Links and Notes for August 19th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

How long will it take to understand long COVID? by Marla Broadfoot (Ars Technica / Knowable Magazine)

“That dichotomy—in which the only possible outcomes of COVID are either complete recovery or death—has turned out to be anything but true. Between 8 million and 23 million Americans are still sick months or years after being infected. The perplexing array of symptoms known as long COVID has left an estimated 1 million of those people so disabled they are unable to work, and those numbers are likely to grow as the virus continues to evolve and spread. Some who escaped long COVID the first time are getting it after their second or third infection”

A friend of mine who works in insurance said that it’s already here. He sees multiple cases per week at his insurance job.

“Resia Pretorius, a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, believes that most long COVID symptoms can be traced back to microscopic blood clots that block tiny vessels and prevent oxygen from reaching the body’s tissues. Recent studies show that these microclots are triggered by the spike proteins dotting the surface of the coronavirus, which can mimic proteins involved in normal blood clotting.”

“But Geng cautions that people should not read too much into a single case. “It is anecdotal and should not be taken as conclusive evidence for this model,” she says. Case reports, she adds, are merely observations that raise questions to be answered in well-designed studies. Geng is unaware of any clinical studies underway to test Paxlovid for long COVID.”

“Some evidence suggests that prior infection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis, puts people at higher risk for developing long COVID. The reactivation of dormant EBV has been linked to myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) , an illness with striking similarities to long COVID.”

Oh, wow.

Economy & Finance

Shedding some more dead weight.

Shedding dead weight

Meme-Stock Vacation Is Over by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“The crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression meant that the mood was bad, so investing in productive businesses was relatively more attractive than betting on mass enthusiasm. The creation of the modern US system of securities regulation in the 1930s meant that stock manipulation was harder to do, while getting financial information about companies was easier”

“In another sense, it is a complicated way to say “look, you are a meme stock, which means that investors want to YOLO your call options, so what you should do is create some call options and sell them to pay off your debt.” Warrants and convertibles are company-issued call options, and call options are the meme-iest way to trade meme stocks.”

“It’s not cleverly harnessing meme-stock volatility to clean up the balance sheet. It’s message boards and misreading the actions of “a meme stock figurehead.” It’s mass psychology, not corporate finance. In a sense, if you buy a big chunk of a meme stock and give the company advice on how to do meme corporate finance, you are doing the right thing. (Meme-stock activists “can nudge companies to be dumber so their stocks will go up,” I once wrote.) In another sense, if you buy a meme stock and think about corporate finance at all, you are making a mistake.”

“Arguably what is most revolutionary about WeWork is that it  extracted $17 billion of investments from SoftBank Group Corp. and has a current market capitalization of about $3.1 billion, while  Neumann is a billionaire. If you can do that trade, you should, as often as possible.”

“Crypto has created a way to tokenize and trade the aesthetic experience of getting scammed by Martin Shkreli, and the people who bought it got exactly what they paid for.”

Public Policy & Politics

Sometimes Humanity Gets it Right by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“To construct this portal monitoring facility, inspectors and inspected alike had to come together in what can only be described as a labor of love, overcoming all the challenges Mother Nature could impose in terms of sweltering, mosquito-and-tick-infested summers, the oppressive muck and mire produced by the spring and fall mud seasons and the mind-numbing cold of the Russian winter to build a complex according to a treaty-mandated timeline which was unforgiving in its exactitude.”

“Under the new regime of glasnost, or openness, the local Communist Party newspaper, Leninski Put’ (“Lenin’s Path”) was transformed from a simple mouthpiece of authority into a first-rate journalistic outlet, with its editorial staff and stable of capable writers performing quality investigatory reporting that would put many of their American counterparts to shame. Through their work, the U.S. inspectors were able to peer inside the humanity of Votkinsk, getting a detailed glimpse into the good, the bad and the ugly reality of Soviet life in transition.”

“Anatoli Chernenko, who was responsible for all construction activities at the site, moved mountains to make Votkinsk a reality, overcoming Soviet bureaucratic inertia and American incompetence to finish the gargantuan construction tasks he was assigned to accomplish through sheer force of will.”

“Who knows? Maybe someday, in the not-so-distant future, a new generation of Americans and Russians can be called upon to save the world by following in the footsteps of those who have gone before them, implementing a new round of arms control treaties capable of walking their respective nations back from the brink.”

Two recent papers further confirm natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 virus by Frank Gaglioti (WSWS)

“The studies both appeared in preprint form in February 2022 but the peer review process has taken several months. The main difference between the preprint and the versions appearing in Science , especially for the Worobey paper, is that most of the references in the preprint using Chinese research and sources have been dropped. This includes extensive material on the layout of stalls in the Huanan market, especially the western wing that housed live animals. Chinese scientific work on the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been branded as somehow biased by the corporate media and promoters of the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy.”

“This analysis represents a devastating blow against the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy theory, as the laboratory is 23 km from the Huanan market and on the other side of the Yangtze River. One would expect the earliest cases would have been around the virology institute if the lab leak theory was correct.”

“In a Twitter post Rasmussen attacked the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy agenda: “Last I checked, just accusing an entire global community of scientists who rely on evidence to assess data is not itself evidence of said worldwide conspiracy to deliberately cause a pandemic and cover it up. It does, however, fit neatly into a ‘Blame China’ agenda.””

““When you look at all of the evidence, it is clear that this started at the market. Separate lines of analysis point to it, and it’s extremely improbable that two distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 could have been derived from a laboratory and then coincidentally ended up at the market.””

Wall Street rises as economic and financial problems mount by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The gyrations on Wall Street are driven by the shortest of short-term considerations. Interest rate rises by the Fed may ease somewhat and so the market goes up. But the longer-term implications of the rises so far have yet to take full effect. They will begin to impact when debt, taken out when interest rates were near zero, must be refinanced.”

The US Could Be on the Verge of a Nationwide Railroad Strike by Ross Grooters (Jacobin)

“In many ways the lean production that you’ve seen in other industries, like auto, hadn’t yet come to the rails. This is in part because we had some amount of regulation. There was a recognition that it’s an unsafe job and that it takes planning and workers with skills and knowledge to perform this job. At some point, there was a deliberate decision to erode that.”

“In the last six years or so, precision scheduled railroading (PSR) has become the program. It’s a pretty Orwellian term, really. The “precision” is just: how precisely can we cut the business, and in particular labor, to the bone and have it still function? And railroads cut way too deep.”

“In the past, you’d have adequate time for breaks. There was a recognition that safety had to be a major focus and that we had to take time to plan our work and work with one another. Now the safety focus has gone out the window. We work much harder to save a little time here and there, which comes with a lot more mental and physical fatigue.”

“The trains have grown. When I started, a one-hundred-car, six-thousand-foot train was a pretty lengthy train. Now they can get to two hundred cars or more. Two miles long is not uncommon, and three miles is pretty commonplace.”

“There’s a book called Ninety Percent of Everything that talks about how you look around a room, and 90 percent of everything you’re looking at — whether the raw materials or the actual item itself — are things that came through a shipping container, overseas, and then through rail.”

The World Is Seeing How the Dollar Really Works by Adam Tooze (Foreign Policy)

“Countries that have pegged their currencies to the dollar or have borrowed in dollars without protection against exchange rate and interest rate fluctuations, particularly if it is governments or households that have borrowed, are likely to be in serious trouble.”

VIDEO: Putin Heavily Criticizes the US and the West’s Foreign Policy Practices by Diego Ramos (Scheer Post)

“They are using all expedients. The United States and its vassals grossly interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states by staging provocations, organising coups, or inciting civil wars. By threats, blackmail, and pressure, they are trying to force independent states to submit to their will and follow rules that are alien to them. This is being done with just one aim in view, which is to preserve their domination, the centuries-old model that enables them to sponge on everything in the world. But a model of this sort can only be retained by force.”

“The US escapade towards Taiwan is not just a voyage by an irresponsible politician, but part of the purpose-oriented and deliberate US strategy designed to destabilise the situation and sow chaos in the region and the world. It is a brazen demonstration of disrespect for other countries and their own international commitments. We regard this as a thoroughly planned provocation.”

“I reiterate that the era of the unipolar world is becoming a thing of the past. No matter how strongly the beneficiaries of the current globalist model cling to the familiar state of affairs, it is doomed. The historic geopolitical changes are going in a totally different direction.”

“I am sure that the forum will continue to make a significant contribution to the strengthening of peace and stability on our planet and facilitate the development of constructive dialogue and partnership.”

Putin is the president of a country that is actively attacking another right now.

All Disquiet on the Eastern Front by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“What Big Volod says has to be right, of course, even if he wandered from television comedy into the Ukrainian presidency like a child lost in city traffic. If anyone has a sound, balanced idea of how to deal with Russia, it is Volodymyr Zelensky. Everyone knows this. When the Ukrainians boast, as they often do, that they consider Russians animals, not humans, we have to accept that they know what they are talking about.”

“These bans and proposed bans are not the acts of secure, confident nations. I do not think it coincidental that they are advanced as it becomes ever more obvious that the Kyiv regime is on a losing streak in its conflict with Russia and the West has misread this crisis top to bottom. Frustration and desperation are abroad, readers.”

We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty.”

““When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.””

“The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.”

“The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.”

That’s correct, information forces thinking. Denial of anthropogenic climate change is a form of mental weakness, an inability to accept a dark reality whose only remedy is to renounce nearly everything one has been trained to accept from civilization. People literally cannot accept information that would force them to voluntarily give up luxuries or lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. It must always happen forcefully.

What’s behind the US air traffic controller labor shortages by Claude Delphian (WSWS)

“National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Rich Santa spoke at an aviation conference in early August, saying: “In 2011, there were over 11,750 Certified Professional Controllers [CPCs] and additional trainees yielding over 15,000 total controllers on board at the FAA. By the beginning of 2022, there were more than 1,000 fewer fully certified controllers, and 1,500 fewer controllers on board, a number that has declined for at least the past 11 years.””

“The FAA, and everyone else in the US aviation industry, have held as common knowledge for over 40 years that a staffing crisis was in the wings. After Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, the FAA had to massively rehire to regain a functioning NAS. Because of this, it was well-known that a huge number of controllers would retire or otherwise leave the workforce within a few years of each other.”

Trump’s Critics Are Even More Dangerous Than He Is by Ted Rall

“Certainly, Trump and his presidency were unusual in some respects. He’s the only man to have won the White House without having held political office or served in the military. He eschewed prepared speeches. His campaign ran on a shoestring budget without a national organization. He expressed the willingness to talk to enemies and adversaries without preconditions. He continued to hold campaign rallies during his presidency. But the media hype is a lie. In the ways that matter most in a presidency—policy and tone—Donald Trump was/is anything but anomalous.”

Biden Is Canceling $10,000 of Student Loan Debt for Some Borrowers. That’s Not Good Enough. by Ben Burgis (Jacobin)

“Means-testing the relief also concedes a core point of principle. Imagine that K-12 public schools charged tuition, or that the fire department charged co-pays when they came to put out a fire — but that there were programs in place to generously allow you to borrow the money and slowly pay it back for decades. If you find this hypothetical morally repulsive, the reason isn’t because you worry that not everyone would have the means to pay it back. It’s that no one should be charged for such things in the first place.”

This is a well-made point. The article does not, however, make an effort to convince those not otherwise already convinced.

The Age of Hypocrisies by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“I owe the above story to Jeffrey St Clair of CounterPunch who also gives a devastating quote from an interview with John Ehrlichman, former long-time senior lieutenant of President Nixon, about Republican strategy 50 years ago. It is not much different in its ultimate aims today:”

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about?” Ehrlichman said. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

China Forgives 23 Loans for 17 African Countries, Expands ‘Win-Win’ Trade and Infrastructure Projects by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)

“Beijing pledged to strengthen trade with Africa, and has made agreements with 12 countries on the continent to remove tariffs for 98% of the products they export to China, increasing the competitiveness of African goods.

“Wang said Beijing will continue to provide food, economic, and military aid to Africa, while offering assistance in the fight against covid-19.
Emphasizing the importance of “development cooperation,” China offered billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure projects as “a strong boost to Africa’s industrialization process.””

“Scholar Deborah Brautigam wrote that the US government-sponsored narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”

““Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” she added.

“Brautigam found that, between 2000 and 2019, China cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced around $15 billion of debt in Africa, renegotiating at least 26 individual loans.”

Will the Democrats Manage to Help Re-Elect Trump? by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“The lesson I took from the episode was that people underestimated Trump because of his general weirdness. Strange he may have been, but as one of his former advisers put it, he is “a cunning nutter”. He may not have been very good, in 1989, at building what came to be called a “pluto-populist coalition”, but he was learning. When he made a grand entrance to the Republican convention in 2016 as their presidential candidate, he was hailed as “the blue-collar billionaire”.”

Journalism & Media

I’m a Local News Reporter. To Save Local News, We Must Publicly Fund It. by Guthrie Scrimgeour (Jacobin)

“I was forbidden from quoting a major affordable-housing advocate who was perceived as too much of a troublemaker. I was required to interview both landlords, the implication being that I would feature their quotes prominently, which I did”

“I’d learned just how easy it is to buy the narrative for a couple million dollars — pocket change to the landlords, developers, and corporations who use local newspapers as free public relations machines.”

“From 2008 to 2020, 57 percent of local newspaper jobs were lost, putting a total of forty thousand people out of work, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center study. For scale, this is similar to the total number of people employed by the entire US coal industry today .”

Jesus, what a deliberate decimation.

“More than two thousand local newspapers have been shuttered since 2004, with hundreds of counties now considered “news deserts,” with no local paper at all. People living in them are left to their own devices, forced to browse “You Know You’re From . . .” Facebook groups to learn what’s going on in their towns.”

And even those with with local newspapers have little to no local staff. The OD is mostly content recycled from WaPo and AP.

“To make ends meet, the Daily Item employed a strategy of hiring reporters fresh out of college, working them for a year at $30,000, and pushing them out before they start to ask for raises. When the paper was purchased, the union evaporated, and with the union went regular wage increases and any sort of reporter control over workload.”

“The paper expanded into several other towns without increasing staffing. Reporters were made to write for three new magazines that were created largely to serve as ad vehicles to generate revenue.”

“[…] won’t stop media investors from grabbing the extra tax money while keeping salaries low and using the same burn-and-churn employment strategy. And they won’t stop papers from censoring articles that go against the wishes of their most powerful investors and advertisers.”

“Some will worry about the effect of government funding on the slant of news coverage. I would ask them, Is it better that a paper be funded by a democratically elected government that could be voted out of office, or by a group of unelected millionaires with no accountability to anyone or anything except their own self-interest?”

The Great Disappearing Raid Story by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Even if the raid wasn’t politically motivated, it will for sure continue to look politically motivated, if the Justice Department doesn’t come up with a better explanation than the six or seven leaked so far. Yet everyone is acting like that question has been answered.

“What gives? Even though stories like Russiagate and Ukrainegate had holes from the start, their underlying dramatic logic was consistent: Trump is guilty, and proof will be released any minute. The Mar-a-Lago raid by contrast feels like an accidental missile launch. Are we really being softened up for the DOJ ending this story without ever explaining what it had at the time of the raid? That would be bananas, and even crazier if the public accepted such an ending. This is way too big of a story to leave unexplained.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Multiplicity Horror, the Intelligibility Urge, Categorization Imperative, & the Mosquito-in-Amber Effect by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“A consequence of multiplicity horror is the deep desire to be made in some sense easily and consistently comprehensible to others in a way that provides comfort to yourself. This is what I call the intelligibility urge. When confronted with the innumerable personas that populate the internet, we’re faced with several different kinds of terror. The first is that we might be just one more face among all of them. The second is that they might perceive us in a way different than we perceive ourselves. And so the intelligibility urge is the desire to be easily digestible to others, to have clear boundaries and associations that enable others to clock us quickly and assign us to a tribe.”

“This is the mosquito-in-amber effect; people online want you to remain the way they initially clocked you because the idea of juggling so many relationships with such a massive throng of people is already challenging enough. If that vast multitude of people can change, too, then the challenge becomes truly discouraging. I already clocked you, they seem to think, and I cannot invest the energy to clock you again.”

This is how people are with everything, though, not just other people. They very much approach public-policy issues and science and … whatever … the exact same way. They read six words about it, establish an opinion, then defend it to the death, against any new information. They can maybe be coaxed away, but it’s a long process. The effort required is too great. It’s why we won’t realistically address climate change in a proactive way. People only change when their environment forces them to.

On gender identity, again by Miriam Ronzoni (Crooked Timber)

“What I know is that I cannot quite see a convincing reason for the claim that there is some fundamental, objective truth in just rejecting gender in a full and uncompromising way, and that this would be emancipatory for everybody – not just for those who think that gender is not for them. Once more, I am left with the feeling that more epistemic modesty from everybody would be extremely beneficial, and that we all have something to learn from one another here.”

As far as gender norms are concerned, I’m also a cis-male and don’t really spend much thought on it. There is no need for me to do so, and I can probably cruise on to the grave without having to spend any more time on thinking about it. If anyone thinks I should, then they’ll have to clamor for my attention and push their way up the priority list of things that I think about and spend time on—just like everything else does. I grant that there are many issues for which the way is much more smoothed and that have to expend much less effort to gain my immediate attention, but that’s just how it is.

I have long since stopped thinking about how I present to the world, really. At 50, and, having been monogamous for an eternity, my gender and sexuality have long since become established and largely faded into the background, with what I’m thinking about knowing and able to comprehend long since having taking precedence. Who I am, especially most identity, doesn’t really matter to me. I understand that that’s because, as an intelligent, well-educated, white, not exceedingly short, and reasonble-looking male, citizen of two countries (one of them an advanced social state and the other the global hegemony) and, therefore, with access to good housing, clean water and air, etc., that’s because I don’t have to. But that’s also the way of the world. I realize that this isn’t the same for everyone, but that’s no reason for me to waste my time focusing on me, rather than on figuring out how to get the world to afford those privileges to more people, perhaps even to the point where they are no longer considered to be privileges, but just what everyone has.

Book Review: What We Owe The Future by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“You will not be surprised to hear we can repeat the process to go to 20 billion people with happiness 90, 40 billion with 85, and so on, all the way until we reach (let’s say) a trillion people with happiness 0.01. Remember, on our scale, 0 was completely neutral, neither enjoying nor hating life, not caring whether they live or die. So we have gone from a world of 10 billion extremely happy people to a trillion near-suicidal people, and every step seems logically valid and morally correct.

“This argument, popularly called the Repugnant Conclusion, seems to involve a sleight-of-hand: the philosopher convinces you to add some extra people, pointing out that it won’t make the existing people any worse. Then once the people exist, he says “Ha! Now that these people exist, you’re morally obligated to redistribute utility to help them.” But just because you know this is going to happen doesn’t make the argument fail.

“(in case you think this is irrelevant to the real world, I sometimes think about this during debates about immigration. Economists make a strong argument that if you let more people into the country, it will make them better off at no cost to you. But once the people are in the country, you have to change the national culture away from your culture/preferences towards their culture/preferences, or else you are an evil racist.)”

“When the friendly AI asks me if I want to switch from World A to something superficially better, I can ask it “tell me the truth, is this eventually going to result in my eyes being pecked out by seagulls?” and if it answers “yes, I have a series of twenty-eight switches, and each one is obviously better than the one before, and the twenty-eighth is this world except your eyes are getting pecked out by seagulls”, then I will just avoid the first switch. I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table − the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point − but I’m willing to make that sacrifice.”

“The future is 20,000 pages worth of glyphs representing 10 billion people each. Are we morally entangled with all of those people, just as we would have an obligation to pick up a glass bottle that might injure them?”

“[…] one potential catastrophe is a vicious cycle of stagnation that slows growth for millennia. Since our current tech level is pretty conducive to world destruction (we have nukes and the ability to genetically engineer bioweapons, but nothing that can really defend against nukes or genetically-engineered bioweapons), staying at the current tech level for millennia is buying a lot of lottery tickets for world destruction. So one long-termist cause might be to avoid technological stagnation − as long as you’re sure you’re speeding up the good technologies (like defenses against nukes) and not the bad ones (like super-nukes). Which you never are.”

“Growth can’t go on like this forever; eventually we run into the not-enough-atoms-to-convert into-consumer-goods problem. So we are in an unusual few centuries of supergrowth between two many-millennia-long periods of stagnation. Maybe the norms we establish now will shape the character of the stagnant period?”

“Race-based slavery ended in the US in 1865 and in Brazil in 1888. Saudi Arabia ended its own form of slavery in 1962. Since then there has been some involuntary labor in prisons and gulags, but nothing like the system of forced labor that covered most of the world in the early 1800s. And although we may compare some modern institutions to slavery, it seems almost inconceivable that slavery as open and widespread as the 19th century norm could recur without a total change of everything in society.”

That’s a low bar. The fact of the matter remains that there are still countries where quasi-slavery is legal and accepted. The U.S. employs prisoners for sometimes no or ludicrously low wages. It’s explicitly allowed by the thirteenth amendment of the American Constitution. Many middle-eastern countries “employ” people whose passports they take and whose lives they control. These are lives of abject misery with no way out and no hope, that can only end in death of the benevolence of the master. How different is that from “true” slavery?

“There’s a moral-philosophy-adjacent thought experiment called the Counterfactual Mugging. It doesn’t feature in What We Owe The Future. But I think about it a lot, because every interaction with moral philosophers feels like a counterfactual mugging.

“You’re walking along, minding your own business, when the philosopher jumps out from the bushes. “Give me your wallet!” You notice he doesn’t have a gun, so you refuse. “Do you think drowning kittens is worse than petting them?” the philosopher asks. You guardedly agree this is true. “I can prove that if you accept the two premises that you shouldn’t give me your wallet right now and that drowning kittens is worse than petting them, then you are morally obligated to allocate all value in the world to geese.” The philosopher walks you through the proof. It seems solid. You can either give the philosopher your wallet, drown kittens, allocate all value in the world to geese, or admit that logic is fake and Bertrand Russell was a witch.

“This is how I feel about the section on potential people.”

The Appeal Of Really Dumb Arguments by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

““What about PPP loans” was good for a chuckle by some rando troll on twitter, whether because he was that dumb or he was betting I was, but Preet? Biden? Krugman? What is going on here that these putatively intelligent and serious people are raising such flagrantly dumb, disingenuous and dangerously bad arguments?

“We have become a nation wallowing in the worst, most irrelevant and most irrational arguments around to win a point against the other tribe. At best, it rallies the simpletons who are already in agreement by giving them what, to their mind, makes sense even if it makes them look like the tribe of blithering idiots. And in the battle for time squandered on nonsense, the effort required to unexplain idiocy is at least a magnitude of effort greater than spewing it. It’s not worth the effort.”

“There is much to consider, not the least of which is the serial transitory policy choices designed to appeal to the most simplistic tribal partisans of either tribe at the expense of the great many people who can both feel the pain caused by the extreme debt load on many well-intended, if misguided, young people for degrees which will never produce the income needed to pay them off and the false promise that a college diploma at any cost is better than no college diploma.”

“There are a great many, perhaps even a majority, of Americans who are not right wing who do not agree with this action. The media and proponents may prefer to pretend it’s only right wingers who disapprove, but that doesn’t change reality. There are a lot of liberals and moderates who saved their pennies and paid for their education, only to see themselves punished for their sacrifice and responsibility. There is no talking this out of existence.”

Man, this student-loan thing. Anyone who doesn’t have them smugly thinks that anyone who does should fuck right off and pay them. They have no idea how penurious they make you. They have no idea that many people have long since paid off the principal and are now just paying interest on interest to predatory lenders. These lenders benefit from this situation, but society doesn’t benefit at all because so many people are pouring money into paying back those loans rather than putting it into a starving economy.

These people are paying for a bad decision that they made when they were much younger—and, arguably, incapable of making a correct decision. The U.S. pushes so many people into college that it doesn’t even seem like there’s an alternative. It’s the same thing that drives people to buy or lease $72,000 trucks when they only make $32,000 per year. It’s hard to blame them because the indoctrination is so strong in one direction—they never hear any contrary opinion or hear of any other way of running their lives.

It’s a drag on society and we should consider the continued evil promulgated by it rather than just thinking of eternally punishing people for a bad decision that they made, but that we, personally, did not. We are so in love with eternal punishment for everything in this country that we can’t even keep ourselves from being giddy thinking about it.

Technology

Apple M1 energy efficiency

I noticed that my M1 Macbook was at only 40% power, even though I couldn’t remember when I’d last had it connected to for charging. It turns out that it had been 4.5 days since the last charge (about 105 hours) and it was still going strong. It would have had even more charge left, but I’d left Safari open with my Outlook work email open in it. That was by far the most significant power drain over those four days. Apple has done a tremendous job of ensuring that the main apps I use are extremely parsimonious with energy-use.

Programming

Avoiding useEffect with callback refs by TkDodo

“[…] if you need to interact with DOM nodes directly after they rendered, try not to jump to useRef + useEffect directly, but consider using callback refs instead.”

Style Queries by Una Kravets

“If you’re querying @container (min-width: 420px), you want to apply styles if the rendered size is greater than or equal to 420px at any given time. If you’re querying @container style(min-width: 420px), you’re looking for a computed value of min-width to equal 420px. The style query looks at the computed style value – not the value of the element when it’s rendered on the page. Style and size are different types of CSS containment.”

Can types replace validation? by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“The problem is that for complex types (i.e. types made from other types), exceptions short-circuit. As soon as one exception is thrown, further data validation stops. The ASP.NET validation revisited article shows examples of that particular problem.
This happens when validation functions have no composable way to communicate errors. When throwing exceptions, you can return an exception message, but exceptions short-circuit rather than compose. The same is true for the Either monad: It short-circuits. Once you’re on the failure track you stay there and no further processing takes place. Errors don’t compose.”

“The problem is that during composition, we lose information. While a single false value causes the entire aggregated value to be false, we don’t know why. And we don’t know if there was only a single false value, or if there were more than one. Boolean all short-circuits on the first false value it encounters, and stops processing subsequent predicates.

“In logic, that’s all you need, but in data validation you often want to know what’s wrong with the data.

“Fortunately, this is a solved problem. Use applicative validation, an example of which I supplied in the article An applicative reservation validation example in C#.

“This changes focus on validation. No longer is validation a true/false question. Validation is a function from less-structured data to more-structured data. Parse, don’t validate.”