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Rakesh Bhandari

@postdiscipline.bsky.social
213 followers 90 following 751 posts

Associate Director of Interdisciplinary Studies and Senior Lecturer at Cal. Have acted as Director for many years. Twisting Marx to make capitalism stronger since I got a mortgage. But don't ask me what my field is, I'm not a donkey.

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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I taught it in an intro social theory course, and I think the graduate students enjoyed teaching it with me. Astonishing range.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The SF Bay Area is at the edge of the posthuman. We've gone from moving fast & breaking things with CRISPR germline edits made possible (& cautioned against) by Doudna's Lab to self-recursively accelerating AI created in SF labs, which Gates warns could cull a billion people.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
On October 16th, both the Holmes and Musk documentaries will be released, it seems. So it won't be Barbenheimer but Mulmes or Holsk?
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Maybe they would have if his political career hadn’t been derailed by all that jail time for tax fraud, but we know who The Feds were harassing Lyndon LaRouche, aka Lynn Markus, on behalf of: the drug-running British Monarchy. 😜
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Maybe they would have voted for him if his political career hadn’t been derailed by all that jail time for tax fraud, but we know who The Feds were harassing Lyndon LaRouche, aka Lynn Markus, on the behalf of: the drug-running British Monarchy.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
This thread reminds me of the need for any student to be aware that different disciplines need different approaches. Eg deduction from axioms is OK in maths, not the social sciences; creating clarity OK in engineering, less so in literature. Beware of professional deformation.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Matthew Yglesias & @mattyglesias
The GOP operative class is younger, better educated, and more urban than the national average which means their intuitions pull the party to the center.
The Dem operative class is also younger, better educated, and more urban but that means their biases pull Dems off-center.
4:15 PM • 11/7/22 • Twitter for iPhone
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
From @matthewcobb.bsky.social's history of genetic engineering, I learned that the USSR did serious research into bioweapons, while the US didn't. The Soviets lied about the CIA inventing HIV to deflect from its own biochemical warfare. Now the US may have no resistance to bioweapons research
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
You need a vote of 85% of shareholders to press the kill switch on the public-minded Anthropic Board of Directors. Say Amodei is worried that the Board will keep Anthropic in the sandbox. He rushes to go public so he has the votes to neutralize the Board, not just to get rich.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
You need a vote of 85% of shareholders to press the kill switch on the public-minded Anthropic Board of Directors. Say Amodei is worried that the Board will keep Anthropic in the sandbox. He rushes to go public so he has the votes to neutralize the Board, not just to get rich.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Teach people to demand pay in stock options, and then they maximize the value of those options at the expense of everyone else at the firm. I'd guess that this is one reason for the rent-extracting ways of business school-educated CEO's.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Teach people to demand pay in stock options, and then they maximize the value of those options at the expense of everyone else at the firm.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I'd advise Business Departments & Schools, as well as Business Economics majors, not to overreact to this finding & thereby call attention to it. The public is so outraged about the corruption of higher education by DEI that they won't pay no mind to this. Ignore this. Acemoglu's lost The Economist
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Yes, this social movement may emerge outside and against party politics. It may also birth a poet, a new Wm Blake decrying data centers not as dark Satanic mills but as Digital Mills of Urizen. That the Blake & other connections haven't yet been made suggests that this is only starting!
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Yes, this social movement may emerge outside and against party politics. It may also birth a poet, a new Wm Blake decrying data centers not as dark Satanic mills but as Digital Mills of Urizen. That the Blake & other connections haven't yet been made suggests that this is only starting!
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Omg. Can’t wait to read this with the attention I want to give it. Recently retired Cal economist Michael Reich had a theory of how racial inequality stabilized capitalism. Given efforts to roll back DEI, may be something to it. Meanwhile some say anti-racism or pro-DEI stabilizes capitalism best
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
What the S.Ct. does is not crumbling or capitulating but revealing a full partnership to exploit the moment for authoritarian or illiberal gains?
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Hard to see how LLM’s won’t ‘suppress’ counterintuitive and ‘long proof’ truths exactly because they will be sold as superior to and replace the human institutional expertise that would have been the guardians of such truths and commanded social respect 2/2
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
From this framework the LLM won’t stand for the truth (hawk) but play sycophant (dove), the tougher it is to establish the truth value of the belief and the greater the cost of ‘offending’. 1/2
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Tony Jackson @jacksont0ny.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Please read and share; let’s focus on the truth Everything good about Professor Jason Arday leilacancode.github.io/everythinggo...
leilacancode.github.io
Everything Good About Jason Arday
First-hand accounts from people who knew him. Collected by his students.
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Akshat Rathi @akshatrathi.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
This science paper was quite the journey. A really scary one. Oh India... www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth...
sciencefocus.com
One country seems immune to global warming. And nobody knows why | BBC Science Focus Magazine
Welcome to the warming hole, a part of the world that bucking the Earth's temperature trends
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Naomi Oreskes @naomioreskes.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I missed this when it came out, but super important discussion, including of the crazy energy demands of LLMs www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1...
technologyreview.com
We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.
The company's star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google's business.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I don't live in a swing state, but I did not want Trump to end up getting the majority that he did get.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
If she couldn't say at that point in the catastrophe that there would ever be conditions on military assistance, she was never going to put them on the assistance unless it was going to cost her and the party elections. Like many, I still voted for her, explaining why she wasn't conditioning aid.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
So if Greenland uses force to shut down an unauthorized Trump-aligned firm from drilling for oil and Trump sends the US military to protect the illegal US firm, does NATO then use force to protect Greenland's sovereignty? The petro Axis of US & RU => WW3?
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
So if Greenland uses force to shut down an unauthorized Trump-aligned firm from drilling for oil and Trump sends the US military to protect the illegal US firm, does NATO then use force to protect Greenland's sovereignty? The petro Axis of US & RU => WW3?
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Biden wouldn't have chosen her if she had any chance of ever breaking with him on anything related to Israel.
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Diane Coyle @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
A couple of nice & not all that technical essays on AI in J Economic Perspectives, pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/... & pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...
pubs.aeaweb.org
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
If she is at a disadvantage in the identity politics Olympics, then why didn't she embrace the shamed identity of an ogre? It makes no sense.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
On how Enron's Special Purpose Vehicles to hide debt worked, see attached also.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
On how SPEs work
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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
The Fauci show trial is an amazing illustration of the fundamental immaturity and insecurity of the modern right. What really outrages them is that he dared to suggest that people make sacrifices for the common good. So much of X/techbro/manosphere thought is just insisting that should never happen.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Partial explanation here: scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho....
scholarship.law.duke.edu
"Declining Corporate Prosecutions" by Brandon L. Garrett
In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, people across the United States protested that "too big to jail" banks were not held accountable after the financial crisis. Little has changed. Newly ...
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho....
scholarship.law.duke.edu
"Declining Corporate Prosecutions" by Brandon L. Garrett
In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, people across the United States protested that "too big to jail" banks were not held accountable after the financial crisis. Little has changed. Newly ...
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Akshat Rathi @akshatrathi.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Province of Inner Mongolia is at the poster child of China's energy bet. Last year, it cut coal use in power by 4% -- more than any other province. It is also home to 20 GW of new coal power plants in pipeline -- more than any other province. Great deep dive! 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
bloomberg.com
China’s Net Zero Strategy Relies on an Unlikely Tool: Lots of Coal
The central government sees coal as an essential bridge to a clean-energy future. Some regions are motivated to extend its use as long as possible.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
As the summer burns again, a reminder that only last year a top executive at both McKinsey and one of the largest insurance companies in Germany matter-of-factly stated that entire regions were becoming unisurable and capitalism therefore unviable. www.commondreams.org/news/capital...
commondreams.org
Capitalism Eating Itself by Fueling Climate Mayhem, Warns Capitalist | Common Dreams
If humanity stays on current course, warns top insurer, the "financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable."
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Yes compare how well Biden got along with Strom Thurmond
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Trillionaire exoneration day. One may not intend that 14 M people die by cutting aid, but the consequence of that action, as it was abruptly undertaken, was fully foreseeable and predictable. Clearly, this was man(mass)slaughter, a form of homicide.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
People ceding their thinking this easily to LLMs may suggest they were already alienated from their thinking: thinking for them was already the alienated activity of apprehending the thoughts of the anyone or the agentic mouthpiecing of the principal in whose legal hold they already were
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
But the joke is the aliens violate The Axiom of Foundation, the rule—no x ∈ x? I don’t know set theory
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Sometimes the best answer to a question is to negate it. Did Wittgenstein or Marx ever write that?
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Akshat Rathi @akshatrathi.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
AI is starting to undermine democracy in direct ways already. Important investigation by @toddwoody.bsky.social & @zhirji.bsky.social 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
bloomberg.com
AI-Powered Mass Emails Are Warping Local Energy, Climate Politics
From California to North Carolina, officials weighing policy changes are being inundated with comments via platforms that tout AI capabilities.
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Kill off higher ed to clear the way to accumulate power and money in the ways that the past and hard-won self-understanding would teach us not to and to prevent us from apprehending the genuinely new problems we should be solving and devising the tools to do so. Trump U forever
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Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
It now costs more to cause climate change than to prevent it
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Shiller’s concern with doommaxxing narratives seems irrelevant to the macro dangers. I agree it’s a less forceful piece, but compared to better stuff he and Akerlof had written in Animal Spirits before his strong narrative turn. 3/3
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Well, Shiller has himself theorized how sharp asset deflation could by itself crash an economy dependent on wealth effects, and then add the vulnerabilities from high corporate debt levels. 2/3
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
The ‘29 stock market crash doesn’t give you the Great Depression, Shiller argues, because only 2% owned stocks. You needed doomaxxing narratives. 1/3
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Donald Trump: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surrender?
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
John Cage, not Ph. Glass
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Rakesh Bhandari @postdiscipline.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Charles Hall emphasized that with fossil fuels the energy rate on investment was falling, i.e. it was taking more fossil fuel energy to extract fossil fuel energy. This may explain early interest in renewables until they developed fast & threatened to strand fossil fuel assets & tech connected to it
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