Links and Notes for July 15th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

Significant economic slowdown as China battles COVID by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“During a visit to Wuhan last month, Chinese president Xi Jinping indicated that Zero-COVID would continue. While he acknowledged there were economic problems, he said it was better to “temporarily affect a little economic development rather than risk people’s health and safety.”

“Chinese authorities have estimated that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, could die if the “let it rip” policy in the rest of the world were adopted.”

Economy & Finance

Cryptocurrency “market caps” and notional value by Molly White

“f I decide to hop on the crypto bandwagon and create MollyCoin, and I write some code to create a million MOLLY tokens out of thin air, how much are they worth? In reality, approximately $0 — I’ve put no real money into the system, and they don’t represent any good or service that might be considered valuable. But if I can convince someone to buy one MOLLY token from me for $1 on one of the many exchanges that will allow you to exchange any token under the sun, suddenly we have a price! And even though only one token has ever traded hands, because market cap is calculated by taking the price per token on an exchange and multiplying it by the number of tokens circulating, MollyCoin now has a market cap of $1 million.”

“Even if we assume that there is actually $165 billion worth of real, fiat currency floating around in the system to form the reported Ethereum market cap, we now have two tokens each ostensibly worth $165 billion, with no additional fiat being introduced. Each dollar that is backing some amount of ETH is also “backing” MollyCoin — it’s being counted twice. It should be clear in this contrived example that there is no way people could actually cash out all MOLLY and ETH tokens and somehow wind up with $330 billion in fiat. Now extrapolate that to the actual cryptocurrencies that exist today—how much actual value exists in the system, and how much is just double, triple, or n-times counting the same dollars?”

“When NFTs are stolen, large numbers are thrown around without any clarity as to whether they are the original prices paid by the victims for the NFTs, the prices netted by the thiefs when flipping them, the floor prices, or some other value.”

Public Policy & Politics

Extended episode: Richard Wolff Doesn't Want to Scare You But… (YouTube)

At 28:00, there’s a spectacular 11:00 minute segment that starts with him talking about how our leaders are happy to blame everything on the supply-chain—just like the Soviets used to do. When the Soviets had long bread lines, we blamed it on socialism and central planning. When we have “supply-chain” issues

He continues at 33:00 with a parable about a refrigerator repairman who’s been keeping a fridge going for a while but finally tells the owner he’s going to have get a new one. “This system is busted. It’s done.” Absolutely brilliant. “The question is now whether we’re going to be adult enough to acknowledge it.”

At 53:00, he discusses the “Nixon Shock” where the U.S. had a much lower inflation percentage, but Nixon imposed price and wage controls (with threat of jail time for transgressors) for 90 days, which was extended for another 90 days. That stopped inflation dead.

At 59:00, he discusses Roosevelt’s rationing during the depression, which distributed rare goods to those who needed them, rather than just letting the market pool them all with the richest handful, who we then hope will distribute them to those who actually need them.

War with Iran by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport.

“If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.”

“Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged. Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.”

““There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.””

Joe Biden is a disgusting, heartless, ideological, purely politically driven monster. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone. He serves his masters. He always has.

“The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at whom we have become, does not take us seriously. They fear our bombs. But fear is not respect. They no longer envy our hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of our infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque. America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of the Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.”

The balrog of America will take down a lot of infrastructure as it tumbles from the bridges, it’s cruel whip curling back up to seize our Gandalf’s leg.

Hedges seems to be of the same mind. I wrote the above before I read the passage below. I’d actually said something similar to colleagues over lunch (in Swiss German, naturally). It seems Hedges and I have achieved a confluence of sorts.

“How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli aparatheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Mulism world? How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war,” this time against Iran? The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who we are. They know that in our eyes they are unworthy. Our inevitable demise on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as we go down, we are determined to take so many others down with us.”

On the Political Efficacy of Trump’s Endless Prosecution by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“It’s an extraordinary story that’s gotten almost no attention, even as the Endless Prosecution has become a permanent feature of American life. Trump has become America’s Goldstein, increasingly invisible yet still always conniving to overthrow “democracy itself” through a succession of ever-bolder and more desperate schemes.”

“A friend who worked on the Hill for years insists the city was ruined by Game of Thrones. Everybody with a political job in the capital thinks of his or herself as a soldier in a thrilling bloodsport, instead of a pawn chipping away for incremental improvements somewhere. The Trump show is six years of thirtysomething Dems in gingham and power dresses gunning to be Arya killing the Night King. They think 80 million Trump supporters will collapse into ice cubes if they get him. It doesn’t work that way. You have to win in 50 real states, not Twitter.”

NATO: The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S.”

“The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.”

The Dangerous US Opposition to Eurasia Integration by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“G7 countries – which saw themselves as the guardians of the global capitalist system – begged states outside their orbit, such as China and India, to put their surpluses into the Western financial system to prevent its total meltdown.

“In return for this service, countries outside of the G7 were told that, henceforth, the G20 would be the executive body of the world system and the G7 would gradually disband. Yet, almost 20 years later, the G7 remains in place and has arrogated to itself the role of world leader, with NATO – the Trojan horse of the U.S. – now positioning itself as the world’s policeman.”

“By 2021, the tune had changed, and NATO’s Brussels summit communiqué accused China of “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.” The revised 2022 Strategic Concept accelerates this threatening rhetoric, with accusations that China’s “systemic competition … challenge[s] our interests, security, and values and seek[s] to undermine the rules-based international order.””

Translation: China seems unwilling to accept a role as a vassal state. Its influence will be nullified by military means.

Why Nord Stream II Must Be Opened Immediately by Maxyyjones (Scheer Post)

“Next winter Germany, and other European countries, will have an energy crisis. This crisis, we are told, is caused by the proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Europe. They say that Russia has cut us off from its natural gas deliveries.

“That is a lie.

“Ukraine and Poland have shut off some pipelines that bring in gas from Russia to western Europe. Germany has not delivered on the contracted maintenance that is required to keep the Nord Stream I pipeline at full capacity. The German government has blocked the certification of the Nord Stream II pipeline which is technically 100% ready to work at full capacity.”

“All German natural gas storage sites can be filled to the brim via Nord Stream II if the Germany government would allow for it. It does not do so. That is the reason why you in Europe will to have pay much more for heating and electricity in the months and years to come.”

Art & Literature

Why Is America So Cracked? by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“It is just this process of endless renewal that is captured in the sustained crescendo of clarity that is Le temps retrouvé, the seventh and final volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Here is Marcel the narrator describing his final tour before death of the salons of le monde that he had frequented years before, and the astounding ignorance in these places, both familiar and unfamiliar at once, of so many things that he had once assumed to be eternal:”

“This ignorance was not only an ignorance of le monde, but also of politics, of everything. For memory lasted less long than life among individuals, and moreover some who were very young, who never had the memories that had been abolished in the others, were now part of le monde too, and most legitimately — even with respect to nobility origins were forgotten or never known to begin with, they took people at the height or at the nadir at which they were now found, believing that things were always so […]”

“The guard was also portly, and he was black, two features the young man at odds with him was determined to highlight in his verbal imprecations. He picked up a handful of gravel, and threw it, along with the N-word, at the guard. The guard flinched. His white assailant had his hair shaved on the sides, and falling down from on top in small, carefully wrought, bleached-blonde dreadlocks. He screamed that awful word again.”

“I need to find a higher calibre of people, I thought to myself, and that’s what I spent the next several decades trying to do. Mostly in vain.”

ChronoSwooping by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

““If you want to get to the future, you’re just going to have to wait,” Quast wrote in an entry in his Hefte dated 6 October, 1959 (SB-1omk 21.237). “To live in time is already to travel in time. So be patient” [In der Zeit zu leben, das ist schon in der Zeit zu reisen. Hab also Geduld]. Rumors of future-transit apps downloadable from ultra-sketchy oglindas have been circulating for years, but I’ve never seen any, and having studied Quast’s work I have come to believe that they are a theoretical impossibility.”

“When people first started ChronoSwooping, there were rumors of “headaches”, which were supposed to have resulted from the transit back in time of the more fully developed neurological structure of the time-traveller — essentially cramming, say, a thirty-eight-year-old’s brain into the cranium of his ten-year-old past self. But of course no such thing occurs, for what travels back, as Quast predicted, is the immaterial self alone, and the fact that this is possible does indeed demonstrate, whether the scientific establishment is ready to admit it or not, that we do not need to remain anchored to any parcel of matter at all in order to exist as conscious beings.”

“ It’s not clear how ChronoSwoop managed to pull it off, but we can at least affirm what the emerging scientific consensus says about this new option, namely that it demonstrates the truth of the so-called “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, where each new timeline created by a different course of action initiated by a time-traveller through the vehicle of that traveller’s own former self simply places that self on a different timeline of a different world, of which there are in any case infinitely many.”

“I can’t tell you what happened after that, or whether I’m still there, or what is even happening anymore. If you think I’ve been spending my days watching moustachioed men on velocipedes going to the beach and changing there into comical striped one-piece bathing suits to play beach-croquet with ladies in bloomers, you really haven’t understood what pre-birth ChronoSwooping is like. I set the thing for 1900, but the human calendar doesn’t mean very much when you’ve shed your body, and your senses, and any trace of your connection to the world of particulars.”

Philosophy & Sociology

The World as a Game by Justin E.H. Smith (Liberties Journal)

“Yet curiously, as the machines draw closer to this peculiar ideal of humanness, the society they have been brought in to structure has grown correspondingly more inhuman. As the scope of algorithm-based applications in social reality has expanded over the past decades, we have by the same measure been conditioned to approach ever more fields of human life as if they were strategy games.”

We’re meeting in the middle—that’s why I can’t tell whether an essay has been written by an AI or an ESL. We are blunted and numbed, accustomed to increasingly lower levels of expressivity in our communication, until our intellectually inadequate AIs can catch up to us by simply standing still.

“Rather than understanding pop-cultural artifacts such as “Bohemian Rhapsody” as lying at the end of a tradition of romance ballads, faintly echoing that tradition’s themes in words whose large and original meanings have been mostly forgotten, we are instead invited to see pop culture, or at least the pop culture of Chalmers’ childhood, as the pinnacle of tradition, as bringing to its fullest expression what could only be more crudely attempted in centuries past. Here it is the past that asked “Mercury’s questions,” rather than “Mercury” channeling that past with only dim knowledge that this is what he is doing. ”

“Perhaps under pressure from editors to give hasty shout-outs to non-Western ideas — the sort of shout-outs that are now de rigueur in Anglophone philosophy, which congratulates itself for being “inclusive” and then goes right back to doing what it would have been doing anyway […]”

“In the case of the computer simulation, it is not at all clear to me that the simulated brain cell, even if it is a limit-case atom-for-atom simulation, shares the relevant properties with the biological brain cell, such that we may be able to anticipate that it is capable of facilitating consciousness — no more in fact than we might anticipate that a computer-based hydrodynamic model of a river, if it were to reach a sufficiently fine-grained degree of accuracy, would become wet.

“That is just not something we can expect to happen inside a computer, no matter how much the computer is able to reveal to us about wetness, and I have seen no real argument that consciousness is relevantly different from wetness in this regard. Until I see such an argument, I must withhold a commitment to substrate-independence, and this means that I am also going to decline to take the simulation argument seriously, since it depends entirely on substrate-independence in order to work. Or at least, as with creation science and other similar deviations, I am going to take it seriously as a social phenomenon, and try to understand its causes, while refusing to take it seriously on the terms it would like to be taken.”

“A philosopher who has no interest in even acknowledging the way in which ideological structures shape our worldviews has no business presenting himself as an authority on the question whether the world is a simulation or not.”

“It is ironic that Baudrillard should find his way at all into a book arguing that physical reality itself may be a simulation, since Baudrillard’s concern was with the way in which our picture of social reality is shaped and mediated in large part through media technologies. His famous (or notorious) declaration that “the Gulf War did not take place” was not, by his own lights, a denial that anyone actually died in Iraq or Kuwait in the early 1990s, but only that the idea that a typical American, and perhaps a typical European, formed in association with the phrase “the Gulf War” was excessively shaped by media forces, particularly the new uninterrupted onslaught of images on cable news networks such as CNN. And when you understand a war to be something that happens on your screen rather than in the world, this significantly constrains your capacity to arrive at a mature and sober analysis of war’s moral and human costs. Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation drew him toward the conclusion that our attachment to digitally mediated images of reality, an attachment that is pushed on us by the profit-seeking interests of the media companies, fundamentally weakens our ability to engage critically with reality itself.”

“Such a landscape of artificial stupidity, in which there is a glut of undifferentiated information and misinformation issuing forth from machines that could not care less about the distinction between the two, is, much more than the possible dawning of machine consciousness, which is the real story of our most recent technological revolution. That we human beings are compelled to submit to the terms and the constraints laid out by thoughtless machines — for example that we are expected to groom and update AI-generated stub profiles of ourselves that we never asked for in the first place, lest misinformation about us spread and we “lose points” in the great game of our professional standing — is, quite obviously, an encroachment on our freedom, and therefore, again, an encroachment on the one sort of play by the other.”

“Universities now regularly take such metrics as the number of downloads an open-access article has received to be decisive for promotion and tenure, and there is no reason not to expect, in such a gamified landscape, that soon enough professors up for advancement will respond to this absurd predicament by paying an off-shore click-farm for bulk downloads of published work. In time we might expect to outsource the work of both scholarship and scholarship-evaluation to the machines, which would really just be the perfection of a system already emerging, in which the only real job left is the work of managing our online profiles, while the machines do everything else.”

“Our greatest challenge today is not that machines may gain consciousness, and still less that we are ourselves conscious machines, but that the machines may defeat us, and do not require consciousness in order to do so.”

Technology

No Days Off by Matt Murphy (The Baffler)

“The forecast is that soon at least 70 percent of companies will be using software that tracks worker productivity via their computers. This tracking might include keylogging, location tracking, web and email monitoring, or even in some cases, taking images of workers through their webcams at random intervals throughout the day.”

“Being tracked is continually normalized by companies using the guise of safety, efficiency, or health. Scholars sometimes refer to this as “participatory surveillance,” and much of employer surveillance has shifted to this model. Workplace wellness programs are one of the easiest ways for corporate America to get its greasy paws on behavioral data. Many employers and insurers have wellness kickback programs that give money in exchange for biometric data from wearable devices.”

The New Economy in China: The Past 20 Years and the Next 20 Years by Eric Li (Scheer Post)

“What kind of companies will be accomplished in the next twenty years of China’s new economy? Let me share three cases with you. The first company is called Baibu, which is the largest textile fabric intelligent supply chain platform in China. Textile is a trillion dollar market, 90% of the world’s textiles are made in China. However, China’s textile supply chain is at a very primitive stage, with manufacturers scattered in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, numbering tens of thousands.

“So Baibu is doing the industrial Internet in textile industry, linking the upstream and downstream of information asymmetry, allocating efficiently, turning the physical factory into a cloud factory, connecting hundreds of thousands of looms, optimizing production capacity, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.”

“Moreover, the State Council has very strict requirements on the carbon peak, and cement production is a big carbon emitter because of calcining limestone, which accounts for about 20% of the total national emissions, so the state strictly limits the cement production capacity. The production process of BIOHENG’s geopolymer material does not use limestone and does not need to be calcined, so the carbon emission is very small, only 30% of that of cement, so it can kill three birds with one stone, and it is very fast to land in all provinces.”

“[…] in China, capital must grasp two principles: first, it must closely combine its own return on investment with the interests of the country, and actively play its function as a factor of production; second, it must not pursue its own interests in a way that runs counter to the long-term interests of the country and the well-being of the people.”

Programming

Code in database vs. code in application (Brandur)

“Relational databases are often a single choke point for an application, while other application code is deployed in a set of parallel containers that access it. Application code in one of those containers scales easily – just deploy more of them. Scaling the database is harder.”

“Even if you know it well, writing procedural SQL is awful. Not all programming language syntax is created equal, and procedural SQL belongs somewhere down at the bottom of the pile with BASIC and COBOL . And sure, you may be able to activate an extension for an alternative scripting language with better syntax, but do you really want something like a Python VM running inside of your database?”

SPAs: theory versus practice by Nolan Lawson (Read the Tea Leaves)

“Both SPAs and MPAs have their strengths and weaknesses, and the right tool for the job will vary with the size and skills of the team and the product they’re trying to build. It will also vary over time, as browsers evolve. The important thing, I think, is to remain open-minded, skeptical, and analytical, and to accept that everything in software development has tradeoffs, and none of those tradeoffs are set in stone.”

Double Take: RavenDB Day by Oren Eini / dotNETZurich (YouTube)

At 1:33:90, he discusses performance and internals

“How am I going to look up my data? This is actually something really interesting: the whole trick—every database in the world—comes down to one trick: lookups on sorted data structures are fast. We’re done. That’s it! […] How are we actually going to store sorted data in a file?”

He goes on to describe the difference between searching in-memory and searching data that is only partially in-memory and mostly in-file. The typical scenario requires an approach that considers pages rather than individual values as the atomic search unit. For in-memory searching, avoid pure seeks by using B-Trees rather than AVL-Trees. “Locality of reference as a core concept.” (01:45:30)

Disks suck, even SSDs. The cloud is worse. Be careful of buffers that aren’t flushed because they have unpredictable reliability characteristics. Don’t use unbuffered system calls, either, though. 😉

Latency for hardware

A long way to persistence

He goes on to discuss how to write a robust and efficient log/journal mechanism. After that, he discusses transactions and concurrency. He recommends using single-threaded writes (even with concurrent operations). Why? To avoid writing complex code with locking. A single-threaded implementation that queues writes doesn’t use any locks and ends up being faster in many situations. 30-40% of the cost of concurrent code is in the locks and latches.

Durability is guaranteed by the write-ahead log. The readers and single writer never conflict. Always use queues. Separation of operations & queries. Read replicas are simple and error-tolerant. Keep it simple.

He’s a big fan of Zig, especially compared to C or Rust. The tooling and sophistication aren’t as good as C#, but as a low-level language, it’s the best one so far. Rust’s guarantees are better, but they come at the cost of an at-times overly stringent compiler.

Tailwind is an Anti-Pattern by Enrico Gruner (JavaScript in Plain English)

“CSS is not necessarily global. With ShadowDOM and CSS Modules, we have two strong tools at our disposal that take care of CSS classes that would otherwise be problematic. We don’t have to come up with crazy names anymore (which makes BEM obsolete, too). Also, is 30 different classes slapped into an HTML element’s class attribute supposed to be any better?”

“CSS has improved since the dark ages of Bootstrap and the likes. Because we have native variables, grids, and CSS Modules at our disposal, there’s little to no reason to use SCSS, Bootstrap, or Tailwind.”

“Another issue is that you’re not learning CSS patterns by using Tailwind. E.g., what does space-x-8 do? It will translate to .your-element > * + * { margin-left: 2rem; } which is a typical design pattern in CSS. Do you know what it does? It is so common that you should be able to recognize this pattern at first glance!

“If you’re a beginner in CSS, Tailwind is the safest way that you will remain a beginner.”