He’s had a very visible career so it’s actually pretty clear what his views are. He is not at all a socialist, he is a SocDem. He likes neoliberalism with some safety nets.

Are people using capital to acquire more capital to then undertake more capital-intensive endeavors? Yes? Then it’s still capitalism.

At this point I think Varoufakis only continues to rant his drivel in order to feel better about being a rich capitalist himself.

And advertising customers. Great company all around.

Hm. Maybe I’m missing something but I’m not seeing a million ‘successful’ AI startups pop up overnight like during the Dot Com Bubble. Most of the AI investments I’ve seen have been from major corporations that can pivot and eat a little loss. I do see several resume and business-plan writing services but it just doesn’t seem like much of a parallel, to me.

The article doesn’t address this disparity, it just pretends like it’s an equivalency - citing only megacaps like GOOG, MSFT, etc. Clickbait headline, I guess.

The story actually gives the background of the holes. They were dug by humans. They aren’t supernatural and didn’t appear from nowhere, they emerged from older sediment layers that were raised back to the surface again after an earthquake. The story doesn’t specifically say it, but it implicitly builds on ideas the predominant religion in Japan - syncretic Buddhism - which is common for any literature and would be recognized readily in Japanese audiences. These people committed crimes and were punished in the past, and now they have been reborn again. Like all people they are ignorant to their past lives in normal situations, but their ‘souls’ are still bound to and resonate with the same infinitely continuous karmic system.

If you find a hole hidden under geological eras, and it was made just for you and you knew it… you wouldn’t feel tempted at all to just… take a step in… a unique hole unlike any other in the world, this one welcoming you like your own shadow with its depths… and confirm that someone really did carve out your exact silhouette?

It’s certainly something I could imagine happening in a dream. Like my recurring dream of driving off of bridges.

There is a Buddhist element of reincarnation going on which might be lost on some foreign audiences, but the feeling it is trying to summon should be familiar - a strange familiarity of something that should be unknown to you, an inexplicable intuition, something that feels like it could be from a past life, a premonition, deja vu.

If none of this is relatable to you, that’s okay, but it is relatable to myself and many others. Hopefully you don’t have recurring dreams about driving off of bridges, either.

The surreal aspects beg you to drop your hyper-criticism and to look for deeper imagery. I love it. And he can do it in such a short form, while also managing to singularly capture the psychological horror as well as anyone.

Imagine present day Stephen King telling stories through a one-shot manga. The action wouldn’t even be started before he ran out of paper! Of course, King has his own masterful way of conveying horror and it works very well, too.