Links and Notes for June 21st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Julian Assange boards a plane for Saipan, then Australia

Julian Assange freed after plea deal with the US by Oscar Grenfell (WSWS)

“Assange has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to a single count under the US Espionage Act. He will appear tomorrow morning in a US court in Saipan, capital of the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. When the agreement is signed off by a judge, Assange is set to be free under time served and to return to his native Australia.

“The arrangement represents a massive victory for Assange, whose liberation will be welcomed by defenders of democratic rights and opponents of imperialist war around the world. It is an enormous climbdown by the American government, which since 2019 had sought Assange’s extradition so that he could be prosecuted under 17 Espionage Act charges carrying a maximum sentence of 170 years imprisonment, i.e., life.”

“The plea deal demonstrates there was never any legal basis to this attempted prosecution, even within the hollowed-out framework of bourgeois law and draconian national security legislation. It was always a brutal and politically motivated witch hunt, aimed at silencing and destroying Assange because he had exposed historic US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s criminal conspiracies the world over, and gross violations of human rights.

“Assange is being freed as a result of his own extraordinary and courageous resilience in the face of vast state persecution, and the indefatigable efforts of his supporters, including his family, legal team and WikiLeaks colleagues.”

“After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.”

“Assange had been compelled to plead guilty to a single Espionage Act charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.” That is one last act of petty vindictiveness by the Department of Justice and the Biden administration, directed against a journalist who has already had more than ten years of his life taken away in an illegitimate pursuit.”

The Ethnic Cleansing of California and the Midwest (Reddit)

Mexican Repatriation

I clicked on this because I thought that it sounded way too much like the Nakba. I thought it was too convenient. I was wrong. This actually happened: Mexican Repatriation (Wikipedia).

“Repatriation was supported by the federal government but actual deportation and repatriations were largely organized and encouraged by city and state governments, often with support from local private entities. However, voluntary repatriation was far more common than formal deportation and federal officials were minimally involved. Some of the repatriates hoped that they could escape the economic crisis of the Great Depression. The government formally deported at least 82,000 people, with the vast majority occurring between 1930 and 1933. The Mexican government also encouraged repatriation with the promise of free land.”

“Estimates of the number who moved to Mexico between 1929 and 1939 range from 300,000 and 2 million, with most estimates placing the number at between 500,000 and 1 million. The highest estimate comes from Mexican media reports at the time.”

'Decade of Betrayal': How the U.S. Expelled Over a Half Million U.S. Citizens to Mexico in 1930s by Democracy Now! (YouTube)

Hunter Biden’s Charge of Lying Under Oath by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Payments of $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden by Mykola Zlochevsky, the founding chairman of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company. Zlochevsky sought (and enjoyed) Vice–President Biden’s protection from Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma on charges on suspicion of extensive corruption.”

“Biden, hiding behind his drug and alcohol addictions, claimed in testimony, “I sent the text to the wrong Zhao.” The committee produced What’sApp telephone records showing there was only one “Zhao” in Hunter Biden’s universe, and it was Raymond Zhao, the chairman of CEFC, a Chinese energy company that, shortly after the exchange of texts, wired $5 million to accounts Hunter Biden controlled.”

“Biden claimed to have no beneficial association with or control of the bank accounts of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a financial entity Biden operated with a business partner named Devon Archer. The committee revealed evidence that Biden in fact used Rosemont Seneca to receive his monthly stipend from Burisma, where he sat on the board during his father’s vice-presidency, as well as funds from other foreign enterprises and people to whom he was selling influence.”

“Biden asserted, “I’d never pick up the phone and call anybody for a visa.” The committee produced email traffic demonstrating that Biden “was actively using his name and father’s influence to aid foreign nationals in obtaining visas from the U.S. government.””

“Even The New York Times suggested this risked leaving the president open to charges of witness tampering, given Hallie Biden was scheduled to testify for the prosecution. Hallie Biden is the widow of Beau Biden, Joe’s oldest son, and, during Hunter Biden’s years as an addict was for a time after Beau’s death Hunter’s paramour.”

“Has a decision been made at top levels of the Democratic- controlled federal judiciary to find Hunter Biden guilty on the lesser crime of illegal gun possession — on the argument he had to be convicted of something — so as to prepare a skeptical public for an innocent verdict in the much more consequential trial on charges of financial corruption — a trial that could directly threaten the Biden presidency?”

White House proclaims “new era” of nuclear weapons “without numerical constraints” by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“The US media, in line with the official propaganda of the Biden administration, has framed the semi-official decision by the Biden administration to abandon all limits on the deployment of nuclear weapons as a response to unexpected actions of Russia and China. It is no such thing. Instead, it is the consummation of a years-long plan to massively expand the US nuclear arsenal, which US think tanks christened in 2016 as a “second nuclear age,” language that was echoed six years later in the Biden administration’s proclamation of a nuclear “new era.””

“Stoltenberg’s comments after the NATO summit make it clear that the nuclear escalation is not idle talk about “the coming years,” but refers to decisions that have already been largely finalized. As is usual in American politics, by the time the public hears that a decision is being “considered,” it has already been made, and all that is necessary is the proper media messaging to announce it to the public.”

“Last month, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the New York Times that the NATO military alliance will “eventually” send significant numbers of active-duty NATO troops to Ukraine.”

„Putin bezahlt die Verteidigung der Ukraine“ – Fake News zum 50-Milliarden-Dollar-Ukraine-Paket der G7 by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Heute-Sprecherin Anne Gellinek verkündete dort gleich zu Beginn als Top-Meldung, die G7 hätten sich auf einen Milliardenkredit an die Ukraine geeinigt, der „aus Zinsen von eingefrorenen russischen Geldern bezahlt werden soll“. Das ist jedoch eine lupenreine Falschmeldung. Ausbezahlt wird dieser Kredit von den G7-Staaten selbst, zurückgezahlt wird er von der Ukraine. Die Zinseinahmen eingefrorener russischer Gelder sollen dabei lediglich als Sicherheit dienen. Da dies nicht reichen wird, werden die G7 am Ende auch dies übernehmen müssen.”

“Mit anderen Worten: Sollte die Ukraine als Kreditnehmer die Raten nicht vertragsgemäß bedienen können, müssten die russischen, von Clearstream verwalteten, Zinseinnahmen als Sicherheit einspringen. Auch das wäre nach gängiger Auslegung ein klarer Bruch des Völkerrechts, der jedoch nur im Falle einer Zahlungsunfähigkeit der Ukraine eintreten würde.”

“Wenn es beispielsweise im nächsten Jahr einen Friedensvertrag gäbe, würde Russland selbstverständlich darin die Freigabe der eingefrorenen Gelder fordern und mit Unterschrift dieses Vertrages wären die Sicherheiten weg. Die Grundlage für das Einfrieren ist dabei selbst fragil. Aller sechs Monate müssen die betreffenden Sanktionen durch die EU verlängert werden – und dies einstimmig. Würden z.B. Ungarn oder die Slowakei die Unterschrift verweigern, wäre die Sicherheiten ebenfalls weg; Gleiches gilt für den Fall, dass ein internationales Gericht das Einfrieren der russischen Währungsreserven für nicht rechtens erklärt.”

“Das ganze Gerede über „Putins Gelder“ oder auch nur die Zinsgewinne im Allgemeinen ist also ein pure PR-Nummer. Aus diesen Geldern wird nichts bezahlt und selbst als Sicherheit werden sie kaum angetastet werden. Streng genommen reden wir hier also über einen Kredit privater Banken und Fonds, den die G7 und damit die Steuerzahler der G7-Staaten und niemand sonst absichert.”

Lying Down With Netanyahu, Getting Up With… by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“A report on the state of Gaza’s economy by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) shows that between October 2023 and May 2024, real GDP in Gaza collapsed, falling by a staggering 83.5 percent since October. The Gazan economy has shriveled to only 4.1 percent of the Palestinian economy, down from nearly 17 percent. Gaza’s unemployment rate now stands at 79 percent. Meanwhile, inflation soared by 153 percent in the Strip in April 2024, making it difficult for Palestinians to meet even the most basic needs.”

I’m surprised that they have an economy at all.

Two Palestinian women walking through Khan Younis in June 2024

Julian Assange Is Free! by Joseph D. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Last weekend, the American and British governments agreed to set Assange free if he pleads guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. He will be sentenced to time served and then go home to freedom in Australia. I am ecstatic that Assange is free. Once he reaches Australia, he should denounce the governments that persecuted him and renounce his own guilty plea since he has committed no crime. Then, he should resume WikiLeaks revelations!

“The feds have perfected three things – lying, stealing and killing. In the Assange revelations, we learned that they have excelled at what they have perfected. They don’t care about the Constitution or the rule of law, both of which they have sworn to uphold. The deep state is animated by a warped belief that its personnel are superior to the Constitution and can use the powers of government however they want, so long as they can get away with it.

“They prefer the government’s unbridled liberty and the servitude of the rest of us. Assange is a hero. He exposed government without limits – the archenemy of personal freedom.”

Debate debacle triggers panic in Democratic Party by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“Biden’s disastrous performance has already touched off a full-blown crisis in the Democratic Party. Even before the 90-minute session ended, there were panicked phone calls among party leaders and their media apologists declaring that Biden must withdraw from the race and allow the Democratic National Convention in August to nominate a more credible candidate. The process for carrying out such a shift is highly contentious and problematic, however, with no obvious replacement at hand.

“The primary concern of dominant sections of the US political establishment is that Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, which has solidified Trump as the frontrunner in the election, has put in jeopardy far-reaching plans to massively escalate the war in Ukraine, to which Trump has expressed reservations. All of their efforts to orchestrate a replacement for Biden are aimed at putting in place a president capable of overseeing the massive escalation of US imperalist violence on a global scale.

“If Biden had not so visibly disintegrated on stage, Trump’s own performance would have been widely viewed as deeply damaging, even disqualifying. The 78-year-old fascistic ex-president frequently refused to respond to questions, seemed fixated on migrants as the cause of every social evil in American life, and was unable to acknowledge elementary facts or discuss political issues without brazen and obvious lies.

“That said, the political crisis goes far beyond the debilitation and disorientation of the two candidates. The CNN moderators are not senile or delusional, but their questions and follow-ups were no better, from an intellectual standpoint, than the meandering answers and non sequiturs of the Democratic and Republican candidates. The entire event was a manifestation of the thorough, deep-going rot that characterizes official politics in the wealthiest and most powerful capitalist nation.”

“Both parties are fundamentally opposed to the social and democratic interests of the American people. Both are unalterably committed to the defense of Wall Street and the worldwide hegemony of the United States, against both Russia and China, and rival imperialist powers like Japan, Germany and France.”

“The problem is not Biden or Trump—or Putin, Xi Jinping, Macron, Scholz or any other individual capitalist politician. The problem is the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state system with which it is indissolubly bound up.

“The resources exist to abolish poverty and provide a decent and fulfilling life to every human being. But these resources, produced by the labor of the world’s population, have been appropriated by a relative handful of corporate exploiters and billionaires, who subordinate all of society to their increasingly deranged pursuit of expanded wealth.”

Really Think About What It Means That The US President Has Dementia by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“If you were lucky enough to have missed the debate, Biden was so confused and zoned out that not only did CNN’s audience overwhelmingly say Trump won while the word “dementia” was sent trending on Twitter, but it was also uniformly acknowledged to have been a horrifying catastrophe by Democratic Party operatives and liberal media pundits, who are now widely suggesting that the president should withdraw from the race.”

Caitlin linked the following 15-second video (Twitter), which shows Biden stumbling and then trailing off with “We finally beat Medicare.”

Here’s a one-minute video that includes it.

MAJOR DEBATE GAFFE: Biden Says 'We Finally Beat Medicare' During First Presidential Debate by Forbes Breaking News (YouTube)

Trump responded by mixing up Medicaid and Medicare and then just blaming anything wrong on Mexicans. All-around covering itself in glory, the U.S. is.

“Everyone’s talking about whether Biden can assure American voters that he has what it takes to be president, and nobody seems all that concerned about the fact that he is already president and will remain so for half a year.

“What this suggests is that people already kind of know on some level that the president of the United States doesn’t really run the United States, but are still mentally compartmentalized away from this reality enough to care who wins the presidential election.”

“in order to hold their mainstream worldview together, liberals are simultaneously straddling the two completely contradictory concepts that (A) it doesn’t matter who the president is because the country is actually run by unelected empire managers, and (B) that Biden’s debate performance was very concerning because it means Trump will become president.”

“[…] US presidential elections are fake and the results don’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if Americans elected a labrador retriever or a bottle of Tabasco sauce; the empire would roll forward without the slightest interruption. The wars would continue. The economic injustice would continue. The surging authoritarianism would continue. The oligarchy and corruption would continue. The ecocidal capitalism would continue. The imperialist extraction would continue”

so it seems like the debate went well by drew janda (Reddit)

Debate 2024

“Biden: look, the fact is, we can’t… we don’t… look. Here’s the
deal. And this is no foolin

“Trump: there are ten billion guatemalans attacking the lincoln
memorial right now”

“Trump: Wisconsin is GONE. Every single Mexican came and poked holes into the earth of Wisconsin and sunk it beneath lake Michigan

“Biden: the only thing in Wiscombin… Westontin.. West Condor”

While the WSWS and Caitlin summarized things well, these two tweets give a better flavor.

Journalists Dumbfounded As There Were No Previous Signs Of Biden Declining Whatsoever (Babylon Bee)

UK Elections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by LastWeekTonight (YouTube)

This is a video of John Oliver summoning all of his snide-ness and wielding against the Tory party. While also taking potshots against New Labour, he gives them more of a pass. Why? Because he has to. He is who he is, and he simply can’t say that one is as bad as the other. The Tories have been in power for 15 years and have destroyed modern Great Britain. Oliver has to hope that New Labour will do a better job. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this is the case. Britain has two shitty right-wing parties that hate people and love billionaires, just the U.S. does. Oliver does a good job, and it’s very entertaining, but his “vote the bums out” message just looks so sad when all that Britons can possibly do is to “vote other bums in.”

At one point, Oliver shows a word cloud generated by a news service from a poll. It includes the word “Rich” very prominently.

Rishi Sunak Word Cloud

The newslady pointed out that the other words of prominence were “Capable”, “Okay”, “Good”, and “Clever”. OK, sure. Oliver points out that “Twat” and “C*nt” were also in the word cloud, though significantly less prominently, to be honest. In the same color, though, are words like “Untrustworthy”, “Smart”, “Intelligent”, “Bad”, “Greedy”, “Slimy”, “Sly”, “Nice”, “Snake”, “Cool”, “Competent”. Like, literally all of the words are in there, with a significant size. What is the coding of this graphic? What does it mean when a word is faded? When it is colored red/pink? When it is smaller?

The Democratic Coup by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

The article was fine, but I’m going to quote the first comment, which was even better. “No Use for a Name” wrote:

“Regular Americans who are beyond sick of this shit have been gaslit for years by this senile asshat and his elite puppetmasters, to say nothing of their simps in the media.

“But lo! A miracle! The scales have fallen from their eyes! They see what has been obvious to all of us since before 2020!

“And in an instant, as if guided by the hand of God, they translated this miracle into many op-eds and posts. This definitely wasn’t prepared in advance to further disenfranchise Americans and prevent them from choosing the next empty suit that will pretend to lead the country while the wealthy fucks continue to rob us blind while shitting on our heads.”

I’m just going to put this here.

Kamala Harris word salad speech at pro-abortion rally blasted by critics by New York Post (YouTube)

Just in case you think she’s a contender.

A good, very smart—the smartest—friend wrote: “It. Was. So. Bad.”

Oh my God. I’m reading more now. I’m reading things like “if you didn’t watch it, you can’t understand how bad it was.” And I’m thinking: “This is what my friend told me, but with fewer words.”

I just read that they argued about golf handicaps by Matt Bivens M.D. and Trump’s weight. I had to go to the transcript (CNN) to verify that the blogger wasn’t messing with me.

“We’d be better off choosing between two actual, randomly selected children than between these two. Trump is rightly called a narcissist but if there’s one man alive who rivals him in that it’s Scranton Beavis. My golf swing is better than his, he can’t hit a ball 50 yards! Well, my handicap was a six, or maybe an eight, I forget, but still!”

This is far worse than I thought it would go.

How Does Anyone Still Care About This Bullshit? by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I truly could not care less who wins the US election; in my mind Dementia Meat Puppet and Reality TV Oligarch are both perfectly suitable symbols to represent the US empire. And that’s all a US president is: a symbolic representative with no real power.

“I truly do not see how anyone can still give a fuck about this bullshit. It’s so obvious at this point that the US is being run by unelected empire managers who throw up half-dead, half-brained presidential candidates to trick Americans into thinking they live in a democracy. Those empire managers are going to do whatever they want to you regardless of how you and your compatriots vote. Your electoral system is a fake plastic toy they give you to play with so you won’t interfere with the gears of the imperial machine.”

“The “Hamas uses human shields” argument is essentially “We have to attack civilian areas because Hamas hides in civilian areas knowing that we would never attack civilian areas, so that’s why we attack civilian areas every single day.””

“It must suck to be a supremely talented artist or a brilliantly insightful comedian and know you’ll never achieve mainstream success because nobody who says real shit attacking real power gets elevated in our fake plastic civilization.”

“If you focus on domestic issues you’ll find yourself relatively well-tolerated by at least one mainstream political faction, but if you attack the imperial war machine you’ll get empire apologists jumping down your throat from all directions. This is because the ability to freely inflict mass military violence upon disobedient populations is much, much more important to the imperial power structure than domestic issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, or even issues like police brutality and economic justice. This doesn’t mean those issues are unimportant, it just means they’re unimportant to our rulers compared to the emphasis they place on unrestricted mass military violence.”

Journalism & Media

If Gaza Opened Your Eyes To The Empire’s Depravity, Make Sure They Stay Open Forever by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“As a general guideline, if you ever find yourself thinking things like “This time the US is on the right side for once” or “Eh both sides are equally bad,” that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve suckered you. The US empire is the most murderous and destructive power structure on earth by such an immense margin, and is on the wrong side of every conflict so consistently and reliably, that if you ever find yourself viewing a foreign conflict in ways that aren’t completely hostile to Washington, it’s almost certainly because you’ve swallowed the propaganda.

“And there’s no shame in that, to be clear. The US empire has the most sophisticated and effective propaganda engine that has ever existed, and its pervasive narrative control and distortions make it very easy to get lost when navigating the complex information ecosystem of the modern world. If you get something wrong and have to change your position after research and reflection, doing so is just a sign of emotional and intellectual maturity on your part. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“The empire didn’t just start getting crazy and evil with Gaza. It’s always doing things like this. It always lies about them. The mass media always help it lie. Gaza isn’t some aberration in its usual behavior, it’s just more obvious. ”

Labor

Prison Labor in Texas is Modern-Day Slavery by Xandan Gulley (Scheer Post)

“In a hoe squad, we line up back to back, each with a garden hoe or “aggie” to plow the fields while picking cotton, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cabbage, squash, watermelon, cucumbers, okra, and more. We pick and plant the crops, and the prison sells them for profit. We do not get paid.”

“Working without pay in Texas prisons is a loophole in the 13th Amendment that the state takes full advantage of in its opportunistic inhumanity. The question is, where do the profits go when incarcerated people don’t get paid for their labor? The Texas prison system is a billion-dollar infrastructure that steals, kills, and destroys lives while its monopoly of forced labor gets richer and richer.”

Economy & Finance

The Rise of the Tradwife by Sarah Bouillete & Astrid Lorange (This is Hell!)

I thought that this would be more interesting than it was, unfortunately. The two people interviewed were a bit too focused on the silliness and basic untenability of the lifestyle. Of course it’s fake. But why are so many people faking it? Because they want to make money. They don’t care how. Fake it ‘til you make it. But why would people “waste” their time doing this? It’s a lot of work to film yourself all the time.

It’s because of capitalism. It’s because of the late-stage, gig-based, hustle-culture, spectacularly unequal capitalism where we are constantly exposed to people who are wealthy beyond our imaginations—literally—while at the same time completely blocked from ever getting anywhere close to comfortable and secure. That’s why people do this. It’s why most people do most things that seem stupid and annoying. They know that they are fighting over scraps, fighting over the 1-2% of wealth that is left over for the world to run on. They know that they’re basically in The Hunger Games.

But the interviewees droned on and on about how the people doing this are latent white-Christian nationalists, or kowtowers to the patriarchy, or some other horrible thing to be. I don’t think even the successful ones are. They are basically porn stars who found out that something that society says it thinks is abhorrent is actually quite lucrative. Why would they throw their principles out the window and do it anyway? Because they’re hungry. Or maybe because they’re afraid of being hungry. Or probably because they’re brainwashed into thinking that they deserve vast wealth—that they’re entitled to it—and they think that this scam is the way to get there.

Society has ingrained deeply into most people that being useful is secondary to being wealthy. It has also, through its increasingly unreliable institutions, convinced people that they are not secure in their lives. Precarity is the whip.

We shouldn’t venerate these people—tradwives—for toiling in the hustle mines, but neither should we ascribe to them goals like Christian nationalism or tearing down feminist achievement. Porn stars don’t like sex as much as they seem to, either. Most of these people are just playing roles like everyone else. They are entertainers, not educators. If you think they’re educators, then you’ve bought their scam.

Some of them do a lot of damage playing those roles, just like any other scammer. But just remember that most of them are just trying to find their way in this screwed-up world, and they’ve been taught that focusing on your own needs while possibly being detrimental to those of others is the way to go.

Purely fortuitously, the next article I started reading was Our Rulers Are Literally Driving Us Crazy by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“In a society that is guided not by the pursuit of human thriving but by the pursuit of profit, there is no downside to all the underlings being depressed, anxious and overwhelmed all the time, so long as they’re still showing up to work and still consuming products. As long as the gears of capitalism are still being turned, it doesn’t matter whether the people turning them are enjoying their lives.”

Yes, exactly that. Tradwives are crazy. They make other people crazy. The whole scene—like most of social media—is harmful to the spiritual well-being of the people engaged in it, either producing or consuming it. But it makes money for some; it kills time for others. It makes a ton of money for those who aren’t fighting over the 2% scraps. That’s why it exists and continues to exist.

“We see it in the way advertising for the beauty and fashion industries is geared to erode women’s self-image so they’ll buy products and services in order to feel adequate. We see it in the way social media apps are designed to be as addictive as possible in order to commodify their users’ attention and consciousness. We see it in the way the entirety of advertising is structured around artificially inflating demand by psychologically manipulating people into believing they have lack and deficiencies they never knew they had, and creating cravings they’d never previously experienced.”

That’s why tradwives do what they do. They’re caught up in the same cycle as everone else. They don’t believe in their lifestyle any more than you believe in your lifestyle as an assistant to a third-level marketing manager in a product division that makes a product you neither believe in nor really understand for a company that has myriad such divisions and doesn’t understand it either.

Tradwives are on the wheel, just like the rest of us. We focus on them because they seem to be happy doing it—because that’s what the role calls for!—and, honestly, because it’s women pretending to be happy, which has never sat well with anyone, men or women. But especially other women.

And so, we scrape and fight at the bottom of the well. And why does it continue if it’s so bad for most of us? Because we’re not in charge. We’re not secure. We have to fight because we’re afraid of losing what little we have if we ever relax just a little bit. This is the message we hear all of the time. You’re not good enough. You’re missing something. Other people are better. Other people are not missing those things. They will eat your lunch. They will drink your milkshake. They are doing so right now. You will be destitute in a year’s time. You and your children will be living in a broken-down car, rife with diseases. You better start drinking someone else’s milkshake to prevent that future.

“Technological innovations could have been used to liberate people from the need to work and given us an abundance of leisure time, and instead they’re being used to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires while everyone else scrapes and struggles to get by.”

When people say the want to buy NVIDIA now, i ask them if it’s because they see other people being rewarded for being with enough to become wealthier without contributing any value to society and they would like to benefit as well? They want to join the group of parasites 🦠 benefiting from the labor of others?

US debt warnings grow louder by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“[…] the size of the Treasury market (now at more than $26 trillion) has quintupled since the financial crisis of 2008 in an “indication of how much the US has turned to debt financing over the past 15 years.””

“The liquidity problems of the Treasury market are being compounded by the withdrawal of the Federal Reserve as a buyer of bonds due to its efforts to run down its stock of debt holdings built up during the period of quantitative easing—so-called quantitative tightening.”

“[…] there is little prospect for sustained growth in the US economy over the longer term. The CBO forecast that the growth rate for 2024 and 2025 would be lower than in 2023 and for the years 2026‒2034 it would average only 1.8 percent a year, well below levels reached in the past.

“What growth there is and the increase in government revenue it brings will increasingly be gobbled up by military spending.”

Is the Reign of the Dollar Coming to an End? by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“This would mean that China would have to eschew its capital controls and begin to offer RMB treasury bonds for international buyers. RMB internationalisation, Yu argues, ‘is a goal worth pursuing’, but it is not something that can take place in the short run. ‘Distant water’, he writes poetically, ‘will not quench immediate thirst’.”

30 (Ludicity)

“Time spent working: approximately three minutes. Good done for the world: higher than anything I’ve ever done professionally. Even the few times I’ve made a huge impact on the bottom line, those savings were usually immediately thrown away on something else. Makes a guy think, and on the very special day where he’s prone to thinking deeply anyway, that leads to dangerous places.”

We Can’t Have a New Paradigm as Long as People Think the Old One Was Free-Market Fundamentalism by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“[…] the period of so-called free-market fundamentalism was one in which we saw a massive upward redistribution of wealth and income as has been extensively documented in numerous studies. It is understandable that the people who are happy about this upward redistribution would like to attribute it to the natural workings of the market.”

“The story goes, yeah Elon Musk and Bill Gates are very rich, and lots of ordinary workers are kind of screwed, but shit happens. If we feel bad enough about it, we can toss some dimes to the left behind. After all, Bill Gates started a big foundation to help the world’s poor. That’s a far more generous story for the rich than the reality. It was not just a case of “shit happens,” where the natural workings of the market gave them all the money. It was a story where they actively rigged the rules to ensure that a huge amount of money would be redistributed upward.”

“[…] government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. It is mind-boggling that serious people can think that these massive forms of government intervention are somehow the “free market.””

“Our policies were never about free trade. They were about selective protectionism, where we expose manufacturing workers to direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, but we protect our most highly-paid professionals from the same sort of competition. Again, it’s not surprising that the winners from this policy would like to call it “free trade.” That sounds much better than structuring trade to make the rich richer.”

“The UAW strike last fall highlighted the huge disparity in pay between the CEOs at the Big Three auto companies and the pay of top execs at the major auto companies in Europe and Japan. Our top execs get roughly four times the pay of their counterparts at European car companies and, in the extreme case, ten times as much as their pay at Japanese companies.”

“The massive fortunes in the financial sector are only possible because the government has rigged the rules to encourage a bloated financial sector. If there was a tax on financial transactions, similar to the sales tax most of us pay when we buy food or clothes, the sector would be far smaller and there would be many fewer Wall Street millionaires and billionaires. The free market didn’t tell us to exempt the financial sector from the taxes most other sectors pay.”

“Similarly, tax rules, like the carried interest deduction, along with bankruptcy laws that are very favorable to corporate debtors, provide much of the basis for the fortunes earned by hedge fund and private equity partners. These were given to us by the lobbying of powerful interests, not the free market.”

Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI − Schneier on Security by Bruce Schneier

“The problem ultimately stems from the way democracies use information to make policy decisions. Democracy is an information system that leverages collective intelligence to solve political problems. And then to collect feedback as to how well those solutions are working. This is different from autocracies that don’t leverage collective intelligence for political decision making. Or have reliable mechanisms for collecting feedback from their populations.”

“The U.S. spent $14.5 billion on the 2020 presidential, senate and congressional elections. I don’t even know how to calculate the cost in attention. That sounds like a lot of money, but step back and think about how the system works. The economic value of winning those elections are so great because that’s how you impose your own incentive structure on the whole.”

“More generally, the cost of our market economy is enormous. $780 billion is spent world-wide annually on advertising. Many more billions are wasted on ventures that fail. And that’s just a fraction of the total resources lost in a competitive market environment. And there are other collateral damages, which are spread non-uniformly across people. We have accepted these costs of capitalism—and democracy—because the inefficiency of central planning was considered to be worse. That might not be true anymore.”

Wow, exactly what I was telling Alexander the other day.

“Corporations demonstrate that large centrally planned economic units can compete in today’s society. Think of Walmart or Amazon. If you compare GDP to market cap, Apple would be the eighth largest country on the planet. Microsoft would be the tenth.”

“In today’s society, the rich and powerful are just too good at hacking. And it is becoming increasingly impossible to patch our hacked systems. Because the rich use their power to ensure that the vulnerabilities don’t get patched. This is bad for society, but it’s basically the optimal strategy in our competitive governance systems. Their zero-sum nature makes hacking an effective, if parasitic, strategy. Hacking isn’t a new problem, but today hacking scales better—and is overwhelming the security systems in place to keep hacking in check.”

“Misaligned incentives encourage local optimization, and that’s not a good proxy for societal optimization. This encourages hacking, which now generates greater harm than at any point in the past because the amount of damage that can result from local optimization is greater than at any point in the past.”

“When I wrote “Liars and Outliers” in 2012, I wrote about four systems for enabling trust: our innate morals, concern about our reputations, the laws we live under and security technologies that constrain our behavior. I wrote about how the first two are more informal than the last two. And how the last two scale better, and allow for larger and more complex societies. They enable cooperation amongst strangers.”

“In today’s tech-mediated world, we are replacing the rituals and behaviors of cooperation with security mechanisms that enforce compliance. And innate trust in people with compelled trust in processes and institutions. That scales better, but we lose the human connection. It’s also expensive, and becoming even more so as our power grows.”

“On the other end of the scale, the most common form of governance on the planet is socialism. It’s how families function: people work according to their abilities, and resources are distributed according to their needs.”

“It makes no sense that the decisions about the “drug war”—or climate migration—are delineated by nation. The issues are much larger than that. Right now there is no governance body with the right footprint to regulate Internet platforms like Facebook. Which has more users world-wide than Christianity.”

“Growth only equates to progress when the resources necessary to grow are cheap and abundant. Growth is often extractive. And at the expense of something else. Growth is how we fuel our zero-sum systems. If the pie gets bigger, it’s OK that we waste some of the pie in order for it to grow. That doesn’t make sense when resources are scarce and expensive. Growing the pie can end up costing more than the increase in pie size. Sustainability makes more sense.”

“[…] we have replaced the richness of human interaction with economic models. Models that turn everything into markets. Market fundamentalism scaled better, but the social cost was enormous. A lot of how we think and act isn’t captured by those models.”

“I’m happy to let my thermostat automatically turn my heat on and off or to let an AI drive a car or optimize the traffic lights in a city. I’m less sure about an AI that sets tax rates, or corporate regulations or foreign policy. Or an AI that tells us that it can’t explain why, but strongly urges us to declare war—right now. Each of these is harder because they are more complex systems: non-local, multi-agent, long-duration and so on. I also want any AI that works on my behalf to be under my control. And not controlled by a large corporate monopoly that allows me to use it.”

“Butterin’s [sic] trilemma also matters here: that you can’t simultaneously build systems that are secure, distributed, and scalable.”

Bankruptcy is very, very good by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“There’s a truly comforting sociopathy snuggled inside capitalism ideology: if markets are systems for identifying and rewarding virtue, ability and value, then anyone who’s failing in the system is actually unworthy, not unlucky; and that means the winners are not just lucky (and certainly not merely selfish), but actually the best and they owe nothing to their social inferiors apart from what their own charitable impulses dictate.”

“[…] the earliest “money” we have a record of is ancient Babylonian credit ledgers that record the debts of farmers who borrow against the next crop to pay for the materials and labor they’ll need to grow it. Debt, not barter, is the true origin of money. The fairy tale that coin money arose spontaneously to help bartering marketgoers facilitate trade has no historical evidence, while Babylonian ledgers can be seen in person in museums all over the world.”

“Farming requires an enormous amount of skill, but even the most skillful farmer is a prisoner of luck. No matter how good you are at farming, no matter how hard you work, no matter how carefully you plan, you can still lose a harvest to blight, drought, storms or vermin. So over time, every farmer loses a crop. When that happens, the farmer can’t pay off their debts and must roll them over and pay them off with future harvests. That means that over time, the share of each harvest the farmer has claim to goes down. Thanks to compounding interest, no bumper crop can erase the debts of the bad harvests. That means that, over time, “farmer” becomes a synonym for “debtor.” Farmers’ productive output is increasingly claimed by the rich and powerful. No matter how badly everyone needs food, the whims of the hereditary creditor class come to dictate the country’s agricultural priorities.”

“In other words: debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. Either you wipe away the farmers’ debts to the creditor class, or your society collapses, and with it, the political relations that made those debts payable.”

“[…] we don’t hear much about the “moral hazard” of allowing the Sackler opioid family to keep as much as ten billion dollars in the family’s offshore accounts while walking away from the victims of their drug-pushing empire, no matter what bizarre tricks they deploy in pulling off the stunt.

“But when it comes to canceling the debts of normal people, the “moral hazard” is front and center. If you’re a person who borrowed $79k in student loans, paid back $190k and still owe $236k, we can’t cancel your debt, because of the message that would send to other people who want to (checks notes) get an education.”

“Score one for the luck-based theory of wealth, and minus one for the providential meritocracy hypothesis.”

“Millennia ago, everyone understood that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid, and they created a system for discharging debts and freeing productive people from the tyranny of accumulated liabilities, to the benefit of all. Dismantling that system required us to invent an elaborate theological system and dress it up in economic language.”

Science & Nature

The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes by Elise Cutts (Quanta Magazine)

“The formation of these seeds is called ice nucleation. Nucleation is so slow for pure water at zero degrees that it might as well not happen at all. But in nature, impurities provide surfaces for nucleation, and these impurities can drastically change how quickly and at what temperature ice forms.”

“The process of freezing water actually releases heat, which is why you can use an infrared camera to see ice heat up as it solidifies.”

A brief history of Stephen Hawking’s greatest equation by Roger Highfield (Aeon)

“general relativity, Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity, rests on the assumption that the speed of light is constant. It doesn’t envisage gravity as a force, but as a warping of spacetime, a fusion of space and time. Our Earth, for example, warps the Universe this way, and satellites orbit along the resulting curves. This is what we experience as gravity.”

“In 1965, Penrose showed that black hole formation was indeed a robust prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and even went on to speculate about how to extract energy from a black hole by what became known as the Penrose process. Soon after, the term ‘black hole’ was coined by the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, though Penrose would have to wait more than half a century before his work was recognised with a Nobel prize.”

“Hawking’s equation remains the one result in attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity accepted by the entire community of physicists working on the subject.”

“Bekenstein’s result had so irritated Hawking that he had wanted to prove it wrong. Yet, as he did these calculations, to his ‘surprise and annoyance’, Hawking’s results suggested the opposite. By December 1973, he realised that not only did black holes radiate heat, but also that they did so by the amount required if the area of their event horizons was indeed a measure of their entropy. This marked a milestone for ‘black hole thermodynamics’, and the glowing implications of his equation: as Hawking put it, ‘if an astronaut falls into a black hole, he will be returned to the rest of the Universe in the form of radiation.’”

“Eventually, however, Hawking became doubtful he would see direct proof of his profound insight: the amount of Hawking radiation from each black hole is predicted to be so small, it is impossible to detect (with current technology) among the radiation coming from all other cosmic objects. Even so, there are what are called solid state analogues, ‘black holes in a lab’, made of Bose-Einstein condensates (a ‘fifth state of matter’), or optical fibres, or even flowing water, which can still be used to test his ideas.”

Environment & Climate Change

As temperatures soar, governments abandon pledges to fight climate change by Alex Findijs (WSWS)

“Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Earth.org in April “what happened in 2023 was nothing close to 2016, the second-warmest year on record. It was beyond anything we expected, and no climate models can reproduce what happened. And then 2024 starts, and it gets even warmer. We cannot explain these [trends] yet, and it makes scientists that work on Earth resilience like myself very nervous.””

“Scotland, which pledged to reduce emissions by 75 percent by 2030, scrapped the entire program in April. On June 3, Germany’s climate adviser declared that the country’s limited climate goals of 30 percent reductions for 2030 were out of reach. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak criticized climate goals as “unaffordable eco-zealotry,” while UK Labour leader Keir Starmer dropped his proposal for a 28 billion pounds ($35.3 billion) a year green energy program.”

“Shell dropped its 2035 climate pledge in March, while Bank of America abandoned its pledge to not fund new coal mines or power plants. The Science Based Targets Initiative also dropped hundreds of companies, including Microsoft, JBS and Unilever, from its validation process for failing to meet their climate pledges.”

Look, it was always going to be a tug-of-war between companies with way too much money, power, and influence making even more money for its handful of investors, and actually doing something for the common good and the future of humanity. What did you think was going to happen?

“As one NPR headline put it, “The U.S. pledged billions to fight climate change. Then came the Ukraine war.””

That is not how it happened. I mean, obviously: NPR is almost never right about anything. What happened was that pressures led the U.S. to commit to climate-change, but that the wrong companies and people stood to benefit from it. The people who were heavily invested—and benefitting mightily—from classic powerhouses like the fossil-fuel and military industries were not going to see some of the money being spent in the world. They were not happy. So, they cooked up the Ukraine war to keep money flowing in the right direction. It’s probably not as simple as that but a lot of the rich people in charge are not exactly mad that it played out this way. If it had gone the other way, they might have had to compete in new markets. They don’t like to compete. They like to be paid rent. They have more than enough power to keep things that way.

“Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore issued a statement on X/Twitter yesterday stating:”

“The basic issue, denied by the various middle class environmental movements and parties like the Greens, is capitalism. It is impossible to address the increasingly dire reality of global warming within the framework of a social and economic system based on profit. Moreover, the solution to climate change must necessarily be global and therefore is incompatible with the increasingly archaic nation-state system.

“Resolving the climate crisis is fundamentally a class question. The impact of the climate crisis falls primarily on the workers of the world. Moreover, it is the working class, united internationally in the process of production, whose interests lie in the abolition of the capitalist nation-state system.

“A solution to climate change requires a frontal assault on the wealth of the capitalist oligarchs and their control over the economy. An emergency response to the environmental catastrophe must begin with the expropriation of the global energy giants under the democratic control of the working class.

“The giant banks and corporations must be expropriated and the resources of society mobilized to finance an emergency program to produce energy in a way that can meet social needs while protecting the environment, including a massive social investment in alternative forms of energy and public transportation.”

Medicine & Disease

Curious about Ozempic? Here’s the lowdown by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Many people experience side effects, particularly nausea and diarrhea. A recent analysis from an insurance agency found that 6 in 10 people who start the drugs quit before they see benefits because of side effects. These tend to go away after a few weeks, but they can substantially impact the quality of life until then.”

“After a century of fad diets and weight loss gimmicks, people are tired: some from fighting stigma and others from trying to lose weight unsuccessfully. These medications have proven to work, and the market shows it: GLP-1 prescriptions have increased by over 300% since 2020. A recent poll indicates that nearly half of adults express interest. But there’s no sugarcoating it: it’s expensive—about $1000 per month without insurance. The price should decrease dramatically in about 8 years once the patent expires and the generic version comes to market.”

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Christ, the way we run our societies is a joke. It’s just so blatantly for the benefit of a handful of the already-rich. But seriously, there’s zero content here, Katelyn. The drugs are good because doctors are writing prescriptions. Are you kidding me? Did you actually just write something that stupid when the U.S. is still in the grips of an opioid crisis where 100K people die per year?

Art & Literature

VThe filmmaker vanishes: Roman Polanski’s name missing from Paramount’s Blu-ray version of Chinatown (1974) by David Walsh (WSWS)

“Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual acts with a minor. When a corrupt judge threatened to renege on the plea bargain, and planned instead to sentence Polanski to years in prison, the filmmaker fled the US.

“As a 2020 open letter signed by 100 female French lawyers observed, the victim in the case, Samantha Geimer (then Gailey), “has appealed countless times for an end to the exploitation of her story.” In an interview with the French-language Slate in 2020, opposing the campaign against Polanski, Geimer insisted that a victim “has the right to leave the past behind her, and an aggressor also has the right to rehabilitate and redeem himself, above all when he has admitted his mistakes and apologized.””

From Divine Machines to Sex Machines by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“I would posit a fundamental distinction, in music, visual art, literature, and so on, not between the high and the low, but between work that is subordinated entirely or mostly to profit-seeking interests, and work that manages, even sometimes under the system of capitalist profit-seeking, to bring the irreducibly human creative force through to the surface. Naturally, what I prefer is the latter sort of work. As I see it, popular music was generally still fundamentally creative, and recognizably human until around 1980, so I spend most of my time paying attention to output from before that date.”

“I think of what I do not as running together “the high and the low”, but rather, let us say, “the academic and the vernacular”. I think the vernacular deserves more attention than it generally gets, and above all from philosophers, who, when they trepidatiously venture out to consider cultural artifacts, often feel much safer when these artifacts are certified as meritorious by institutional imprimatur —“Genius” grants, book prizes, and so on.”

“Of course in our own time the academic and the vernacular often intertwine. Nina Simone was classically trained and loved Bach above all, but her genius ultimately came through at its most powerful when she placed herself in a tradition that prizes idiosyncrasy and spontaneity over mastery of technique. I have in the past defined the vernacular in music as that in the performance of which the artist does not have to be “good” in order to be “great”. That is, to stay with the example of Nina Simone, the more lost and flailing she was in her late performances, the clearer it was what a genius she had been all along.”

“[…] when a contemporary jazz critic writes something like “Kamasi Washington is our greatest jazz prophet” or “Kamasi Washington is the true heir to Coltrane”, I want to know who “we” are, and I want to know why, if that is what he is, practically nobody knows or cares. Jazz critics in the 21st century seem happy to allow their preferred genre of music to go on existing as a monadically sealed “world apart”, without spending any time really thinking about the conditions that made it so irrelevant, and that now ensure there will never be another Coltrane — at least not a Coltrane of jazz.”

Kamasi Washington is very hit or miss.

“As you might recall, Mr. Balboa is shown in this installment of the series tragically underestimating the power of his Soviet opponent, who meanwhile is running up snow-covered mountains in the Urals with, like, broken-down Ladas roped to his back.”

None of this is true and just goes to show that Justin is just as guilty of disparaging the vernacular as his colleagues. Mr. Balboa did not tragically underestimate the power of his Soviet opponent. Apollo Creed did. The Soviet opponent was not running up snow-covered mountains; Rockey was. Ivan Drago was highly technologized, in a way that would be fetishized as ur-American today, but which was disparaged as somehow cheating, as not being true to the roots of boxing, or indeed very sportsmanlike, back in the 80s. No-one had Ladas roped to their back; it was Rocky who carried a large log on his back as he tramped through waist-deep snow.

Guitarist Charlie Hunter Versus the Music Industry by Chandler Dandridge (Jacobin)

“By industry standards, Hunter is one of the most successful professional guitarists of his generation. He is also a scathing critic of the music industry itself, which continues to treat artists almost as poorly as it did Hunter’s hero Blind Blake. “The way our culture thinks is, let’s reduce everything to a commodity, to a transaction,” Hunter says. “But who is establishing that narrative? It’s not the people that develop the music. It’s the people taking and profiting from it.””

““One big difference in my own empirical experience from thirty years ago versus now is, yeah, every deal you signed was a relatively bad deal, but those were still music people on the other end,” he says. “The executives liked and felt strongly about music. Now there’s no music people. There’s tech people, and they don’t even know music.””

“The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson developed a compelling theory of psychosocial development. The stage associated with middle age proposes that the individual can adopt either a generative or stagnated stance. For Erikson, generativity meant a genuine concern and care for the next generation, while stagnation meant self-absorption.”

““With other OGs it’s often their session, and they know what they want,” says Fonville. “But with Charlie, he was like, ‘You guys got something special, and I am trying to be a part of it.’ He killed his ego every time. He understands how important it is to allow others to get involved and bring in their personality. He’ always learning. He’s a student.””

“Music’s centrality to our lives can often mask the industry’s brokenness and depravity. A song appears to us commodified on Spotify, the labor and social relations that went into making it totally concealed from view. But those relations are increasingly bad, with the streaming era marked by dwindling compensation and career prospects for artists.”

“Hunter sees his role now as arming younger musicians with the tools to remain centered on music when the industry tries to wrench their attention away.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Elite Education Journalism: Still Ideology at Its Purest by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Our problem is a) we’ve got social problems related to race and class that cannot be resolved in the classroom and b) students possess a level of intrinsic academic potential which is likely heavily influenced by genetics and definitely influenced by environmental factors that parents have limited ability to control and which public school educators can’t possibly influence. But the concept of an individual student’s intrinsic academic potential is not discussed in polite company, even as everyone knows it exists. (I assure you that parents do not sincerely believe that their kids have the exact same potential as everybody else’s kids.)”

“What would I do if I was [sic] king? Gather population-level data using stratified samples, so that we never have kids or teachers laboring under tons of testing. Stop trying to move students around dramatically in the performance spectrum because we have no reason to believe we can achieve such a thing. Reorient schooling towards making childhood safe, nurturing, and stimulating for all, giving everyone a chance to learn what they like and what they’re good at so they know what to pursue professionally. Of course, some will fail in their professions regardless, which is why the real goal is to build a humane and just society. If you really care about kids who struggle at school, you’ll stop trying to shove their square pegs into round holes and instead invest in a robust public sector that will protect them from poverty and need, no matter how they perform in school.”

While you’re all chasing whatever local maximum has been selected as the target by our self-elected thought leaders, I’ll be over here searching for a different, better maximum.

Wealth is supposed to be how society rewards usefulness. It has been perverted beyond recognition. No-one seriously thinks that someone became rich because they are wise or good or useful. To the contrary, when we meet someone who is wise or good or useful, we expect them to be poor.

This is why I don’t care about chasing wealth using whatever mechanism has been selected by those who pursue without being useful. Buy Nvidia. Shut the fuck up. I don’t expect any interesting conversation to follow that.

It’s also why I don’t care about accreditation. Respect, but suspect. You have to listen to what these people are saying and doing. The credentials they have matter much, much less. Rachel Maddow is fucking idiot, but she’s also a Rhodes scholar with a PhD in Philosophy from Oxford. Paul Krugman is a small-minded dipshit who’s forgotten anything he ever knew about economics in favor of partisan opinions delivered with an utter lack of empathy. He’s also a Nobel Prize winner. Go figure.

The world is largely intractable. Better to find somewhere alee and ride it out until you shuffle off your own mortal coil.

LLMs & AI

We are truly blessed to be in an age where the overconfidence of an entire generation is met by that of a tool that has no idea what it’s doing. I just helped a student try to untangle a solution that he was trying to convert from WPF to Maui by just copy-pasting files and folder from one to the other and then using liberal gobs of Copilot botshit to paper over whatever cracks appeared. It might work if he knew enough, because Maui is relatively close to WPF. He doesn’t know nearly enough to do this, though.

Instead, what he ended up with was an AppShell.xaml that was trying to find an App.xaml that had mysteriously found its way into a View folder, which had been pasted in from the WPF project. The AppShell.xaml was, thanks to Copilot, an amalgam of that file and the App.xaml file, with mismatched start and end tags. Even once we’d gotten that cleared up, the next error was about a missing splash-screen graphic deep in the Android settings that he couldn’t even remember having created (probably be cause he didn’t).

This is not good. This is like a person calling themselves an auto mechanic, but all they know how to do is to take things that look like auto parts and throw them through the garage door, then wonder why there isn’t a functioning vehicle inside when they’re done. They’re being assisted by the neighbor’s kid, who’s super-confident and super-friendly, but who had unfortunately spend a little too long with his umbilical cord around his neck on his way out of the birth canal a decade ago.

My experience so far:

I’ve personally turned off Copilot for text-based formats because it just gets in the way. I still have it on for coding but it’s 50/50 useful. When it’s not useful, it’s actively disturbing.

I don’t know that I’m the target audience, though.

First of all, I don’t really have too many “tedious and repetitive tasks.”

Second of all, I don’t really have the situation where I “don’t know what to write.” I like writing. I’m not trying to avoid it. I can’t imagine that, instead of simply starting to write what I want to say, I would instead start to formulate a request for Copilot to write what it algorithmically determines to be the likeliest appropriate thing based on my “prompt.”

This may be something that’s needed for some, if not many, people, but I’ve been lucky enough to come through a long gauntlet of training to be able to express myself without too much, or any, writer’s block.

Using Copilot to write feels like using a translator for a language I’m fluent in.

As a very localized example, a prior sentence contains the phrase “some, if not many”, which is intended to convey the idea that at least some people are affected, but that it’s also quite likely that many are affected. It’s just shorter to write it my way. The almost-certainly, Copilot-backed grammar-checker in Outlook wants to change “not many” to “few” … which completely changes the meaning. It’s distracting and it’s wrong.

Were I instead to have prompted Copilot to write this for me, then it would have never used that phrase in the first place. In this way the difficult will be slowly but surely eliminated, and the candle of human creativity will be snuffed out.

Programming

UI Libraries Are Dying, Here's Why by Theo − t3.gg (YouTube)

I’d expected an answer something along the lines of “because the web platform has gotten so strong that they’re no longer necessary”, but was instead treated to an absolute smorgasbord of web technologies layered one on top of the other until, a quarter of the way through the video, I couldn’t tell whether the presenter wasn’t taking the piss—à la the Programmers are also human channel—but he seemed to be quite serious. He’s advocating using components from a framework but as snippets that you include then modify. He has tailwind and crazy naming and layers of framework shit until you pretty much have no idea what you’re looking at and you’re typing cryptic and completely unvalidated strings into numerous configuration files and pretending that this is all just fine and normal.

I mean, look at this stuff.

AccordianContent

AccordianItem

Command line for adding components

HomePage

“A little annoying that it’s confusing the radix imports with the shad-cn ones […]”

Dude, that’s on you. You’re the one who imported so. Much. Shit.

“V0, a new project by Vercel that lets you generate components based on shad-cn with AI.”

Just stop. This is wildly unmaintainable but you do you.

“It’s really easy to use Tailwind […]”

Just shutup. Tailwind looks like assembler. This is ridiculous.

He’s totally pretending that he’s not sponsored but he’s already sponsored V0 (made by Vercel, his sponsor) and Tailwind (also a commercial library).

I was teaching Mobile App Development last night and was, once again, confronted with how much stuff you need to know in order to program in a modern way. Just for using Maui.Net, you need to know the following concepts:

1. Git branching
2. Git pushing/pulling
3. MVVM
4. IOC
5. DI
6. Commands vs. events
7. async/await
8. Asynchronous programming
9. Testing
10. Abstraction
11. Behaviors
12. Binding
13. INotifyPropertyChanged
14. Source generators

The list goes on and on. All of these are important but it’s … a lot. We integrated an SQLite database last night and we had to discuss what is even a database first.

ReadOnlySet<T> in .NET 9 by Steven Giesel

“Readonly and immutable are two different concepts. Readonly means you can’t modify it, but you can still modify the original collection, which then would be reflected in the “readonly” collection. With immutable collections, this wouldn’t be reflected. I even have a whole blog post about it: “ReadOnlyCollection is not an immutable collection”.”

Good point.

Text Coordinate Systems by Thorsten Ball, Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra (Zed Decoded)

“[…] a DisplayPoint describes a position on the DisplayMap […] and takes into account”

• soft-wrapping
• folding
• inlay hints
• tabs
• blocks & creases

“An anchor is a logical coordinate. You can create an anchor on the right side of a character or the left side of a character. Then, at any point in the future, you can always redeem the anchor and get the position of the character that you essentially marked or anchored. Even if editing has occurred in the meantime, even if that code’s been deleted, or that character’s been deleted, you could still get the position of its tombstone — where it would be had it not been deleted, or where it would emerge if that delete is undone.”

“That makes total sense for a collaborative text editor: if your cursor sits on the W and someone comes along and edits the text to the left of it, you want your cursor to stay on the W and not the text-floor changing beneath your cursor-feet.”

“In a CRDT, or at least our CRDT implementation, every piece of text, whether it’s a character or a big block of pasted text or something else that’s inserted, is viewed as an immutable block. That immutable block is given a unique ID, an ID that’s unique across the cluster.”

“Anchors are also used for background processing of text. Think about it: you want to send a piece of text to, say, a language server running in the background. You create two anchors — start and end of the selection — and start a background process with these two anchors to send the text over to the language server. Meanwhile, the user can continue typing and changing the text, because the two anchors will forever be valid, since they are anchored to a position in an immutable piece of text.”

Threat Modeling for Applications by Adam Caudill

“To define the threat model, you must define the different types of attackers that your application may face; some of these apply more to some applications than others. In some cases, it may be perfectly reasonable to say that you don’t protect against some of these – what’s important is to clearly document that fact.”

“Passive attackers are in a position that they are able to see communications, but can’t (or won’t, to avoid detection) modify those communications. The solution to most of the passive attackers is to encrypt everything – this not only eliminates most of the passive attacks, it eliminates or greatly complicates many active attacks.”

“Not only is there a risk of a malicious user, but that a legitimate well-intended user has malware or had their device otherwise been compromised. Attackers can leverage a user’s device to perform attacks as them, or capture information.”

“One threat that is too often overlooked is the people running the servers – they have access to the logs, can see the server setup, and in some cases can see the application source code and configuration files. This type of attacker has far more insight than most attackers do – in some cases, it’s assumed that those that run the servers simply must be trusted, as there’s no way to fully protect against them.”

“Perhaps the hardest to address are those that build and maintain the application itself. How do you prevent them from inserting a backdoor? Code reviews are normally the answer, but there are real flaws to relying on them. While there may be policies that prevent developers from accessing the production database or credentials – a simple “mistake” made that displays a detailed error message, or allows SQL or code to be injected can quickly render those policies worthless.”

It is here that is most important to be diplomatic and to encourage everyone to take their ego out of the equation. Anyone can create a security hole; the idea is to think about what measures can we take to prevent them from happening, or to catch them early. An active attacker doesn’t care about the difference between maliciousness and incompetence. Neither do code-scanners.

“When defining a threat model, you have to account for a member of the development or DBA staff going rogue, ignoring all policies that get into [sic] their way, and inserting backdoors or otherwise opening a door that completely defeats the security of the application.”

“When a host or service provider becomes malicious, it can be difficult to impossible to maintain security. As fewer and fewer applications are hosted within corporate walls, it’s important to understand that there is now an additional team of system administrators, networking and IT support that are suddenly involved.”

“Another issue often overlooked, is the issue of other users of the same host, and this is especially true when using virtual servers; from side channels that allow encryption keys to be stolen, to breaking out the the hypervisor to attack other servers on the same physical hardware.”

“A threat model doesn’t have to be some compliance laden document that means more to auditors than developers and security engineers, it can be a simple listing of threat actors and what the defense against them is – or if a given actor isn’t deemed to be a threat, document that. Having a very simple list-based document can provide guidance to the development team, to those classifying security reports, and to those submitting those reports.”

The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs (Ludicity)

“[…] a gigantic field of people that are cosplaying at engineering. The real market is large in absolute terms, but tiny relative to the number of candidates and companies out there. The fake market is all people that haven’t cultivated the discipline to engineer but nonetheless want software engineering salaries and clout.”

“[…] for the low, low price of lots of someone else’s money, I can very, very inefficiently convert company wealth into personal status, and then convert that into money.

“For example, one of the people responsible for the architecture described in my post about Snowflake madness regularly gives talks about their state-of-the-art infrastructure, which I should remind you is mostly SharePoint strapped to Lambda strapped to DynamoDB strapped to a managed data warehouse to ingest like data approximately the size of one copy of Call of Duty every day. Was it wasting half a million dollars and, in fact, a shrine to Mad Cyric upon His black throne? Yes. Is that going to get them a A$50,000 raise one day ? Yes . We’d have been better off if they just stole A$200,000 but if they do it this way then it’s legal, and everyone is worse off […]”

“Once you notice that the majority of interviewers are just trying to feel good about themselves, it becomes very easy to hack them. That deserves a post on its own, as I suspect this is an area where things come more easily to me. Immigrating to Australia exposed me to many, many systems where the only winning move was to debase yourself and beg a petty official for mercy, with your face in the dirt, and I had to learn how to appease authority figures to remain in the country. Those days are blessedly behind me, but the brain learns to read status quickly when it is your main defense against deportation.

“Suffice it to say that, if you grin in just the right way and keep a straight face, there is a large class of person that will hear you say “Hah, you know, I’m just reflecting on how nice it is to be in a room full of people who are asking the right questions after all my other terrible interviews.” and then they will shake your hand even as they shatter the other one patting themselves on the back at Mach 10. I know, I know, it sounds like that doesn’t work but it absolutely does”

“This is basically weaponized therapy. You meditate, reflect, do self-work, speak to professionals and the like because you don’t want to be a monkey that treats the people closest to you based on whatever the monkey-brain decides its immediate ego needs are, and then you realize that most people are fully in the grips of monkey-brain. You just throw a banana in the cage and slam the door shut behind them.”

“[…] major institution recently sent me a job titled “Senior Snowflake Engnieer “ and they left all the edit history in the word document, so I could see them fail to spell the word “model”.”

Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes And I Am Not Laughing (Ludicity)

“[…] want to work with serious people who are good at their jobs, affirming to spend time with, the company doesn’t waste hours of my time on meetings or placating dysfunctional leadership, and the product should be one that I think that contributes meaningfully in non-trace amounts.”

“It’s a given that the tech industry is large − very, very large. I can’t even begin to guess at how many jobs there are available for people who can make computers do things for a living. But something that I’m starting to very sincerely believe, and I don’t know how it could be otherwise, is that the number of jobs for serious people is probably very, very small.”

“[…] at my normal jobs I’m just slapping people on the knuckles and saying “just use Postgres, you bastards”, and then they use DynamoDB anyway the moment I look away.”

PowerBI Is A Human Rights Violation (Ludicity)

“Hell yes, zero views in the past three months? I’m so glad that’s where we decided to allocate the only senior engineer after paying his exorbitant ransom. We are fully Agile, baby. I could not be happier to have spent my precious hours on this beautiful planet creating this dashboard. Why don’t we just have Universal Basic Income? I’m already basically on welfare, but instead of distributing it evenly to people that need it, we’re giving it all to me because I say I’m an engineer, and to top it all of you make me pretend to work. Just cut out the middle man and give us the money!”

“If the sixth most-viewed dashboard is getting a view every three days and we know most of them aren’t being refreshed then we have almost certainly spent thousands of hours of people’s lives, that they could have been spending with their kids or some wholesome bullshit, making thousands of reports that no one reads?”

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (Kalzumeus Software)

“The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.”

“Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”.”

“It is a little disconcerting that negotiation skills are worth thousands of dollars per year for your entire career but engineers think that directed effort to study them is crazy when that could be applied to trivialities about a technology that briefly caught their fancy.”

Dude, not everyone has the same priorities. Maximizing salary might not be the highest priority.

“Why are you so negative about equity grants? Because you radically overestimate the likelihood that your startup will succeed and radically overestimate the portion of the pie that will be allocated to you if the startup succeeds. Read about dilution and liquidation preferences on Hacker News or Venture Hacks, then remember that there are people who know more about negotiating deals than you know about programming and imagine what you could do to a program if there were several hundred million on the line.”

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (Kalzumeus Software)

“It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you . Bob is spending Bob’s budget . Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of his hiring budget: you get a new Macbook if you convince Bob to give you $5k extra, but Bob gets (if he is anomalously lucky) a dinner at TGIFridays if he convinces you to take $5k less.”

I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again (Ludicity)

“Work must go out. Faster than it goes in. Do you understand? If your backlog is getting bigger, then work is going into it faster than it is going out. Why is that happening? Fuck if I know, but it is probably totally unrelated to not doing Agile well enough.”

“If the problem is one of estimation, then commit to half as much work and see what happens . If you run out of work to do, you can always throw more things on there. If you haven’t even tried this, the most obvious thing on the planet, then you are in a cult and only you can save yourself. You have outsourced your thinking to people that don’t have brains.”

“[…] the problem is actually totally unrelated to Agile. The problem is really that most of these people are not good at their jobs. The part of the human mind that is supposed to recognize patterns and make plans has been utterly calcified somehow, and is only capable of repeating the same moves over and over. They would fail to manage with any methodology, and the thing I object to is that they’ve chosen to fail in a way that inconveniences other people.”

“I am deeply sympathetic, and will feel bad as I haymaker you through ten cycles of reincarnation. I don’t want to do this, but you’ve forced my hand.”

I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet (Ludicity)

“Now you’ve got fucking twenty, and I am hunting you on a deserted island. Was it worth it? Was it worth it, you absolute son of a bitch? You don’t have to live like this. I’ve gotten through my whole career without understanding how to use VLOOKUP. It’s possible, I swear. Just put the spreadsheet down and we can work with databases. Do you remember databases, and possibly happiness?”

“If you make me manually map unnamed_column_1 to 50 to fields in a database again, then you have initiated violence against me, and the horror that ensues will be self-defense.”

“Do you know how many times I’ve written a script that was really only run once? Never. It has never happened across my entire career. Every single thing I’ve ever written has been fucking welded into the soul of every organisation I’ve ever worked at. They’ll never get rid of any of it. My sins will echo for eternity, and I will be damned if I let anyone else get away with what I have. I will send you straight to hell and meet you there.”

“Someone should have fucking stopped me, and I must pay for my crimes by keeping this gate forever . I swear to you, there is nothing good past this gate. Turn away. Turn away. I beg you, turn away. Beyond this lies naught but trying to work out why all the numbers are wrong, only to realize that Excel thought those IDs were integers and dropped all the leading zeroes. This death is a kindness.”

Sports

Willie Mays: The Greatest to Ever Play by Robert Daniels (Roger Ebert)

This article included a link to this video.

Sport Science: Willie Mays ‘The Catch’ ⚾️ | ESPN MLB by ESPN MLB (YouTube)

I’m going to be in the U.S. again and this, I suppose, prepares me for the audiovisual onslaught that is life there. This is a two-minute video that feels like an exhausting half-an-hour, replete with useless statistics, breathless narration, and utterly idiotic analysis.

Please just go to Willie Mays himself to find out what he did:

“They throw the ball, I hit it; they hit the ball, I catch it.”

Willie Mays lived until he was 93 years old. Sometimes God is good.

Man, I just saw a Czechian fan singing his heart out during his country’s national anthem. He had both arms outstretched, each ending in a raised pointing finger, clearing indicating pure positivity. His head thrown back, belting it out. Around his neck his country’s flag knotted. It reminded me of Paul Rudd’s character Pete from Knocked up,

“I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles. […] Their smiling faces just point out your inability to enjoy anything.”

Skip to 33 seconds.

The Best of Paul Rudd in Knocked Up by Screen Bites (YouTube)

Fun

Heroes & Villains. by Jonathan Pie (YouTube)

Shown at the top of Social Climber (Oglaf):

“Q: Which mythological creature casts no shadow?
A: All of them.”

English is weird for so many reasons. Once you get into idioms, you’re completely lost.

“Nice can, lady.”

This can be something a plumber says to the owner of the house to indicate her bathroom is nice. They would never say that because “can” also means “ass” as in “butt” as in “buttocks”.

If the plumber said “nice cans”, then it would definitely be a comment on her breasts.

I think that the pangram “jettison” with the “j’ in the middle would be a particularly stingy NYT Spelling Bee. “jets”, “jeton”, … ???

Happy Birthday (Music Video) [2017 Version] by Weird Al Yankovic (YouTube)

“Well, what’s the matter little friend,
you think this party is the pits?

“Enjoy it while you can,
we’ll soon be blown to bits

“The monkeys in the Pentagon
are gonna cook our goose

“Their finger’s on the button,
all they need is an excuse

“It doesn’t take a military genius to see
We’ll all be crispy critters after World War III

“There’s nowhere you can run to,
nowhere you can hide

“When they drop the big one,
we all get fried.”

43 years later and still accurate.

So You've Grown Attached by DUST (YouTube)

Remy: Because It Got High (Afroman Parody)
by ReasonTV (YouTube)