Links and Notes for July 22nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

Roaming Charges: The Sky is Frying by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Colorado River is all used up and there won’t be more where that came from. The western states want water; West Virginia wants coal. It’s not a fair fight. West Virginia will win every time. Even the powerbrokers of the West understand this dynamic. Fossil fuel comes first. So the irrigators and the real estate tycoons and the ranchers and the city managers and the ca sino operators and the golf course resort owners are now contemplating how to divert water from the Mississippi to the desert Southwest. It’ll have to happen soon. Time is running short.”

Why U.S. Must “Join the Club” and Give Blank Checks to Microchip Companies While Ignoring Other Major Issues by Bernie Sanders (CounterPunch)

“But the question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the micro-chip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion at a time when semiconductor companies are making tens of billions of dollars in profits and paying their executives exorbitant compensation packages? I think the answer to that question should be a resounding NO.”

Because it’s a scam. They might end up producing some chips, but their main goal is to produce wealth for themselves. They will take the lion’s share of the subsidy and the American people will see little to no benefit from it. The U.S. government loves to donate dozens of billions to corporate interests with no strings attached. Their largesse ends when much needier people need far less. That is most likely because they don’t get their kickbacks from it. It is hard to imagine that any of them are not corrupt.

“So, apparently when corporate America needs a blank check of $76 billion we do what other countries are doing. When other countries protect the needs of their workers, their children, their elderly somehow that is not a club we join.”

This is in line with the U.S. being an authoritarian kleptocracy. The primary function of the U.S. is to funnel wealth and power upwards to those who already have it. When Mitt Romney recommends voting for the microchip-subsidy bill, he is doing so as a private-equity multimillionaire (~$300M).

“[…] in order to make more profits, these companies took government money and used it to ship good-paying jobs abroad. Now, as a reward for causing this crisis, these same companies are in line to receive a massive taxpayer handout to undo the damage that they did. That is simply unacceptable.”

“In total, it has been estimated that 5 major semi-conductor companies will receive the lion’s share of this taxpayer handout: Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, Global Foundries, and Samsung. These 5 companies made $70 billion in profits last year.”

That sounds about right. How can you defend anything like this? How do people think that this is where they want their tax dollars invested? The profits they made last year are about the same as the stimulus that the government wants to give them. To be more precise: the stimulus that their lobbyists and bribes have paid for. They invest a few million in bribes and get $76B in return. It’s a nice business model. Many Americans admire them for their gumption while they’re being ripped off. They are fools. I pity them.

Sanders details the Intel case specifically,

“It is estimated that Intel will receive between $20 and $30 billion in federal funding with no strings attached in order to build new plants. And yet, within the last several years, this same company spent over $16 billion on stock buybacks. And there is no guarantee in this bill that they will not continue to do stock buybacks.”

“Let’s be clear. The CEO of Intel received a $179 million compensation package last year. And now what he is saying is that if you don’t give my industry a $76 billion blank check and my company up to $30 billion, despite our profound love for our country and our love of American workers and the needs of the military we are prepared to go to Europe or Asia where we may be able to make even more money.”

JFC the unbelievable arrogance of Gelsinger (CEO of Intel).

“Mr. Gelsinger’s words sure sound like extortion to me. What he is saying is that if you don’t give his industry $76 billion in corporate welfare, despite the needs of the military for advanced microchips, despite the needs of the medical industry for advanced microchips, despite the needs of our entire economy for advanced microchips, he is threatening to abandon America and move abroad.”

It lays within Congress’s power to tell its businesses what to do, just like China does. There are no laws against it. The corporations are in charge in the U.S., though. It lays within Congress’s power to attach conditions to their $76B “gift”. That they do not do so shows how bribed they are.

“Industrial policy to me means cooperation between the government and the private sector. Cooperation. It does not mean the government providing massive amounts of corporate welfare to profitable corporations without getting anything in return.”

God help me, Bernie, if you end up voting for this thing without the amendments you’ve proposed, I hope raising your hand to vote aye kills you. I really hope you’re not going to be a hypocrite this time.

“In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.”

“I am afraid what Dr. King said 54 years ago was accurate back then and it is even more accurate today.”

I was just talking about exactly that with some friends here. A friend of theirs is getting married. Their daughter is a matron of honor at the wedding. The bride’s parents both work at Johns Hopkins and have for decades. The two ladies went to university together. The bride didn’t end up with any student debt because Johns Hopkins paid for her entire education.

My friends’ daughter is still paying her debt down a dozen years later. She’s a schoolteacher in one of the poorest parts of America. As matron of honor, she’s expected to purchase and cart supplies for one of the many parties that her friend is having for herself before the wedding.

They’re best friends, so she doesn’t mind. To be more precise, there is a problem of pride, at least to some degree. Pride prevents a poor person from complaining about being taken advantage of by a richer person. To an outsider, it’s utterly ludicrous that so much money needs to change hands. The rich never even notice that they’re constantly taking from the poor. They think it would be gauche to acknowledge it, if they’re nice. They don’t even notice it’s happening, if they’re utterly ignorant of the massive class disparities from which they benefit.

The rich get richer. They don’t pay for things that the poor have to pay for. The world is built for them. They don’t know what it’s like to be poor—and they pretty much don’t care. They tell themselves the fairy tale that everyone deserves what they get—because they themselves have gotten so much. They think that because they work hard that they deserve what they get. A lot of people work hard and they don’t get their health care and education paid for—on top of salaries that must easily be in the multiples of six figures. They should be agitating for change. They could start by not charging guests to their daughter’s wedding for mimosa supplies.

Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is a reckless provocation by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“On May 5, 2022, the US State Department removed wording on its official website stating that “the United States does not support Taiwan independence” and “acknowledging the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.””

“The Biden administration has approved four massive arms sales to Taiwan so far, and a fifth, coming in at $108 million, is slated for imminent congressional approval.”

“The island is home to 92 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Every product made by Apple, including the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computers, as well as graphics, artificial intelligence and computer vision processors from Nvidia and countless other hi-tech products rely on semiconductors produced in Taiwan.”

This is why the U.S. empire wants Taiwan. It is attempting to wrest it from China by convincing the world that it is a but a colony of China. Would it not be far better as a colony of the U.S.? Wouldn’t the Europeans be much happier if Taiwan were no longer a part of China? What could possibly go wrong?

Journalism & Media

The hustle zombies have broken the perimeter by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“At no point in our short history of large-scale social media platforms has there ever been a time when thinkfluencers, hustle bros, or “founders,” as they’re calling themselves now, were promoted or amplified on purpose. Largely because they don’t add anything of value to a network. This was as true 15 years ago when these people wore Google Glass and were publishing weird embed-heavy blog posts about how the future of business was using Foursquare checkins to sell Groupons as it is now that they’re shilling NFTs and selling discount tickets to their Instagram Stories workshops. If you see a chiropractor-turned-life-coach teaching you the 10 core tenets of personal investment in a Facebook live video, you have to assume that some extremely dark mechanisms of digital content creation led to that popping up in your feed.”

Programming

Advocate, educator, and authorial stance by Martin Fowler

“When writing with a trade-offs stance I like to start with the assumption that folks using a poor technique are doing so for sensible reasons, and my job as an author is to understand and explain those reasons. Even if the alternative is genuinely poor in most contexts, it’s valuable to understand what leads people to adopt it. That empathy is a vital foundation to properly communicating the trade-offs that could lead the reader to a better technique.”

How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? (HTMX)

“The client knows nothing about the API end points associated with this data, except via URLs and hypermedia controls (links and forms) discoverable within the HTML itself. If the state of the resource changes such that the allowable actions available on that resource change (for example, if the account goes into overdraft) then the HTML response would change to show the new set of actions available.”

“This is the source of the incredible flexibility of RESTful systems: since all responses are self describing and encode all the currently available actions available there is no need to worry about, for example, versioning your API! In fact, you don’t even need to document it!”

“The second response is, in fact, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) style of API. The client and the server are coupled, just like the SocialSite API Fielding complained about back in 2008: a client needs to have additional knowledge about the resource it is working with that must be derived from some other source beyond the JSON response itself.”

“Despite these difficulties, the term REST stuck: REST was the opposite of SOAP, JSON APIs weren’t SOAP, therefore JSON APIs were REST.”

“When SPAs hit, web development became disconnected entirely from the original underlying RESTful architecture. The entire networking architecture of SPA applications moved over to the JSON RPC style. Additionally, due to the complexity of these applications, developers specialized into front end and back end.”

“GraphQL couldn’t be less RESTful: you absolutely have to have documentation to understand how to work with an API that uses GraphQL. The client and the server are extremely tightly coupled. There are no native hypermedia controls in it. It offers schemas and, in many ways, feels a lot like an updated and stripped-down version of XML-RPC.”