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Links and Notes for May 17th, 2024

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩

Table of Contents

Public Policy & Politics

Is Washington Trying to Subvert Venezuela’s Elections? by Maria Paez Victor (CounterPunch)

“The results of a 3 May 2024 poll by Encuesta Nacional Ideadatos, indicated that Nicolás Maduro is the choice of 52.7% of voters while Edmundo Gonzalez is the choice of only 18.7% of voters.”

And that 18.7% of voters are probably just so anti-Maduro that they would vote for a cardboard box instead.

“Despite being legally barred from running for public office 15 years ago because of proven corruption, Machado staged a bogus opposition “primary” in which she prevented other opposition candidates from running. Ballots were unaudited and destroyed making post-voting inspection impossible. Then Machado declared the absurdity that two million people voted for her. But truth did not matter. The aim was only to tell this falsehood to the gullible international media, who will print anything the USA candidate of the extreme right will tell them.”
“Gonzalez openly declared he has no plans to campaign personally (What for? He has the money and power of the USA behind him?) People aren’t sure if this is due to his elderly age, 74, or his sheer idleness. Maria Corina Machado is the one who is campaigning for him, carrying around a large poster of his face so people can recognize Edmundo Gonzalez on the ballot.”
“You would think that Washington had no important problems to face, no serious threats to their hegemony, that they can invest so much time, effort and money in attacking the electoral process of a nation that poses no risk to USA citizens, their country or security.”

Oil.

“It is clear to anyone with eyes to see that Nicolás Maduro has been an excellent president, steering his country through thick and thin: through horrendous USA sanctions that have weakened the economy and currency, through a perilous pandemic, and has come out of all this with an economy that is now growing at an astonishing 5% per year. This nation has built, in these last hard years, almost 5 million public housing units, and now produces 97% of all food consumed in the country.”
“The plan is not to gain power via the electoral route. They know they will lose and are banking on creating chaos and bloodshed when they do. They will not be able to overturn a highly popular and successful government, despite the millions of dollars given to them by the empire, and despite the sabotages. The Venezuelan people have seen this before, and they are not amused, but, more importantly, they, their Armed Forces, their 4.5 million member militias, their multitudinous grassroots associations, in short, their organized population will face them down, and win, as before.”

Ireland Is Full… Of Berts by Bridget Meehan (CounterPunch)

“Not surprisingly, locals were incensed. Out of the blue, here they had crowds of strangers coming to their locality without any prior notice or consultation. This approach to managing the influx of refugees was entirely wrong. Blame lies solely with the Irish government who seemed to have no refugee strategy, and who excluded residents from the process and made unilateral decisions that would have significant implications for the communities in question. How did they ever think this was going to work? As an aside, the Irish government continues to remain clueless in this regard. Today, not only are refugees packed into inadequate shelters around the country, they’re also being made to live in tents – yes that’s right, tents – along the streets of Dublin while they wait to be granted refugee status. It’s hard to imagine how the situation can get any worse.”
“Ireland is suffering the deepest housing crisis in its history. Social and affordable housing are practically non-existent and house prices are eight times the average annual wage; in Dublin they can be ten times the average wage. Private renting is as unattainable as owning a home and 90% of earners find rent unaffordable. Rents in Dublin hover around €2,000 per month (the average monthly wage is €3,683) and in 2021, Dublin ranked the sixth most expensive capital city in the world to rent in.”
“Historically, Ireland was a nation of beleaguered emigrants who scattered to the four corners of the world as a consequence of colonialism, exile, famine, and poverty. How short our memories are that we’ve forgotten our painful past and what was done to us. How tragic it is that we can’t hold that memory as a reminder to stand in solidarity with other oppressed people today.”
“[…] nationalism has always had the potential to turn sour. Nationalism is really an extension of capitalism’s principle of private property but on a grand scale where instead of owning property or the means of production, ownership is applied to whole expanses of land. Nationalism allows the citizens of a nation to say this island or this territory or this continent is ours; we have exclusive control over what happens here; we get to decide who is allowed to live here, who is allowed to belong here, who is allowed to work here, who is allowed to exercise rights and freedoms. Nations give citizens license to separate themselves from others, us and them, better and worse, good and bad. Nationalism is the opposite of internationalism and of solidarity, both of which the human race is desperately going to need if we’re to survive the climate crisis and create a sustainable and fair society.”
“Is it time to throw open territorial borders and allow the free flow of people to protect migrants, refugees and future climate refugees and to attract those who can take on the enormous programmes of work that will be required to tackle the climate crisis, especially in countries with aging populations?”

I have no confidence that we’ll be able to navigate this. Older people don’t want anything to change, and most people have no idea how much work it takes to sustain their societies. FYI: AI won’t fix a sewer line, or a power line. They won’t notice this until it’s too late.

“I would like to believe, in fact I do believe, that the majority of people who are caught up in the “Ireland is Full” movement are not evil people who hate refugees. I believe that they’re decent human beings just trying to survive, as we all are, in the terrifying mess that is our modern world. I believe their anger is justified but also misplaced.”

Attentat auf Robert Fico – bitte keine Täter-Opfer-Umkehr by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die „liberale Opposition“ in der Slowakei wird dabei als mustergültig beschrieben. Schuld an der Spaltung der Gesellschaft habe nur Fico, der links-nationalistische Populist, der das Verhältnis zum Nachbarland Ukraine „erschüttert“ hätte, da „er sich nicht an Waffenlieferungen für das bedrängte Land beteiligen will“.”
“Fest steht, dass es keine klare binäre Trennung in „gut“ und „böse“ gibt und ein gegenseitiges Befeuern der Eskalationsspirale nun dazu geführt hat, dass sich ein 71-jähriger Schriftsteller dazu berufen gefühlt hat, den Premier zu erschießen. Die konkreten Hintergründe dazu sind diffus.”
“Wer nun einmal mehr die Schuld einseitig verteilt, eine Täter-Opfer-Umkehr betreibt und instinktiv die Spaltung stets ausschließlich dem politischen Gegner in die Schuhe schiebt, leistet dieser Eskalation am Ende des Tages nur Vorschub.”

Ðiên Biên Phú at 70 by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The battle of Ðiên Biên Phú lasted 55 days, from March 13 to May 7, 1954. Two months after the French were catastrophically defeated they signed the Geneva Accords, wherein they agreed to withdraw all forces not only from Vietnam but also from Cambodia and Laos, France’s other colonial possessions in Indochina.”
“Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers (John Foster at State, Allen at the C.I.A.), and others never got beyond an extensive but covert operation before the French forces under Christian de Castries went down. But we find in Prados’ book a suggestion of the madness and delusion that started the Second Indochina War and prolonged it for 21 years.”
“Washington’s policy cliques, not to mention certifiable paranoids such as the Dulles brothers, are incapable of learning anything from anything, so captive are they within our republic’s exceptionalist ideology. The post–Vietnam record of American foreign policy demonstrates this all too amply.”
“General Võ Nguyên Giáp proved himself a strategic genius as he led the Viêt Minh forces to victory at Ðiên Biên Phú. He famously surrounded the French from the hills that enclosed de Castries’ garrison and made full use of guerrilla tactics as he deployed heavy artillery, carefully arranged for maximum impact, in an elaborate system of tunnels to evade French bombardments. As is recounted in the histories, men and women in Ho’s revolutionary movement had to disassemble Giáp’s heavy guns to transport them, on foot and by bicycle, piece by piece, up the mountains surrounding the French, where they were put back together and into service.”
“The French were at the table in Geneva on May 8, a day after de Castries surrendered. A month later the French government fell.”
“Ðiên Biên Phú stands high among the non–West’s first decisive triumphs against the aggressions of the imperial powers during what we call “the independence era.””
“If we do not live in functioning democracies, as the West’s support of apartheid Israel makes rudely plain, it is only when we cultivate a common consciousness of this reality — no flinching — that people will know what mountains they have to climb and what they must carry with them.”

Exterminate all the Brutes by Mr. Fish

Israel’s Willing Executioners by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Run, the Israelis demand, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs on your tent encampments. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky. Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the pathetic few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run.”
“Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals, die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve . We created this hell. We are the masters.”
“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”

This is why a feeling of security is so important. It is what gives people breathing room to imagine more.

ESC – Risse in der Friede-Freude-Eierkuchen-Blase by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Über die Jahre hat sich der Sängerstreit zu einer hochpolitischen und hoch politisierten Selbstprojektionsfläche des sich als „gut“ empfindenden links-liberalen Europas entwickelt – ein Fest der LGBTQ-Community, man ist divers und politisch korrekt, behauptet dabei aber von sich selbst, unpolitisch zu sein.”
“[…] von den größtenteils jungen Nachwuchskünstlern nun zu fordern, sie sollten ihre Karriere für ein politisches Statement wegwerfen, wäre auch unfair und vielleicht zu viel verlangt.”
“[…] in Belgien sorgte die Gewerkschaft dafür, dass statt des israelischen Beitrags im ESC-Halbfinale eine Protesttafel eingeblendet wurde, die eine Waffenruhe in Gaza fordert. Für die BILD-Zeitung eine „Hass-Botschaft“. Überflüssig zu erwähnen, dass es seitens der deutschen Medien null Kritik an der israelischen Teilnahme gab.”
“In Malmö wurde der israelische Beitrag jedoch lautstark vom Publikum ausgebuht – die Übertragungstechnik tat ihr Bestes, um die Buhrufe herauszufiltern, was ihr bei der anschließenden Punktevergabe jedoch nicht mehr gelang.”

Alabama Is Denying Prisoners Parole to Lease Their Labor to Meatpackers, McDonalds by Kim Kelly (Scheer Post)

“The suit describes how incarcerated Alabamians are forced to work for free in prison and paid extremely low wages to work for hundreds of private employers — including meatpacking plants and fast-food franchises like McDonald’s — as well as more than 100 city, county and state agencies. And it alleges that the state keeps the scheme going by systematically denying parole to those eligible to work outside jobs.”
“[…] incarcerated workers save prisons more than $9 billion a year in operational costs and earn them more than $2 billion in sales of goods and services, while the prisoners make pennies per hour. They have no say over what types of work they perform or how they’re compensated for that labor, and a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 76% of the nation’s roughly 800,000 incarcerated workers are unable to refuse to work without punishment or retaliation.”
“The lawsuit alleges that Ivey forced parole boards to disregard the ​“evidence-based objective standards” for parole decisions that had increased parole grants prior to 2018. The next year, the parole grant rate fell from 53% to 31% . It continued to plummet, and the gap between Black and white prisoners’ likelihood of being granted parole widened. Between 2020 and 2022, Black prisoners were denied parole at twice the rate of white ones. By 2022, the parole rate was 11% overall and only 7% for Black prisoners — meaning that 93% of parole-requesting Black prisoners were denied.”
“The plaintiffs’ legal team estimates that ADOC saves roughly $200,000 a year by not having a corrections officer in that one dorm. Meanwhile, English is paid nothing. ​“The inmates basically run the prison, but the officers are getting compensated for it,” English says. ​“The wages the inmates are paid for their work hasn’t changed since 1927.””
““Most people, it stops them from going home or making parole because it says that we need you more in prison than the world needs you in society,” Walker explains. ​“This lady, her name is Lisa Smith, she’s been in prison about 30 years, and every time she comes up for parole, regardless of her crime, she’s an institutional need.”
“If employers like McDonald’s, Southeastern Meats, KFC or Progressive Finishes (an automotive powder-coating company where plaintiffs Michael Campbell and Arthur Ptomey currently work) are able to hire incarcerated workers, pay them the bare minimum, and work them to the bone because those workers cannot call out or quit, there’s precious little incentive for them to hire outside workers.”
“If employers like McDonald’s, Southeastern Meats, KFC or Progressive Finishes […] are able to hire incarcerated workers, pay them the bare minimum, and work them to the bone because those workers cannot call out or quit, there’s precious little incentive for them to hire outside workers.”

It’s legal, so no worries. The XIIIth amendment explicitly doesn’t forbid it. Do the crime, do the time. Also, do a lot more time because you’re a good worker, you can’t unionize, you can’t quit, and you’re cheap or free, which is Wall Street’s song, baby. You can’t expect an amoral organism to do the right thing. It doesn’t understand what the hell you’re talking about. It’s just optimizing its paper-clips over here.

“The Abolish Slavery National Network is working to eliminate ​“involuntary servitude” exemptions for prison labor from state constitutions. It succeeded in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont in 2022, and eight states are considering legislation in 2024.”

The Road to a Stateless Axis of Resistance by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden manage to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, the damage to American prestige and its malignant influence over the Islamic world may be irreversible. Israel, Babylon’s bloody jewel in the desert, could very well become Uncle Sam’s Waterloo and it won’t be China or Russia dancing over his grave either. Those overworked wannabe superpowers are far too busy policing their own increasingly rambunctious and ungovernably massive populations.”

“After bombing Houthi targets in Yemen over 148 times since January, Joe Biden has thrown up his hands and openly admitted defeat. Tim Lenderking, Biden’s special envoy to Yemen, announced in early April that the administration was open to “diplomatic solutions” including ending certain sanctions and recognizing the legitimacy of the Houthi government.

“The Houthis thought about it for a couple of weeks and then started shooting again, even expanding their targets to the Indian Ocean while informing condescending jackals like Biden and Lenderking that they weren’t interested in engaging their humanitarian blackmail.”

“You will never defeat a massive conglomerate of oppression like the American Empire with a single ideology. Foucault, himself a proudly decadent Queer anarchist heretic, recognized this fact and was roundly ridiculed by his fellow comrades on the left for suggesting that Islam could be a viable force against imperialism that should be taken seriously. But shouldn’t it be?”

Britain’s snap general election: A prelude to direct NATO war against Russia by Chris Marsden (WSWS)

“In his announcement, Sunak made clear that foremost in his considerations is the rapid escalation of NATO’s de facto war against Russia in Ukraine. “This election will take place at a time when the world is more dangerous than it has been since the end of the Cold War,” he declared. “Putin’s Russia is waging a brutal war in Ukraine and will not stop there if he succeeds.”

“He added, “In the Middle East the forces of Islamist extremism threaten regional and ultimately global stability,” while “China is looking to dominate the 21st century by stealing a lead in technology, and migration is being weaponised by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our borders.””

Rishi Sunak is a nearly perfect embodiment of the lunatic view of the world that western leaders in general seem to share.

In his mind, Russia’s lunatic, unprovoked, and erratic invasion of Ukraine portends imperial ambitions that stretch, presumably, to the British Isles.

The massive unrest in the Middle East is due to Islamist extremism, having nothing to do with Israel, which is caught in the middle and defending itself as best as it can, hoping to prevent the Islamist hordes from washing over its borders, just as Sunak is valiantly fighting to prevent Russian and Chinese hordes from overwhelming his own country’s borders.

And, finally, China isn’t out-hustling the west, but “stealing a lead” because, of course, the only way the yellow man could triumph over the clearly superior white one is by cheating.

There’s so much more where that came from. He’s not misspeaking. He’s passionate about this stuff. It’s a full-blown religion based on projection of a persecution complex.

“[…] in a May 13 speech setting out the Tory general election campaign, Sunak warned, “The world is closer to a dangerous nuclear escalation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis,” blaming this on “an axis of authoritarian states like Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.” He declared that “war has returned to Europe, and our NATO allies are warning that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, they might be next.”

“He threatened a savage clampdown on anti-Gaza genocide and anti-war protests, denouncing them as an abuse of “our liberal democratic values.””

NATO is completely innocent in the potential of nuclear danger—it’s all due to the Axis of Evil. George Bush is still running the world; he’s just been cloned dozens of times. Neither does he believe in “liberal democratic values” as he would know such a value if it smacked him in the face.

The article provides an alternative explanation to Sunak’s,

“[…] what is taking place is an attempt by the imperialist powers to redivide the world and its resources between them, in which the war against Russia in Ukraine, support for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the targeting of Iran and China for escalating provocations are various fronts of a single global conflict.”

This seems to fit the data much better, but what do I know?

I believe that Sunak and his ilk are all absolutely unhinged. His words bespeak a mindset that would be certifiable in a person with no power, but portends dark times ahead when spoken by the head of a nuclear power.

Keir Starmer is no better. Neither are Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholtz, Annelina Baerbock, Kaja Kallas, Joe Biden, or any of the other idiotic, self-deluded, amoral, and dangerous people in power.

They are only looking out for themselves. They are not trying to protect us from dangers. They are trying to protect their continued profits. They are trying to thread the needle of provoking enough war to generate massive military windfalls—the military is much easier to fund than any social programs—without actually starting a world war that destroys everything they have. If they can figure out how to start a world war without themselves personally losing anything—or not too much—then they will absolutely do that. Then, they could profit again when everything needs to be built up again.

Though I think that that’s giving most of them too much credit. At this point, they’ve drunk their own Kool-Aid—bought their own bullshit—for long enough that they can no longer stop themselves. They’re on this track now, as fevered and maniacal as any other religious zealot would be. There’s literally no way they’re going to change their minds.

And, to make things worse, there’s no mechanism for removing them from power. Democracy has been breathing its last for a while, but it is well-and-truly dead as a doornail now. Pushing up the daisies. Kicked the bucket. Shuffled off its mortal coil. Run down the curtain. Joined the choir invisible. It’s an ex-parrot.

And people are worried about Trump taking power? Every single western leader talks like this all the time and people thinks it’s completely normal. They’re all so far up their own asses that it would be generous to say that they’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole. They’re wildly misinformed and utterly convinced of their righteousness. That combination—the Dunning Kruger effect writ large—has never ended well. This will end badly.

Meanwhile, We’re Still WAY Too Close To Nuclear Armageddon by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Obviously Ukraine has the “right” to attack Russia since Russia is attacking Ukraine; nobody disputes this. What is of course disputed is that it is wise or moral to risk the life of every terrestrial organism by tempting hot warfare between Russia and NATO over who controls Kharkiv.”

Journalism & Media

Using A Fictional Antisemitism Crisis To Support A Real Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Netanyahu went so far as to advance the ridiculous suggestion that this sudden wave of support for Palestinians has nothing to do with Israel’s actions in Gaza at all, but is solely due to a massive “explosion” in antisemitism which just so happens to coincide with those actions. “It’s not directed at what we do, it’s directed at who we are,” Netanyahu said of the protests, adding, “It’s an antisemitic explosion that threatens all of civilization.””

What an incredible cop-out. It’s worked for him, for his administration, and for his country, so far. The problem with this kind of manipulative bullshit is, that it works…until it doesn’t. Your friends put up with it…until they don’t. It’s alienating and puts all of the work on the other party. That other party isn’t going to stick around forever. This is the definition of an abusive relationship.

“[…] you very seldom see Israel apologists and institutions like the ADL, who are supposedly responsible for fighting antisemitism, going after actual antisemites who harbor actual ill will toward the Jewish people. What you typically see them doing instead is using the “antisemitism” label to falsely smear people of conscience who criticize the actions of the state of Israel.”
“Their crime isn’t that they have an abusive hatred of Jews, it’s that they don’t share Israel’s abusive hatred of Palestinians.”

Mainstream Media Is Spreading Lies About Palestine Protests by Neil deMause (Jacobin)

“[…] and an Indiana State Police official confirmed that one officer had been placed on a rooftop with a sniper rifle.”

For which contingency would rooftop snipers be planning? Shooting Americans on university campuses like it was Maidan Square?

“News outlets have a history of using terms like “clashes” to blur who instigated violence, whether by right-wingers or by the police themselves .”

If You Can’t Even Elect A Candidate Who’ll End A Genocide, How Real Is Your “Democracy”? by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“it’s not really democracy then, is it? It’s not really rule by the people if all the most important and consequential decisions are made by forces with no accountability to the electorate, while the people are confined to a toddler’s playpen in the corner arguing about pronouns and fatphobia.

“And what really sucks is that so many people believe this is freedom and democracy. The people will never know freedom until they first understand how profoundly unfree they really are.”

The welcome reappearance of actor Kevin Spacey by David Walsh (WSWS)

“In late October 2017, as part of the nascent #MeToo witch-hunt, Spacey was accused of a sexual impropriety that allegedly took place at a party in 1986—more than 30 years previously. This one unsubstantiated claim, which when tested in a courtroom five years later took a jury 45 minutes to dismiss, led to Spacey being driven out of the film, television and theater world.”
“Spacey has been vindicated on all fronts, but the Hollywood film industry, terrified of the #MeToo campaign and its well-to-do, well-connected advocates, has been reluctant to hire the actor.”
“Actor Stephen Fry suggested that Spacey’s reputation had already been “wrecked,” and added: “Surely it is wrong to continue to batter a reputation on the strength of assertion and rhetoric rather than evidence and proof? […]”

Economy & Finance

US to quadruple tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The main reason for the more competitive position of China, first in the production of solar panels and now in EVs is not state subsidies, but the development of better technology and more efficient production methods.”
“The profits obtained by major corporations are increasingly being used to meet the insatiable demands for a boosting of share values on Wall Street by banks, finance institutions and hedge funds which are the owners of much of US industry, ranging from manufacturing companies to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.”
“It has been calculated by economist Willam O. Lazonick that between 2012 and 2021 some 474 corporations, included in the S&P 500 index, put $5.7 trillion into share buybacks, some 55 percent of their income. They paid out another $4.2 trillion to shareholders in dividends, representing 41 percent of their income.”

$10T in stock buybacks and dividends. None of that could have been reinvested in their companies? Maybe if they had they would have factories like Xiaomi’s “lights out” EV factories. It’s far better for them to continue paying themselves all of the money, then get the government to block Xiamoi’s imports for a few more years. They don’t really care what happens after that because they will have moved on to the next corpse to dessicate.

“The global economy is increasingly coming to resemble the madhouse of the 1930s as, almost on a daily basis, the major economies erect tariff barriers and sanctions directed against the free movement of goods and technologies”

With a Modest Financial Transactions Tax, Jim Simons Would not Have Been Superrich by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Mr. Simmons’ […] wealth was pure rent. He was pulling money away from other actors in the market who would have earned more if Simmons had not gotten there first. He wasn’t contributing to the economy. Since Simmons and the other math whizzes he hired had skills that could have been put to productive uses in other fields, his fund was a net drain on the economy.”
“An FTT is a great way to raise lots of money for the government while reducing waste in the financial sector. But as we know that waste is income for a lot of rich and powerful people. That means, given the structure of American politics, it is not on the agenda.”

Magic Monetary Theory Goes Primetime by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“I saw Finding the Money and all I can say is, Run. I spent nearly ten years listening to people who in previous eras would have been wandering pantless in asylums insist the solution to all of earth’s problems could be graphed on a napkin. “Okay, if you put a thousand junk mortgages in a box, shake it up ten times, tap the lid and yell Abracazam!, 23% will be AAA-rated when you open the box again.” Banks sold this dream to pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, each other, and finally themselves. When it went kablooey Wall Street ran to the Fed and successfully demanded to be fully compensated for losses caused by its own defective products, arguing society had an obligation to bail out its delusions.”
“The Fed’s understated analysis of a situation where even the greediest people on Wall Street were so pessimistic about the economy that they wouldn’t lend even if you made money free was, “Economic activity has continued to expand at a moderate pace.” QE3 was supposed to unmoderate things, injecting $10 billion a week into Wall Street’s veins until “improvement is achieved.” That sounded not so great. I asked: wouldn’t that basically be a permanent subsidy for the financial services industry, which the public would pay for via inflation?”
“By then I’d been covering finance just long enough to learn a few basic truths, a key one being, When a source starts talking about “liquidity,” he’s about to say some bullshit. After 2008, “liquidity” became code for, “We’re not bankrupt. We’re just suffering from a temporary absence of money.” From Wall Street’s perspective, the rationale for bailouts was simple: give us money today, and we’ll make the economy fine again tomorrow!”
“Virtually overnight, seemingly half of earth’s assets were “insured” by these uncapitalized obligations, and the global economy became a Gordian knot of literally incalculable financial promises. By 2007, averting catastrophe required a bajillion optimistic assumptions all holding up at once every morning. Some of the world’s smartest financial engineers missed fatal design flaws of derivative products like the CDS, which is why listening to bearded lefty social scientists insist they’ve got every angle covered with this “A six is just an upside-down nine” idea is an experience as terrifying as watching The Exorcist on strychnine.”

Art & Literature

Steve Albini Engineered the Indie Rock Revolution by Christopher J. Lee (Jacobin)

“[…] the recording process Albini advocated was fast — typically less than a week — and minimalist. He had little patience for studio tricks and exhaustive multiple takes, which informed his open hatred of bands like Steely Dan. Albini was the precise opposite of producer auteurs like Brian Eno or Nigel Godrich, whose production and remixing on albums by U2 and Radiohead deeply shaped their sound. In contrast, Albini favored a less intrusive approach.”
“In Albini’s view, being an engineer meant knowing the capabilities of different microphones, how to operate a mastering deck, how to tune instruments, managing gain and distortion, and dealing with other technical matters. A particular expertise was needed. A certain kind of labor was demanded.”
“Band members would perform in the same room with careful mic placements proximate to the instruments and amplifiers determining the sound. Excellent musicianship was required under these unadorned conditions.”
“As regularly noted, he took no percentage of the royalties from In Utero (1993). Albini referred to himself as simply a “plumber” who had a job to perform.”
“[…] beneath this self-characterization resided a deeper philosophy about how the world worked and how it should work. Albini never spelled out his attitudes and views in any systematic fashion, but there are countless instances when he expressed his anti-corporatism, citing the brutality that capitalism could mete out to the individual artist. Taken further, he saw himself as a worker — the first song on Lungs , unsurprisingly in retrospect, is titled “Steelworker” — and he saw musicians as fellow workers. As such, they should not be alienated from the fruits of their labor.”
“His rejection of percentages was integral to his aggressively ethical stance against this kind of corporate theft that happened day in and day out in the music industry, destroying artistic careers before they even started, in addition to bankrolling passé musicians and antiquated bands who had long outlasted any sort of vitality that could make meaningful artistic contributions.”
“Steve Albini was an irreplaceable part of the very firmament of punk rock, indie rock, alternative music, whatever you might want to call it. As a staunch arbiter of taste and an opinionated voice for musicians, it seemed like he would be around forever, ready to lay into an elitist platform or lend a hand to an up-and-coming band. And now, forever, he is gone.”

The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon by Erik Schreiber (WSWS)

“Swift also arises out of the remarkable and ongoing monopolization and narrowing at the top of the music industry. Record companies, artist management, broadcasting and concert ticketing and promotion, respectively, have come to be dominated by two or three corporate goliaths each. Of the 2 million artists on Spotify, less than 4 percent account for over 95 percent of streams. In 1982, the top 1 percent of artists took in 26 percent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 percent.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Quote Origin: First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win (Quote Investigator)

This is an in-depth investigation of the following quote, often attributed in the following form to Mahatma Ghandi.

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.”

There is no evidence that Ghandi ever wrote or said this. It was first purported that he had in 1982. “QI believes that the saying under analysis fits into a large and evolving family of statements about the multi-stage difficulties obstructing new ideas and truths.”

The first known attribution is to a Nicholas Klein in 1918, who said:

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

Far earlier, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1819:

“Der Wahrheit zu Theil ward, der nur ein kurzes Siegesfest beschieden ist, zwischen den beiden langen Zeiträumen, wo sie als paradox verdammt und als trivial geringgeschätzt wird.”

There’s a lot more analysis as well as translations for all possible sources.

LLMs & AI

Ilya Sutskever | This will all happen next year | I totally believe | AI is come by 我与ChatGPT (YouTube)

The interviewer—president of NVidia, I think?—summed things up at the end with,

“It is quite an amazing moment and it’s a today’s today’s talk the way you break down the problem and describe it uh this is one of the one of the uh the the best PhD—beyond PhD—descriptions of the state of the art of large language models. I really appreciate that.”

Did we listen to the same interview? This was just a bunch of vague and unsubstantiated gobbledygook about LLMs. I didn’t anything that Sutskever said illuminating or explanatory. Maybe I was distracted by the animated 3D Bitcoin logo that appeared now and again.

The comments, though, are full of paens to these “[t]wo pioneers discussing such an important moment in history.”. Or people who didn’t seem to listen to what he said at all: “This man is a genius. Only a genius can be so humble after this huge success.”

This is why cults work so well. Cults can only have one leader, so another commentator wrote:

“I only watched 2:51 seconds of this and I’ve learned more from it than I have by watching hours of Sam Altman talk.”

Well, that doesn’t mean that Sutskever was actually conveying and useful or applicable information. It might mean that you aren’t capable of understanding what’s going, or that Sam Altman is even more full of shit than Sutskever. The latter is almost certainly true. I don’t think Sutskever is full of shit, but neither do I think anything he said in this video was particularly explanatory or revelatory. He was just mumbling vague scripture.

Programming

Professional corner-cutting by Havoc on May 4, 2016 (Havoc's Blog)

“Cabinetmakers were focused on what their customers cared about. Customers wanted the furniture to look good, and they wanted it to be structurally sound. They didn’t care about invisible tool marks, and didn’t want to pay extra to have those removed.”
“A professional developer does thorough work when it matters, and cuts irrelevant corners that aren’t worth wasting time on. Extremely productive developers don’t have supernatural coding skills; their secret is to write only the code that matters.”
“If the technical debt is a problem, 1) we shouldn’t have put it in there, and 2) we should include it in our estimates and address it. A cabinetmaker would not ask the customer to put “make tenons straight” on the sprint. Nobody cares. Technical debt is our problem; that’s the job.”
“We should not ask customers for more precision than they can give us (a symptom of this is to badger customers or managers for detailed “requirements,” then complain endlessly about “changing requirements”). Our job involves converting vague needs into concrete software — if we’re lucky, we have the help of a skilled product designer, or guidance from a management team that’s able to be somewhat precise, but if not we have to do it ourselves. Accept the job and learn to do it.”

That’s just silly. Just build something. “It’ll be OK” is not a recipe for success. That’s not the right way. If the customer doesn’t specify the requirements, then I guess you have to? But that means that you’ve got a different hat on. Just remember that you shouldn’t put your software-developer hat back on until you’ve got requirements provided by you, wearing your software-engineer hat.

“A professional developer can take a desired UX and work out the technical steps to get there as efficiently as possible. And they do get there; they don’t build something odd that doesn’t meet the need, or something slapdash that doesn’t work .”

Ah. They assume a well-expressed and modular UX exists. They also assume that all problems are UI problems. That’s a bit hubristic and naive. This assumes that the “professional developer” knows as much about the problem domain as the customer. Here there be dragons.

“To push back on an unrealistic schedule, work to narrow the scope or weaken the requirements.”

Oh, so now there are requirements? 😏

“Professional software developers are performing a service for others. That’s the difference between a professional and a hobbyist or an artist. To perform a service for others, we have to know what others need, and apply our expertise to meet those needs.”

Calling requirements “needs” doesn’t make them go away.

The Insane C# 13 Feature That Changes Everything by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

The title is a bit hyperbolic but it’s quite an interesting feature. It’s basically protocol extension from Swift for C#. It’s .NET’s answer to extending extension methods to properties and, probably, operators. You can’t add state, as far as I can tell. But that isn’t so surprising.

What it is, though, is further work on making it easier to transition APIs. We got the first batch of support with default interface implementations. This feature will allow to smooth migrations even more. They will also allow us to “add” properties to types that then introduce their own version of those properties in future versions but that’s OK, I think. It means that every added property will be a potential breaking change for someone but maybe it will make us start categorizing breaking changes.

There are implicit extensions, which are pretty much a new way of defining extension methods, but with support for proprties. The following example shows how the property IsLead will be available for any Person without modifying that type. This doesn’t seem much different than existing extension methods, other than support for properties, where the this keyword stands in for the parameter that would otherwise have been passed in a classic extension method.

public implicit extension PersonExtension for Person
{
    public bool IsLead
        => this.Organization
            .Teams
            .Any(team => team.Lead == this);
}

There are also explicit extensions, which are a way of specifying extensions to types that are neither implemented nor inherited, but are instead given to a type without coercion. That is, you can define a type that can be applied to another type (e.g., Lead for Person in the example below), which makes more methods and properties available. It’s kind of confusing without an example.

public explicit extension Lead for Person
{
    public IEnumerable<Team> Teams 
        => this.Organization
            .Teams
            .Where(team => team.Lead == this);
}

var person = new Person();
var personTeams = person.Teams; // Compile error
Lead lead = person;
var leadTeams = lead.Teams; // OK

While this might look like a cast, it’s not, because Person doesn’t implement Lead—it’s extended by Lead in code that isn’t necessarily associated with the code that defines Person.

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