Links and Notes for October 21st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Teachers Don’t Need Improved Self-Care Techniques. They Need a Raise. by Nora De La Cour (Jacobin)

“[…] the emphasis on self-care “demands [that] teachers maintain a healthy balance in their lives without addressing [the] pay, added responsibilities, and poor conditions” that inevitably disrupt that balance. The admonition to “practice self-care” effectively blames teachers for the sky-high stress and burnout they feel. Are you down about the fact that you’ve missed your prep period for two months and your paycheck barely covers rent? You really need to try guided breathing.”

“[…] the most glaring reason that people leave teaching jobs (or decide not to enter them) is the high opportunity cost: comparably educated workers can make substantially more money in other fields.”

“[…] labor economist Sylvia Allegretto shows that while non-teacher college graduates saw their weekly wages rise by $445 (in 2021 dollars) between 1996 and 2021, public school teachers’ inflation-adjusted wages increased by only $29 during that time period.”

““Over six decades there has been a 31.8 percentage-point swing for the worse in the relative wage gap for women teachers.””

“In 2021, the average pay penalty for male teachers exceeded an eye-popping 35 percent (or 65 cents on the dollar). As Allegretto points out, this goes a long way toward explaining why the profession’s lopsided gender makeup has not improved over time.”

“Fixing this problem by offering more attractive teacher salaries would seem to be a no-brainer. But of course, this would require refunding schools at a time when state legislatures have been moving remarkably fast to defund and dismantle public education.”

Poverty skyrockets in Ukraine by Andrea Peters (WSWS)

“While US and NATO officials are able to dispatch massive amounts of firepower to Ukraine’s front lines within a matter of weeks, the delivery of life-saving humanitarian goods is seemingly an impossible logistical challenge.

“Meanwhile, COVID-19 is spreading, with another 23,000 cases recorded between just October 10 and 16. Ukraine’s coronavirus vaccination rate is under 45 percent, and only a small fraction of the population has ever gotten a first or second booster dose.”

“More than 7 percent of the country’s housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, and millions have lost access to heat, electricity and water. Last week, 30 percent of the country’s power stations were knocked offline. According to news reports, in preparation for the winter, people are gathering wood and building makeshift stoves in abandoned buildings that still have roofs. Under these conditions, the government in Kiev recently made the helpful suggestion that everyone charge their devices and stock up on batteries and flashlights, in anticipation of ongoing rolling blackouts.”

“According to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, 60 percent of Ukraine’s budget is now devoted to defense. World Bank regional country director for Eastern Europe Arup Banerji recently stated that if Ukraine does not receive more financing soon, it will have to either further cut social spending or resort to simply printing money, thereby driving up the inflation rate.”

“In an October 12 commentary published in the South China Morning Post, right-wing economist Anders Aslund noted that of the $35 billion the IMF has pledged to Ukraine to help it keep its government running and schools and health care facilities open, it has released just $20 billion. And of the 9 billion euros the EU committed to the country in May, just 1 billion has been sent.”

Mounting problems in Chinese economy will have global effects by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The expected long-term decline in Chinese economic output as a result of the tech restrictions being imposed on it, and the immediate market selloff in response to the party congress, are both responses to the accelerated war drive against China by the US. As the recent National Security Strategy document makes clear, the US regards China as the greatest threat to its continued global dominance.”

Inflation, Inflation, Inflation and Social Security by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“To be clear, these workers are not doing well. A worker supporting a family on $20,000 a year before the pandemic, will still be struggling if their real earnings increased to $20,800, but they are better off than they were in 2019. The media have largely ignored the story of workers quitting bad jobs for ones that pay better and/or offer better working conditions.”

That’s insane, Dean. Only an economist could think someone would notice being 3.9% less miserable, when 50% would be an ok start. Would you rather get hit by a car going 100kph or one going 96.1kph? Take your time.

“This could mean $2000-$3000 a year in interest savings for a typical homeowner. Are we really supposed to believe that these interest savings won’t cover paying $1 more for a gallon of milk at the supermarket? Obviously,”

Wait, how high is that mortgage? How overpriced was the house? How stable is that equity? Some of Baker’s math is predicated on being in a stable economy.

“So, given the economic reality, is it plausible that everyone feels they are being devastated by inflation?”

Prices are fucking ridiculous on the ground in NYS, Dean. I have no idea where your data comes from or how much massaging it got, but it is ugly out there. Food inflation is not evenly distributed. Prices are very high relative to regional salaries, but let’s not talk about that. Let’s also not talk about how this is happening in the wealthiest country in the world, leaving 99% of the population in just as much precarity as a much poorer nation.

Credit Suisse Was a Reverse Meme Stock by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Eventually some US company is going to attempt to win favor with Texas regulators by announcing “we have a plan to increase our use of fossil fuels in order to pollute more,” and then it will turn out that it did not actually increase its use of fossil fuels, and then it will get sued for securities fraud, and that will be a very American story indeed.”

This would be funny if it were about a smaller, less powerful, and less dangerous country.

“There is something very crypto about this. If you built a bond trading platform and went out to asset managers to sign them up, they would ask you questions like “where is this platform incorporated?” And if you said “oh that’s a secret,” that would be a gigantic red flag and no one would sign up . In crypto, though, permissionless anonymous decentralized finance is a goal , and “we don’t want to get any regulated legal entities involved in our exchange” is a natural thing to say.”

Public Policy & Politics

The Arms-Swapper by John Kiriakou (Scheer Post)

“Couple all that with the problem that I witnessed countless times over the course of my career at the C.I.A. and at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — the insistence of American diplomats, intelligence professionals and White House staff members that they are literally the smartest people in the world and that they know best.”

This reminds me of a post I wrote at the end of March, 2014, called Russophobia: the Lunatics are at the Helm. I wrote it in response to the last time a U.S. administration tried to start a war with Russia; the 2014 putsch in Ukraine engineered by the Obama administration. Eight-and-a-half years later and things remain kind-of unchanged, but mostly worse. If you read through the article and replace “Obama” with “Biden”, you don’t really have to change a word: it all still applies.

To whit:

“I am so tired of hearing of scintillatingly smart people who can’t seem to ever say anything that is even tangentially well-informed. We knew that the Bush administration was a booby-hatch full of cantankerous old farts who hadn’t been right about anything or even had an original thought since before it became illegal to beat your wife and black people, not necessarily in that order. That doesn’t excuse them in any way at all, but they didn’t even really have a veneer of intelligentsia to them.

“And now we have a new administration full of supposed young guns, ready to take on the 21st century. Not only is the Obama administration a moral and ethical failure throughout the whole spectrum but this supposedly technically savvy and hyper-informed and educated pile of Rhodes and Constitutional scholars can’t even seem to grasp the basics of human interaction beyond that which you would find in any neighborhood sandbox. They are a bunch of kindergartners who don’t know enough to shut up and let the grownups handle things.”

Nope. You don’t need to change a thing. They’ve only gotten stupider, more ham-handed, and more arrogant, their unearned confidence propelling us toward a nuclear war.

But let’s continue with the citations from Kiriakou’s article.

“Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser once famously said , “The genius of you Americans is that you never make a clear-cut stupid move. You always make complicated stupid moves, which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” He was right. But rest assured that most of the time, the moves are just plain stupid ones.”

“The problem the Ukrainians are facing is that American weapons are difficult to use. They’re sophisticated and complicated. And there just isn’t any time for Americans to train Ukrainians in how to use them.”

The Lunatic Argument That Nuclear Brinkmanship Makes Us Safe by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)

““If you yield to this nuclear threat once, then what would prevent Russia in the future — or others — to do the same thing again?””

Arms-reduction treaties, you fucking dolts! Like the ones that that fucking criminal Reagan was even capable of understanding were necessary to ensure the continued existence of human life. JFC.

This is Dr. Strangelove stuff right here. They’ve forgotten the lessons of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and think that the only way to get out of this is to let the nuclear weapons fly and let the chips fall where they may. We are looking at a very, very hungry future, with people in Europe unlikely to be the ones to survive a nuclear winter. And, honestly, why should they? They’re part and party to the idiocy—they’re enabling it—of the U.S.

“We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because U.S. President John F. Kennedy secretly acquiesced to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s demands that the U.S. remove the Jupiter missiles it had placed in Turkey and Italy, which was what provoked Moscow to move nukes to Cuba in the first place.”

“In response to a tweet by France’s President Macron saying “We do not want a World War,” Paul Massaro, a senior policy advisor for the U.S. government’s Helsinki Commission, tweeted , “Precisely this sort of weak, terrified language leads Russia to escalate.””

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Macron is a jackass, but the sentiment he expressed, while kind of obvious, should be impossible to disagree with…but highly placed fucknuts on Twitter manage to do so, in the most criminal possible way. They called Macron a pussy for not wanting a nuclear war. Breathtaking.

““Humanity cannot afford to spin the cylinder again in this game of Russian roulette; we must unload the gun. Our only path forward is de-escalation,” vanden Heuvel writes.”

And disarmament.

“We could have such a beautiful world. All the energy we pour into competition and conquest could go toward innovation that benefits us all, making sure everyone has enough, eliminating human suffering and the need for human toil. We’re trading heaven on earth for elite ego games.”

Nope, the self-selected philosopher kings in charge of the asylum have decided that they want all of the marbles for themselves. And if they can’t have them all, then they’d rather that no-one have anything—including themselves. Though I doubt very much that they’ve thought it through far enough to conceive of a future in which they suffer from the consequences of their own actions—they never have.

SMBC: Cold War

• The hover-over title is: “Can we please not? Can the world just be boring for a while.”
• The alternate caption is: “God, I can’t wait until AI kills us off.”

On NATO’s “Steadfast Noon” Operation by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Russian nuclear weapons are authorized for use under “exceptional circumstances” as described in published Russian doctrine, none of which apply to the Ukraine situation. Any talk of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine, Shoigu said, was “absurd.””

“Now is not the time for drama, or theatrically inflammatory rhetoric. Now is the time for maturity, sanity…restraint. A sage leader would have recognized the possibility of misperception on the part of Russia when NATO, a mere week after being encouraged by the Ukrainian president to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia, carries out a major exercise where NATO practices dropping nuclear bombs on Russia.”

“Instead, America gets an unscripted, off-the-cuff reference to a nuclear Armageddon from a narcissistic egomaniac who uses the horror of nuclear annihilation as a fund-raising mantra.”

We’re Closer to a Nuclear Incident in Ukraine Than You Think by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“In just a few hours, Europe, Russia, and the United States are in ruins, thirty-four million are dead, and fifty-seven million are injured. The survivors face an irradiated future without any modern infrastructure, easily accessible food or medical supplies, and a years-long nuclear winter.”

“[…] former president Donald Trump told rally-goers in Arizona that “we must demand the immediate negotiation of the peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet all because stupid people didn’t have a clue . . . [about] the power of nuclear.””

The Republicans are against it because the Democrats are for it. That doesn’t make them wrong, though. This could be the last round of this tit-for-tat, with the Republicans having “won” because they will have been right about the destructiveness of nuclear warfare while the Democrats and progressives had out-crazied them and took them for a spin. I am very cynical and even I didn’t imagine that we could this stupid. I know we are destroying the planet through ignorance and laziness and greed, but that’s more of a slow-burner sort of thing. It’s easy to see how we’re just monkeys in pants, incapable of coordinating our way out of this mess when we’ve put the reins in the hands of the stupidest, greediest monkeys. Things will be all over and it will be far too late before we figure it out. But not blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons is something we used to know how to do. We avoided it a couple of times so far. This time, there isn’t even the acknowledgement that nuclear war would be bad—to avoid bolstering the enemy’s belief that we’re too chicken to use them. What a clusterfuck.

The Last Thing Haiti Needs is Another Military Intervention by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“Ever since the Haitian Revolution won independence from France in 1804, Haiti has faced successive waves of invasions, including a two-decade-long US occupation from 1915 to 1934, a US-backed dictatorship from 1957 to 1986, two Western-backed coups against the progressive former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004, and a UN military intervention from 2004 to 2017. These invasions have prevented Haiti from securing its sovereignty and have prevented its people from building dignified lives.”

“The structures of domination and exploitation established by that system have impoverished the Haitian people, with most of the population having no access to drinking water, health care, education, or decent housing. Of Haiti’s 11.4 million people, 4.6 million are food insecure and 70% are unemployed […]”

He is 100% correct and anyone who disagrees with him here is wrong. by Caitlin Johnstone (Twitter)

She’s referring to a video clip of Jimmy Dore. Click through to see the 90-second clip.

“The “rules-based”, meaning: what we say goes. Because we don’t follow any rules. When we invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for 20 years, we weren’t following any rules-based order. When we invaded Iraq and killed a million people, we weren’t following any rules-based order. When we illegally invaded Libya, bombed the shit out of them, turned that state into a failed state, with open slave markets, we weren’t following any rules-based order. When we went and dropped 26,000 bombs on Syria, we weren’t following any rules-based order. They call rules-based order but what they mean is that the United States rules the world. That’s what this is about. So we don’t follow any rules, or order. That’s all bullshit. Right now, we’re occupying a third of Syria. Which third? The oil parts. We’re stealing Syria’s oil right now. What rule does that fall under? […] What he’s actually saying is: this is about us staying in control of the world. He’s just saying it. And if you don’t know what the words mean—that’s what they mean. We are going to be in control of the world—and that’s why we’re fighting, in Ukraine.”

And in Syria, and Somalia, and, soon, again, in Haiti. And the U.S. gets away with it again and again and again. No-one is going to lift a finger when U.S. troops “enter” Haiti on a “peace-keeping” mission, once again.

Scott Ritter: We’re in a Moment When One Mistake Could Start a Nuclear War by Margaret Flowers (Scheer Post)

“The assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, in Moscow was an act of terror and ironically the United States all but acknowledges this. When the CIA contacts the New York Times and says this was carried out by the Ukrainian intelligence services on orders of President Zelensky, that means without saying but legally speaking that the Ukrainian intelligence service is now a terrorist organization and the Zelensky government is a state sponsor of terrorism.”

“It mirrors, the strategic air campaign that the West did against Iraq in 1991. On day one, we struck these targets. It’s taken Russia eight months to get to this stage but they’re at this stage now.”

“People need to understand that the United States in carrying out similar strikes against Iraq, which again were lawful under the laws of war, we killed thousands. Russia is going out of its way not to harm the civilian population of Ukraine, deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure in a way that minimizes civilian casualties.”

I would take this with a grain of salt, but OK. Also, but you should also say “initial civilian casualties”. Water pumps need power, too. So do hospitals. A lot of people suffers in the months after this kind of bombing.

“The United States is providing the targeting for this and also the employment mechanism. For instance, they monitor Russian aircraft and Russian troop movements and they find a window of opportunity where the Ukrainians can maneuver their artillery into a specific location to strike a specific target without fear of retaliation.”

That it’s done remotely is a loophole to enable plausible deniability but, honestly, no-one that matters cares about these types of games. Russia is not fooled into thinking that the U.S. is not involved—or that their claims of only being tangentially involved, and not, like, really involved, make any difference whatsoever.

“[…] the location of these warehouses and the timing of the movements between the warehouses are closely coordinated with the intelligence that monitors Russian intelligence – when there’s a Russian satellite passing over, when a Russian surveillance aircraft is up in the air, when a Russian drone is in the air, things of that nature, and we identify, we being the West, identify gaps in Russian coverage and then we build a line of communication that navigates these gaps and gets this equipment from the border to the front.”

“It’s making it to the front line because we have dozens if not hundreds of American special operators, covert warriors, who are overseeing this and making this happen. They’re not on the front line, they’re not fighting, but they’re the ones who enable the front line to exist the way it does today, and that’s what they’re doing.”

That’s pretty crucial involvement.

“Instead of consoling his European allies, his close German friends, America’s partners, about this horrible loss of 12 billion dollars’ worth of critical infrastructure that’s going to throw Europe into the Stone Age this winter, Blinken says this is a great opportunity because it allows the United States to introduce its gas at 10 times the market rate. So, we’re making windfall profits while squeezing out that cheap Russian gas. It is the clearest statement of motive that one can have.”

“And now, NATO’s running an exercise where they are preparing to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia. I mean, what is the other purpose of this exercise? So, optics alone dictate that mature people in NATO should shut this exercise down and say this is not a good time to run this exercise. We don’t want to create any potential for misunderstanding.”

“It was so bad that Ronald Reagan, Mr. Evil Empire, when briefed on this a year later by the CIA, he said wait a minute, the Soviets actually thought we were going to launch a preemptive nuclear strike and the CIA said yes, they thought that was the case. Ronald Reagan said this is insane and he began the process of moving towards nuclear disarmament that manifested itself in the signing of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty in December, 1987 and the implementation of the treaty in June of 1988.”

“One mistake, one misunderstanding could lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons that ends the world as we know it.”

“If Russia is going to use a nuke, they’re going to use it against Europe, not Ukraine, but they would never do that preemptively. Russia has two conditions under which they can use nuclear weapons. The first is if they’ve been attacked with nuclear weapons, and then they will retaliate with everything they have. The second is if a conventional combat capability is brought together that threatens the survival of the Russian State, then Russia can use all the means at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, to resolve that threat.”

“So, the American people need to wake up because otherwise we’re going to give our future over to a political Elite and economic Elite who are going to do everything possible to preserve what they have for as long as possible, even if at the end it means the destruction of everything that they purport to be trying to save.”

Sometimes What a Van Gogh Needs Is a Splash of Tomato Soup by Ted Rall

“Phoebe Plummer of the Just Stop Oil movement, 21, shouted: “What is worth more, art or life?” She continued: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet?””

Why do I have to choose? And why is it OK to respond to the destruction of the planet by destroying culture? This is called a false dichotomy and it’s infantile. The tragedy is that we hear from this dimwit (or dimwits) and we’re exhorted to either hate her or love her, when we should we be wishing fervently that we could have an adult conversation about this without destroying stuff (or trying to, or pretending to, or miraculously not doing so because of dumb luck).

“It is largely forgotten that Van Gogh was a populist and a Marxist. Odds are, he would have approved of this attempt to raise awareness of the climate crisis.”

What the hell does that have to with anything? I hope I’ve never written something this trite or stupid. I’m afraid to look. I probably have, in just such a fit of pique as Ted Rall has written in. Sometimes it’s cathartic and sometimes you just want to have written something—so you hit “publish” and wait for the regret to kick in. Pro tip: You can avoid the last step by never re-reading anything you’ve written.

“The Taliban government, which had previously protected the statues, reversed course when a Swedish delegation along with UNESCO traveled to Afghanistan and offered money to buy and preserve the 1400-year-old sandstone relics at a time that the country was reeling under the weight of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, requests for medical and food assistance for living, breathing flesh-and-blood human beings fell on deaf ears.

“Sometimes the world needs a slap across its face to force it to pay attention.”

In that case—and so many others—the slap absolutely did not work. The Taliban were right to care more about their starving children than statues, but the world remembers its own, completely different, narrative. The narrative should have been, oh, of course, you’re right, let’s talk about this and compromise: we’ll agree to provide humanitarian aid as well as cultural-protection aid if you’ll agree to treat a slightly larger group of your population as human beings. We could have used our money as leverage—bought better behavior—but we didn’t. Because we really don’t care about anything but bossing other people around.

“Radically mitigating climate change should be humanity’s top priority. 69% of all animals on earth died between 1970 and 2018. Since 1900, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish species have died 72 times faster than “normal.” Droughts are severe. Storms are getting more violent. This isn’t an emergency. It’s THE emergency.”

Absolutely horrific. and spot-on.

“99.9% of humanity does not own energy stocks and we’re all willing to die for the tiny minority who do.”

This is also woefully simplistic. Many people’s lives depend on the power that thus far only fossil fuels are capable of providing. I’m not on board with shutting it off and seeing what happens. I’m not interested in a world made by hand brought by a chaos planned by people who are utterly unaware of how the world they currently live in—and thoroughly enjoy—works. Ted Rall just got back from a vacation in Russia, for Christ’s sake. Is he prepared to stop doing that forever? Because that’s what “stopping everything right now” would mean and there’s no use pretending it doesn’t. There are reasonable solutions that don’t involve growing our way out of this, but also don’t involve magically solar-powering our way either.

“If your blood boils over what they did more than it does over what they’re talking about, you’re too dumb to be won over in the first place. Complacency kills; outrage fights complacency.”

That is not at all true. That is making enemies of everyone again. Just drawing lines in the sand for virtue-signaling.

Biden administration drafts UN resolution for deployment of foreign military forces to Haiti by Alex Johnson, Keith Jones (WSWS)

“The first occupation, which lasted until 1934, was not Washington’s first instance of interference in Haiti but rather consolidated its grip over the country. Six months beforehand, US Marines had marched on the state treasury in Port-au-Prince and took the nation’s entire gold reserve. At the height of the US military presence, 5000 Marines were stationed in the country of less than 3 million and brutally suppressed a radical and largely peasant-based resistance movement, the Caco. The fighting led to the murder of over 15,000 Haitians but only 16 US fatalities.”

“North America’s imperialist governments refused all requests from Haiti’s elected government for assistance until the rebels were at the gates of Port-au-Prince, then intervened under the pretext of preserving order and democracy and promptly kidnapped Aristide and bundled him on a plane for the Central African Republic.”

“The whereabouts of the $13 billion donated for Haitian earthquake relief, very little of which reached the Haitian people, and the role Bill Clinton, who served as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, played in its dispersal remain live political issues in Haiti.”

Autumn Escalation by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“The mobilization initiated by Vladimir Putin as a way to turn the tide on the front has not had the intended effect and turned into a serious problem in itself. There is no one to teach the mobilized, there is nowhere to keep them, there is no equipment to use, and no uniforms to wear. The State Duma acknowledged the fact of the “disappearance” of one and a half million sets of military uniforms (although now recruits receive generous offers to buy this same uniform at their own expense in Voentorg stores). Several hundred thousand young men, including many valuable professionals, have fled the country, evading the draft.”

“From the point of view of a market economy, massive attacks on infrastructure facilities do not look like a good solution. Rockets are insanely expensive, the costs associated with their use are many times greater than the resulting economic damage caused to the neighboring country […]”

“Sharp fluctuations generally undermine the psyche of society. After a short period of emotional upsurge, bewilderment sets in (where is the promised break?), and then shock, depression and panic follow once it is discovered how things really are.”

True, to a point. But it’s not unsustainable. Witness Russiagate. Six years of “victory around the corner” and it’s still going strong. Perhaps the author underestimates how powerful and long-lasting propaganda can be. There are great jokes out there about Russians or Soviets “studying” American propaganda only to be told “what American propaganda?” to which the inevitable reply is “Exactly.”

“In order to calm the propaganda mafia for two or three weeks, more than a hundred rockets and several hundred million dollars had to be spent. Perhaps the stabilization of the propaganda discourse was worth it. Unfortunately, however, missiles and money are a limited resource that tends to run out.”

Workers die in extreme heat during China’s summer by Lily Zhao (WSWS)

“Workers did not have any time off on weekends or national holidays. One day not at work was a day without pay. There was no contract or insurance of any kind. The company was highly exploitative. Workers had to hand in their cell phones when coming into work. They often had to work overtime but were only paid if they worked a full extra hour. Work hours are also uncertain. Workers were on call 24/7.”

This would sound very familiar to many workers in the U.S. Dean Baker would beg us to understand how much better it’s gotten, but once you’re down far enough, incrementally “better” no longer makes much of a difference—change needs to be a quantum leap. People in the U.S. (and, apparently, China) are like gamblers who have been losing for a very long time: they need a really big win to break even again. Just winning a few dollars doesn’t matter when you’re thousands in the hole.

“The deaths were all avoidable. According to a regulation published by State Administration of Work Safety and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in 2012, no outdoor work should take place once the temperature is above 40°C. When the temperature is between 37° and 40°, there should be no outdoor work during the hottest three hours of the day and no-one should work more than six hours outside.”

“Many companies simply ignore the regulation and treat workers’ lives as expendable. Nor is the regulation ever seriously reinforced by the state apparatus. Despite the illness and deaths of many workers, no company management has been even fined or warned, let alone charged.”

When There’s Talk of Gun Control, Gunmakers Play the Jobs Card. They’re Often Bluffing by Alana Semuels & Jason Koxvold (Time Magazine)

“When the Remington Outdoor Company filed for bankruptcy in 2020, it owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to local suppliers and utility providers, including the local shoe store, the hardware store, and Ilion’s treasurer, police department, water commission, and the roughly 609 workers it had abruptly laid off without the health care benefits or severance pay promised in their contract.”

“Remington’s Ilion and Tennessee properties, as well as its long-gun, shotgun, and pistols businesses, were bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 by a company called the Roundhill Group LLC, which now operates Remington through a holding company called RemArms. Roundhill appears to have been created solely to purchase Remington’s assets from its bankruptcy proceedings; Richmond Italia, a paintball entrepreneur who is one of Roundhill’s two partners, said in court filings that he was approached by Ken D’Arcy, a professional race-car driver and manufacturing executive who was appointed CEO of Remington in 2019. D’Arcy suggested that Italia buy Remington’s firearms assets. (The two men knew each other because they had both served as CEOs and then sat on the board of GI Sportz, a paintball company that filed for bankruptcy in October 2020, shortly after Roundhill purchased Remington.)”

JFC, what a shitshow.

“RemArms has called back nearly all of the 609 workers Remington laid off when it filed for bankruptcy in 2020, according to Jamie Rudwall, District Two Representative for the United Mine Workers of America. He notes that only 300 have actually returned, the rest having either found new jobs or retrained for new careers.”

“Though some gunmakers have picked up and moved their factories south from states like Connecticut, the far more common occurrence is that they move only their headquarters to Southern states, but keep manufacturing in the state in which that factory already exists. Such a move can secure juicy incentives such as tax breaks and free facilities, and generate headlines about liberal states losing manufacturing, while sparing gunmakers the hassle of moving millions of dollars of equipment and hiring and training new workers. Indeed, most of the companies on the NSSF’s list of “gun industry migration” still have manufacturing in the northeast.”

“The two top states for gunmaking in 2020, according to the data, were Missouri and New Hampshire. However, those figures only show where guns are distributed, rather than manufactured, deceptively counting Smith & Wesson—the biggest producer of guns in 2020—as a Missouri company, even though its guns in 2020 were made in Massachusetts, not Missouri. The company generated headlines in 2017 when it announced it was moving to Missouri, receiving a 50% tax break over 10 years . But at the time, it only moved about 20 jobs from its Massachusetts headquarters. The data shows that Massachusetts made 21% of all firearms in 2015 and just 0.49% in 2020—but that’s because Smith & Wesson established a distribution center in Missouri, not because it moved its manufacturing, Small Arms Analytics’ Brauer says.”

“His research has found that gunmakers that say they’re leaving a Northeast state because of its gun-control policies usually keep a substantial presence there, and that they leave not because of the political climate but because they can find nonunionized, lower-paid workers in the South—and get millions of dollars in incentives.”

“one of the ironies of the company’s indicating it will move to a state friendlier to gun owners is that Ilion is a place where people love guns.”

The Non-West Coalesces by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] brings us considerably closer to the new world order Russia and China, the two most influential non–Western nations, have been talking about for several years and notably since the Biden administration took power in January 2021. Within months, Beijing and Moscow concluded that there is no making sense of a nation that, even as its power declines, has no intention of working with them as equals to mutual benefit. Since then, numerous other countries have had little trouble detecting which way the wind blows.”

“Every nation just named is currently subjected to U.S. sanctions. Parenthetically, I do have to wonder what happens when most of the world other than the Anglosphere and Western Europe is condemned in this way, but that is another conversation.”

“As the non–West gathers in the cause of constructive action, mutual benefit, and (not to be missed) noninterference, the only thing they are against is global disorder, and the only nations they are against are those responsible for it.”

“I can’t decide if he is a schlemiel or a schlimazel —as a Yiddish-speaking friend explains it, the guy who knocks over a bottle of wine at table or the man into whose lap the wine spills.”

“Once again, the man from Scranton proves what he always has been, a provincial pol who thinks he can sell snake oil around the world just as he long did in Delaware and with no clue as to what makes responsible statecraft.”

“Here is how Erdoğan, ever eager to appear important in world affairs, concluded his conversation with Putin on these matters:”

“We can work together because we are more concerned about the poor countries than the wealthy states. This is how we should envisage this, and if we do it, we will be able to change much—to change the balance in favor of poor countries. Turkey and Russia are together. I know some of our steps will worry some circles and some countries, but we are full of resolve. Our relevant bodies, our colleagues [in our ministries], will establish contacts and strengthen our relations.”

“See what I mean about which way the wind blows? See what I mean about the non–West’s coalescence?”

Philosophy & Sociology

Why Do Philosophy? by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

“This is kind of embarrassing, going after Marx…”

Existential Comics: Why do Philosophy?

Two Education Stories That Are Just Begging for Good Journalism by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“I don’t mind being frank: I am an opponent of the charter school movement. Public services (such as public schools) are not an ATM. You are no more entitled to withdraw “your share” of the public school budget to educate your child someplace else than I am to take out “my share” of the public transportation system to buy a BMW. But look: prove me wrong. Show that, despite the great variability between states and even between schools, the lotteries basically work. Show me that there’s uniformity. Show me that independent authorities are handling the basic work so that the schools don’t have the opportunity to cheat. Show me that there’s an adversarial regulatory process to ensure fairness and consistency. Prove me wrong.”

Technology

Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker by Nilay Patel (The Verge)

This was a long interview. The interviewer seemed to be a bit thick and disbelieving at times, but Whitaker’s answers were consistent and good.

“Let’s be clear, we are not in the business of compromising on privacy, and we are not in the business of handing people who want and need Signal a compromised version of it. We are not going to do that. Are there people in South and East Asia who want to be able to talk privately, safely, and intimately outside of the gaze of corporate state surveillance? Absolutely. Do we want them to have access to Signal? Absolutely, we do. Do we want Signal to be available there? Yes. Can we magically transform the geopolitical dynamics? No, we can’t. We will do what is within our power to make sure that Signal is available to as many people as possible, and we will do that without compromising our privacy promises.”

“If encryption is broken, it is broken. If Signal doesn’t keep its privacy promises, then there is no real point for us to exist as a nonprofit whose sole mission is to provide a safe, private, pleasant place for messaging and communication in a world where those are vanishingly few and far between. There are a number of other services, but because very few people use them, they are much less useful to those who pick them up and try them.”

“[…] was part of ethical whistleblowing networks. We were sharing information we thought was in the public interest with the public and journalists, which I stand behind. A lot of this information should not be behind the walls of proprietary tech companies where the decisions are being made based on profit and not on social good. Full stop.”

“We don’t track or analyze use on specific features, but there are insights that are produced outside of Signal. There are basic sensibilities that come from folks having, oftentimes, decades of experience in the messaging space. We are not riding blind, we’re just not relying on surveilling our users to make our choices.”

“Too often, I think that pretext gets used to reflexively instill in people a response to these questions that’s like, “Break anything we have to break, because this is too emotionally meaningful for me to sit by.” It almost short-circuits that sort of deliberate and discerning analysis of the whole scope of the problem. I think that is also an issue with this debate.”

Won’t somebody please think of the children. Yeah, they throw “child porn” out there like it’s just lying around all over the Internet and like millions of people are trying to get it or sell it or whatever. It’s vanishingly small and shitcanning everyone’s private communications to combat it is highly disingenuous and cynical. It’s a power-grab, levered on people’s darkest fears. Business as usual.

Programming

Tree search in Haskell by Mark Jason Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“And then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time:”

“[Lazy evaluation] makes it practical to modularize a program as a generator that constructs a large number of possible answers, and a selector that chooses the appropriate one.”

“That’s exactly what I was doing and what I should have been doing all along. And it ends:”

“Lazy evaluation is perhaps the most powerful tool for modularization … the most powerful glue functional programmers possess.”

The Illustrated Stable Diffusion by Jay Alammar (GitHub)

“Say we have an image, let’s take a first step of adding some noise to it.

“Let’s call the “slice” of noise we added to the image “noise slice 1”. Let’s now take another step adding some more noise to the noisy image (“noise slice 2”).

“At this point, the image is made entirely of noise. Now let’s take these as training examples for a computer vision neural network. Given a step number and image, we want it to predict how much noise was added in the previous step.

“While this example shows two steps from image to total noise, we can control how much noise to add to the image, and so we can spread it over tens of steps, creating tens of training examples per image for all the images in a training dataset.

“The beautiful thing now is that once we get this noise prediction network working properly, it can effectively paint pictures by removing noise over a number of steps.

“Note: This is a slight oversimplification of the diffusion algorithm.”

“Now the forward diffusion process is done on the compressed latents. The slices of noise are of noise applied to those latents, not to the pixel image. And so the noise predictor is actually trained to predict noise in the compressed representation (the latent space).”

Real World OCaml: Functional Programming for the Masses: Chapter 10 − GADTS (Cambridge University Press) (PDF)

“Generalized Algebraic Data Types, or GADTs for short, are an extension of the variants we saw inChapter 7 (Variants). GADTs are more expressive than regular variants, which helps you create types that more precisely match the shape of the program you want to write. That can help you write code that’s safer, more concise, and more efficient.

“At the same time, GADTs are an advanced feature of OCaml, and their power comes at a distinct cost. GADTs are harder to use and less intuitive than ordinary variants, and it can sometimes be a bit of a puzzle to figure out how to use them effectively. All of which is to say that you should only use a GADT when it makes a big qualitative improvement to your design”

“As this kind of complexity creeps in, it can be useful to be able to track the state of a given request at the type level, and to use that to narrow the set of states a given request can be in, thereby removing some extra case analysis and error handling, which can reduce the complexity of the code and remove opportunities for mistakes. One way of doing this is to mint dierent types to represent dierent states of the request, e.g., one type for an incomplete request where various elds are optional, and a dierent type where all of the data is mandatory.

“While this works, it can be awkward and verbose. With GADTs, we can track the state of the request in a type parameter, and have that parameter be used to narrow the set of available cases, without duplicating the type.”

As always, I’m fascinated by increasingly expressive type systems that allow authors to much more precisely define the allowable states. I am, however, respectful of the complexity of the formulation—and the corresponding inscrutability of the error messages. As always, one must become fluent in a language to really judge it—and I’m not even close to fluent in Haskell and I’m even worse at OCaml. Instead, I’m hanging on by my fingernails. But, still, I judge the usability of this language and its more high-level concepts to be nearly impossible to contemplate using in a team of mortals.

I’ve been reading language specifications for decades. I started with OOSC and OOSC2 for Eiffel. Those were the longest ones. But I’ve always read the C# and F# language specifications and the TypeScript ones. I’ve read the ones for Dart and Go. Like I wrote above, I’ll freely admit I don’t get nearly everything in Haskell or OCaml examples. The simpler stuff I can grasp immediately, but the GADT stuff uses syntax that I have to parse painstakingly and I’m sure I’m only getting half of it. Without the natural-language text accompanying it, I would barely understand any of it.

For example, I don’t really understand what this means,

“All of which is to say: when creating types to act as abstract markers for the type parameter of a GADT, you should choose definitions that make the distinctness of those types clear, and you should expose those definitions in your mlis.”

Why functional programming should be the future of software development by Charles Scalfani (IEEE Spectrum)

I’ve yet to read the article (I’ve scanned it, but it’s on the stack for next week). However, in true Internet tradition, I won’t let that stop me from already commenting on it.

I think a functional approach is the important thing here. I’ve managed to successfully use C# in a very functional way for years, even though it’s not even close to a pure functional language. The same for JavaScript and TypeScript. Yes, C# is missing the pipe-operator (SelectMany is ugly) and support for Option is weak to nonexistent (the TryGet pattern with out parameters is not the same), but with a little discipline, you can get a lot of the benefits without necessarily changing languages.

The most important thing is to be aware of the pitfalls of your language and avoid them wherever possible. Citing from my C# handbook:

• Use static typing wherever possible
• Make as much data as possible immutable
• Make as many functions as possible pure
• Make as much as possible non-nullable

Using a functional language enforces these things, but you can “fill the gap” in traditional languages with developer discipline and code-reviews. 👍

bliki: ConwaysLaw by Martin Fowler

“Putting teams on separate floors of the same building is enough to significantly reduce communication. Putting teams in separate cities, and time zones, further gets in the way of regular conversation. The architect recognized this, and realized that he needed take this into account in his technical design from the beginning. Components developed in different time-zones needed to have a well-defined and limited interaction because their creators would not be able to talk easily.”

“The key thing to remember about Conways Law is that the modular decomposition of a system and the decomposition of the development organization must be done together. This isn’t just at the beginning, evolution of the architecture and reorganizing the human organization must go hand-in-hand throughout the life of an enterprise.”

“The source for Conway’s law is an article written by Melvin Conway in 1968. It was published by Datamation, one of the most important journals for the software industry at that time. It was later dubbed “Conway’s Law” by Fred Brooks in his hugely influential book The Mythical Man-Month [1984]”

Simplify NuGet Package Versions in your application with Central Package Management (Nick's .NET Travels)

“[…] it’s recommended to add the PackageVersion elements inside an ItemGroup element in a Directory.Packages.props file. You also need to include the ManagePackageVersionsCentrally element (with value set to true) in either the Directory.Build.props file, or the Directory.Packages.props file, in order to enable Central Package Management.”