary people, but instead help the predatory rich impoverish ordinary people. The political system responds more to the needs of those who finance it than to those of the majority of its constituents, so we continue with an economy organized for a minority to take advantage of the majority. Be careful: we run terrible risks! (Nobel laureate Angus Deaton) Food not for thought, but for action.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at [schuftan@gmail.com](mailto:schuftan@gmail.com)
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
--A couple reminders: In 1971, the first UNCTAD list of ‘Least Developed Countries’ counted 25 extremely poor countries. In 1991, there were 52 already, and until now, only 6 countries ‘graduated’ and 46 are still on the list. In other words, there are, today, more very poor countries than fifty years ago. And as for their debt service, it more than tripled since 2011 and absorbs 5 to 13% of the value of their exports. Further, as regards poverty reduction, let us not forget that the world’s poverty reduction, since 1981, is mainly the result of China’s efforts!). The bleak outlook for the poorest countries could make us forget that some countries did do well these past decades. The foremost example is obviously China, but also Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico and some others.
--Oxfam states that, since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth --nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and fund a global plan to end hunger. Lessons learned from the past are several: a) development in terms of HR remains a worthy goal (never forget that development necessarily comes from within and can never be brought from the outside); b) interdependence is a primary condition for peace and requires a well-functioning multilateral system (the international institutional order should be examined and transformed from this perspective); c) neocolonialism has been very damaging (‘the West’ is responsible for this damage); d) people continue to be subdued and exploited; and e) growing South-South cooperation is very positive. (Francine Mestrum)
--Let me finish with five short quotable quotes I love:
· The poor themselves sometimes fall into the deception of a world that is not built for them. (Pope Francis)
· God said: We must share; the rich shall have the food, the poor shall have the appetite. (Coluche)
· There is a social class that thinks more about money than the rich: the poor! (Oscar Wilde)
· ‘Lost cities’, ‘callampas’, ‘villas miseria’, ‘favelas’ are all the same; either you live there, or you are one of those guilty of their existence. (Carlos Fuentes, ‘Adam in Eden’) …and those who adapted to living there, survived; but many were not able-to and died. (Primo Levi)

Rolling Stone - Top 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century (part 3)
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Part 3 of the Top 300 of Argentine rock songs of the 21st century that the Rolling Stone magazine published in March 2023.
It became the longest Argentine rock ranking of all which have been made so far, dethroning the Top 125 by Listas 20 Minutos, from 2012.
It includes songs spanning the period of the 21st century up to the year before the ranking was published, that is, from 2000 to 2022.
It was intended as a sequel, expanded and updated, to the Top 50 of Argentine rock songs of the 2000s decade, which the magazine had published in 2010.
Links of the ranking: * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-101-300/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-81-100/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-61-80/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-41-60/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-21-40/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi/
In the words of the ranking's organizers:
"The 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century
To celebrate no less than its 300th edition, Rolling Stone Argentina presents this list with the best of the local production of the last years. A journey through time, genres, popular artists and underground gems
FOR ARGENTINE ROCK, just like for most of the cultural, social, political and economic strata of our country, 2001 was a bomb that scattered splinters aimlessly and everywhere. A most mobilizing start of the century. In that context it was the release of Jessico, the album which that bunch of freaks called Babasónicos had been hoping to compose for years, which would soon lead them to a state of (in)famous popularity, and which would indicate an aesthetic and a sound for the future. On the Internet, the exchange of music files (songs) was already a reality, but although there were still no platforms where you could listen to any song you craved for a modest monthly price, Steve Jobs presented in October of that year the first iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket”. A month after that launch in Cupertino, California, but 10,300 kilometers away, in Buenos Aires, the sky fell on Patricio Rey's head and splitted the paths of the duo Solari-Beilinson. We didn't know it yet, but Los Redondos would remain forever on that side, that of the 20th century.
From that starting point until this third decade, which began with urban music boasting loudly that “whether you like it or not, we are the new rock and roll, kid”, there is an abyss. In between, rock witnessed the fall of heavyweights from the nineties (the breakups of Los Piojos and Caballeros de la Quema, and the dismemberments of groups such as La Bersuit, Ratones Paranoicos and Los Pericos, among others), and the loss of representatives of the genre (Luis Alberto Spinetta, Pappo, Gustavo Cerati, Pil Trafa, Rosario Bléfari, Palo Pandolfo); the tragedy of Cromañón, the closure of venues for live shows and the subsequent wave of unplugged singer-songwriters; the return of the most song-driven Andrés Calamaro and the beginnings of solo careers of all-terrain singers (Andrés Ciro Martínez, Vicentico, Cordera); the rise of the La Plata indie scene with Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado as emblem; the crossover with rap and trap, which is here to stay; and the visibilizing – after a long struggle – of a large number of women leading their own musical projects, with Marilina Bertoldi and her Telecaster in hand as an icon of a new generation. And more, much more.
But, beyond the ups and downs of a country always on the brink of falling and a scene in constant boiling, what never lacked in these lands were great songs. That's why it is worth arranging this update of the list that ROLLING STONE produced in 2010, together with the MTV video network, with the “50 best Argentine rock songs from the first decade of the 2000s”. On the pretext of celebrating the 300th issue of ROLLING STONE in Argentina, this time we add the songs which were selected as the best of each year by the different editorial teams that have worked on the magazine during this time, plus the vote of the journalists who today make up the squad of critics, writers and editors.
The result is a resounding playlist that travels through time and subgenres, that delves into both the work of popular artists and the small hidden gems of the underground scene. Here are songs which are beautiful, complex, innovative; songs that said what needed to be said at the right time; which were played that night and a thousand nights more; with immortal verses, those that are printed on t-shirts and walls and in anonymous dedications. There are stories which are real, raw and reportorial. There's pure fiction and brilliant fantasy. Here are 300 songs that amount to 300 reasons to celebrate the Argentine rock of this century".
List of songs:
​ * 100 - Carca - Luz De Blues - 2013 * 99 - Conociendo Rusia - Cabildo Y Juramento - 2019 * 98 - Leo García - Morrisey - 2001 * 97 - Miranda! - Yo Te Diré - 2004 * 96 - Richard Coleman - Incandescente - 2013 * 95 - Eruca Sativa - Carapazón - 2019 * 94 - Ciro Y Los Persas - Mírenla - 2012 * 93 - Moura Sergi ft. Vicentico - Perdón - 2012 * 92 - Los Reyes Del Falsete ft. Litto Nebbia - Los Niños - 2012 * 91 - Indio Solari - Pabellón Séptimo (Relato De Horacio) - 2004
​ * 90 - Pablo Dacal - El Esclavo Feliz - 2019 * 89 - Duki ft. Bizarrap - Malbec - 2021 * 88 - Poncho ft. Luis Alberto Spinetta - Tantra Sky - 2009 * 87 - Onda Vaga ft. Fito Páez - Gilda - 2008 * 86 - Bajofondo ft. Gustavo Cerati - El Mareo - 2007 * 85 - Barbi Recanati - Que No - 2019 * 84 - El Siempreterno - Full Coma - 2012 * 83 - Charly García - Influencia - 2002 * 82 - Prietto Viaja Al Cosmos Con Mariano - Av. Corrientes - 2007 * 81 - Victoria Mil - G-13 - 2003
​ * 80 - Intoxicados ft. Andrés Calamaro - Fuego - 2005 * 79 - Banda De Turistas - Todo Mío El Otoño - 2008 * 78 - Me Darás Mil Hijos ft. Hilda Lizarazu, Toto Rotblat - Sueños De Autostop - 2004 * 77 - Sol Pereyra - Nadie Te Preguntó - 2014 * 76 - Kevin Johansen + The Nada - Down With My Baby - 2002 * 75 - La Renga - En Bicicleta - 2020 * 74 - 107 Faunos - Jazmín Chino - 2014 * 73 - Guasones - Reyes De La Noche - 2005 * 72 - normA - Freezer - 2012 * 71 - Las Pelotas - Personalmente - 2009
​ * 70 - Daniel Melero - Tu Vida Empieza Hoy - 2001 * 69 - Shaman Y Los Hombres En Llamas - La Niebla - 2011 * 68 - Emmanuel Horvilleur - Radios - 2007 * 67 - Él Mató A Un Policía Motorizado - El Tesoro - 2017 * 66 - Trueno ft. Wos - Sangría - 2020 * 65 - Indio Solari - Nike Es La Cultura - 2004 * 64 - Valle De Muñecas - Días De Suerte - 2005 * 63 - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs - Nosotros Egoístas - 2008 * 62 - Doris - Así - 2004 * 61 - Lisandro Aristimuño ft. Ricardo Mollo - Un Dólar, Un Reloj Y Una Frase Sin Sentido - 2012
​ * 60 - Mimi Maura - Yo No Lloro Más - 2001 * 59 - Luis Alberto Spinetta - Iris - 2015 * 58 - Bestia Bebé - Lo Quiero Mucho A Ese Muchacho - 2013 * 57 - Acorazado Potemkin ft. Flopa Lestani - La Mitad - 2011 * 56 - Ciro Y Los Persas - Antes Y Después - 2010 * 55 - Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas - Águila Amarilla - 2012 * 54 - Fito Páez ft. Fabiana Cantilo - Tu Vida Mi Vida - 2017 * 53 - Mi Amigo Invencible - Máquina Del Tiempo - 2015 * 52 - Babasónicos - Los Calientes - 2001 * 51 - Loquero - Era Un Día Perfecto - 2001
​ * 50 - Las Ligas Menores - A 1.200 Km - 2014 * 49 - Tan Biónica - La Melodía De Dios - 2013 * 48 - Gustavo Cerati - La Excepción - 2006 * 47 - Onda Vaga ft. Pablo Dacal - Mambeado - 2008 * 46 - Los Cafres - Si El Amor Se Cae - 2004 * 45 - Vicentico - Solo Un Momento - 2010 * 44 - Árbol - Pequeños Sueños - 2004 * 43 - Callejeros - Una Nueva Noche Fría - 2003 * 42 - Boom Boom Kid - I Do - 2000 * 41 - Palo Pandolfo - Oficio Del Cantor - 2008
​ * 40 - Skay Beilinson - Oda A La Sin Nombre - 2002 * 39 - Andrés Calamaro - Carnaval De Brasil - 2007 * 38 - La Mancha De Rolando - Arde La Ciudad - 2004 * 37 - Carajo - Sacate La Mierda - 2002 * 36 - Charly García - Asesíname - 2003 * 35 - Kapanga - Fumar - 2002 * 34 - Fidel Nadal - International Love - 2008 * 33 - Rosario Bléfari - Estaciones - 2004 * 32 - Los Tipitos - Campanas En La Noche - 2004 * 31 - Divididos - Casitas Inundadas, A Votar - 2002
​ * 30 - Almafuerte - Toro Y Pampa - 2006 * 29 - Los Espíritus - La Crecida - 2015 * 28 - Nicki Nicole - Wapo Traketero - 2019 * 27 - Gabo Ferro - El Amigo De Mi Padre - 2005 * 26 - Daniel Melingo - Corazón & Hueso - 2011 * 25 - Flopa Manza Minimal - Debajo Del Álbum Blanco - 2003 * 24 - Massacre - Tanto Amor - 2011 * 23 - Dillom - Opa - 2021 * 22 - Pez - Desde El Viento En La Montaña Hasta La Espuma Del Mar - 2002 * 21 - Attaque 77 - Arrancacorazones - 2003
​ * 20 - León Gieco ft. Pibes Chorros - El Ángel De La Bicicleta - 2005 * 19 - Estelares ft. Jorge Serrano - Ella Dijo - 2006 * 18 - Bersuit Vergarabat - La Soledad - 2004 * 17 - Miranda! - Don - 2004 * 16 - Las Pelotas - Será - 2003 * 15 - Los Piojos - Pacífico - 2007 * 14 - Turf - Pasos Al Costado - 2004 * 13 - Catupecu Machu - Magia Veneno - 2004 * 12 - Juana Molina - Un Día - 2008 * 11 - Pappo - Juntos A La Par - 2003
​ * 10 - La Renga - La Razón Que Te Demora - 2003 * 9 - Marilina Bertoldi - Fumar De Día - 2018 * 8 - Intoxicados - Una Vela - 2003 * 7 - Los Auténticos Decadentes - Un Osito De Peluche De Taiwán - 2003 * 6 - Wos - Canguro - 2019 * 5 - Indio Solari - Y Mientras Tanto El Sol Se Muere… - 2007 * 4 - Él Mató A Un Policía Motorizado - Mi Próximo Movimiento - 2008 * 3 - Gustavo Cerati - Cactus - 2009 * 2 - Andrés Calamaro - Estadio Azteca - 2004 * 1 - Babasónicos - La Pregunta - 2018
Series of videos published by MusicaArgentina about Argentine rock rankings made by third parties — 5th video of the series in 2024, and 17th of the whole series in general.
MusicaArgentina — 2024

Hi ShopifyeCommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter. Let's dive in... .

1. STAT OF THE WEEK: Over the last 4 years, a store that installs from the Shopify App Store has a 54% chance of being closed within 12 months. This number has been rising into the 60% range last year and continues to climb. — According to Stuart Chaney, CEO of Rivo .
2. Mercari, the Japanese marketplace that allows users to buy and sell new and used items, made some big changes to their fee structure in an attempt to attract more sellers to its platform and better compete with secondhand competitors like Poshmark, Depop, and ThredUp. The result: they may be turning off buyers and sellers alike. Mercari is eliminating the traditional seller fee on items sold, which used to be 10% plus a 2.90% + $0.50 payment processing fee, and instead passing those fees onto buyers with a new “service fee” and “payment processing fee” that are added to the customer's total at checkout. They also launched a new returns policy and began charging for direct deposits to transfer funds to your checking account (which they've since back pedaled on). .
3. The average US household now spends 19% more than they did in 2019 to survive, according to a report published from Doxo, a payment platform for household bills. The report found that US households now spend $25,513 a year, which is 34% of the median household income, on the 10 most common bills which include mortgage, rent, utilities, auto loans, auto insurance, mobile phones, health insurance, life insurance, security, and home Internet access. This number is up 4% from a year ago and 19% since 2019, however median US household income was up just 0.2% in the past year and 14% since 2019. .
4. Walmart, Amazon, Whole Foods, Kroger, Nestle, and over a dozen other retailers are encouraging Congress to pass legislation that would require two food labels: “best if used by” and “use by.” Currently there are nearly 60 types of date labels that appear on food and drinks in US grocery stores, and no federal regulation of date labels. Food expiration dates differ from state to state or are often left up to the manufacturer's discretion — which can cause a lot of confusion for customers and is estimated to be responsible for about 7% of the 78M tons of food wasted across the country each year. To solve this problem of food waste, about three dozen members of Congress have sponsored legislation known as the Food Date Labeling Act of 2023, which would require manufacturers to only use the “best if used by” and “use by” labels, thus standardizing how consumers gauge whether their groceries are suitable for consumption. .
5. Overstock.com is back! Last July, Overstock.com bought the Bed Bath & Beyond brand from bankruptcy for $21.5M and adopted the name. Within a week, the company had relaunched the Bed Bath & Beyond domain in Canada, followed by a refreshed website in the U.S. a few weeks later. It then started forwarding the Overstock website to BB&B's website. Seven months later, the company said it "deeply regrets" the decision and announced that Overstock will be returning to its old name and running the two websites independently. .
6. Amazon has been fined $8M by Poland for its use of dark patterns that injected a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and misled shoppers about product availability and delivery dates. Poland says that Amazon misled users into believing that placing an order or receiving an order confirmation was tantamount to a sales contract, however in reality, the contract only actually goes into effect when Amazon fulfills the order. Amazon also displayed countdown timers to users which implied that they would receive an order on a certain date if they placed it within a certain time frame. This placed pressure on the consumer to buy as soon as possible, however, Amazon would often fail to meet those shipping deadlines after presenting them as a guarantee. .
7. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by the same parent company ByteDance, launched a standalone app for its booming e-commerce business. The new app, called Douyin Mall, was launched last week for Android users in mainland China with the slogan, “Choose great bargains with little effort.” There is currently no iOS version yet. Online shopping via Douyin started in 2019 as a click-and-buy function within the short video app, similar to how TikTok Shop has launched in the US. ByteDance decided to also make an independent app to compete head-to-head with Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, which are more traditional shopping apps, as opposed to exclusively having shopping integrated within videos. .
8. Google began rolling out a feature that gives shoppers more personalized shopping results. Users can now rate different products in order to get style recommendations when shopping for apparel, shoes and accessories. For example, when users search for certain clothing, shoes, or accessories like “straw tote bags” or “men's polo shirts”, they'll be presented with a section labeled “style recommendations.” From there, they can rate options with a thumbs up or thumbs down, or a swipe right or left, and instantly see personalized results. It will then remember your preferences, so if you ever search for men’s polo shirts again, you will see style recommendations based on what you liked in the past — which is perfect because our tastes as consumers never change. .
9. Mastercard and Visa reached a multi-billion dollar settlement that aims to end 20 years of antitrust litigation around swipe fees and restrictions placed on merchants. The antitrust settlement is one of the largest in U.S. history, and if it receives court approval would resolve most claims in nationwide litigation that began in 2005. Under the settlement, swipe rates will be reduced by at least four basis points for three years, and ensure an average rate that is seven basis points below the current average for five years and merchants will now be able to raise their prices or charge fees based on the kind of card. For example, buying groceries with a higher-fee card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve could become more expensive than paying with a lower-end one. .
10. A report by The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that consumers have increasingly been the targets of fraudulent account openings and purchases, particularly with installment lenders like BNPL, which represented 65% of all reports in the personal lending segment. Complaints ranged from being charged interest and/or fees that the borrowers said that they did not expect to not receiving ordered items and still having to pay back the loan. .
11. Estée Lauder launched its cosmetic brand Clinique on the Amazon Premium Beauty store last week, making Clinique its first brand to sell its products on Amazon, but not its last brand, according to the company. Amazon Premium Beauty store is a category on the site that caters to big brands and professional beauty products that are generally sold in luxury retail stores. .
12. Colin Huang, founder of PDD Holdings which owns Pinduoduo and Temu, surpassed Tencent and ByteDance founders as China's richest tech billionaire after a surge in the value of PDD's US-listed shares. The 44-year-old grew his wealth by 71% to $53.4B from a year earlier, according to the annual Hurun Global Rich List 2024 released last week. China remains the country with the most billionaires globally, but the pool has shrunk by 155 to 814 over the past 12 months. .
13. McAfee warned users about five malicious Chrome extensions, currently installed on over 1.4M devices, that are designed to track users' browsing activity and inject code into e-commerce platforms. The extensions can modify cookies on e-commerce websites so that their creator receives affiliate payments for the purchased items, without the victim's knowledge. .
14. Remember Facebook Watch? Court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim that “Watch” was kneecapped in 2018 to protect Facebook's advertising relationship with Netflix. From 2011 to 2019, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privilege analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals, which was incentive enough for Facebook to retreat from its own streaming aspirations. .
15. Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said during an appearance on CNBC that human connection will help the pharmacy compete with Amazon's healthcare aspirations. The CEO claims that Walgreens is in a strong position compared to Amazon because of its 8,600 locations, which give customers the ability to discuss medications and health concerns in-person. Wait until he finds out that consumers don't really care about talking about their intimate health concerns in person, with a line of other patients impatiently waiting behind them! .
16. Kroger is closing three e-commerce facilities — one in South Florida and two others in Texas. The grocer says that despite its best efforts in the regions, the facilities did not meet its benchmarks for success. .
17. Four of the largest school boards in Ontario are suing TikTok, Meta, and SnapChat for allegedly disrupting student learning. The lawsuit claims that the social media platforms are “designed for compulsive use, have rewired the way children think, behave, and learn” and that teachers have been left to manage the fallout. Rachel Chernos, a trustee for the Toronto District School Board, said, “These companies have knowingly created programs that are addictive that are aimed and marketed at young people and it is causing significant harm and we just can't stand by any longer and not speak up about it.” .
18. Robinhood launched a new Gold Card that offers the ability to invest cash back perks. The card has no annual or foreign transaction fees, other than the cost of being a Gold member for $5/month or $50/year, which offers other benefits like access to a 5% HYSA. Gold Card users can earn 3% cash back on all categories and 5% cash back when booking travel on Robinhood's new travel portal. (Robinhood has a travel portal now?) The card also allows users to create and delete virtual cards for one-time purchases. .
19. Amazon will now let you sign up for its palm recognition service from your phone via its new Amazon One app, which can take a photo of your palm and set up your account. The company says that your palm and vein images are “immediately encrypted” and sent to a “highly secure zone” in the AWS Cloud that’s specifically built for Amazon One. Previously, users were required to visit physical locations to enroll in the service. .
20. Data from Fakespot shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on Amazon over the past three years, as well as an increase in the number of negative or unreliable reviews for this product category. Fakespot founder Saoud Khalifah says bug zappers are just one example of the convergence of recent trends in e-commerce, where merchants seek to sell low-cost products with high margins, and generative AI tools make it easier for sellers to churn out questionable marketing copy and reviews. .
21. ShopeeFood in Vietnam changed its non-compete policy prohibiting workers from signing up with rival delivery apps after Rest of World reported on the issue. Delivery drivers were previously having to buy two phones so that they could log on to a rival app and work both simultaneously, in fear that Shopee would detect a rival app on their primary phone, which Shopee had the technical capabilities to do. .
22. Amazon plans to spend almost $150B in the coming 15 years on data centers to give its cloud division firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for AI applications and other digital services. Amazon currently holds about twice the market share of its closest competitor, Microsoft, in the cloud services market, and aims to keep that position. .
23. A pregnant Nigerian woman was arrested and is facing imprisonment for allegedly breaching the country's cybercrime laws after writing a negative review for a can of tomato puree, which she claimed tasted too sugary. The manufacturer, Erisco Foods, accused her of making a “malicious allegation” that damaged its business. .
24. Amazon is launching same-day delivery of prescription medications in New York City and Los Angeles, with plans to expand the offer to more than a dozen cities by the end of the year. The prescriptions are offered via Amazon's online pharmacy service, which launched in 2020 and was born out of the company's 2018 acquisition of PillPack. To speed up deliveries, Amazon said it's using new, smaller facilities, stocked with the most common prescription medications for acute conditions. .
25. Advertisers are suing Meta for damages exceeding $7B, accusing it of inflating its social platforms' Potential Reach metric by up to 400%. They claim that the metric included bots and other fake accounts, rather than individual users, leading to artificially high premiums for ad placements. The case, which was originally filed in 2018, encompasses millions of advertisers, and will either proceed to trial or potentially be resolved through a settlement. .
26. Speaking of ads transparency, Amazon will now have to provide information about ads running on its platform in a publicly accessible online archive, following a decision by the European Union's highest court. Other tech giants have complied with the DSA requirement, but Amazon filed a legal challenge to its designation last year and was granted a temporary suspension on the ad library element, until now. .
27. In other news of Amazon facing the music, The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that some delivery drivers for Amazon Flex are now to be regarded as employees, not independent contractors, which makes them part of the state's unemployment insurance system and entitled to jobless pay if they are laid off. The decision means that Amazon Logistics will likely be hit with a tax bill of more than $200k. Other states are also looking into Amazon's classification of drivers. .
28. ByteDance shut down LetsChat, its WhatsApp clone that it launched in Africa in 2021, which had over 7M downloads across the continent. The company finally conceded that its app had little chance of success against WhatsApp, despite several years of investing in local promotion. .
29. Instacart is launching a new API program called Instacart Developer Platform, which will enable third-party players to launch apps that integrate with its grocery shopping platform. Through the program, developers will gain access to Instacart's product selection and real-time store data, enabling them to offer features like same-day delivery and personalized meal planning. The first round of partnerships will include an integration with New York Times Cooking to make recipes shoppable, a WeightWatchers integration to purchase recommended foods, and an integration with GE Appliances to make products such as ovens offer shopping capabilities from their touchscreens. .
30. Amazon reported that it invested $1.2B into fighting counterfeits last year and had over 15,000 employees dedicated to preventing abuse of its platform. The company also claimed that its Counterfeit Crimes Unit took action against more than 21,000 bad actors since 2020 by either reporting them to law enforcement or suing them. .
31. Tidbyt, which manufactures a retro-style smart display that displays the time, weather, and other notifications from your phone, claims that Meta lost $40k of its advertising dollars and suspended their advertising account until they wire them $40k more. The retailer says that after switching to credit card payments for the first time last month and having their card successfully charged for $40k, Meta lost the money and has no record that the transaction occurred, even though Tidbyt can provide proof from their bank that they were charged. Meta's customer service has since made it impossible to get help over the matter. .
32. Last year, investors funded 471 e-commerce deals valued at $11.7B, down 30.4% YoY and close to 2018's $10.5B total. The report by Pitchbook noted, “The COVID-19 lockdown offered the perfect storm of low interest rates and a bevy of consumers stuck inside with no option other than to shop online, but these conditions are now entirely behind the e-commerce vertical. Consequently, the sector is unlikely to return to the levels of funding seen in 2020 to 2022 for some time.” .
33. A data breach was discovered on Shopify plugins developed by Saara, which leaked data from over 1,800 Shopify stores and held data from more than 7.6M individual orders, including sensitive customer data. The data stayed up for grabs for eight months and included customer names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, order info, IP addresses, and partial payment information. .
34. Plus 10 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Uzum, an e-commerce app that offers online shopping, fintech, and food deliveries to customers in Uzbekistan, raising $114M in a Series A round, making it the country's first unicorn with a valuation of $1.2B.
    I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
    

For more details on each story and sources, see the full edition: https://www.shopifreaks.com/mercaris-controversial-fees-expiration-dates-and-overstocks-comeback/
What else is new in e-commerce? Share stories of interesting in the comments below (including in your own business) or on shopifreaks.
-PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter

Hi ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry pretty closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition. Let's dive in... .

1. STAT OF THE WEEK: Over the last 4 years, a store that installs from the Shopify App Store has a 54% chance of being closed within 12 months. This number has been rising into the 60% range last year and continues to climb. — According to Stuart Chaney, CEO of Rivo .
2. Mercari, the Japanese marketplace that allows users to buy and sell new and used items, made some big changes to their fee structure in an attempt to attract more sellers to its platform and better compete with secondhand competitors like Poshmark, Depop, and ThredUp. The result: they may be turning off buyers and sellers alike. Mercari is eliminating the traditional seller fee on items sold, which used to be 10% plus a 2.90% + $0.50 payment processing fee, and instead passing those fees onto buyers with a new “service fee” and “payment processing fee” that are added to the customer's total at checkout. They also launched a new returns policy and began charging for direct deposits to transfer funds to your checking account (which they've since back pedaled on). .
3. The average US household now spends 19% more than they did in 2019 to survive, according to a report published from Doxo, a payment platform for household bills. The report found that US households now spend $25,513 a year, which is 34% of the median household income, on the 10 most common bills which include mortgage, rent, utilities, auto loans, auto insurance, mobile phones, health insurance, life insurance, security, and home Internet access. This number is up 4% from a year ago and 19% since 2019, however median US household income was up just 0.2% in the past year and 14% since 2019. .
4. Walmart, Amazon, Whole Foods, Kroger, Nestle, and over a dozen other retailers are encouraging Congress to pass legislation that would require two food labels: “best if used by” and “use by.” Currently there are nearly 60 types of date labels that appear on food and drinks in US grocery stores, and no federal regulation of date labels. Food expiration dates differ from state to state or are often left up to the manufacturer's discretion — which can cause a lot of confusion for customers and is estimated to be responsible for about 7% of the 78M tons of food wasted across the country each year. To solve this problem of food waste, about three dozen members of Congress have sponsored legislation known as the Food Date Labeling Act of 2023, which would require manufacturers to only use the “best if used by” and “use by” labels, thus standardizing how consumers gauge whether their groceries are suitable for consumption. .
5. Overstock.com is back! Last July, Overstock.com bought the Bed Bath & Beyond brand from bankruptcy for $21.5M and adopted the name. Within a week, the company had relaunched the Bed Bath & Beyond domain in Canada, followed by a refreshed website in the U.S. a few weeks later. It then started forwarding the Overstock website to BB&B's website. Seven months later, the company said it "deeply regrets" the decision and announced that Overstock will be returning to its old name and running the two websites independently. .
6. Amazon has been fined $8M by Poland for its use of dark patterns that injected a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and misled shoppers about product availability and delivery dates. Poland says that Amazon misled users into believing that placing an order or receiving an order confirmation was tantamount to a sales contract, however in reality, the contract only actually goes into effect when Amazon fulfills the order. Amazon also displayed countdown timers to users which implied that they would receive an order on a certain date if they placed it within a certain time frame. This placed pressure on the consumer to buy as soon as possible, however, Amazon would often fail to meet those shipping deadlines after presenting them as a guarantee. .
7. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by the same parent company ByteDance, launched a standalone app for its booming e-commerce business. The new app, called Douyin Mall, was launched last week for Android users in mainland China with the slogan, “Choose great bargains with little effort.” There is currently no iOS version yet. Online shopping via Douyin started in 2019 as a click-and-buy function within the short video app, similar to how TikTok Shop has launched in the US. ByteDance decided to also make an independent app to compete head-to-head with Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, which are more traditional shopping apps, as opposed to exclusively having shopping integrated within videos. .
8. Google began rolling out a feature that gives shoppers more personalized shopping results. Users can now rate different products in order to get style recommendations when shopping for apparel, shoes and accessories. For example, when users search for certain clothing, shoes, or accessories like “straw tote bags” or “men's polo shirts”, they'll be presented with a section labeled “style recommendations.” From there, they can rate options with a thumbs up or thumbs down, or a swipe right or left, and instantly see personalized results. It will then remember your preferences, so if you ever search for men’s polo shirts again, you will see style recommendations based on what you liked in the past — which is perfect because our tastes as consumers never change. .
9. Mastercard and Visa reached a multi-billion dollar settlement that aims to end 20 years of antitrust litigation around swipe fees and restrictions placed on merchants. The antitrust settlement is one of the largest in U.S. history, and if it receives court approval would resolve most claims in nationwide litigation that began in 2005. Under the settlement, swipe rates will be reduced by at least four basis points for three years, and ensure an average rate that is seven basis points below the current average for five years and merchants will now be able to raise their prices or charge fees based on the kind of card. For example, buying groceries with a higher-fee card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve could become more expensive than paying with a lower-end one. .
10. A report by The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that consumers have increasingly been the targets of fraudulent account openings and purchases, particularly with installment lenders like BNPL, which represented 65% of all reports in the personal lending segment. Complaints ranged from being charged interest and/or fees that the borrowers said that they did not expect to not receiving ordered items and still having to pay back the loan. .
11. Estée Lauder launched its cosmetic brand Clinique on the Amazon Premium Beauty store last week, making Clinique its first brand to sell its products on Amazon, but not its last brand, according to the company. Amazon Premium Beauty store is a category on the site that caters to big brands and professional beauty products that are generally sold in luxury retail stores. .
12. Colin Huang, founder of PDD Holdings which owns Pinduoduo and Temu, surpassed Tencent and ByteDance founders as China's richest tech billionaire after a surge in the value of PDD's US-listed shares. The 44-year-old grew his wealth by 71% to $53.4B from a year earlier, according to the annual Hurun Global Rich List 2024 released last week. China remains the country with the most billionaires globally, but the pool has shrunk by 155 to 814 over the past 12 months. .
13. McAfee warned users about five malicious Chrome extensions, currently installed on over 1.4M devices, that are designed to track users' browsing activity and inject code into e-commerce platforms. The extensions can modify cookies on e-commerce websites so that their creator receives affiliate payments for the purchased items, without the victim's knowledge. .
14. Remember Facebook Watch? Court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim that “Watch” was kneecapped in 2018 to protect Facebook's advertising relationship with Netflix. From 2011 to 2019, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privilege analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals, which was incentive enough for Facebook to retreat from its own streaming aspirations. .
15. Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said during an appearance on CNBC that human connection will help the pharmacy compete with Amazon's healthcare aspirations. The CEO claims that Walgreens is in a strong position compared to Amazon because of its 8,600 locations, which give customers the ability to discuss medications and health concerns in-person. Wait until he finds out that consumers don't really care about talking about their intimate health concerns in person, with a line of other patients impatiently waiting behind them! .
16. Kroger is closing three e-commerce facilities — one in South Florida and two others in Texas. The grocer says that despite its best efforts in the regions, the facilities did not meet its benchmarks for success. .
17. Four of the largest school boards in Ontario are suing TikTok, Meta, and SnapChat for allegedly disrupting student learning. The lawsuit claims that the social media platforms are “designed for compulsive use, have rewired the way children think, behave, and learn” and that teachers have been left to manage the fallout. Rachel Chernos, a trustee for the Toronto District School Board, said, “These companies have knowingly created programs that are addictive that are aimed and marketed at young people and it is causing significant harm and we just can't stand by any longer and not speak up about it.” .
18. Robinhood launched a new Gold Card that offers the ability to invest cash back perks. The card has no annual or foreign transaction fees, other than the cost of being a Gold member for $5/month or $50/year, which offers other benefits like access to a 5% HYSA. Gold Card users can earn 3% cash back on all categories and 5% cash back when booking travel on Robinhood's new travel portal. (Robinhood has a travel portal now?) The card also allows users to create and delete virtual cards for one-time purchases. .
19. Amazon will now let you sign up for its palm recognition service from your phone via its new Amazon One app, which can take a photo of your palm and set up your account. The company says that your palm and vein images are “immediately encrypted” and sent to a “highly secure zone” in the AWS Cloud that’s specifically built for Amazon One. Previously, users were required to visit physical locations to enroll in the service. .
20. Data from Fakespot shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on Amazon over the past three years, as well as an increase in the number of negative or unreliable reviews for this product category. Fakespot founder Saoud Khalifah says bug zappers are just one example of the convergence of recent trends in e-commerce, where merchants seek to sell low-cost products with high margins, and generative AI tools make it easier for sellers to churn out questionable marketing copy and reviews. .
21. ShopeeFood in Vietnam changed its non-compete policy prohibiting workers from signing up with rival delivery apps after Rest of World reported on the issue. Delivery drivers were previously having to buy two phones so that they could log on to a rival app and work both simultaneously, in fear that Shopee would detect a rival app on their primary phone, which Shopee had the technical capabilities to do. .
22. Amazon plans to spend almost $150B in the coming 15 years on data centers to give its cloud division firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for AI applications and other digital services. Amazon currently holds about twice the market share of its closest competitor, Microsoft, in the cloud services market, and aims to keep that position. .
23. A pregnant Nigerian woman was arrested and is facing imprisonment for allegedly breaching the country's cybercrime laws after writing a negative review for a can of tomato puree, which she claimed tasted too sugary. The manufacturer, Erisco Foods, accused her of making a “malicious allegation” that damaged its business. .
24. Amazon is launching same-day delivery of prescription medications in New York City and Los Angeles, with plans to expand the offer to more than a dozen cities by the end of the year. The prescriptions are offered via Amazon's online pharmacy service, which launched in 2020 and was born out of the company's 2018 acquisition of PillPack. To speed up deliveries, Amazon said it's using new, smaller facilities, stocked with the most common prescription medications for acute conditions. .
25. Advertisers are suing Meta for damages exceeding $7B, accusing it of inflating its social platforms' Potential Reach metric by up to 400%. They claim that the metric included bots and other fake accounts, rather than individual users, leading to artificially high premiums for ad placements. The case, which was originally filed in 2018, encompasses millions of advertisers, and will either proceed to trial or potentially be resolved through a settlement. .
26. Speaking of ads transparency, Amazon will now have to provide information about ads running on its platform in a publicly accessible online archive, following a decision by the European Union's highest court. Other tech giants have complied with the DSA requirement, but Amazon filed a legal challenge to its designation last year and was granted a temporary suspension on the ad library element, until now. .
27. In other news of Amazon facing the music, The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that some delivery drivers for Amazon Flex are now to be regarded as employees, not independent contractors, which makes them part of the state's unemployment insurance system and entitled to jobless pay if they are laid off. The decision means that Amazon Logistics will likely be hit with a tax bill of more than $200k. Other states are also looking into Amazon's classification of drivers. .
28. ByteDance shut down LetsChat, its WhatsApp clone that it launched in Africa in 2021, which had over 7M downloads across the continent. The company finally conceded that its app had little chance of success against WhatsApp, despite several years of investing in local promotion. .
29. Instacart is launching a new API program called Instacart Developer Platform, which will enable third-party players to launch apps that integrate with its grocery shopping platform. Through the program, developers will gain access to Instacart's product selection and real-time store data, enabling them to offer features like same-day delivery and personalized meal planning. The first round of partnerships will include an integration with New York Times Cooking to make recipes shoppable, a WeightWatchers integration to purchase recommended foods, and an integration with GE Appliances to make products such as ovens offer shopping capabilities from their touchscreens. .
30. Amazon reported that it invested $1.2B into fighting counterfeits last year and had over 15,000 employees dedicated to preventing abuse of its platform. The company also claimed that its Counterfeit Crimes Unit took action against more than 21,000 bad actors since 2020 by either reporting them to law enforcement or suing them. .
31. Tidbyt, which manufactures a retro-style smart display that displays the time, weather, and other notifications from your phone, claims that Meta lost $40k of its advertising dollars and suspended their advertising account until they wire them $40k more. The retailer says that after switching to credit card payments for the first time last month and having their card successfully charged for $40k, Meta lost the money and has no record that the transaction occurred, even though Tidbyt can provide proof from their bank that they were charged. Meta's customer service has since made it impossible to get help over the matter. .
32. Last year, investors funded 471 e-commerce deals valued at $11.7B, down 30.4% YoY and close to 2018's $10.5B total. The report by Pitchbook noted, “The COVID-19 lockdown offered the perfect storm of low interest rates and a bevy of consumers stuck inside with no option other than to shop online, but these conditions are now entirely behind the e-commerce vertical. Consequently, the sector is unlikely to return to the levels of funding seen in 2020 to 2022 for some time.” .
33. A data breach was discovered on Shopify plugins developed by Saara, which leaked data from over 1,800 Shopify stores and held data from more than 7.6M individual orders, including sensitive customer data. The data stayed up for grabs for eight months and included customer names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, order info, IP addresses, and partial payment information. .
34. Plus 10 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Uzum, an e-commerce app that offers online shopping, fintech, and food deliveries to customers in Uzbekistan, raising $114M in a Series A round, making it the country's first unicorn with a valuation of $1.2B.

I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL
Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Rolling Stone - Top 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century (part 2)
​
​ Part 2 of the Top 300 of Argentine rock songs of the 21st century that the Rolling Stone magazine published in March 2023.
It became the longest Argentine rock ranking of all which have been made so far, dethroning the Top 125 by Listas 20 Minutos, from 2012.
It includes songs spanning the period of the 21st century up to the year before the ranking was published, that is, from 2000 to 2022.
It was intended as a sequel, expanded and updated, to the Top 50 of Argentine rock songs of the 2000s decade, which the magazine had published in 2010.
Links of the ranking: * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-101-300/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-81-100/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-61-80/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-41-60/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-21-40/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi/
In the words of the ranking's organizers:
"The 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century
To celebrate no less than its 300th edition, Rolling Stone Argentina presents this list with the best of the local production of the last years. A journey through time, genres, popular artists and underground gems
FOR ARGENTINE ROCK, just like for most of the cultural, social, political and economic strata of our country, 2001 was a bomb that scattered splinters aimlessly and everywhere. A most mobilizing start of the century. In that context it was the release of Jessico, the album which that bunch of freaks called Babasónicos had been hoping to compose for years, which would soon lead them to a state of (in)famous popularity, and which would indicate an aesthetic and a sound for the future. On the Internet, the exchange of music files (songs) was already a reality, but although there were still no platforms where you could listen to any song you craved for a modest monthly price, Steve Jobs presented in October of that year the first iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket”. A month after that launch in Cupertino, California, but 10,300 kilometers away, in Buenos Aires, the sky fell on Patricio Rey's head and splitted the paths of the duo Solari–Beilinson. We didn't know it yet, but Los Redondos would remain forever on that side, that of the 20th century.
From that starting point until this third decade, which began with urban music boasting loudly that “whether you like it or not, we are the new rock and roll, kid”, there is an abyss. In between, rock witnessed the fall of heavyweights from the nineties (the breakups of Los Piojos and Caballeros de la Quema, and the dismemberments of groups such as La Bersuit, Ratones Paranoicos and Los Pericos, among others), and the loss of representatives of the genre (Luis Alberto Spinetta, Pappo, Gustavo Cerati, Pil Trafa, Rosario Bléfari, Palo Pandolfo); the tragedy of Cromañón, the closure of venues for live shows and the subsequent wave of unplugged singer-songwriters; the return of the most song-driven Andrés Calamaro and the beginnings of solo careers of all-terrain singers (Andrés Ciro Martínez, Vicentico, Cordera); the rise of the La Plata indie scene with Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado as emblem; the crossover with rap and trap, which is here to stay; and the visibilizing –after a long struggle– of a large number of women leading their own musical projects, with Marilina Bertoldi and her Telecaster in hand as an icon of a new generation. And more, much more.
But, beyond the ups and downs of a country always on the brink of falling and a scene in constant boiling, what never lacked in these lands were great songs. That's why it is worth arranging this update of the list that ROLLING STONE produced in 2010, together with the MTV video network, with the “50 best Argentine rock songs from the first decade of the 2000s”. On the pretext of celebrating the 300th issue of ROLLING STONE in Argentina, this time we add the songs which were selected as the best of each year by the different editorial teams that have worked on the magazine during this time, plus the vote of the journalists who today make up the squad of critics, writers and editors.
The result is a resounding playlist that travels through time and subgenres, that delves into both the work of popular artists and the small hidden gems of the underground scene. Here there are songs which are beautiful, complex, innovative; songs that said what needed to be said at the right time; which were played that night and a thousand nights more; with immortal verses, those that are printed on t-shirts and walls and in anonymous dedications. There are stories which are real, raw and reportorial. There's pure fiction and brilliant fantasy. Here are 300 songs that amount to 300 reasons to celebrate the Argentine rock of this century".
List of songs:

• 200 - Acorazado Potemkin - El Pan Del Facho - 2014
• 199 - Peligrosos Gorriones - Florería - 2014
• 198 - Chancha Vía Circuito - Sueño En Paraguay - 2014
• 197 - Los Brujos - Beat Hit - 2014
• 196 - Mercedes Sosa ft. Gustavo Cerati - Zona De Promesas - 2009
• 195 - Indios - Ya Pasó - 2013
• 194 - Miranda! - Fantasmas - 2014
• 193 - Juan Ravioli - Son Días Felices - 2009
• 192 - Eruca Sativa - Fuera O Más Allá - 2012
• 191 - Ratones Paranoicos - Sigue Girando - 2004

​ * 190 - Alfonso Barbieri ft. Lucas Martí - El Pintor Verdadero - 2011 * 189 - Pilsen ft. León Gieco - Nonsanto - 2020 * 188 - El Perrodiablo - Algo Sobre Estar Vivo - 2012 * 187 - Vicentico - Morir A Tu Lado - 2010 * 186 - Viva Elástico - El Gran Encuentro - 2012 * 185 - Cabezones - Pasajero En Extinción - 2005 * 184 - Nonpalidece - Reggae En El Universo - 2006 * 183 - Estelares - Un Día Perfecto - 2006 * 182 - Intoxicados - Está Saliendo El Sol - 2003 * 181 - Gustavo Cerati - Crimen - 2006
​ * 180 - Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas - Ula Ula - 2012 * 179 - Arbolito ft. Chizzo Nápoli - Europa - 2009 * 178 - Bicicletas - 11 Y 20 - 2008 * 177 - Travesti - Calibre 44 - 2009 * 176 - Los Reyes Del Falsete - Las Cosas Como Son - 2009 * 175 - Gran Martell - Empetrolado - 2008 * 174 - Guasones - Brillar - 2008 * 173 - Adicta - Tu Mal - 2003 * 172 - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs ft. Damas Gratis - Padre Nuestro - 2008 * 171 - Francisco Bochatón - Balvanera - 2007
​ * 170 - Fémina ft. Iggy Pop - Resist - 2019 * 169 - Lucy Patané - En Toneles - 2019 * 168 - Fito Páez - La Canción De Las Bestias - 2020 * 167 - Cuentos Borgeanos - Océano - 2007 * 166 - Florencia Ruiz - Movimiento Final - 2007 * 165 - Pelea De Gallos - Viernes - 2019 * 164 - No Lo Soporto ft. Gustavo Cerati - Nunca Iré - 2008 * 163 - El Bordo - En La Vereda - 2006 * 162 - Los Pericos ft. Carla Morrison - Anónimos - 2016 * 161 - Callejeros - 9 De Julio - 2006
​ * 160 - Boom Boom Kid - She Runaway - 2004 * 159 - Flopa Lestani - Corazón De Pie - 2004 * 158 - Ariel Minimal - A Los Amigos - 2006 * 157 - Skay Beilinson - El Golem De La Paternal - 2004 * 156 - Los Piojos - Dientes De Cordero - 2003 * 155 - Las Pelotas - Cerca De Las Nubes - 2012 * 154 - Divididos - Living De Trincheras - 2012 * 153 - Intoxicados - Nunca Quise - 2005 * 152 - Gustavo Cerati ft. Domingo Cura - Sulky - 2002 * 151 - Los Natas - Humo De Marihuana - 2005
​ * 150 - Ca7Riel & Paco Amoroso - Ouke - 2019 * 149 - Catupecu Machu - Musas - 2011 * 148 - Árbol - Trenes, Camiones Y Tractores - 2004 * 147 - Karamelo Santo - Nunca - 2001 * 146 - Charly García - Lluvia - 2017 * 145 - Pequeña Orquesta Reincidentes - Mi Suerte - 2001 * 144 - Luis Alberto Spinetta - Tu Vuelo Al Fin - 2008 * 143 - León Gieco - La Memoria - 2001 * 142 - Riel - Paseo Psicodélico - 2019 * 141 - Leo García ft. Gustavo Cerati - Tesoro - 2005
​ * 140 - Coiffeur - ¡Qué Mala Suerte! - 2006 * 139 - Peces Raros - Cicuta - 2021 * 138 - Viva Elástico - Imágenes De Amor - 2009 * 137 - Marilina Bertoldi - Cosa Mía - 2021 * 136 - Jóvenes Pordioseros - Descontrolado - 2004 * 135 - Andrea Álvarez - Dormís? - 2005 * 134 - Las Manos De Filippi - Los Métodos Piqueteros - 2002 * 133 - Las Ligas Menores - En Invierno - 2018 * 132 - Babasónicos - El Loco - 2001 * 131 - Él Mató A Un Policía Motorizado - Más O Menos Bien - 2013
​ * 130 - Massacre - La Octava Maravilla - 2007 * 129 - Trueno ft. Nathy Peluso - Argentina - 2022 * 128 - Vicentico - Cuando Te Vi - 2002 * 127 - La Franela - Hacer Un Puente - 2011 * 126 - Utopians - Algo Mejor - 2014 * 125 - Almafuerte - La Máquina De Picar Carne - 2006 * 124 - Los Mundos Posibles - La Guerra Del Japón - 2018 * 123 - Babasónicos - Risa - 2003 * 122 - normA - 6 AM - 2015 * 121 - Mostruo! - El Capitán - 2011
​ * 120 - Lisandro Aristimuño ft. Fito Páez - Desprender Del Sur - 2009 * 119 - Fantasmagoria - Gori Llamando A Río - 2001 * 118 - Andrés Calamaro ft. Bersuit Vergarabat - Tuyo Siempre (Vivo) - 2005 * 117 - Las Pelotas - Esperando El Milagro - 2003 * 116 - Paula Maffia - Corazón Licántropo - 2019 * 115 - Miranda! - Traición - 2004 * 114 - Rosario Bléfari - Viento Helado - 2004 * 113 - Fabiana Cantilo - Desde El Cielo - 2015 * 112 - A-Tirador Láser - Rasante Oscuridad - 2002 * 111 - Pappo - Rock And Roll Y Fiebre - 2003
​ * 110 - Palo Pandolfo - Río Reconquista - 2008 * 109 - Jorge Serrano - Emociones Negativas - 2009 * 108 - Gustavo Cerati - Lago En El Cielo - 2006 * 107 - Gabo Ferro - Costurera Y Carpintero - 2006 * 106 - Wos - Fresco - 2019 * 105 - Usted Señálemelo - Agüetas - 2017 * 104 - Juana Molina - Cosoco - 2017 * 103 - Estelares ft. Andrés Calamaro - Moneda Corriente - 2003 * 102 - Las Pastillas Del Abuelo - El Sensei - 2006 * 101 - Bándalos Chinos - Vámonos De Viaje - 2018
Series of videos published by MusicaArgentina about Argentine rock rankings made by third parties — 4th video of the series in 2024, and 16th of the whole series in general.
MusicaArgentina — 2024

Rolling Stone - Top 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century (part 1)
​
​ Part 1 of the Top 300 of Argentine rock songs of the 21st century that the Rolling Stone magazine published in March 2023.
It became the longest Argentine rock ranking of all which have been made so far, dethroning the Top 125 by Listas 20 Minutos, from 2012.
It includes songs spanning the period of the 21st century up to the year before the ranking was published, that is, from 2000 to 2022.
It was intended as a sequel, expanded and updated, to the Top 50 of Argentine rock songs of the 2000s decade, which the magazine had published in 2010.
Links of the ranking: * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-101-300/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-81-100/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-61-80/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-41-60/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi-21-40/ * https://es.rollingstone.com/arg-300-canciones-rock-argentino-siglo-xxi/
In the words of the ranking's organizers:
"The 300 Argentine rock songs of the 21st century
To celebrate no less than its 300th edition, Rolling Stone Argentina presents this list with the best of the local production of the last years. A journey through time, genres, popular artists and underground gems
FOR ARGENTINE ROCK, just like for most of the cultural, social, political and economic strata of our country, 2001 was a bomb that scattered splinters aimlessly and everywhere. A most mobilizing start of the century. In that context it was the release of Jessico, the album which that bunch of freaks called Babasónicos had been hoping to compose for years, which would soon lead them to a state of (in)famous popularity, and which would indicate an aesthetic and a sound for the future. On the Internet, the exchange of music files (songs) was already a reality, but although there were still no platforms where you could listen to any song you craved for a modest monthly price, Steve Jobs presented in October of that year the first iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket”. A month after that launch in Cupertino, California, but 10,300 kilometers away, in Buenos Aires, the sky fell on Patricio Rey's head and splitted the paths of the duo Solari–Beilinson. We didn't know it yet, but Los Redondos would remain forever on that side, that of the 20th century.
From that starting point until this third decade, which began with urban music boasting loudly that “whether you like it or not, we are the new rock and roll, kid”, there is an abyss. In between, rock witnessed the fall of heavyweights from the nineties (the breakups of Los Piojos and Caballeros de la Quema, and the dismemberments of groups such as La Bersuit, Ratones Paranoicos and Los Pericos, among others), and the loss of representatives of the genre (Luis Alberto Spinetta, Pappo, Gustavo Cerati, Pil Trafa, Rosario Bléfari, Palo Pandolfo); the tragedy of Cromañón, the closure of venues for live shows and the subsequent wave of unplugged singer-songwriters; the return of the most song-driven Andrés Calamaro and the beginnings of solo careers of all-terrain singers (Andrés Ciro Martínez, Vicentico, Cordera); the rise of the La Plata indie scene with Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado as emblem; the crossover with rap and trap, which is here to stay; and the visibilizing –after a long struggle– of a large number of women leading their own musical projects, with Marilina Bertoldi and her Telecaster in hand as an icon of a new generation. And more, much more.
But, beyond the ups and downs of a country always on the brink of falling and a scene in constant boiling, what never lacked in these lands were great songs. That's why it is worth arranging this update of the list that ROLLING STONE produced in 2010, together with the MTV video network, with the “50 best Argentine rock songs from the first decade of the 2000s”. On the pretext of celebrating the 300th issue of ROLLING STONE in Argentina, this time we add the songs which were selected as the best of each year by the different editorial teams that have worked on the magazine during this time, plus the vote of the journalists who today make up the squad of critics, writers and editors.
The result is a resounding playlist that travels through time and subgenres, that delves into both the work of popular artists and the small hidden gems of the underground scene. Here there are songs which are beautiful, complex, innovative; songs that said what needed to be said at the right time; which were played that night and a thousand nights more; with immortal verses, those that are printed on t-shirts and walls and in anonymous dedications. There are stories which are real, raw and reportorial. There's pure fiction and brilliant fantasy. Here are 300 songs that amount to 300 reasons to celebrate the Argentine rock of this century".
List of songs:

• 300 - Neo Pistea ft. C.R.O, Obiewanshot, Ysy A, Cazzu, Khea, Lucho SSJ, Coqeéin Montana, Marcianos Crew, Duki - Tumbando El Club (Remix) - 2019
• 299 - Guillermo Klein Y Los Guachos - Va Román - 2008
• 298 - Pablo Sbaraglia ft. Indio Solari - Nada! (Zippo Rock) - 2008
• 297 - Sol Pereyra - Ella Y Un Perro - 2009
• 296 - Viva Elástico ft. Jorge Serrano - Algo De Mí, Algo De Vos - 2021
• 295 - Luca Bocci - Bahía - 2017
• 294 - Turf - Disconocidos - 2017
• 293 - Guasones - Canción Para Un Amigo - 2017
• 292 - Victoria Mil - Cambiar - 2008
• 291 - Almafuerte - Mi Credo - 2012

​ * 290 - Mostruo! - Dios - 2006 * 289 - Juana Molina - Río Seco - 2006 * 288 - Él Mató A Un Policía Motorizado - Mujeres Bellas Y Fuertes - 2012 * 287 - Boom Boom Kid - Lo Único Feo Es No Tener Porque Vivir - 2009 * 286 - Ca7Riel - Bad Bitch - 2021 * 285 - El Robot Bajo El Agua - Ver-Tiente - 2010 * 284 - Fin Del Mundo - La Noche - 2020 * 283 - Pyramides - Caoscalma - 2017 * 282 - Gustavo Cerati - Adiós - 2006 * 281 - Charly García - Tu Vicio - 2002
​ * 280 - Pequeña Orquesta Reincidentes - Siete Suelas - 2003 * 279 - Leo García ft. Litto Nebbia - Canción Para Los Inocentes - 2016 * 278 - Coki & The Killer Burritos - El Club De La Pelea - 2015 * 277 - Babasónicos - Microdancing - 2008 * 276 - Fidel Nadal - Crucial - 2015 * 275 - Los Antiguos - La Culpa Al Viento - 2015 * 274 - Rubín Y Los Subtitulados - Odio El Amor - 2004 * 273 - Massacre - Niña Dios - 2015 * 272 - Estelares - Aire - 2006 * 271 - Los Besos - Helados Verdes - 2017
​ * 270 - Las Bodas Químicas - Compañero - 2016 * 269 - Los Reyes Del Falsete - Contale Al Mundo - 2012 * 268 - Viajantes ft. Daniel Melingo, Marcelo Moura, Palo Pandolfo, Jorge Serrano, Litto Nebbia, Miguel Zabaleta, Andrés Calamaro, Miguel Cantilo, Horacio Fontova, Fito Páez - La Hora De Los Magos - 2009 * 267 - Palo Pandolfo ft. Santiago Motorizado - Tu Amor - 2021 * 266 - Banda De Turistas - Química - 2014 * 265 - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs - No Era Para Vos - 2016 * 264 - Bajofondo ft. Usted Señálemelo - A Tiempo - 2019 * 263 - Les Mentettes - Fairy Tale - 2008 * 262 - O'Connor - Rock Del Suicida - 2006 * 261 - Skay Beilinson - El Viaje De Las Partículas - 2007
​ * 260 - Nicki Nicole - Mala Vida - 2020 * 259 - Valle De Muñecas - 1.000 Kilómetros - 2015 * 258 - Los Álamos - Problemas - 2008 * 257 - Los Auténticos Decadentes - Sigue Tu Camino - 2003 * 256 - Lisandro Aristimuño - Tu Nombre Y El Mío - 2004 * 255 - Andrés Calamaro - Cuando No Estás - 2013 * 254 - Fito Páez - Margarita - 2013 * 253 - Orión XL - Delirante - 2015 * 252 - Lache - Yo Quiero Ser Un Jedi - 2007 * 251 - Perotá Chingó - Ríe Chinito - 2014
​ * 250 - Carmen Sánchez Viamonte - Pensamientos Intrusivos - 2022 * 249 - Francisca Y Los Exploradores ft. Fito Páez - Villa Urquiza - 2018 * 248 - Las Armas Bs. As. ft. Amparo Torres - Tenis - 2022 * 247 - Modo Diablo - Quavo - 2018 * 246 - Barbi Recanati - Teoría Espacial - 2018 * 245 - Pez - 1986 - 2017 * 244 - Las Pastillas Del Abuelo - Ojos De Dragón - 2011 * 243 - Humo Del Cairo - Sepia - 2014 * 242 - Un Planeta - Fuego III - 2014 * 241 - Miranda! ft. Dillom - Dos - 2022
​ * 240 - Viejas Locas - Perro Guardián - 2011 * 239 - Horcas - Esperanza - 2002 * 238 - Trueno ft. Nicki Nicole - Mamichula - 2020 * 237 - El Estrellero - Ok Amigo - 2019 * 236 - Conociendo Rusia - Loco En El Desierto - 2018 * 235 - Duki - Goteo - 2019 * 234 - Babasónicos - El Colmo - 2005 * 233 - Jorge Serrano - Fósforo - 2009 * 232 - Daniel Melingo ft. Skay Beilinson - ¡Cha Digo! - 2007 * 231 - Perras On The Beach - Ramona - 2016
​ * 230 - Rayos Láser - Disparo De Onda - 2011 * 229 - Sr. Tomate - Dibujo Un Corazón - 2012 * 228 - Eterna Inocencia - Nuestras Fronteras - 2004 * 227 - Villanos - Chau Corazón - 2004 * 226 - Miss Bolivia ft. Leo García - Tomate El Palo - 2013 * 225 - La Portuaria - 10.000 Km - 2003 * 224 - Feli Colina - Aguatera - 2022 * 223 - Bándalos Chinos - El Ídolo - 2020 * 222 - Trueno - Dance Crip - 2021 * 221 - Wos - Melón Vino - 2019
​ * 220 - El Kuelgue - Planeta Numir - 2018 * 219 - Las Ligas Menores - La Nieve - 2021 * 218 - Las Armas Bs. As. - La Policía Emocional - 2017 * 217 - Louta ft. Zoe Gotusso - Ayer Te Vi - 2018 * 216 - Los Rusos Hijos De Puta - Capilla Del Monte - 2018 * 215 - Las Sombras - Rocanrol Del Idiota - 2018 * 214 - Indio Solari - Encuentro Con Un Ángel Amateur - 2021 * 213 - El Plan De La Mariposa - El Riesgo - 2017 * 212 - Los Caligaris - Asado Y Fernet - 2007 * 211 - Usted Señálemelo - Pastizal - 2019
​ * 210 - Marilina Bertoldi - La Cena - 2022 * 209 - Juan Ingaramo ft. Adrián Dárgelos - Matemática - 2016 * 208 - Expulsados - Nada Cambió Mi Amor - 2006 * 207 - Marina Fages - Piedra Marea Fuego - 2019 * 206 - Willy Crook & The Funky Torinos - Lotophagy - 2019 * 205 - Lo' Pibitos ft. Julián Kartun - El Ritmo De La Vida - 2015 * 204 - Bestia Bebé - El Uruguayo - 2013 * 203 - Mujercitas Terror - La Secta Olvidada - 2015 * 202 - Morbo Y Mambo ft. Santiago Motorizado - Pomán - 2017 * 201 - Los Espíritus - Jugo - 2017
Series of videos published by MusicaArgentina about Argentine rock rankings made by third parties — 3rd video of the series in 2024, and 15th of the whole series in general.
MusicaArgentina — 2024

In today’s fast paced digital marketing world, the traditional way of brand communication which is shouting messages at people is becoming more and more irrelevant. Successful brands today have to move away from shouting towards listening as a basic requirement for branding. This change is not just fashionable but an obligatory need in a world where consumers expect brands to be able to meaningfully interact with them. Previously, companies focused on creating punchy slogans, catchy logos and flashy adverts that were supposed to capture the attention of the intended market. However, due to social media and information being open to everyone, customers now have a voice and can help shape how they perceive your brand. Silence spells doom.
What does it mean for a brand to listen in this age of technology? It is much more than just keeping tabs on social media buzz or checking consumer reviews online. For one, there must be consistent interaction with consumers; we need to know what they want when they want those services and products through their feedbacks too so that we can act accordingly
What if you consider Starbucks? Starbucks didn’t cower away from the issue when a viral video depicted an unjust treatment of two black men in one of their stores, which brought about public relations crisis. Rather, they heard their customers’ complaints and acted promptly and resorted to racial bias training across all its branches showing that they want to be responsive and listening to the concerns of their community.
Likewise, Netflix has perfected the art of social listening as a source of content strategy. This involves using data to better understand viewers’ preferences so as to come up with personalized experiences (Streamailor 2018). For instance, there are interactive marketing campaigns and tailored recommendations. Not only does this enhance customer satisfaction but it also helps build brand loyalty in a stiffly competitive market.
Even small brands can embrace listening as a strength. Arby’s is another example where Social Media Monitoring serves as an effective way of tracking relevant discussions (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). In this case, Arby’s social media monitoring supports them in finding appropriate subjects for conversation while enabling them to share witty content that resonates with their audience. This promotes further identity establishment and encourages followership among people who have become loyal because of it.
You can read the full article at https://growbymillions.com/ Grow By Million Website HERE-https://growbymillions.com/brands-used-to-shout-now-they-have-to-listen/

Pozdravljeni,
imam vprašanje glede šestdesetih let (LSD, gibanje hipijev, Timothy Leary, kriminalizacije psihedelikov...).
Kakšno je vaše mnenje o 60-ih in ljudeh, ki so takrat uživali psihedelike?
Kakšno je vaše mnenje o Timothyju Learyju?
Nekateri so ga opisovali kot prevaranta, tudi kot nekoga, ki je postal odvisen od medijske pozornosti. Njegov slogan je bil: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Bil je upornik, poudarjal je potrebo po kritičnemu odnosu do oblasti in razmišljanju z lastno glavo.
Kako ocenjujete dejanja Learyja v tistem času? Nixon je dejal, da je bil najnevarnejši človek v Ameriki. Bil je kulturni ikon za kontrakulturno gibanje. Nasploh mu veliko očitajo za negativne posledice konca šestdesetih let, zaprtje raziskav psihoaktivnih substanc… a morda je tudi nepošteno obtožen za marsikaj. V zvezi s težavnimi časi 60-ih je splošno prepričanje, da so psihoaktivne substance povzročile težave. Ljudje so jih uživali nepripravljeni, doživljali čustvene zlome, postajali psihozni, celo samomorilski, s težavami pri nekaterih pri uživanju psihoaktivnih substanc, bodisi zaradi nepravilne priprave ali neznanja o količini, ki jo zaužijejo, kar je privedlo do odpora proti njim.
Po drugi strani pa nekateri trdijo, da je pravi razlog, da so psihoaktivne substance delovale, torej, da so ljudje doživljali občutek povezanosti, ki jih je dejansko politično motiviralo, s čimer so izzivali vietnamsko vojno, okoljsko gibanje… kar je privedlo do povratnega udarca s strani oblasti.
Slišal sem tudi, da so bili hipiji vseh ras, ko so ljudje uživali psihedelike, so kulturne ovire izginile. In ko doživite to mistično izkušnjo, enost, se identificirate z ljudmi, s katerimi se morda sicer ne bi, ker obstaja globlji del nas, globji od naše države, nacionalnosti, vere, spola, spolne usmerjenosti. Obstaja jedro, ki nas povezuje...

Nekaj (zanimivih) citatov na to temo iz dokumentarnih filmov, ki sem si jih ogledal:
•Gabor Maté (Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca, 2010) Živimo v kulturi, ki je duhovno zelo prikrajšana zelo prazna, živimo v kulturi, ki je zelo materialna z drugimi besedami, živimo v kulturi, ki ljudem ne daje tistega, kar resnično potrebujejo, kar pušča v ljudeh veliko praznino..
Zasvojenost izvira iz občutka praznine in poskus zapolsnitve samega sebe od zunaj je bistvo zasvojenosti. Z ayahuasco se ponuja priložnost doživeti samega sebe kot celoto in popolnost. Če to dejansko dosežete, da zadržite občutek popolnosti, kaj še ostane za čutenje od zunaj, ni več potrebe po tem.
•Richard Meech producer and director, known for Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul (2010) Mislim, da niso za vsakogar. Mislim, da se je v 60. letih prejšnjega stoletja zgodilo to, da jih je preveč ljudi začelo uživati brez kakršnega koli spoštovanja do njih, brez kakršnega koli znanja, brez konteksta in družba ni bila pripravljena na toliko ljudi, družba je bila še vedno zelo adolescentna
•Dr. Kenneth Tupper (Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca, 2010) Mislim, da je velika razlika med današnjo uporabo ayahuasce in uporabo drugih substanc v šestdesetih, to zelo močno razumevanje pomena obreda in obrednega elementa pri spodbujanju terapevtske ali duhovne izkušnje. To ni droga za zabave na način, druge snovi so bile uporabljene modrost učenja preko rastlin je kulturna tradicija, ki sega več sto, če ne tisoč let nazaj
•Stanislav Grof (The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD 2011) To, kar se očitno dogaja pri ljudeh, ki uživajo psihoaktivne substance, še posebej pri mladi generaciji, je, da se ne morejo več strinjati s standardi družbe okoli njih. Razvijajo popolnoma drugačen sistem vrednot, drugačno življenjsko strategijo itd. Del tega je zagotovo zelo močno nasprotovanje vojni, saj imajo transpersonalne izkušnje, kjer čutijo esencialno enotnost z drugimi ljudmi, celo s živalskimi vrstami, naravo in podobno. To ima zelo pomembne posledice za njihovo stališče do vojn in ubijanja med ljudmi. Psihodelične substance so postale zelo, zelo pomembno orodje transformacije, spremembe svetovnega pogleda na način, ki je zelo izzival starodavne konservativne vrednote. Vzporedno z uporabo psihoaktivnih substanc v 60. letih mislim, da so psihoaktivne snovi bile del tega gibanja, zelo pomemben del, vendar ne mislim, da so bile vzrok tega, kar se je dogajalo.
Tako so psihedeliki postali zelo zelo pomemben instrument preobrazbe in spremembe pogleda na svet na način, ki je zelo izzival stare konservativne vrednote.
•Stanislav Grof (The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD 2011) Kar se je zgodilo z Learyjem, ki je naredil psihedelike veliko bolj nevarne, kot bi bili v odgovornih rokah, je zagotovo povečalo tveganja in zmanjšalo koristi ter dobesedno ubil legitimne raziskave.
•Gabor Mate (Psyched Out 2018) V 60. letih so psihoaktivne snovi resnično bile uporabljene na disfunkcionalne načine in povzročile veliko trpljenja. To je zakrilo njihovo možno terapevtsko uporabo. Zelo podobno je prizoru iz Čarovniškega vajenca, kjer dobiš nekaj zelo močnega, vendar ali je koristno ali škodljivo, je odvisno od tega, kdo ga uporablja in za kakšen namen. V šestdesetih letih so bile psihoaktivne snovi zelo pogosto uporabljene na negativen način, ker ni bilo pod vodstvom izkušenj in modrosti.
•David E. Nichols, PhD. (Neurons to Nirvana, 2013) Ko si ljudje zaužili LSD, so se vprašali: "Počakajte malo, zakaj naj bi se šel bojevat v Vietnam, natančno mi pojasnite, kaj naj tam počnem? Želite, da ubijem te druge ljudi, ki so prav takšni kot jaz." Z uporabo LSD se ljudje lahko osvobodijo kulturami vsiljenih vrednot in začnejo razmišljati zunaj ustaljenih okvirov.
•Roland Redmond Griffiths, (Neurons to Nirvana, 2013) Značilna lastnost mistične izkušnje je občutek globoke povezanosti z vsemi ljudmi in stvarmi - občutek, da je vse eno. Ta izkušnja je spremljana z noetičnim občutkom, globokim razumevanjem, da je jedro izkušnje bolj resnično in resnično kot vsakdanja zavest. Osnovno spoznanje, ki smo ga odkrili iz študij z zdravimi prostovoljci na Johns Hopkins je, da pride do globoke, kvantne spremembe v dojemanju življenja, sebe, stališč, razpoloženj in vedenja. Večina ljudi še vedno potrjuje, da je ta mistična izkušnja med najbolj osebno pomembnimi in duhovno pomembnimi dogodki v celotnem njihovem življenju.

This quote is from the 3rd page of the Weird Fibune article here:

"I know each of us may seem small, and we're from different backgrounds, but when we carry out our Buddhist practice and dedicate our lives to the development of our communities, we will not only change but also make Chicago the most beautiful, most peaceful city." (SGI-USA's then-General Director Danny Nagashima)

Nope - Chicago is still known as one of the US cities with the most racial problems. That same year as putting some nobody's vanity plate above a street sign, Chicago was cited here as the most racially segregated city in the US:

Chicago ... is the most segregated major metropolitan area in the U.S. Source

The SGI has had a presence there since the very beginnings here in the US - since the 1960s! If over 50 years of SGI presence hasn't made it better (we won't speculate that perhaps SGI has made things WORSE), then putting up a stupid vanity plate nobody's going to notice isn't going to change anything!
Look at this gushy review:

Yes, we know, Chicago’s got a serious segregation problem. But no evidence of any such racial divide exists inside the Culture Center at 1455 S. Wabash—the local worship center of Soka Gakkai International-USA, a lay association of Nichiren Buddhism. On the day I visited to attend a celebration of women, hundreds of people of all imaginable backgrounds filled a spacious auditorium with a stage in the front, while a long line of women told one-minute stories about successes they’d had during the previous year. The vibe was gleeful; the presiding attitude was gratitude. SGI offers many types of events, from prayer sessions to music concerts to dance performances, all free. In a world where anger is too easy to find, the Culture Center is a place that brings out the best in people, and where you can feel hopeful about humanity’s future. Source

Sure, hon. Notice this review is from 2011 - that was a LONG time ago and all those "types of events" are now long gone - except the creepy culty chanty sessions are probably still going (but nobody in the community wants those).
Wanna see a partial list of all the "types of events" for the community/suggested for the community - "all free" - that Chicago's SGI-USA leadership either KILLED or blocked? Nothing for the SGI members now but those dreary nothing "districts".
Even in 2011, that chirpy reviewer was obviously completely OBLIVIOUS to that episode of SGI's history in Chicago where they had the "black" center AND a "𝕨𝕙𝕚𝕥𝕖" center at the same time, and conducted racially-segregated "activities"! Either oblivious or deliberately attempting to bury that shameful episode:

I was there. I hated it. The city is already racially divided and then this shit happens. It was an old bank. There were some fist fights there as well. I remember Mr. Nakabashi had a meeting with us as Headquarters and Chapter Leaders- must have been about 40 leaders there that night. I was a YWD HQ leader then. Something happen between a MD leader and him and they were off to the races,. He told the MD to leave and the MD said no. Omg so much staring and cussing and such. I hated the place it took me almost 2hours to get there after work. Miss Inoashi the National Ywd leader ( who loved to look at herself in the mirror and who was screwing Mr. Williams) told me I should go there everynight after work because I worked late. I had to get guidance on that because . I had no car and it meant me getting their after 10pm when everyone was practially gone and I still needed to get back on the bus and spend another hour getting home. Source
But beneath the immediate controversies and anger lie deep racial divides, decades-old, and often the direct result of public policy.

The direct result of public policy. "Public policy" indicates (=) "what the government is doing." "Public policy" allocates tax revenues to education, with more allocated to the wealthier schools in the wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, for example, which results in better educational outcomes for the students in those schools. The schools serving the poorer, darker-skinned neighborhoods are funds-starved; their students suffer from worse educational outcomes, something that typically has lifelong negative implications for those individuals - "bleak prospects". The boards that make these decisions are made up of the wealthy and powerful. SGI is "attributed almost exclusively as a Buddhism of the lower classes and minorities" - the opposite demographic.

The broader tragedy of Baltimore, of Ferguson, of Chicago, is that black and Hispanic Americans in the poorest areas of our cities have such bleak prospects. The danger is that once the media bandwagon has moved on, these structural inequalities will remain. Will things be any better in 2020, or 2030? Source

Now, in the dawn of 2024, we can definitively confirm that things were NOT any better for Chicago in 2020, and all signs point to that inequality remaining the status quo in 2030 as well. From mid-2023:

Chicago remains the most segregated city in America
Chicago has the highest segregation between white and Black residents of any city in America, according to data from Brown University. Source

What is SGI doing to affect public policy? NOTHING! People "making Sensei's heart their own" is worthless masturbation - AT BEST! SGI is a tool of the status quo; they don't seek to change anything because their Japanese masters like everything just the way it is. Just slap the "Daisaku Ikeda" name on something (doesn't really matter what it is) and the Dead-Ikeda-cult SGI members will all cheer and slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves about how much they're "changing the world". They can't help anybody; they can't even help themselves. They're hopelessly out of touch and impotent, helpless to change anything, even themselves. They can't even change their own organization for the better!
The SGI needs a new slogan, something like:

SGI: Making And Keeping People Stuck Whenever They LET Us

SGI member: "But we got a little vanity plate put up on a pole - for Sensei! This means Sensei loves us best! Isn't that amaaazing?? That's the ONLY thing that matters!"

Ok so, the next Portuguese legislative election will happen on 10 March 2024, some two years and a half before it was supposed to. I previously did a very detailed post about the Socialist Party's leadership election and people seemed to enjoy it, so I thought I would do one for the election itself.
Background
Incumbent Prime Minister António Costa and the centre-left Socialist Party have been in power since 2015, first as a minority government with a confidence and supply agreement with two smaller left-wing parties (2015-2019), then as a minority government that haggled on for two years with informal support from one of the parties (2019-2022), and finally as a majority government after winning a landslide victory in the 2022 snap election.
The government was very popular at first due to its reversal of some of the austerity measures put in place by the previous centre-right government. During the confidence and supply years, it achieved some of the highest approval ratings in history of Portuguese democracy and was even cited internationally as an example of a government being able to balance social justice and fiscal responsibility. Even as it drifted towards the political centre, with an increasing focus on debt reduction at the expense of social spending, the left-wing electorate continued to support it, partly due to a fear of handing power to an increasingly radicalised right-wing.
However, after the 2022 election everything went downhill extremely quickly, with nearly weekly corruption scandals, the national healthcare service nearing collapse, massive housing shortages, everyone on strike, etc. The situation was bleak, but that by itself was not enough to cause a majority government to fall.
However, in late 2023 the General Procuratorship of the Republic announced that it was opening a corruption investigation on the Prime Minister and several of his close associates, relating to alleged misuse of power to facilitate construction of a data centre in the town of Sines. By now, the courts have dismissed most of the accusations and its doubtful that anyone will even be formally accused of anything, especially not the Prime Minister.
Much cricticism has been levied against the Procurator for publicly announcing an investigation without sufficient evidence, but whatever the case, the damage is done. PM Costa resigned, and President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa immediately dissolved the Assembly of the Republic and called for new elections.
Parties and coalitions
Socialist Party (PS)
In power for eight years, Portugal's main centre-left party faces an uphill battle this time, its popularity weakened by a stagnant economy, deteriorating public services and corruption.
In the 2023 leadership election, the PS elected former infrastructure minister Pedro Nuno Santos (PNS for the cool kids) as its new leader. Long seen as the main figure of the party's furthest left-wing faction (significantly to the left of Costa, who himself was originally from the party's traditional left-wing), he was the architect of the 2015-2019 confidence and supply agreement, which he now aims the re-create.
Despite publicly clashing with Costa over many issues during their time in government, PNS has embraced his predecessor's legacy during the campaign. Quite astonishingly for a man who first became known for his vociferous denunciations of "German Bankers" and advocating for the option of sovereign default, he has been waving the flag of fiscal responsibility, praising Costa for his debt reduction efforts and attacking the right-wing oppositions' proposed tax cuts on the basis pf their cost. However, he also says that Costa's restraint was excessive considering the period of social crisis the country is facing and promises to increase social spending if elected Prime Minister.
The PS program rejects market-based solutions to the country's problems. It instead proposes to tackle housing shortages through public housing construction, healthcare and education problems by increasing the salaries of teachers and doctors, and economic stagnation through a selective system of incentives that funnels economic activity toward strategic sectors. It also calls for new infrastructure projects, including a (much delayed) new airport in Lisbon and a high-speed rail.
Democratic Alliance (AD)
A coalition formed by the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) and two small right-wing parties currently without parliamentary representation, the Democratic Social Centre–People's Party (CDS-PP) and the People's Monarchist Party (PPM).
The PSD and CDS were previously in government between 2011 and 2015, under Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho. That government mostly implemented an austerity program that had previously been agreed between the IMF and the previous PS government, but was widely criticised for going above and beyond that program, effecting larger cuts to salaries and pensions and more wide-ranging neoliberal reforms. This led to the left-wing victory of 2015, after which the PSD briefly moved towards the centre (some would even say centre-left) under the leadership of former Porto mayor Rui Rio.
Rio stepped down in 2022, after thrwating two leadership challenges and losing two legislative elections, after which the leadership passed to former parliamentary leader Luís Montenegro, widely seen as a loyal Passista.
Meanwhile the CDS had a brief failed attempt at reinventing itself as a right-wing populist party, after which they lost parliamentary representation. The current leadership brought the party back to its roots and started beggining the PSD for the coalition.
Anyway, the AD program for this year calls for free-market turn, with a focus on lowering taxes and reducing bureaucracy. They propose to solve housing issues by stimulating private construction, and healthcare issues by increasing the number of public-private partnerships, which they believe will take some pressure away from the national healthcare service.
CHEGA (CH)
Until 2019 Portugal stood as an oddity among European countries for having no major far-right party, but that changed very quickly. It was thought that this was due to a number of factors, including a recent fascist dictatorship (1926-1974) and the absence of a large immigrant population, but it turns out what was actually missing was a sufficiently capable political entrepreneur.
Alas, eventually one did come. At first, André Ventura might seem an odd fit for the job. A highly educated young man who wrote a thesis on civil rights and joined his PSD local branch. Unfortunately, when running for mayor of Loures in 2017, he accidentally made some off-hand comments about the romani, which prematurely ended his career in mainstream politics. Over the next two years, he reinvented himself as the leader of the far-right, founding CHEGA and entering parliament as its only.
During his short first term in parliament, he quickly became known for his aggressive debating style and (in the eyes of everyone but his supporters) demagoguery. Initially, antiziganism was his bread and butter, but he soon branched out into a broader right-wing populist message, including opposition to immigration, law and order politics and (largely imported) culture war issues. However, much of his popularity comes from public disappointment with political corruption among the mainstream parties, which he regularly stresses in his speeches.
CHEGA became the third largest party in 2022 and is polling as high as 19% for this election, which may be the largest percentage ever achieved by any party other than the PS or PSD.
One of their slogans is "Portugal needs a cleaning". Whether this refers only to corrupt politicians or is extensible to immigrants and romanis is anyone's guess
Liberal Initiave (IL)
A classical liberal and right-libertarian party that entered parliament at the same time CHEGA and has also seen rapid, if less spectacular, growth. It's already one of the most popular parties among young Portuguese people, who usually vote more right-wing than their older peers.
Despite being liberal on most social issues (they're bit iffy on stuff like trans rights), on economic the IL is by far the most right-wing party, promising to radically transform the Portuguese economy and welfare state along neoliberal lines.
Their proposals include a flat tax, more flexible labour laws, privatisation of several state-owned companies, a school vouchers program, and the transformation of the national healthcare service into a "national healthcare system" where the government would cover the costs of private healthcare for all citizens rather than treating them in public hospitals and clinics.
Critics argue that the cost of their fiscal policies would be immense, but the party says that they would largely pay for themselves by promoting economic growth
Left Bloc (BE)
A left-wing populist and democratic socialist party, the BE was one of the PS's government partners between 2015 and 2019. The party has always been very fractious due to its diverse ideological makeup (ranging from social democrats to maoists), and cooperation with the PS was a contentious issue from the beggining.
After suffering a severe setback in 2022, with most of their electorate abandoning them for the PS, they are now rising in the polls again, largely due to the personal popularity of leader Mariana Mortagua, an economist known for opposing banking interests. While the rise CHEGA will make impossible for the party to regain its former position as the third largest political force, they are still expected to finish a respectable fourth.
The BE platform calls for a complete abandonment of fiscal restraint to fund investments, including 40% pay raises for national healthcare service professionals, full coverage of medication costs for poor families, etc. They also propose a set of stringent housing market regulations to tackle the ongoing crises, including strict rent control and the prohibition of selling houses to non-residents. Many of the party's policies are likely to find resistance from the European Union, to which the BE advocates disobeying as per their soft euroskeptic position.
Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU)
A coalition of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and their satellite, the Ecologist Party "The Greens" (PEV)
Formerly one of Portugal's largest parties (achieving as much as 18% of the vote in the 80s), they are now in steep decline, holding on to a shrinking base of mostly elderly voters, particularly concentrated in the rural south where the party used to dominate local government.
Despite being a hard-line stalinists ideologically, they are actually surprisingly reasonable when it comes to domestic policy, being more pragmatic than the BE and having a much better sense of how to 'get things done'. They made many valuable contributions to the first two Costa governments, but did not receive the proper credit for these achievements and were eventually punished by their electorate for bringing down the second Costa government.
Since then, they have made a series of bad decisions, including taking a strongly anti-Ukrainian stance in the ongoing conflict with Russia, opposing euthanasia and surrogacy (deviating from their usual socially liberal stance on most issues), and picking a no-name apparatchnik over a popular figure as their new leader. They are widely expected to further decline in this election, but will probably stay in parliament.
People-Animals-Nature (PAN)
A former single animal rights party that later adopted a broader green and vaguely centre-left(-ish) platform. The party declares thar its neither left nor right and is willing to work with anyone except CHEGA. They have recently backed a right-wing regional government in Madeira under local PSD leadet Miguel de Albuquerque, known to be an avid hunter, prompting criticisms from much of the party's base.
Still, they are potentially seen as kingmakers in this election
LIVRE (L)
A small left-wing party formed by former BE independent MEP Rui Taveres. Unlike its parent party, LIVRE is pro-European and very dedicated to building bridges between different left-wing parties.
Their voter base is much younger than other parties on the left, and concentrated on major cities
Possible outcomes for the election
Scenerio 1 - Left-wing majority
If there is a left-wing majority , it is widely expected that the PNS will be able to repeat the 2015-2019 solution, with the possible addition of the LIVRE. All parties have identified this as their preferred solution.
The PAN may also possibly count for this majority if the only other option is to join CHEGA, but they have not excluded the possibility of joining an AD-IL only government
Scenerio 2: right-wing majority; PS largest party
If there is a right-wing majority but the PS remains the largest party, PSD leader Luis Montenegro has ruled out the possibility of forming a government with CHEGA support, but he has not revealed whether he would allow a PS minority government to take office, opening the possibility of a yet another dissolution and new elections
Scenario 2: right-wing majority; AD largest party
Barring the unlikely sub-scenario of AD-IL-PAN being enough for a majority, Montenegro would try to form a minority government. PNS has already said that he would allow this government to take office, but has offered no guarantee that he would approve the 2025 budget, meaning that this may also result in new elections, albeit at a later date compared to the last scenario
Overall, the future of Portuguese politics seems very uncertain

Having grown up in the US and having deep family ties and regular long stays (1979-2011)in Kolkata, it is clear to me that the Left Front was much closer in thought and action to the US Democratic Party than the Soviet Communist Party (or CCP). Totally misbranded, misaligned. And they never realized that.
Founded on the same set of democratic social values and mostly ethical politics, if WB “Left” had been called Democratic Progressive Front and had allies with the US, instead of “মার্কিন সাম্রাজ্যবাদ নিপাত যাক” slogans, it would have been a different history for both WB and USA.

5
In the summer of 2004, before the military training in high school began, I had two months to enjoy my vacation. However, the intense heat of the Southern summer confined people's activities indoors, even with fans, as the air was hot. Spending too much time indoors led to a sense of helplessness, and during the afternoons, it was common to take a short nap to break the monotony. After all, outdoor activities were not suitable from early morning, and indoor spaces were equally inhospitable. The result of this boredom was often a midday nap. Speaking of naps, many times I would fall asleep around midnight and wake up at five or six in the evening, feeling disoriented and groggy. Yet, each day unfolded in a similar manner.
During the scorching intervals, I attempted to do something productive. In one of my sister's parcels, I found a book titled "Youth in Blossom," which I initially treated as a sci-fi adult novel. Later, I dared not continue reading as the plot and story progression were beyond my comprehension. (Around 2011, I stumbled upon the same book at home. Comparing it to my experiences during the years of studying in Beijing, I began to feel that the author wrote a work of documentary literature, depicting aspects of campus life in the early 2000s that still existed in real universities many years later.) Somewhere else, I discovered a book titled "The True Story of Ah Q" and found it captivating. Despite Ah Q's unfortunate life experiences, he did not choose to give up. Instead, he employed a spirit similar to Ah Q's spiritual victory method to cope with the setbacks and disappointments in the real world.
Thus, after reading each of Ah Q's experiences, I had a feeling of being transported to another world. You could interpret this as the power of art, whether it's popular fiction or fabricated stories. Each of Ah Q's independent experiences felt like a movie from beginning to end, and this movie could evoke certain common sentiments in you. This feeling did not occur when I later read about Ah Q. It's not that Ah Q's story is better than Ah P's story; in fact, in many years of reading experiences in Chinese language classes, articles that could evoke common feelings in me were few and far between. Notable examples include Zhang Ruoxu's "Spring River in the Flower Moon Night," Yang Zhenning's speech, and Yu Hua's "Leaving Home at Eighteen." I will discuss these experiences in detail later. At that time, Ah P's story provided me with a rare immersive experience.
This to some extent prompted me to begin pondering my personal situation, although it was only in a very basic sense. Regardless of fiction or non-fiction, good literary works can inspire us to perceive the surrounding world more attentively, experience life more profoundly, or strive harder in life, rather than letting life unfold on its own.
When I talk about reflecting on personal situations, I mean that, at a young age, I began to gain inspiration from written materials. This discovery was based on personal experience, not the routine understanding imposed by the school. Everything presented in the nine-year compulsory education textbooks cannot be considered garbage, but in terms of the presentation of knowledge and information, it's challenging to be satisfied. It's quite amusing that this examination method, primarily based on memorization, can still be seen in some disciplines' Ph.D. qualification exams today. I'm not criticizing the compulsory education system or academic education in China, which ranges from middle to high levels, or even very specialized fields. I will discuss these aspects continuously in subsequent writing and provide detailed comments to explain why almost all levels of education in China are essentially garbage. However, regarding the nine-year compulsory education mentioned here, policymakers in the education sector, textbook writers, and teachers all lack a fundamental understanding of education as a basic national endeavor. This has resulted in a generally low level of reasoning and inductive abilities, not to mention reading comprehension and innovative thinking, among individuals who have or have not received a lower nine-year compulsory education or higher education.
The general path for humans to acquire knowledge is based on empirical reasoning and induction, where we extend our methods of dealing with future experiences based on rational reasoning. Through experience-based induction, we can better engage in rational thinking. If we consider fictional works as a form of knowledge production, it also involves imaginative thinking. When dealing with literary and artistic works, some form of imagination is necessary.
Experience is something every living person has, but the ability to reason or induct based on experience clearly requires specialized training. Even imagination and intuition, which play a crucial role in the humanities, can be and need to be strengthened through training.
However, schools do not teach us these abilities; the focus is on memorization-based education. Reciting and doing exercises have become universal methods in both the humanities and STEM fields. Using the metaphor of teaching someone to fish or giving them a fish, schools do not concentrate on improving individual learning abilities. Instead, they force you to learn, treating the cultivation of learning abilities as a matter of personal enlightenment. The expectation is that one day, during continuous memorization or exercise sessions, you will suddenly awaken, integrate everything, or suddenly understand during some weekend holiday extracurricular training class or interest class. Then, you will forge ahead without turning back.
Around the year 2000, I obviously did not have this realization. However, I was lucky to be inspired by reading "Stories" in the corner, and these short stories stimulated my emotions, leading me to brief contemplation on several idle afternoons. This indirectly triggered an awakening of my self-awareness. I began to actively write diaries to record life, but due to my limited starting level, I wrote about mundane things like today's weather, sleeping and waking times, and so on. After a few days, I found it boring and gave up.
I feel that, in a very loose understanding, the brief encounter with the summer after the third year of junior high school, to some extent, laid a tiny foundation for my later life. This experience hinted at what might attract me later, leading to a related kind of life.
Of course, a small "Stories" or "The True Story of Ah Q" or "Youth in Blossom" cannot have such a great influence. These were just very accidental factors that inclined my personal interests and life trajectory in a certain direction, making me feel close to certain things. Simultaneously, I started cultivating my unique interests because I could find satisfaction in them and receive concrete personal experiences from investing time and energy. A world constructed by books, whether fictional or non-fictional, unfolded certain possibilities in some potential future world for me. It vaguely presented a certain possibility of life, even though only a rough outline was revealed to me. There were too many specific details that I needed to fill in with my own time and energy. Still, considering the source of this accidental influence, the experiences of the summer of 2004 remain stored in the active region of my memory in a very concrete way.
6
The summer of 2004 was not at all lengthy. Within days of paying the school selection fee, I received the admission notice from Quzhou No. 3 High School, explicitly stating that military training would commence in August.
In other words, after idling away for two months of vacation, the guilt brought about by the school selection fee had not yet subsided. As mentioned earlier, this guilt did not stem from my academic performance or the enormity of the sum, but rather from the fact that my parents, despite leading a financially tight life, managed to save money to fund my education. Although I always believed there was no need for such financial hardship, for over twenty years before I ventured out to earn and spend money on my own, I couldn't change my parents' way of life. Apart from emotional guilt, I indeed couldn't change anything. You can't change anything, just like you can't change anyone. Therefore, one of my life mottos is to change the way you describe the world, and you can change the world. Of course, aside from that, the world remains the same. The bugle for military training had already sounded, and it was time to enter the city with my bags and parcels, embracing high school life.
Due to peculiar historical reasons and its advantageous geographical location, Quzhou had a small military airport in the city, complemented by a radar unit. As one of the indicators of various military-civilian collaborations, our school's military training instructors came from the artillery battalion. The content of the military training remained perennial under the sun – standing and running. August was possibly the hottest period of the year. If you have the chance to open Google Maps, you might see tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of junior or senior high school graduates foolishly gathered on open sandy fields in the coastal region of East Asia, all clad in various shades of yellow, occasionally shouting slogans with a strong ideological flavor left over from over sixty years ago.
We don't simply view the military as an emotionless national machine. Strictly speaking, the military belongs to the party, not the nation. The military upholds the interests of the party, not the nation. However, considering the complex political situation domestically, since the establishment of the Republic in 1949, the hereditary party forces have maintained absolute control over the operation of the country. In the discourse system of the Republic, the party is the country, and the country is the party. Although in terms of both connotation and extension, the nation is far larger than the party, in the ideological environment of the past sixty years, what belongs to the country is that of the party, and what belongs to the party remains with the party. As for those in the military, most of them are ordinary people from the masses who undergo paid ideological indoctrination in the military for several years and then return to the civilian population, either unemployed or becoming security guards, continuing along the path arranged for them by the previous generation.
So, what makes military training special? If it's not for inefficient ideological education, what other explanation is there? According to one interpretation, military training is actually a historical legacy. The modern school military training system with clear regulations began during the period of the Republic of China's Nanjing National Government. Considering the political atmosphere in the 1920s, we can assume that the Nanjing government advocated school military training, partly to promote nationalism for military considerations, preparing for the entire population to be soldiers. On the other hand, it was to suppress potential student movement forces domestically. Coincidentally, in Beijing over sixty years later, similar events are still happening. Therefore, according to another understanding, military training is just an industry that has emerged in the past twenty-plus years. In that case, the uniqueness of military training is not hard to understand.
Let's skip these sensitive and foolish political topics and continue the story of the summer of 2004. Carrying an extreme guilt for the thousands of yuan spent by my family on the school selection fee, the impact of the foolish military training and the blows from the instructors were quickly forgotten. I started considering recording all my expenses because doing so might alleviate my guilt about money. From as far back as I can remember until going to a distant place for university, during the nearly seventeen years living with my parents, I witnessed them living an overly frugal life, a lifestyle tradition prevalent and considered normal in Chinese villages, which I found highly inefficient and foolish. However, while living on my parents' money, eating their food, and staying in the space they provided, I couldn't make any meaningful comments or changes. After all, it's not wise to bite the hand that feeds you. That's why, after every big argument with my parents, I would eventually go home and have dinner or go to bed, although all of this ceased after I graduated from university. I rarely went home, let alone eat or sleep there.
So, during the evening self-study sessions after military training each day, I started keeping accounts in a notebook, and occasionally added some diary-like entries. I remember a certain time when I was sitting alone in the back row of the classroom, bowing my head to write my accounts. It was still during military training, and the classes hadn't been organized yet. A classmate came over, looked at me, and realized I was journaling. It made me feel a bit embarrassed. I immediately turned to a new page in the notebook and started doodling.
In reality, life during high school was quite unstable. I once dedicatedly recorded my daily expenses, starting on the last few pages of the exercise book provided by the school, marking dates and various categories clearly. However, not long after, I would find that the notebooks were lost somewhere. In those years, MP3 players hadn't become widely popular, and there was no intentional effort to save data. As a result, many financial records from my early years disappeared with each change of location between semesters, different dorm rooms, or different classrooms. Although I could still provide a basic range for monthly expenses in the early years, those precise and intuitive numerical records were lost in either a paper recycling station or a garbage dump.
After entering university, with the slight development of technology, I began using my phone to record my expenses. One result was that every penny I spent in the last decade has a trace, and I usually create a report for myself at the end of the year, summarizing monthly and yearly expenditure. It helps me gain a practical understanding of my life based on spending. Of course, during the university period, the expenses were limited in terms of categories. Especially between 2007 and 2012, the annual maximum expenditure was limited to tuition fees, followed by food expenses, book purchases, and some other miscellaneous spending. After 2012, when I started living independently, the disposable amount increased slightly each year, but the expense of rent also increased significantly. You see, a year's rent in school was only a few hundred or a couple of thousand yuan, but when you venture out and want a decent living environment, it's in the thousands or tens of thousands.
So, a very strange point is that in 2012, the first year after leaving school, the standard of living for the whole year was lower than when I was in school. In other words, no matter how you scramble for money, life was still very difficult. Later on, life gradually improved with the introduction of credit cards, and in the past two years
, my standard for evaluating my living standard is how much more I spent this year compared to the previous year. I use that to motivate myself to find a job and strive for a better life. All of this becomes very straightforward when I compare the annual bills of the past decade.
7
The military training ended at the end of August, marking the beginning of the new semester. In other words, it was the true beginning of high school life.
In the previous section, I mentioned the unpleasantness brought about by the foolish military training. However, considering the unknown possibilities that the upcoming new life might bring, such discomfort was quickly forgotten. I chose to redirect my energy towards the new academic struggles and experiences I anticipated in my planned study and diverse campus life.
The new life I spoke of began with a meeting after class placement. A group of people, some of whom had connections during military training, formed small groups, either already familiar or inquiring about hometowns. Some even discovered they were from the same hometown or village or were classmates from junior high. Meanwhile, I silently hoped for a female desk mate when distributing books or arranging seats. After all, I wanted to study hard to repay my parents for the school fees they paid.
The specific state of mind at that time is no longer ascertainable. However, when I was organizing my high school diaries later, I found a diary entry from the beginning of the autumn semester in 2006. Regardless, it reflects the general state of high school life:
"7.1 Carefully flipping through, I realized I hadn't written in my diary for more than ten days, like waking up from a nap and realizing it's the first day of school. I was still online in the morning, wandering aimlessly. After a few short hours at noon, I forgot everything and started studying. Slowly, I began to feel the casual nature of time. The confusion of the past seemed to be temporarily unraveled. Finally, I understood what 'no time' meant, how time flows like water, and how time flies. Without a purpose but still continuing the diary, knowing I didn't plan or couldn't write anything good, I continued nonetheless. It's like ignorant people living in ignorance but staying content! (2006.9.2)"
With the commencement of school life, the military green environment during training, which was initially calm, became exceptionally lively due to the arrival of high school juniors and seniors from the same school. I, as usual, silently prepared to immerse myself in intense studying on one hand and hoped to integrate into campus social life on the other.
For the former, it's needless to say; the influx of new courses overwhelmed me, and I quickly lost interest in these boring subjects. Instead, I focused on developing new learning projects. As for the latter, I still vividly remember a particular evening after self-study in the dorm, chatting with others. A classmate forcibly came over, demanding contributions for "protection money" for a senior in the third year, claiming it would be beneficial in the future. Although I was very unwilling to contribute ten yuan, seeing classmates around eagerly paying without hesitation, I went along with the flow.
Contrary to my initial plan of social integration in campus life, it turned out to be this form of integration. I envisioned engaging in communicative social activities, enriching experiences, and meeting interesting people on campus, rather than passively going with the flow. However, throughout the three years of campus social life that followed, I adopted the same approach. It's not that I'm personally weak; it's just that, in the context of that era, campus socializing was monotonous and impoverished.
I can say that I was deceived by TV dramas because reality is completely different from the world depicted in TV and movies. For example, when I finished high school and went to Beijing, wanting to experience another possibility shown in "Waiting Alone," not to mention the worlds depicted in campus romance dramas.
However, in that era, as someone who just finished junior high in a small town and eagerly entered city campus life for thrilling unknown adventures, there was no real reference for me to understand. My sister graduated from the third year of senior high at Three Middle School, but she remained silent, showing no signs of being baptized by the new world. Apart from a few old acquaintances from the village or town, she didn't make any new friends who appeared to be "city people" at first glance. I had to face the potential new life alone, something I had never experienced before in terms of living geography (i.e., the school was located in the city, not the village or town where I had been active for more than ten years) and learning environment (I was a selected student, and undoubtedly, most students in the class studied much better than me). In that era without Baidu Knows or platforms like Douban or Zhihu, if you wanted to know the "experience of xxx," besides TV dramas and movie channels, there were no other reliable channels. In reality, if you wanted to further understand the outside world and the unknown, I could find only two channels. Watch the news during breaks and watch urban romance TV dramas or campus youth dramas (such as the popular "Meteor Garden," "MVP Lover," and "18-Year-Old Sky") in other breaks, plus watching cartoons. That's all there was to life, and those were all the channels available to get information about the outside world.
Continuing with the tense academic life, I once vowed to repay the school fees of thousands and the solemn faces of my father and the worn-out faces of my mother every now and then (our family's economic situation was not considered poor in the village or town, but for some reason, even after more than ten years, my parents still liked to express their understanding of life through similar facial expressions. You should know that this strategy has fundamentally affected the way I spent my three years of high school, making me live under constant pressure during those three years. Generally, my understanding of life is indifferent and plain. If you watch documentaries or the news, you'll see that there are many people on Earth who have lives with food. My parents' sorrowful way of life made me feel that everything was my fault, and they paid for my personal behavior through their hard life. I affirmed the foolishness of studying and school life on one hand, using my willpower to resist the assimilating force of this foolishness, and on the other hand, every time I asked my parents for a few hundred yuan in living expenses, I encountered the tearful faces of my parents, as if a fragile family could collapse at any time due to the few hundred yuan I spent each month. Under the influence of these two pressures, I naturally suffered substantial blows both physically and psychologically. Ten years after graduating from high school, the days I spent affected by neurasthenia have even exceeded ten years, and it can be expected to continue.)
Imagine how eager I was when I received the high school textbooks, hoping that everything would start soon, and I could make a big difference. However, after two class assignments, I was ready to criticize teachers or course arrangements. In the first year, all subjects were covered, with the main courses being Chinese, mathematics, and English, and others including physics, chemistry, biology, politics, history, and geography. I could achieve the class average in all humanities subjects, but lagged behind in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Perhaps the reason was that the latter three required much more homework or exams in terms of quantity, so I became less willing. After all, in any evening self-study or self-study class, I needed to set aside some time to chat with my desk mate (mainly to train my skill of talking nonsense), try to get close to female classmates around (most of the time unsuccessful), and daydream (self-reflection) to think about interesting things.
I don't remember where this general view came from, but from the moment I realized it, it became a substantial standpoint in my worldview. That is, I believe daily life should be interesting. However, everything in high school campus life is completely contrary to fun. My school, Qizhou No. 3 High School, has always emphasized hard work. Although located in the city, the core student source comes from students in surrounding villages and towns, unlike the other two similarly competitive high schools located in the city, whose students mostly come from the main urban area and its surroundings. The difference in student sources is not just a simple geographical distinction because the admission score for Three High is generally the lowest among the three schools. Teachers hope that everyone can improve their college entrance exam results by working hard, doing exercises, and other actions so that the next intake of students will improve, and the school will replace the other school to become the second most eye-catching. However, all this was quite unacceptable to me. I also aspired to go to a good school (for example, if possible, I hoped to enter either of the other two), and I also hoped to enter a broader metropolis through high school studies to achieve the learning or social life I expected. Still, I couldn't accept strategies like alchemy, such as doing exercises and homework intensively, to strive for that goal. I hoped for a smooth progression in between, similar to following a certain trajectory, steadily advancing towards your goal, and naturally reaching the place you want to go without lowering your head and sitting in the classroom doing papers and such. As I expressed in my diary:
"7.2 I can't study, and my grades won't improve. Probably because I don't like reading, don't like homework, don't like classes. I have a certain set of values. I believe that using a huge amount of time and attention to do things must contribute to self-improvement, self-realization, and progress. The so-called reading, attending classes, doing homework, physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, English, Chinese - none of them stirs my interest or enthusiasm. It doesn't make me put in great effort with my full attention. I don't base my entire life direction on learning. Although most of my time is spent on studying, my energy is not focused on it. In my free time, I invest in other things." (2006.11.28)
8
I am talking about life after the first year of high school. The first year begins with class assignments and seating arrangements, and to some extent, these non-natural forces determine the possible social circles for the next few years. For me, the social circle ultimately boiled down to friends sitting around me, particularly those on my left and right. Right at the beginning of high school, I encountered some special classmates around me, whom I still consider extraordinary to this day. However, I haven't decided to delve into this story in detail for now.
Several years ago, when I was organizing my book purchases, I wrote a simple summary, starting from the year 2004. Here is the summary:
8.1 Prehistory of Online Book Shopping
If memory serves me correctly, my personal book-buying experience began around the summer and autumn of 2004. At that time, books like "The Little Prince by the Window" and "Harvard Girl" would occasionally appear on my desk, thanks to my desk mate. As I had no reading habits before (prior to this, I had only read "The True Story of Ah Q" from Storytelling magazine, apart from textbooks and comic books), these books were merely flipped through for the images. It was during the high school period in the city, where I went home every weekend and returned to school before Sunday evening self-study. I would often find new books piled on my desk during these weekends, and in my leisure time, I would often flip through them.
Later on, when my desk mate occasionally brought in the 16mo "Good Books" with vivid illustrations, my interest in flipping through books increased significantly. "Good Books" was a reader's publication from Xishi Bookstore at that time, mainly compiling introductory texts on recently published books, serving as a small-scale book review magazine. Looking back today, what left the deepest impression was an article written by Annie Baobei about "Love Letters" in a certain issue. However, many years later, I discovered that this article was published as an introduction in the July 2004 edition of "Love Letters" by Tianjin People's Publishing House. I can infer that the "Good Books" I saw was probably around the 4th-5th issue in 2004 ("Good Books" is a bimonthly magazine, and the 4th-5th issues were probably published between August and October).
The bimonthly format means that you can only repeatedly flip through a small book within two months. Although my desk mate may have had several issues at hand during that time, it was still not enough. Consequently, almost naturally, I started considering going to Xishi Bookstore myself. So, around the end of 2004, I spent 25 yuan at Xishi Bookstore to buy my first book—Yu Qiuyu's "A Sigh of a Millennium." (This book was probably given to a classmate from Gansu around 2010 or sold, but I lean towards the former).
As for my first book-buying experience, there are probably many things to talk about. For now, I'll only discuss two points: the process of buying books and the issue of book prices. Looking at the background behind the book-buying process at that time, it had a larger context. For instance, during high school weekends, it took about two hours by bus to travel home from the city, making the round trip quite troublesome. So, I usually went home once every three weeks. The living expenses at that time meant that I would only have disposable funds starting from the afternoon of the beginning of each new three-week cycle, just before Sunday evening self-study. Naturally, that became the best time to buy books. This arrangement could continue until the end of high school. Ignoring too many details, after wandering around bookstores for two weekends or more (I might have stood there flipping through a particular book dozens of times; during a certain period, I had developed the habit of standing in a bookstore for an entire weekend afternoon), I finally decided to buy "A Sigh of a Millennium."
The price of 25 yuan was not cheap, at least for me at that time, as 30 yuan was enough to buy a new pair of jeans or something else. Another aspect worth mentioning about the 25 yuan is that I seemed to feel that the prices of most books at that time were around 25 yuan. Due to the membership system at Xishi Bookstore, B-level members could enjoy an 80% discount, and E-level members could enjoy a 75% discount. During most of my book-buying times, I used the B-level membership status of my desk mate, and many books were obtained at the price of 20 yuan, causing the bookstore owner to think for a long time that I was my desk mate. (I reported my desk mate's name when buying books, and the owner could retrieve membership information from the database).
According to my statistical record at that time, the total number of books I purchased from Xishi Bookstore would not exceed 50 (mostly by Annie Baobei, Yu Qiuyu, and similar authors). I am not sure if this "statistical record at that time" is accurate, but even allowing for some error, I think it would not exceed 100 books (which was unimaginable in terms of financial capability at that time; if I'm conservative, I think the total might be around 30 books). Especially after 2007, I began to try more frequently to buy books on Dangdang — many books with titles I had only heard of could be found on Dangdang, and they also offered cash on delivery!
The last memorable book-buying experience came in 2007. One weekend, I bought Chen Danqing's new signed edition, "The Sequel to the Retreat Collection," on Dangdang. Later, I went to Xishi Bookstore specifically to show off and bought another copy there. This was before or after May 1, 2007. As mentioned earlier, in the spring of 2007, I had already started my online shopping journey on Dangdang (the first two books I bought were Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation" and Heidegger's "Being and Time"), even though I often went to Xishi Bookstore near the back gate of the Chinese Medicine Hospital and the new store next to Erzhong later on. It's just that the books in the bookstore could no longer satisfy what I wanted to read, and, at the same time, I had not been doing well for many years. These two factors made me rarely chat with the store owner again. (December 18, 2012)
The above is about the beginning of reading and buying books, which was triggered by my desk mate. Another kind of trigger came from classmates in front and behind. I remember that the student in front of me was a girl who liked basketball. Every week, she would buy "Contemporary Sports" or "Slam Dunk" basketball magazines. At the end of each week, as we sat in the classroom waiting for Sunday evening self-study to begin, many students with extraordinary powers would share strange encounters over the weekend, comment on this week's TV programs, or show something novel to share with everyone.
I took advantage of these moments of exchange or chit-chat, borrowed basketball magazines, and began to read them. It was this unique experience that smoothly turned basketball into my main extracurricular activity for the next three years of high school. At the same time, the "Good Books" my desk mate brought from Xishi Bookstore opened up another world, smoothly making buying and reading books my most continuous hobby for the next decade.
It was a very coincidental and strange experience that happened in the summer when high school began. I have never been a fatalist; I believe that my destiny is in my own hands. Such a belief lasted for at least twenty years. Later, I read Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," which had a substantial impact on refining my life and worldview. However, I was not convinced by Rorty; I don't believe in the power of contingency. Including later readings on Nagel's moral luck, Aristotle and Hegel's discussion of the individual's position in tragedy, none of them provided much convincing power. Moving forward, as I came out of school, traveled from the south to the north, and, influenced by my life experiences, began to slowly lower my head to fate, I started to believe a bit in the concept of contingency.
Later, in a response by Zhao Jie on a question about fatalism in the "Wenzhao Wheel" on Zhihu, the answer resonated with me. The reason I agreed with that answer is, I think, based on empirical summaries inside. Later, I found an interview with Wen Zhaolun on Weibo, where Old Zhao talked about his fatalism again:
Old Zhao: Acceptance means acknowledging that there are things in the world that you cannot change no matter what, and they may play a decisive role in your life and development. In this way, when you succeed, you will feel that there is nothing to be proud of; it's just a bit better luck, so continue to strive. When you fail, you will also feel that there is nothing to regret; it's just a bit worse luck, so continue to strive.
What I want to say is the shaping power of experience on life. I was once attracted by the power of reason, but in daily experience, I repeatedly found that to change life, the power of reason is so negligible. Later, I turned into a person who purely pursued changing life, and it was obvious that reason's power was insignificant. In the second half of 2016, I changed my Weibo signature to "Have surprises given by fate, unaware of any worries." Before this, my signature was "How can I bow down to the powerful and flatter them, causing me to lose my cuteness." I think life gave me a very substantial education, making me realize the power of fate, making me aware of the illusion I had held for over twenty years about practical daily life. Experience truly began to shape my life.
I am talking about an experience that went from active resistance to passive acceptance, about what I consider the power of fate. I have not become a true fatalist; I believe more in luck than fate. So, in my high school more than ten years ago, when I was assigned to a corner in the classroom with a few peculiar classmates around me—front, back, left, and right—these classmates, unconsciously, influenced all my subsequent life. According to my current perspective, this is also a kind of surprise given by fate, resolving countless possible worries I didn't know about back then.

Hello! Today, while perusing the Doe Network, I looked at the updates section. This new profile caught my eye because this is the same region of the United States I reside in, and her name.
Case:

• Name: Hanan A. Forawi
• Case Classification: Endangered Missing
• Missing Since: April 5, 2006
• Location Last Seen: Jackson, Hinds County, Mississippi

The Story:
Hanan A. Forawi was a professor and doctoral student at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. After leaving campus on April 5, 2006, she was not seen again. She was reported missing when she did not show for work the next day (presumably by coworkers). She resided at the "Trails at Northpoint Apartments" on Northpointe Parkway.
Very little information is available about the disappearance online, and even less about Hanan herself. It also states that Hanan’s brother, unnamed, came to the United States in 2009 to search for her, and that her family is or was concerned she may have been deported. I haven’t been able to find what country she is from.
Of Hanan, a 2011 newspaper article about local cold cases states the following: “She was described as intelligent, hard-working, resourceful, and had a reputation as a good student,” and that “Some people believe she may have just cracked under the pressure and walked away.”
I have been unable to find what her major was, but her name is attached to a research paper about xenoestrogen modulation. The paper cites her as being affiliated with “Molecular Toxicology Research Laboratory, NIH-Center for Environmental Health, School of Science and Technology, Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi 39217, USA.”
Two photos are available; both are posted to the Doe Network.
Demographics:

• DOB: September 1, 1963
• Age: 44 years old
• Race: Black/African
• Gender: Female
• Height: UNKNOWN
• Weight: UNKNOWN
• Hair Color: Black
• Eye Color: Brown
• Nicknames/Aliases: UNKNOWN
• Distinguishing Marks/Features: UNKNOWN

Identifiers:

• DNA: UNKNOWN
• Fingerprints: UNKNOWN
• Dentals: UNKNOWN

Clothing and Personal Items

• Clothing: UNKNOWN
• Jewelry: UNKNOWN
• ADDTL Personal Items: UNKNOWN

Notes:

• Hanan Forawi is NOT currently on NamUs.
• NamUs and Doe Network are currently only accepting submissions from law enforcement and medical examiners, implying that Jackson law enforcement submitted her to DN, and will likely do the same with NamUs.
• Jackson is in south Mississippi, relatively close to the Louisiana border. It is the state capital.
• The Northpointe Apartments are approximately 20 minutes from Jackson State University.
• The MSU Repository (database maintained by Mississippi State University in Starkville) lists 1400 John R. Lynch Street as her last known location (this street runs through JSU). The repository received her information January 29, 2023.
• Lots of information is absent from her DN profile; it is reasonable to assume more information will be added soon.
• Her eye color is listed as brown. In the enhanced photo, they appear a light brown or hazel, though this could be a mistake in the enhancement.
• If alive today, Hanan would turn 66 years old in 2024.

Observations and Questions:

• How many neighbors, friends, students, classmates, and coworkers, were questioned or interviewed?
• What caused her to be classified as endangered missing specifically?
• Who made the initial missing persons report?
• Was her apartment searched? Did she own a vehicle? Did she have a companion animal?
• What was her state of mind/behavior leading up to April 5, 2006? The aforementioned witnesses would be able to report this.
• What would cause people to believe she may have “cracked” and simply walked away?
• Was she seeing anyone?
• Did she have any extracurricular activities and/or hobbies?
• Did she have any family living in the United States at the time at all?
• Is her brother still residing in the United States?
• Where is she from? How many languages can she speak?
• Did she have any medical conditions?
• Hanan was a 44 year old doctoral student and professor; what was her profession prior to this? How far into her doctoral program was she?

I'll end this with the slogan on the Missing Sippi logo: 'till they're ALL home!
Sources:
The Doe Network Profile (January 26, 2024).
Mississippi State University Repository (January 29, 2023)
WLB-T3 News (April 29, 2006).
Clarion Ledger Article (February 6, 2011).
Research Paper (2004)
Missing Sippi Profile (Unknown)
​

TL;DR — At least 50% of the world's population exists only in a spreadsheet. They are Ghosts, fake people created by evil governments to grab power, mess with our heads, and hide the human genocide agenda. The creation process is perfectly legal and there is no downside to it. Every country I checked does it, from tiny specks of dirt in the Pacific to Afghanistan, China, India, and USA.

Introduction

We do it wrong, being so majestical,To offer it the show of violence,For it is as the air, invulnerable,And our vain blows malicious mockery.-"Hamlet", Act I, Scene I
A conspiracy theorist doubts government data. Chemtrails? Flat Earth? Fake Moon landings? They mean doubt in air pollution, topography, and space exploration data. This post presents and explains the Ghost Population Conspiracy (GPC), meaning doubt in national and global population numbers.
GPC states that a government derives power from the supporting population. A good government guarantees freedom and safety for the population, which leads to increased population, increasing the government's power.
An evil government makes life a living hell, driving its people away or killing them off, which leads to a population decline that leads to an economic collapse and a revolution. By creating Ghosts, an evil government can stay in power despite the dwindling population.
Those illusory people that exist only in spreadsheets are Ghosts. They count in millions but you can't see them. They don't need shelter yet their presence causes real estate prices to go up. They don't need work yet they suppress wage growth. Most importantly, they were never born yet they vote for the evil government.
The implications of GPC are far-reaching and this post can only scratch the surface of it, focusing on:

• why Ghosts are made
• what China's ghost cities have to do with it
• examples of countries with many Ghosts
• how Ghosts help elections get stolen

How does an evil government benefit from Ghosts?

It gets bigger, richer, and more divisive.
A government can only grow as big as the population. By claiming the population is 100 times larger than it is, an evil government can grow 100 times the size it should. That would bankrupt the country but that’s where international banks come in.
A bigger population lets the government take out bigger loans. International banks give loans based on population size and demand new taxes and policies to guarantee repayment. The evil government takes out loans and hires micromanagers at 100 times the rate they should be to enforce policies and oversee tax collection.
The evil government creates a burgeoning apparatus to divide the population. Hiring one half of the population to micromanage the other creates an "US vs THEM" mentality on both sides. Instead of cooperating, the two abuse each other, causing a rift that prevents people from reforming or overthrowing the government.
GPC is the linchpin of the elite’s global power structure. Expose the real population numbers and you’ve revealed the wizard behind the curtain. It’s the living who create prosperity and have all the bargaining power, but evil governments use Ghosts to make the living feel powerless and insignificant. Those who become aware of GPC reclaim their ability to prosper, become less materialistic and focus on genuine, wholesome relationships, which leads to strong communities and families.
I shudder in awe when I realize the kind of genius that thought of GPC and put it in action without anyone noticing. It took me 3 years to find the name for it — psychopath.

What kind of genius is creating Ghosts?

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!-"The Great Dictator", Charlie Chaplin, 1940
The word "psychopath" comes from an 1885 criminal case involving a woman that killed a little girl. An expert witness for the defense testified that she was unable to resist her murderous impulses that placed her outside social norms. That argument led to her acquittal and widespread use of the word. Psychopaths regularly use that same excuse but you’ll rarely hear the word, let alone its definition, because the modern society is so psychopathic that we’d be always using it.
Stories involving the devil are actually talking about psychopaths who toy with others and twist their perception of reality. The devil can change shape, exploit emotions, and is crafty with words to the point of weaseling out of any promise, just like a psychopath. He or she promises benefits in exchange for obedience but never fully delivers, again like a psychopath. A human psychopath can’t shapeshift but can use different personas to recruit others as allies and henchmen.
https://preview.redd.it/gmotgsfinv6c1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95e3fe0f96073bb84a1eb9c0773e0a5abcea322e
Modern entertainment presents psychopaths in movies such as "The Silence of the Lambs" (1993), with Hannibal Lecter a suave doctor capable of dissecting his targets to find and press their weaknesses before brutally assaulting and eating them. Another example is Anton Chigurh from "No Country for Old Men" (2007) who literally treats his victims like cattle, runs them around in circular conversations, and toys with them.
My favorite is Jigsaw from "Saw" movies, who kidnaps people and puts them in contraptions that loosely correlate with their wrongdoings, taunting them with "live or die, the choice is yours" (most traps are inescapable).
https://preview.redd.it/u9wvcn2nnv6c1.png?width=727&format=png&auto=webp&s=84169248225a3b41e80db2b0633d715446bcbcd3
The most fascinating part of Saw movies is when there’s multiple people in Jigsaw’s scenarios. Pitted against each other, people break and hurt other victims to save themselves. They "win" the game and become Jigsaw’s accomplices. That is a real phenomenon called "Stockholm syndrome" that occurs after abuse and explains why normal people become enforcers for evil.
The above should also prebunk a common conspiracy-debunking argument, "You think a government can run GPC without someone blowing the whistle?"
Government employees don’t have to be aware of an agenda to enforce it because governments select for obedience. Those who disobey are disciplined until they fall in line or leave; whistleblowers end up like Manning, Assange, or Snowden. All governments eventually become filled with enforcers that go by, "Live on my terms or die on yours".
Charlie Chaplin’s description fits a psychopath to a T — powerful people with machine minds and machine hearts who use and dispose of others like a bored child of its playthings. Successful psychopaths build a facade of benevolence, behind which they create a soul-crushing system that dehumanizes everyone it touches. Their ideal world is shown on the March 2020 cover of The Economist.
https://preview.redd.it/rj40b6ipnv6c1.jpg?width=450&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d21711edae697c1d61ac549c4216d883a6973155
GPC makes perfect sense when you understand how a psychopath thinks. To a psychopath, empathy is the ultimate weakness that has to be corrected by promoting greed and consumerism. The easiest way to promote those "strengths" on a mass scale is to create a lie that the planet is overcrowded and its resources are not enough for us all.
Eat or be eaten, trounce everyone for scraps and baubles or be left in the dust — that’s the psychopath’s mindset and we’re all supposed to think and feel the same. The purpose of Ghosts is to make us all psychopathic, meaning predictable, self-destructive, and easily controllable. It’s by nurturing our empathy that we overcome the psychopathic programming and by caring for others that we become alive and aware of the moment.
Still, all the examples I listed can be dismissed as exaggerations. My attempts to describe psychopathy in real terms were hampered by the lack of real-world references until I read Michel Foucault’s "History of Madness", an excellent overview of how governments build segregation structures that remain in place for centuries, with the justification for their existence shifting from leprosy to venereal diseases to madness and so on.
The book states that governments cyclically undergo periods of madness when they declare large swaths of their population filthy or undesirable and start killing them off. Those periods appear to be caused by psychopaths and their enforcers reaching critical mass in the government. The COVID-19 mania is a global example of that madness, with some indications it happened before.
https://preview.redd.it/guye8f1xnv6c1.jpg?width=1667&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=179328a68dd77caa3a70393a55b2867a76b89ec9
One example of government madness comes courtesy of 1930s Germany that had health passes that served the same purpose as COVID-19 vaccination certificates, primarily allowing free travel and unfettered access of "clean" people to "civilized" society. I also found indications that the cannabis and alcohol scares are two modern examples of the same madness, but those deserve their own posts.
In any case, it took me until I discovered a certain quote by a certain Georgian that it all clicked into place and I found out how Ghosts are made and how come all evil governments use the same blueprint for tyranny.

Stalin, a psychopath's role model

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.-Stalin, 1947
A compelling story needs a compelling villain, so here he is — Josif Visarionovich Stalin, a hardcore criminal that rose to the top of the political food chain in USSR in the early 20th century.
Stalin was the most successful psychopath of the 20th century, creating millions of Ghosts by decree and building a government that turns the governed into psychopaths through abuse and desensitization. His methods are in widespread use to this day.
Stalin realized that people have basic needs, and if those needs aren’t met, they will leave or die, causing a population reduction, which reflects poorly on his reputation and undermines his government. The above quote tells you the solution he thought of — ship people to remote areas of the country and kill them there.
If you don’t personally know anyone who’s died, why does that bother you. Are you a traitor? Off to a gulag with you! That method works in the other direction too — if you're told the population is growing, who are you to challenge it?
Stalin’s methods are described in detail in two books:

• "Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn
• "1984" by Orwell

In short, he used constant propaganda to deify himself and his system, overwhelming surveillance and intrusions to humiliate and micromanage, and a network of prisons where people were held for no reason, dehumanized, and used as slave labor.
"1984" is a thought experiment on what would happen if the entire world used Stalin’s methods. In Chapter 17, there is an explanation why the world is constantly at war (emphasis added):

In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling.
In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment. All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour.

https://preview.redd.it/vqtr5u5tnv6c1.png?width=1386&format=png&auto=webp&s=337eec8d8ee2db9e2262cd11d8761c2d59e2bb01
If you’re wondering how come Bumfuck Nowhere, US, gets thousands of Somali, Syrian, or Pakistani immigrants bused in on the taxpayer dime or why Puerto Rican airports have billboards advertising a move to the US, now you know the answer — the US government has created so many Ghosts that it has to desperately import immigrants or the ruse will be discovered. In Canada, maintaining GPC includes importing millions of Indian immigrants who are accustomed to living 50 to a hovel and working for a bowl of slop to prop up its real estate market. Local history will later be rewritten to enshrine their population as native and censor anyone saying otherwise as racist.
https://preview.redd.it/5vcrttpbiw6c1.jpg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82ce8b746977a01848fbf2a3345eb4b718afe1ca
​
All the wars and turmoil in the Middle East have a simple explanation, which is that they are created to collapse those countries and absorb their populations, just like in "1984". At times, psychopathic politicians will let their mask slip, admitting they want as much destruction as possible outside their borders.
You can ponder any of Stalin’s statements and actions and find a parallel with today’s politicians. The COVID-19 madness showed all countries in the world readily use Stalin's methods under the flimsiest of excuses. "Take the jab or be ostracized, the choice is yours". Three years later, all governments that enforced COVID-19 measures pretend that never happened, which is another Stalin's tactic described in "1984" as memoryholing.
https://preview.redd.it/p9d0t4y5ov6c1.jpg?width=686&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=49c8e2f4762ade77096961b075ba8872fd8c0420
So, how did Stalin create Ghosts? With the stroke of a pen.

How Stalin created 8 million Ghosts

In 1935, he gave a speech) (emphasis added):

The birth rate is higher, the death rate is lower and the pure population growth is far stronger. It is of course good and we welcome it. [Jolly murmurs in the auditorium.] Now every year we have a population growth of three million souls. It means that every year we grow as much as the whole of Finland. [Everybody laughs.]

In 1937, Stalin ordered a national census and announced it will show 170 million people. When it came in at 162 million, he executed the census takers, appointed new ones, and ordered a new census, which showed 170 million.
A 5% population drop would be a devastating blow to Stalin’s carefully groomed image and a cold shower for his zealots; you can imagine his reaction by how a modern politician reacts to a 2% population drop. It’s sheer panic and despair because nobody knows how to stop or reverse population decline, as China is now experiencing after ending its decades-long one-child policy.
Stalin created Ghosts by decree, but surely today we use science, don’t we? Not at all. Every country in the world uses population estimates, which actually makes sense if you think about how census bureaus work.
Counting the population takes money, time, and people. The bigger the population, the more money, time, and people it takes to count them, and the number is still not accurate because people shift around. So, census bureaus came up with an elegant solution — estimates.

How do modern governments create Ghosts?

Estimate (noun): a tentative evaluation or rough calculation, a judgment based on one’s impressions; an opinion.-TheFreeDictionary.com
Faced with pressure to provide correct population numbers to set government policy, census bureaus resort to a Solomonic solution — put out an imaginary number and tag it as an estimate. You will find population estimates everywhere, and they direct every aspect of our lives. This excerpt from a March 2022 article talking about St. Louis shows it in action:

As of July 1, the Census Bureau estimated that just 293,310 people resided in the region’s core city of St. Louis, down from the 301,578 people counted in the 2020 census.

Can you see it? Are your awake to the ruse? In 2020, the US Census Bureau counted and in 2021 it estimated, with both numbers presented with equal weight, which indicates both numbers are opinion rather than fact. As a result of the population drop, there’s a federal financial injection to try to right the ship (emphasis added):

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities” like the almost $500 million in federal money the city received from the federal government will allow it to invest in affordable housing and neighborhood amenities.
“These steps are necessary to reverse decades of disinvestment that has led to St. Louisans leaving our city — especially north of Delmar,” Jones said in a statement.

A 2.7% drop in population, mere 8,000 people, resulted in $500mm going to St. Louis politicians. I think the situation is worse than that but publishing a more realistic estimate would open the Census Bureau to scouring claims of racism since 95% of St. Louis population is black. When I tried to see the raw St. Louis data for myself, I discovered the US Census Bureau website blocks foreign traffic, which I’m sure is just a coincidence.
That’s fine, because people went for a drive through St. Louis, Missouri, the most dangerous city in the US, and it already looks like a ghost city. That video is filled with stats, such as that the 2022 population of St. Louis is estimated at 286,578, a further 2.4% drop from 293,562 estimated to live there in 2021.
You can find many more videos like that one and more estimates to piece together the true scale of GPC. In short, many places in the US are already a ghost city but local governments are using Ghosts to drain as much money out of the GPC before it is discovered and the entire system collapses.
Money doesn’t help reverse the population decline and may even accelerate it, because it fuels the growth of the parasitic bureaucracy. By the time that $500mm filters down through the sieve of corruption to the ordinary people, there will only be drops left. People will get their welfare pittance to birth more kids and pad the population numbers, but without a functioning society those kids can only move out, become psychopaths themselves, or die a violent death.
Once you understand psychopathic politicians see us all as cattle to be bred, managed, milked, and slain as needed, you’ll hopefully understand GPC is the perfect way to keep the cattle docile before slaughter. It’s like that everywhere on the planet, but some places have pushed GPC to its limits, leading to a crack in the narrative and potentially revealing the entire scam.

Ghost cities in China

There are certain things you don’t talk about in China because if you do it’s a fast track out of there. You’re gonna get into a lot of trouble, you’ll be silenced, it’s just proven fact, it happens. (...) Even the very mildest criticism of very basic things in China (...), minor criticism will also land you in a lot of trouble.-Serpentza, "How China Forced me to Criticise China – I have no choice"
China is so alien to the Western audience that it might as well be the surface of Jupiter. There are three causes for it:

• the Western media is English-centric
• Chinese culture of "fake it till you make it" and "shoot the messenger of bad news"
• Chinese Communist Party (CCP) obsession with micromanaging the population

Put all three together and you’ve got total media blackout regarding trouble in China, leaving us with Westerners such as Serpentza to explain China’s ghost cities. In rare cases, the Western media runs negative stories on China and that's when you should pay attention. We don’t get any bad mainstream news from China unless there’s an agenda behind it.
When The Guardian reports that China used to spend half the world's concrete for construction, you should realize it means a massive real estate boom in China. When MSN reports on China's ghost cities, it means there’s not enough people for that real estate. When Bloomberg handwaves those same ghost cities as "well, they’re just waiting for people to move in", you should start connecting the dots — there’s so many Ghosts in China that CCP built sprawling cities that will never be populated.
https://preview.redd.it/vfyycg50ov6c1.jpg?width=1800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2fa1fcbe70509a0346447f9f6cf667849093c667
There need not be any malice behind Ghost creation in China. Local politicians come into office and see a certain population number in their area, say, 200 million. They don’t know if it’s true but there’s no incentive for them to check, and especially not to report a lower number.
So, they report a higher number, which makes them look good and is what CCP expects to hear while making them eligible for land development funds. Repeat across China and you’ll get a huge population on paper but sprawling desolate cities in reality, which is what we’re seeing.
https://preview.redd.it/q6u54z30fw6c1.png?width=1188&format=png&auto=webp&s=45bb7081f4a2ce5ca697d37493cd2b75e4e5918a
One researcher, Yi Fuxian, checked the Chinese newborn vaccination data and concluded there’s 140 million Ghosts in China. In my opinion, that’s a conservative estimate and I think the number is closer to 400 million, with the 140 million being controlled disclosure. Sensitive information does not randomly leak from government offices, and that applies doubly to China, a country obsessed with projecting a strong image abroad.
I don’t have a grudge against China, it’s just the most dramatic example of GPC. Check any country in the world and you’ll find Ghosts.

Ghosts around the world

Anatol Lieven of Georgetown University in Qatar wrote in 2021 that "it may be noted that in the whole of modern Afghan history there has never been a census that could be regarded as remotely reliable."-Wikipedia, "Demographics of Afghanistan"
In Afghanistan, the last census was in 1979, reporting 15.5 million. After 5 million people left the country, the Afghan government estimated the population number at 15.96 million. It is currently estimated at 37 million, which curiously includes a 3-million-strong diaspora in Iran and Pakistan.
US spent $2.2T in the Afghanistan war theater) blowing up random caves and mountains over two decades. Any whistleblower who exposes the real purpose of the Afghanistan occupation will get Assange'd or Hillary'd but I can say it out loud — psychopaths in the US government shipped domestic patriots to a remote battlefield under a false pretense (chasing the Bin Laden ghost) and let them get killed.
In India, there hasn’t been a national census since 2011 and even that was a provisional (read: superficial) census that allegedly found 1.2 billion people. World Bank states it is currently at 1.4 billion and cites, among other sources, the US Census Bureau (??). India and China have experienced similar growth trajectories of their populations in the past few decades. I have a simple explanation — they are belligerents and presumably use Ghosts to prevent the other from claiming desolate areas across the border.
https://preview.redd.it/2x28sb93ov6c1.png?width=1910&format=png&auto=webp&s=ac51a8c08dfc321552e9e257a95288ce92c3c76a
In Germany, the last full population census was in 1987. Recent population numbers are based on the 2011 EU housing census, showing (what else?) constant growth and estimating the current number at 84 million. However, Germany has an enormous worker shortage, with the education sector alone missing some 450 thousand workers. Nobody knows where all those millions of people are but we can be quite sure they aren’t in the workforce. Germany is the economic fulcrum of the European Union; if investors lose confidence in Germany, the Euro currency goes belly up and with it the entire EU.
In Nigeria, the 2006 census allegedly found 140 million people. The current estimate is 213 million despite no reliable system in place to record births and deaths, with many Nigerians having no documents. The main problem with censuses in Africa is the sheer size of it and the lack of infrastructure in vast swaths of the continent. Africa is so big that it could easily house 5 billion people, it’s just that there’s no way to count them. In the meantime, African countries create Ghosts to receive more charity, which is distributed based on population size.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), which is where I live, the last population census was in 2013, finding 3.6 million people, with current estimates ranging from 3.2 million (World Bank) to 3.8 million (CIA Factbook). The government adamantly claims the number is exactly the same but the number of pupils enrolled in basic education dropped by 13% and the number of college students fell by about 30% since.
In Kingdom of Tonga, the estimated population across 171 islands with a combined surface area of 717 square kilometers is 105,000. On January 15, 2022, an underwater volcano exploded 60 kilometers (38 miles) north of Tonga, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes hit ground zero. The blast, estimated at 10 megatons, cooled the Earth's atmosphere by 0.01 °C.
Dubbed "the loudest moment of the century", the sound of it circled the planet twice and could be heard in Alaska. The resulting wave killed 2 people in Peru but the confirmed death toll in Tonga was 4. Digging a bit deeper revealed passport fraud is a motive for creating Ghosts — Tongan king was selling citizenship to Hong Kong residents.

How Ghosts enable voter fraud

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.-Stalin, 1923
Election night. The establishment darling is losing. The counting stops. A few hours later the votes pour in and the darling is ahead. People look at each other, "Who voted for him? The country is lost." The loser appeals to courts about voter fraud, but all motions are denied and the election is rubber-stamped.
I described the 2022 regional election in B&H. We have Gotham-tier criminals in politics, such as a drug dealer with the campaign slogan, "With me, a gram has always been a gram". Thanks to them I discovered voter fraud is an art form.
Each hijacked polling station specializes in one way of vote tampering. Some use special pens to edit ballots, others print fake ones with the "correct" vote, third ones use goons to keep the wrong voters out etc. Any investigation can only find a fraction of it.
The fraudsters coordinate through party liaisons who give the true vote count and the desired vote count. Hijacked polling stations drip-feed fake votes into the system to narrowly win. That happened in the 2020 US presidential election as well.
But, voter fraud is done in a hurry and sloppily. Without Ghosts, the fraudsters have no safety margin; each fake vote could land them in jail. With Ghosts, there's so many votes that nobody cares to investigate, which is what happened in the B&H and the US elections.
Strong voter systems may take decades to subvert in this way. Once in power, the chief psychopath promotes agendas that kill or intimidate the population, which leads to a sharp population decline and the lack of genuine political opposition. The missing population is replaced by Ghosts that hide the disastrous consequences of those agendas and allow for easier vote fraud. The more evil the regime, the more votes the psychopath gets.

Conclusion

And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.-John 8:32
The human brain is a reality-decoding organ that is highly susceptible to suggestion. If it’s fed enough lies, it will see a wretched reality. But if it’s given the tools to discover the truth, it’s going to manifest paradise. That’s what happened to me and proved GPC is true.
I started research for this text in 2020, with writing proper starting in June 2023. It was a transformative experience. I started consuming and spending less, enjoying small things in life. I hope reading this text will have a similar effect on you.
We matter and our voices matter. The only way anyone can ever convince us otherwise is by making us believe the planet is overcrowded and that we need to desperately consume to give meaning to our life, that we’re filthy useless eaters that need to be on a short leash, shamed, muzzled, and disciplined until we’re proper house-broken slaves.
Wherever you are, whatever your station in life, now you know how to improve things. Evil governments are out of control. There’s no running from them but you can expose Ghosts and thus destroy the reputation of psychopaths. Good governments won't be negatively affected by that.
Here’s a handy summary of tools and methods for exposing GPC:

• Look at pupil numbers
• Take a tour around your neighborhood
• Look at disaster reports
• Track local sports event attendance
• Look for population estimates in your region/country

If you need more details or want to send money my way please send a DM. I wish you all the best.