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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy

The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (French: La Part maudite) is a 1949 book about political economy by the French intellectual Georges Bataille, in which the author presents a new economic theory which he calls "general economy". The work comprises Volume I: Consumption, Volume II: The History of Eroticism, and Volume III: Sovereignty. It was first published in France by Les Éditions de Minuit, and in the United States by Zone Books. It is considered one of the most important of Bataille's books.

🔗 Physics

The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman:

🔗 California 🔗 California/Los Angeles area

Skid Row is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. The area is also known as Central City East.

As of a 2019 count, the population of the district was 4,757. Skid Row contains one of the largest stable populations (about 2,783) of homeless people in the United States and has been known for its condensed homeless population since the 1930s. Its long history of police raids, targeted city initiatives, and homelessness advocacy make it one of the most notable districts in Los Angeles.

Covering fifty city blocks (2.71 sq mi) immediately east of downtown Los Angeles, Skid Row is bordered by Third Street to the north, Seventh Street to the south, Alameda Street to the east, and Main Street to the west.

🔗 United States 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model is a working hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. While the Bay Model is still operational, it is no longer used for scientific research but is instead open to the public alongside educational exhibits about Bay hydrology. The model is located in the Bay Model Visitor Center at 2100 Bridgeway Blvd. in Sausalito, California.

🔗 Energy

In utility-scale electricity generation, the duck curve is a graph of power production over the course of a day that shows the timing imbalance between peak demand and renewable energy production. The term was coined in 2012 by the California Independent System Operator.

🔗 China 🔗 Capitalism 🔗 Culture

Neijuan, sometimes known by the English term involution, is a Chinese term that describes a condition in which a system, institution, or competitive process continues to intensify in effort, complexity, or participation without a corresponding increase in output, efficiency, or collective benefit. Neijuan is the Chinese calque of the English word involution. Neijuan is written with two characters which mean 'inside' and 'curling/rolling'.

Neijuan had been used to describe an uneven distribution of social, economic, and educational resources and ongoing economic malaise, especially in terms of higher education bodies and labor markets. On a macroeconomic level, neijuan has led to overproduction and diminishing returns for capital owners who engage in fierce price wars that aggravate deflationary pressures in a pure unregulated market. When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible. On a personal level, neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing.

The exercise paradox, also known as the workout paradox, refers to the finding that physical activity, while essential for maintaining overall health, does not necessarily lead to significant weight loss or increased calorie expenditure. This paradox challenges the common belief that more exercise equates to more calories burned and consequently, more weight loss.

🔗 Books

Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang. It combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books). It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読).

The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state.

🔗 Mathematics

Connes' embedding problem, formulated by Alain Connes in the 1970s, is a major problem in von Neumann algebra theory. During that time, the problem was reformulated in several different areas of mathematics. Dan Voiculescu developing his free entropy theory found that Connes' embedding problem is related to the existence of microstates. Some results of von Neumann algebra theory can be obtained assuming positive solution to the problem. The problem is connected to some basic questions in quantum theory, which led to the realization that it also has important implications in computer science.

The problem admits a number of equivalent formulations. Notably, it is equivalent to the following long standing problems:

• Kirchberg's QWEP conjecture in C*-algebra theory
• Tsirelson's problem in quantum information theory
• The predual of any (separable) von Neumann algebra is finitely representable in the trace class.

In January 2020, Ji, Natarajan, Vidick, Wright, and Yuen announced a result in quantum complexity theory that implies a negative answer to Connes' embedding problem. However, an error was discovered in September 2020 in an earlier result they used; a new proof avoiding the earlier result was published as a preprint in September. A broad outline was published in Communications of the ACM in November 2021, and an article explaining the connection between MIP*=RE and the Connes Embedding Problem appeared in October 2022.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Corruption

State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage.

The term was first used by the World Bank in 2000 to describe certain Central Asian countries making the transition from Soviet communism, where small corrupt groups used their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making in order to strengthen their own economic positions.

Allegations of state capture have led to protests against the government in Bulgaria in 2013–2014 and in 2020–2021 and Romania in 2017, and have caused an ongoing controversy in South Africa beginning in 2016. Turkey is considered as a post-2002 example of state capture. The term has also been used against Elon Musk by critics of U.S. President Donald Trump.