Links and Notes for February 16th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Climate Change
• Art & Literature
• LLMs & AI
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit (London Review of Books)

“Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back.”

“[…] tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient. There is an underlying assumption that each of us aspires to be as productive as possible, and that stripping away everything seen to interfere with productivity is a good thing.”

“The American Booksellers Association reported that in 2021 alone, ‘the movement of dollars to Amazon and away from retailers displaced 136,000 shops occupying 1.1 billion square feet of traditional commercial space.’ That’s a lot of local jobs and relationships both to places and people.”

“[…] cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived.”

“Cultural, social and religious institutions have been displaced or run aground, film festivals and art centres have left the city, historic businesses, including the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the US, have been evicted, all while wealth continues to concentrate at the fastest rate ever seen.”

“The luxury shuttle buses that Facebook, Google and Apple launched for their employees around 2012, by easing the congested commute, encouraged large numbers of them to move to San Francisco, which has now been fully annexed by the Valley. The desire of tech workers to live in this dense, diverse place while their products create its opposite is an ongoing conundrum. Many tech workers think of themselves as edgy, as outsiders, as countercultural, even as they’re part of immense corporations that dominate culture, politics and the economy.”

“More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.”

“Completed in 2018, the tower has been half-empty since Salesforce, with the volatility typical of the tech industry, laid off many of its employees early last year (before hiring another few thousand in the autumn). Tech companies routinely push out other businesses only to flop or morph or migrate, leaving only emptiness in their wake.”

“The closures of several downtown chain stores were blamed by their parent corporations on theft, but when journalists looked into the stories, they found that in most cases outlets were closed because of low revenue and other more mundane problems.”

“[…] the sheer wealth generated by Silicon Valley has given its pack of billionaires the belief that they are above or beyond the law. Most of them made their fortunes in finance or technology; those fortunes and the accompanying hubris and seclusion convinced them they were magnificent at everything and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.”

“If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice, and the enemies of the homeless routinely portray them as criminals. The assumption that Bob Lee was murdered by the underclass rather than one of his own speaks to this, as well as to the sense among tech leaders that they are the good guys, the people with solutions, sometimes the victims but never the perpetrators of problems.”

“The proliferation of delivery services has made eating restaurant food at home common. ‘The exploitation economy is just as unhealthy and dehumanising for the customers as it is for the workers,’ Andrew Callaway, a San Francisco gig-worker, wrote in 2016. ‘You never even have to see the person who is cleaning your house or your clothes. Plenty of people requested that I drop off their food at the door. Customers grow to love apps that make the worker anonymous.’ In this system, the invisible hand of the market can actually bring you a burrito.”

“Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that ‘conservatism consists of one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’ applies precisely to the industry and its captains.”

“Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely.”

“You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.”

“They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.”

Prison-tech is a brutal scam – and a harbinger of your future by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Prisoners, asylum seekers, drug addicts and other marginalized people are the involuntary early adopters of every form of disciplinary technology. They are the leading indicators of the ways that technology will be ruining your life in the future. They are the harbingers of all our technological doom.”

“This presented telco predators with an unbeatable opportunity: they approached state prison operators and offered them a bargain: “Let us take over the telephone service to your carceral facility and we will levy eye-watering per-minute charges on the most desperate people in the world. Their families – struggling with one breadwinner behind bars – will find the money to pay this ransom, and we’ll split the profits with you, the cash-strapped, incarceration-happy state government.””

“[…] prisons could end in-person visits and replace them with sub-skype, postage-stamp-sized videoconferencing, at rates even higher than the voice-call rates. Combine that with a ban on mailing letters to and from prisoners – replaced with a service that charged even higher rates to scan mail sent to prisoners, and then charged prisoners to download the scans – and prison-tech companies could claim to be at the vanguard of prison safety, ending the smuggling of dope-impregnated letters and other contraband into the prison system.”

Of course, contraband comes in anyway because it’s mostly carried in by guards, not by visitors.

“[…] prisons shuttered their libraries and replaced them with ebook stores that charged 2-4 times the prices you’d pay for books on the outside. Prisoners were sold digital music at 200-300% markups relative to, say, iTunes.”

“Prisoners can earn money, sure – as much as $0.89/hour, doing forced labor for companies that contract with prisons”

“[…] those $3 digital music tracks are being bought by people earning as little as $0.10/hour. Which makes it especially galling when prisons change prison-tech suppliers, whereupon all that digital music is deleted, wiping prisoners’ media collection out – forever (literally, for prisoners serving life terms):”

“As Paul Wright from the Human Rights Defense Center told Schwenk, “The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain.””

“Revoking your media, charging by the byte for messaging, confiscating things in the name of security and then selling them back to you – these are all tactics that were developed in the prison system, refined, normalized, and then worked up the privilege gradient. Prisoners are living in your technology future. It’s just not evenly distributed – yet.”

“The assumption that let the NSA get away with mass surveillance was that it would only be weaponized against the people at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve: brown people, mostly in other countries. The Snowden revelations made it clear that these were just the beginning, and sure enough, more than a decade later, we have data-brokers sucking up billions in cop kickbacks to enable warrantless surveillance, while virtually following people to abortion clinics, churches, and protests. Mass surveillance is chugging its way up the shitty tech adoption curve with no sign of stopping.”

The Owl of Minerva in the Darkness by Anna Ochkina (Russian Dissent)

“The proven technique is being practiced again: if you want to overthrow a competitor, accuse him of treason. The most important, the key part of the ideology of modern Russia has become the maxim that any objection to the current policy of the state is betrayal, lies, apostasy and, in general, a crime. This greatly distinguishes modern ideological practices from their Soviet forebears. Soviet propagandists and denouncers branded their targets as “enemies of the people” for betraying the working class and the gains of the revolution, for distorting the party’s policies, and the very ideas of communism. Of course, it was assumed that that government served the working class in the most faithful and devoted way, and strictly followed the ideas of communism, and preserved and developed the gains of the revolution.”

“[…] attempts to set boundaries for philosophical thought can only lead to one thing – philosophy will disappear, since it is somewhat inconvenient to formulate questions at the gunpoint of ideological snipers. But it is always possible to assemble ready-made, officially-approved, eternally-valid answers.”

“Raphael and Rublev, Repin and Goya, Shakespeare and Chekhov, Marx and Ilyenkov, Pushkin and Byron, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Roland and Tolstoy, Dickens and Hara, Akutagawa and Khayyam, Marques and Tagore, Keynes and Kondratiev, Einstein and Landau, Wiener and Vavilov – not one of them fit into the framework of the “permissible,” none of them put up with any restrictions on knowledge and creativity.

“All of them created the future, creating its very basis and prototype – the common culture of humanity – albeit in their own national languages. And in these languages they were sworn at and cursed by politicians and ideologues, who were always panicked over the “sovereign”or the “alien,” the “loyal” or the “undermining.” Such politicians, like the philosophers who sing along with them, belong to the prehistory of humanity, being only temporary obstacles on the way to its true History.”

Sympathy for the Shia Militias by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“I may be a decadent gender bending infidel, but I am also very familiar with the condition of being stepped on and if some pompous foreign army was using an illegal base in Altoona to carpet bomb Queer kids in Jamaica, I would light that motherfucker up with whatever ordinance I could get my hands on. This is what the Shiite militias of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen are doing right now, and Kali help me, I don’t believe that they deserve to be vilified and annihilated for it.”

“There are some 3,400 American troops in that region. 900 in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, and as bad as I may feel for the misfortunate life choices of our brave men and women in uniform, they are not there handing out stickers and bubblegum. They are there to serve as an advance force for America’s various imperial enterprises in the region, and right now that means assisting the American puppet regime of Israel in committing genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip.”

“So, let me play that back for you just one more time. The United States is using bases typically reserved for starving out indignant Shiites in Syria to facilitate the wholesale annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and who are the fucking terrorists here? Why, the scary brown people of course.”

“But it’s OK everybody, this isn’t a war crime! Those dead bodies don’t belong to real people, just Iranian proxies.”

“In 1979, a loose knit coalition of students, clerics, feminists and communists overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty and its fascist reigning thug, the Shah, at the height of the Cold War with zero support from any superpower in the Global North. At the time, Iran maintained the fifth largest military on earth and one of the most vicious police states of the twentieth century with America picking up the tab for all of it in exchange for unfettered access to the nation’s oil.”

Washington, Pro-Democracy? Depends on the Country by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“[…] the United States reimposed sanctions for barring Machado. The European Parliament went even further, denying that the Venezuelan court has legal grounds and insisting that Machado “remains eligible to run for the elections.” It says “Unless María Corina Machado is allowed to participate in the elections…elections and election results will not be recognised.” The European Parliament then urged EU member states “to tighten existing sanctions” and to add new sanctions on judges of Venezuela’s Supreme Court.”

As detailed in the article and elsewhere, Machado has a long history of anti-democratic activity in Venezuela, plausibly if not definitively linked to foreign governments like neighbor Panama and perennial instigator the U.S. She is a signatory to two documents supporting and encouraging coups in Venezuela, one of which succeeded for a few days. The decision to bar her was taken by the courts, not by executive fiat.

“A leaked Pakistani cable reveals a meeting between Asad Majeed Khan, then-Pakistani ambassador to the United States, and two State Department officials, one of whom was Donald Lu, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs

“Lu begins the meeting by expressing that the United States and Europe “are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position” on the war in Ukraine. He pins responsibility for Pakistan’s neutral defiance of the U.S. on Khan, saying, “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” Lu informs the Pakistani ambassador that the trigger for the American concern was “the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow.” On the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Khan was in Moscow, meeting with Putin. He defied the United States by refusing to cancel the meeting.

“Lu then advises Pakistan’s ambassador, “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead…[H]onestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.””

None of this is about democracy. Pakistan is being “encouraged” to support the war in Ukraine. Khan is being punished for not doing so. Khan is the most popular politician in Pakistan. The youth supports him overwhelmingly. The U.S. does not care what the people of Pakistan think.

Journalism & Media

The Crisis at The New York Times by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)

“It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.

“The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being.”

Oh my, no. No, no, no. There is no need to exaggerate. They are doing terrible things. But they are no better or worse than the U.S. soldiers who made ear-necklaces in Vietnam, those who befouled corpses in Iraq. This is what dehumanizing always brings. See that documentary The Act of Killing, which is about the atrocities in Indonesia. All of those that committed the atrocities all still around—powerful and rich—dozens of years later. No regrets. They happily reenact murders. They laugh about it. Israelis are not unique in this regard. Not at all. They are no better and no worse. They have a very human capacity for evil and cruelty, but it’s very banal, as Ms. Arendt would say. To call it “inhuman” is to ignore the wide swath of history.

“Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself. When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure in it as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility.”

Historians are unlikely to find this moment as pivotal as we do. Those that live in a particular moment or supposed import grant that moment outsized relevance. In history’s eyes, the U.S. will not ever have had a lofty moral standing from which to decline. Gaza is a side-show to so much else that is changing simultaneously.

It’s only from within the U.S.—struggling to stay above the cloying waters of propaganda that constantly threaten to close over one’s head—that you can think this. We are, as Gore Vidal so aptly put it, “The United States of Amnesia”. Even Patrick Lawrence easily forgets—or allows himself to elide—the enormity of the crimes committed against Afghanistan over 50 years, against Iraq over 40, against Vietnam for 15, against Russia for 30—but particularly for the first 10 as it struggled to recover from the USSR’s dissolution—against most of Central and South America. Anyone who’s paying attention would have noticed that the U.S. lost all of its credibility long ago. It’s always been a hypocrite. Historians with sufficient temporal distance will fail to see Gaza as anything more than another data point in a long history of cruelty and empire.

“We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too. Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and—the worst offense, in my view—their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.”

“We now have a usefully intricate anatomy of an undeservedly influential newspaper as it abjectly surrenders to power the sovereignty it is its duty to claim and assert in every day’s editions. It would be hard to overstate the implications, for all of us, of what The Grayzone has just brought to light. This is independent journalism at its best reporting on corporate journalism at its worst.”

“The newspaper has reported the shocking statements of Israeli officials, some openly favoring genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and the like, only when these have been so prominently reported elsewhere that The Times could no longer pretend such things were never said.”

“At issue is The Times’s coverage of the Gaza crisis altogether. The routinized relationship between The Times and the Israeli authorities is now exposed to more light than was ever supposed to shine on it. Ditto the slack, sloppy, unprofessional mediocrities mainstream media altogether have made of themselves.”

“Are you interested in what Israeli police say they believe? I’m not. I’m never interested in what officials in such positions believe or feel or, a lot of the time, think: I am interested in what they know, and they did not tell Gettleman that they knew anything. Do you see the air these officials put between the rape theme and their reputations? Equally, The Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed? Is Gettleman suggesting that The Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this.”

“Did one or more Hamas militiaman rape a woman in the presence of her husband, then, in one or another sequence, murder her and burn her, then murder the husband—all not in 44 minutes, as the Gettleman piece implies, but in four? Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting. “She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.””

“You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities—militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads—that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.”

“Max Blumenthal thinks the crisis inside The Times reflects a deep divide between the newsroom, where there seems to be a surviving cohort of conscientious journalists, and the upper reaches of management, where the paper’s ideological high priests reside. I have not been inside the Times building in well more than a decade, but there is a history to support this thesis.”

Journalism is dying—will democracy go with it? | The Chris Hedges Report by The Real News Network (YouTube)

A fantastic interview and conversation with Gretchen Morgenson.

Israel-Palestine Isn’t ‘Complicated’, You Just Support Killing Palestinians by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The US-centralized empire is currently backing a literal genocide and deliberating whether it should begin extraditing and incarcerating foreign journalists for reporting on its war crimes, while continuing to condescendingly wag its finger at the global south over human rights.”

“One thing a lot of people miss about the rising authoritarianism in our society is that such measures are not being rolled out with the goal of constructing a new dystopia that will look wildly different from what we see today, but to lock our current dystopia into place.

“[…]

“This misconception is based on the erroneous assumption that the powerful are not already getting everything they want from normal human beings, when they absolutely are.”

“We’re already working, consuming and voting in perfect alignment with the interests of the powerful, and for the most part we’re thinking and speaking as the powerful want us to as well. This is because our education and media systems have successfully trained us to act in ways our rulers want us to act.”

“Some dissident-minded people miss this because they are sympathetic to the values of capitalism, and they have been trained to believe that freedom looks like being free to choose what you will consume and which exploitative capitalist you want to have your labor extracted by, and how you will spend your “free time” when your labor is not being exploited. They therefore imagine that this current dystopia is what freedom looks like, and that the powerful are plotting to inflict some future alien dystopia upon them that looks more collectivist and communismy.”

“This civilization is saturated in mass-scale psychological manipulation geared toward tricking us into believing that this is what we want, that we built this horrifying dystopia ourselves, that it serves our interests, and that this is what freedom looks like — but we only believe such things because we were trained to believe them. That is the doctrine of the dystopian capitalist empire we live under, and all the information systems in our society are slanted toward tricking us into thinking it’s the truth. The delusion that dystopia would be experientially different from what we are currently experiencing is itself part of the propaganda prison.”

For Biden, It’s Michigan Or Israel by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“What they demand of Biden in exchange for their vote is simple. Abandon Israel and reward the terrorists.”

“It’s an article of faith on the left that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, so much so that nobody bothers to either acknowledge the meaning of genocide or offer any explanation of why their claim is correct. Arguing the point is a fool’s errand, as there are neither facts nor logic that alter religious fervor. While it may be that of two million Gazans, thus far about 29,000 have died according to the Hamas Ministry of Health and Truth, even if some unmentioned share of the dead are Hamas soldiers.”

It’s neat to see him write things like that because he doesn’t see the irony at all. He doesn’t think his unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative smacks of religious fervor. His take on U.S. and Israeli domestic and foreign policy is nearly impossibly simplistic and utterly without merit. What he writes here makes him look like an easily dismissed moron, which is a pity, because that’s not at all what he is. His opinions on Israel are utterly fanatical.

“If Israel wanted to commit genocide, it has the capacity to kill far, far more. It hasn’t. ”

This line of argument is reprehensible and fails to acknowledge anything about the reality of the situation there. Israel has nukes. I suppose we should give it a doggy treat for not having used those yet. Greenfield has never once discussed proportionality or collective punishment. He doesn’t discuss what the long-term—or even medium-term—plan might realistically be in Israel. Eradicate the terrorists, as if that’s possible, as if that’s ever worked, as if an increase in violence of many orders of magnitude has ever resulted in anything other than more violence and more terrorism. It’s naive to pretend to think otherwise. The only conclusion that would “work” is absolute eradication. And even that might not work, because there will be those outside of Palestine who might take up the cause of revenge for what was wrought. If Israel feels such a strong urge for revenge for the acts of a single day, then how can they—and their fervent supporters—fail to understand that the same urge exists in their enemy? Only a few countries have achieved what Israel seeks. The U.S. and Australia subjugated their native populations to such a degree that they are no longer able to effectively fight back. They don’t even try anymore. Many, many decades have passed since those native peoples’ subjugation, but it would be hard to argue that it wasn’t ultimately successful.

“Biden has taken the position that Israel has a right to exist. Israel is not the party here required to lay down its arms and let terrorists rape, behead, burn, murder and kidnap at will. And if Israel doesn’t eradicate Hamas, it will happen again and again. Hamas says so. Biden knows it.”

Greenfield is really so sadly basic and utterly immoral in his reasoning here. There is a clear abdication of a duty to be at least partly informed about a political situation before writing about it. Perhaps he feels that just religiously and exclusively reading coverage from the New York Times suffices as research, but his views are completely siloed. I would have expected him to notice this himself, to be better aware that he might be in an echo chamber. As I’ve noted before, people’s bullshit meters seem to be broken. Lines of argument that Greenfield laughed out of the room when Bush used them to wage a war in Afghanistan and Iraq are taken utterly seriously, as if they’d been carved onto tablets carried down by Moses.

“Biden knows what these progressive dreamers do not, or at least won’t admit, that the terrorism won’t end until Israel is destroyed and every Israeli, Jew or Arab, is dead or gone. But it won’t end there either, because this is a war against western values, our values, and these emboldened terrorists will then use terrorism that has garnered them adoration from progressives as the accepted weapon to eradicate the heathens and heretics of the west.”

My goodness, Scott, have you started listening to Sam Harris as well? Israel is fighting for all of us in the west, standing as a Hebraic bulwark against the slavering Muslim hordes bent on imposing Sharia law on the entire west, which is so addles with woke-ness that it will allow the perverse steamroller of Allah to have its way with it? Are you going to write something about Neville Chamberlain next?

“Nothing he does for them will be good enough. There is no mollifying the children. They demand purity and nothing less will do.”

Is he talking about progressives? Or about Israelis? You know, like the purity of getting rid of every last member of Hamas, as if the name of the organization that hates you matters at all. It’s the amount of hate you engender with your actions that pays you back. Greenfield doesn’t ever discuss about what horrible things Israel is doing that makes terrorism against them inevitable. That doesn’t mean they deserve terrorism, but that they will continue to suffer it for entirely comprehensible reasons.

“If they don’t realize that the alternative to Biden is Trump, and there is no disputing that compelling argument, then there can be no reasoning with them.”

There it is: vote for another Biden administration because that’s the only alternative to a Trump administration. What a maroon. What a simpleton. How basic.

Good old Scott. Don’t ever change, buddy.

Economy & Finance

How the Ruling Class Became Vulgar: an interview with Doug Henwood by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“Who or what is the ruling class?”

The ruling class is anyone who is comfortable, secure, and safe, but continues to chisel every unfair advantage they were either born with or gained through plunder for further gain at the expense of the comfort, safety, and security of others who do not do this. They manipulate the tilted playing field to ensure it tips their way forever. They grub for money when they already have too much of it. They marketize everything because that tactic works for them, and they perceive no loss in things dying that they do not personally value. And they recognize no value in anything other than money. They are crassly simplistic, desperately short-sighted, and deeply anti-intellectual.

“[…] there’s a tendency to descend into conspiracy theorizing, where it’s just a small group of people in a room who plan everything, and that’s not true. It’s a much larger group than that. They can’t always get together in a room, and they really can’t plan everything. But there’s an insight to that attraction of conspiracy theorizing, which is, I don’t think anybody believes that this is a democracy anymore. Probably since the mid-’80s, it’s become ever more discredited, to the point where now nobody can believe that. It’s just such transparent nonsense driven by the interest of the money. And that sounds like vulgar Marxism, but as my late friend [Robert] Fitch used to say, “Vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what goes on in the world.””

“I can understand why the masses might resent liberal power, because liberals kind of look down their noses at the masses. There’s no question about it. They think they’re all deplorables, as Hillary Clinton famously said. But these are not the people who run the state. They’re not the people who run finance. They’re not the people who make decisions in the Fortune 500, which are the ones that are the most consequential for people. Now, I can understand why the Right would want to draw attention to that, because it draws attention away from the real nature of power, which they’re extremely complicit in or puppets of. But I find it distressing when people on the Left adopt some of this argument.”

“I think race and gender and sexuality are really important material political concerns. And I really don’t like this tendency of a lot of people to dismiss that as secondary or diversionary or even wrong. These are important things.”

They are important but only because the more important things have been sorted out. They’re higher on Maslow’s pyramid. If the base crumbles for some people, don’t fault them for not focusing on the same moral priorities you have been granted the luxury of addressing from your privileged and relatively secure position further up that pyramid.

“That’s when WASP consciousness really came to the fore. And it had this ethic of discipline and austerity. It was not the luxury that we associate with our contemporary ruling class. These were people who lived in very disciplined, modest ways.”

“There was this concern that everyone was going soft as industrial civilization was taking us away from the fields and manly labors. So somebody like Teddy Roosevelt would engage in cartoon-like performances of masculinity to counter that creeping softness. Endicott Peabody and the Groton ethic was very much like that as well: getting up early, working hard, going to bed, and no sex, no fun, no art, just discipline.”

“Our current rich don’t feel any need to be civilized. They’re so confident in themselves and their right to rule the world. They feel no social anxiety about not having the proper manners or the proper education, the proper understanding of their civilization. They just know everything because they’re so rich.”

“They may not have loved having unions, but they didn’t want to destroy them. Then the shareholder revolution, the Volcker tight money regime from 1979 to 1982, and the Reagan revolution — notably the breaking of the PATCO union — all these things together really transformed that old comfortable world into the one that we live in today. And we’re still living pretty much in the world that was shaped by the 1980s, where now it’s a sacred principle that stock prices are the preeminent guide for what a corporation is all about, at least for a public corporation.”

“There was a rehabilitation of the word entrepreneur too. Weirdly, [John Maynard] Keynes used that term a lot in the general theory; I guess he didn’t want to say capitalist because he didn’t want to sound anti-capitalist. But that word went out of fashion until the early ’80s when you started hearing about entrepreneurship all over again. The lone wolf hero of accumulation was lionized by the broader society in ways that we hadn’t seen since the 1920s, and before that the 1890s. It was a remarkable transition.”

“Almost no one can beat the stock market averages unless you’re George Soros or Stanley Druckenmiller or somebody like that. What that means is it makes the most sense just to try to mimic those averages. So as a result of this financial theory, it became really hard to justify paying a lot of money to money managers to try to beat the averages when it was virtually certain that they wouldn’t be able to do it.”

“Under Shad, they legalize this practice of corporations buying their own stock to boost its price. Corporate managers who are paid in stock go, “Let’s use this corporate treasury money to buy the stock and boost its price, it’ll keep outside shareholders happy and will make me richer.” So if you look at the flow of corporate money over the last forty years, trillions of stock dollars of stock have disappeared. There are times when the buybacks exceed the level of corporate investment going into the pandemic crisis. Boeing and some of the major airlines were so cash depleted because of all their buybacks that they needed a federal bailout. A lot of companies were even borrowing money to buy their own stock — not borrowing money to expand or do something.”

In fairness, borrowing money was cheap. It cost nearly nothing. So, you’d have more debt—which wasn’t factored against you because you had almost no interest—and you could make more money betting on your own stock. This wasn’t stupid—it was the incentive laid out by the policy-makers. There was never going to be another conclusion.

“it was very interesting to watch during the early Trump years, because big capitalists really were not very high on Trump. They favored Hillary. They thought that Trump is an irresponsible and dangerous character. But as soon as he came into office and he cut their taxes and deregulated everything and the stock market took off, they were happy. So they didn’t care about all the other insane stuff he was doing, as long as the stock price was going up and their taxes were going down and regulations were disappearing. That’s all they cared about.”

Same thing with Biden. No tax cut, but no getting rid of that PE exemption, either. The stock market is through the roof, so the Biden administration can talk about how great they are for the economy—because no-one looks at any other measure, really. People like to cite the extremely carefully delineated inflation and unemployment figures and then ask why no-one’s happy? Didn’t we tell them to be happy? Haven’t we proved to them on paper that they should be happy? The numbers don’t account for the very large Dunkelziffer where much of poor America finds itself.

“It’s true not only at the national or even the international level, but at the local level. A lot of local billionaires really dominate their state’s politics. So a character like Art Pope in North Carolina, who made billions off a chain of discount stores for poor people, has a material interest in creating more poor people because they patronize his stores. And he has been financing a lot of the reactionary agenda in North Carolina. And North Carolina is not a blue state by any means, but it is not a reactionary state.”

“They just have so much to spend, and they’re willing to spend it. And they feel so persecuted — funny since these folks have never had it so good. Maybe there’s a little more hostility now than there was toward them some years ago. But politically, they’re really safe. They don’t have to pay any taxes, and yet they still feel so besieged. I guess it’s a guilty conscience, the sense that they’re getting away with murder and that any time now that the angry masses are going to come slit their throats. But it’s a weird sense of aggrievement that leads them to fund all these crazy politicians to push this agenda even further.”

“This combination of being materially secure and politically secure, and at the same time culturally insecure, produces a very volatile mix of reactionary politics.”

“If you go back into the progressive era too, a lot of the base for the progressive era of politicians were the professional class that resented all the new capitalists. They felt they were vulgarian and what we needed were nice civilized experts to run things. The early twentieth century Nation magazine very much reflected that. It editorialized in favor of chain stores. There was this big movement, especially in the rural South, against chain stores, and the Nation in those times was contemptuous of the rejection of what they considered economic evolution.”

“That’s emblematic of so-called woke liberalism: materially, money did the work of making sure that just the right kind of people would enter their suburbs and they wouldn’t have to worry about vulgarians from the city coming in and taking over.”

You can always discriminate by class, by who can afford what. Nobody’s every going to get around that. It’s like water for fish. We don’t even realize we’re doing it when we say of course you can’t do such-and-such if you can’t afford it. Very few people wonder (A) why is that so self-evident? That societal goods should be apportioned only to those who’ve proven their value to society through the monetary system? And (B) why can’t they afford such-and-such? How was that money apportioned? We don’t all have the same starting line.

“Places like Yale made a conscious effort starting in the 1970s to bring in people who are not third-generation legacies and try to recruit people from public high schools. But if you look at the makeup of the Yale student body today, it’s overwhelmingly people from households with six-figure incomes. I think [Thomas] Piketty says in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the average Harvard undergraduate’s family has a household income of $300,000.”

“Brookings [Institution] had a study out the other day that almost all of the families that are under the poverty line for three generations in a row are black. There are almost no white people whose families are under the poverty line for three generations in a row. That kind of thing is really hard to do much about without a major social reconstruction, which is impossible to imagine in the current political environment.”

“One of Vrijmoeth’s key insights is that a policy of ever increasing housing prices as a means to wealth increase itself generates a kind of wealth pyramid, where simultaneously entry from the bottom into the rising pyramid gets harder and harder. This is especially so when the increase in home prices outstrips productivity/wage growth as it does when supply of new homes is hindered and the prices of existing homes and land are supported indirectly through policy.”

Nobody wants to fish these days

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day.

“Teach a man to fish, buy the pond, tell him he can’t have the fish but he can fish for you and you sell the fish and give him a very small cut and then he’ll say stuff like “I am hungry and my teeth hurt.”

“Nobody wants to fish these days”

As global war intensifies, world economy moving to slump by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“According to data compiled by the Federal Reserve, production in the US defence and space sectors has increased by 17.5 percent since the start of the Ukraine war. The State Department has reported that the US made more than $80 billion in major arms deals in the year up to last September of which about $50 billion was with Europe, more than five times the historical norm.

“And there have been other “benefits.” The cutting of gas supplies to Europe from Russia as a result of the Ukraine war and the escalation of prices has proved a bonanza for the US such that it became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas last year with exports set to double by 2030.

“The US economy, however, is not immune from the developing recessionary trends. As the global struggle for markets and profits intensifies, major US firms, in auto and other industries, are slashing jobs. Tech companies alone, according to a report in the Financial Times, have axed 34,000 jobs so far this year as part of the shift to the use of artificial intelligence.”

The U.S. is still propping up its numbers with military and fossil-fuel bonanzas but that won’t last that long. And the bonanza is quite thin for a “war haul”. You can see the U.S. siphoning off all of the pre-recessionary benefit for itself in what must be one of the most blatant examples of short-term thinking in history.

Climate Change

Single-use plastic with pre-cut exotic fruits

Art & Literature

Novum Vetus (Official Video) by Sunny Day Real Estate (YouTube)

A lovely song accompanied by a live-drawn series of painting that form a story, an animation of sorts.

LLMs & AI

How To Adjust Salomon Bindings To Fit Ski Boots? Learn These Tips To Improve Your Skiing Experience! by Emma Brooks (The Ski Lesson)

This is exactly what I predicted would happen.

“A typical adjustment process involves sliding back and forth within its track over a fixed ball joint with multiple screw holes in-place between existing tick marks at heel pieces movable carrier position until forward pressure torque spring centre mark aligns with it while boot fits identical coloured lines engraved at heels a visual quick check once properly torqued up securing firmly into place by releasing lever mechanisms ready for use”

There’s also this woefully useless video of someone asking a chat robot how to do it. It was top-ranked by DuckDuckGo.

[SOLVED] HOW TO ADJUST SALOMON SKI BINDINGS FOR BOOT SIZE? by Knowledge Base (YouTube)

The enchittification is well underway.

On the other hand, there’s this cool story The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video by Simon Willison

Basically, he uploaded a seven-second video of his bookshelf and asked it to identify as many books as it could and it got most of them. He’d asked for JSON output and it delivered a bullet-list. He reiterated that he wanted JSON, with title and author keys, and it complied. Pretty damned cool, and quite a time-saver.

You’d still have to cross-check it, of course, if the output is important to you, but it’s pretty cool. You can visually verify more quickly than you could type the titles yourself.

Programming

The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous by Bert Hubert (IEEE Spectrum )

“The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries —dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.”

“I hope that this post provides some mental and moral support for suffering programmers and technologists who want to improve things. It is not just you; We are not merely suffering from nostalgia: Software really is very weird today.”

“Without going all “Old man (48) yells at cloud ,” let me restate some obvious things. The state of software security is dire . If we only look at the past year, if you ran industry-standard software like Ivanti , MOVEit , Outlook , Confluence , Barracuda Email Security Gateway , Citrix NetScaler ADC, and NetScaler Gateway, chances are you got hacked. Even companies with near-infinite resources (like Apple and Google ) made trivial “worst practice” security mistakes that put their customers in danger . Yet we continue to rely on all these products.”

“The assumption is then that the cloud is somehow able to make insecure software trustworthy. Yet in the past year, we’ve learned that Microsoft’s email platform was thoroughly hacked, including classified government email. (Twice!) There are also well-founded worries about the security of the Azure cloud.”

“I want to touch on incentives. The situation today is clearly working well for commercial operators. Making more secure software takes time and is a lot of work, and the current security incidents don’t appear to be impacting the bottom line or stock prices. You can speed up time to market by cutting corners . So from an economic standpoint, what we see is entirely predictable. Legislation could be very important in changing this equation.”

Even he is working within the parameters of a broken system.

“Apple is (by far) not the worst offender in this field. But it is a widely respected and well-resourced company that usually thinks through what they do. And even they got it wrong by needlessly shipping and exposing too much code.”

“In 1995 Niklaus Wirth lamented that software had grown to megabytes in size. In his article “A Plea for Lean Software,” he went on to describe his Oberon operating system, which was only 200 kilobytes, including an editor and a compiler. There are now projects that have more than 200 KB for their configuration files alone.”

“[…] these days we often ship software as containers, shipping not only the software itself but also including operating system files to make sure the software runs in a well-known environment. This frequently entails effectively shipping a complete computer disk image. This again vastly expands the amount of code being deployed. Note that you can do good things with containers like Docker (see below), but there are a lot of images over 350 MB on the Docker Hub .”

This is not a good argument. A container is less code than the OS you expect to be there otherwise. Hell, a container expects to run on a host system anyway. Which attack surface are you trying to reduce?

“The world is shipping far too much code where we don’t even know what we ship and we aren’t looking hard enough (or at all) at what we do know we ship.”

“I want to end this post with some observations from Niklaus Wirth’s 1995 paper : “To some, complexity equals power. (…) Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication , which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.””

“As Tony Hoare noted long ago, “[T]here are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors . The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.””

“Back to Wirth: “Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software. The time pressure that designers endure discourages careful planning. It also discourages improving acceptable solutions; instead, it encourages quickly conceived software additions and corrections. Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products.””

Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine by Tero Piirainen (Nue)

This article mentioned that the Catalyst demo page—which is the latest incarnation of Tailwind CSS—includes HTML for a button that looks like this:

<button class="
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:-mx-0.5
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:my-0.5
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:shrink-0
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:size-5
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:sm:my-1
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:sm:size-4
  [&>[data-slot=icon]]:text-[–btn-icon]
  [–btn-bg:theme(colors.zinc.900)]
  [–btn-border:theme(colors.zinc.950/90%)]
  [–btn-hover-overlay:theme(colors.white/10%)]
  [–btn-icon:theme(colors.zinc.400)]
  after:-z-10
  after:absolute
  after:data-[active]:bg-[–btn-hover-overlay]
  after:data-[disabled]:shadow-none
  after:data-[hover]:bg-[–btn-hover-overlay]
  after:inset-0
  after:rounded-[calc(theme(borderRadius.lg)-1px)]
  after:shadow-[shadow:inset_0_1px_theme(colors.white/15%)]
  before:-z-10
  before:absolute
  before:bg-[–btn-bg]
  before:data-[disabled]:shadow-none
  before:inset-0
  before:rounded-[calc(theme(borderRadius.lg)-1px)]
  before:shadow
  bg-[–btn-border]
  border
  border-transparent
  dark:[–btn-bg:theme(colors.zinc.600)]
  dark:[–btn-hover-overlay:theme(colors.white/5%)]
  dark:after:-inset-px
  dark:after:rounded-lg
  dark:before:hidden
  dark:bg-[–btn-bg]
  dark:border-white/5
  dark:text-white
  data-[active]:[–btn-icon:theme(colors.zinc.300)]
  data-[disabled]:opacity-50
  data-[focus]:outline
  data-[focus]:outline-2
  data-[focus]:outline-blue-500
  data-[focus]:outline-offset-2
  data-[hover]:[–btn-icon:theme(colors.zinc.300)]
  focus:outline-none
  font-semibold
  forced-colors:[–btn-icon:ButtonText]
  forced-colors:data-[hover]:[–btn-icon:ButtonText]
  gap-x-2
  inline-flex
  isolate
  items-center
  justify-center
  px-[calc(theme(spacing[3.5])-1px)]
  py-[calc(theme(spacing[2.5])-1px)]
  relative
  rounded-lg
  sm:px-[calc(theme(spacing.3)-1px)]
  sm:py-[calc(theme(spacing[1.5])-1px)]
  sm:text-sm/6
  text-base/6
  text-white"> Button </button>

That’s nuts. That’s writing-on-every-square-inch-of-your-prison-cell-in-your-own-poo-style crazy.