Links and Notes for June 28th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation .”

“While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.”

Putin—Behind the Shoji by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“This pervasively Western–centric work makes it impossible, for anyone who relies solely on it, to see either the Russian leader or the nation he represents with any clarity, just as they are. One is invited to think Putin never acts but for the damage his chosen course will inflict on the U.S., the rest of the Atlantic world, and by extension the non–Western allies of this world.”

“It was in February of that year Putin gave his famously frank speech at the Munich Security Conference , wherein he attacked the West’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force — military force, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.””

“On the military side, the Western press and those who spoon-feed it must make up their minds whether Russia needs North Korean arms as it presses its intervention in Ukraine, as long reported, or whether North Korea is now happy that it will receive supplies of Russian military technology — as is now reported. They’ll get the story straight some day, I’m sure.”

“I was interested to see PetroVietnam bring Russia’s Novtek into the development of an oil exploration block in the South China Sea — but on Vietnam’s continental shelf, which leaves Block 11–2 clear of long-running disputes with China and other nations concerning maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea.”

“[…] as Putin knows very well, the Vietnamese are resolutely nonaligned in their foreign policies, in my judgment as nonnegotiably as India, where Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, chiseled this principle in stone in the mid–1950s. Since nonalignment is a policy reference the Americans have never accepted or coped with, from Nehru’s time to ours, Putin’s renunciation of blocs will have shown him up well in Hanoi last week.”

“For the obligatory quotations, Cave goes to Rahm Emmanuel, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Tokyo; Samuel Greene, a Russianist at King’s College London; Derek Grossman, a defense analyst at RAND, and Nguyen The Phuong, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“Not a single Asian official to tell us just one thing about how Asians think of these matters.”

As is standard.

“The Times has been pulling this stunt as long as I have been reading the paper: Send a correspondent to Kinshasa or Rio or Tokyo, and then he or she makes a habit of calling people in Washington or Canberra or London to tell readers all about what’s what in Kinshasa, etc.”

This is nearly exactly the plot of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

“You are supposed to think you have just read a report about events in this or that region, but you have read only how the imperium and its appendages want said events to be depicted in the media they more or less control.”

“Putin has disrupted, and not at all comprehensively, but one thing: the designs of the imperium and its appendages to continue projecting hegemonic power at the western end of the Pacific.”

The Impending Collapse of American Empire by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire. They make decisions based not on reality, but on their distorted visions of reality, one coloured by their own propaganda.”

““They genuinely believe the myths,” he concludes, “and of course are paid handsomely to do so. To help these agents of the racket get up in the morning there also exists, throughout the West, a well-stocked army of intellectuals whose sole purpose is to make theft and brutality acceptable to the general population of the US and its racketeering allies.””

“Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.”

“Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying US weapons. Egypt. which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems.”

“The US public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.”

““In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York City. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest. The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.””

“It is vital we see what lies before us. If we continue to be entranced by the images on the walls of Plato’s cave, images that bombard us on screens day and night, if we fail to understand how empire works and its self-destructiveness we will all, especially with the looming climate crisis, descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where the tools of repression, so familiar on the outer reaches of empire, cement into place terrifying corporate totalitarian states.”

‘Falling Gently Away’: The G–7 in Italy by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Axios had a wonderful headline on this, “World losers gather at G–7 summit.” Meloni was the enviable star, with a 40 percent approval rate, but Meloni was the odd one out: She has populist tendencies in a group of neoliberal authoritarians. Biden was second, with 37 percent, but this puts him behind Donald Trump in the American polls. The rest we can count among the walking wounded: Trudeau arrived at Savelletri with a 30 percent approval rate, Olaf Scholz with 25 percent, and then the hanging-by-fingernails group: Rishi Sunak (25 percent, about to be turned out of office), Emmanuel Macron (21 percent, tipped to lose in snap elections), Fumio Kishida (13 percent).”

90 Minutes That Shook the Liberals Awake by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“When these two frightening people descended into a bickering exchange concerning Biden’s golf handicap and Trump’s girth, I knew this first and probably last direct exchange between two incompetents contending for the world’s most powerful office was a lost cause. I lost 90 minutes of my time as it schussed down the chute. But never mind that. And never mind the media “analysts,” who rated the event like theater critics according to who turned in the best performance. The American people lost Wednesday night, and they lost big. And beyond Americans, the rest of the world lost, too.”

“Guy Debord, the tortured sage of the 1968 événements in Paris, warned us all those years ago that public life in what used to be the Western democracies had lapsed into sheer spectacle. This is what we saw last night, but let us not stop there. Our politics, our political process, our voting rituals: These were up on that studio stage last night right along with the two buffoons demanding our attention, and we must now see that these are all mere spectacle, too.”

“Paul Krugman: “The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw.” Something curious in the Krugman case. His piece, in which he argued that Kamala Harris would make a fine replacement should Biden drop out—amazing, Krugman—was pulled from the page a few hours after it was published. I’m not even going to speculate why the economist-turned-Democratic-ideologue took this decision.”

Oh, I will absolutely speculate. Whatever brains Paul Krugman may once have had have leaked out of his loud long ago. Paul Krugman’s continued prominence is yet another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that official awards are mostly bunk. He’s a hack, indistinguishable in his opinions from any other nattering nabob of the chattering classes.

The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza | Fault Lines Documentary by Al Jazeera English (YouTube)

A good third of this documentary is in Arabic, so you’ll need subtitles if you don’t speak it.

‘The President Is Now a King Above the Law,’ Sotomayor Warns in Chilling Dissent by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)

Oh, no. Something’s changed significantly. Everyone look over here, at the supreme court. Stop talking about Biden’s brain leaking out of his ears. Let’s instead talk about how presidents are suddenly unaccountable for their crimes. Sotomayor? Sit down and shut the fuck up. I’ve never heard any of you opine about the shocking crimes perpetrated by the nation, killing dozens of millions in the last decades, ruining countless other millions of lives.

None of those crimes matter. Instead, you’ll keep fighting about whether or not a bunch of yokels at the capitol building almost four years ago was an “insurrection”. Just stop. This is embarrassing. The justice to your left is browsing scuba trips that various wealthy sponsors will buy him if he votes as they’d like. There is crime everywhere. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Bush are wealthy and powerful, free as birds. So’s Trump. So will Biden be, when he’s allowed to retire.

Biden’s cheerily arming a genocide, like, right now, provably and without a care in the world. Trump may have been involved in what may or may not have been an insurrection, but was definitely not an insurrection because nothing happened, and there were no plans for anything to happen. But, sure, focus laser-like on what Trump might do, were he to return to power. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, murdering children right now.

But, yeah, let’s shit out pants about “our democracy in peril” or some shit. Darlin’, that ship has sailed. There is no democracy to speak of in the U.S. There is no real democracy for anyone anywhere as long as the empire exists. An obscure and already wildly misinterpreted ruling about presidential power doesn’t make an ounce of difference. I’m surprised anyone in power even bothers trying to make things look legal at all. Why even bother putting in the effort? We can’t stop them either way. Maybe their egos want to be stroked, so they not only want to get away with everything, they want us all to believe that they’ve not gotten away with anything. They want us to believe that they’ve won, fair and square.

Oh No, Now The US Has To Stop Imprisoning Ex-Presidents For Their Crimes! by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“It’s hilarious how the liberal commentariat is freaking out not because their president is a dementia patient but because they’re not sure if a dementia patient can win an election.”

Mother charged after daughter dies in car while she was working at Amazon by Trévon Austin (WSWS)

“Everything is done to paint Stallings as a negligent and contemptible mother, but absent from the official narrative is any questioning of the social conditions that would deprive a working parent of childcare, forcing them to bring their children to their workplaces. The fact that Stallings attempted to stay in communication with her daughter via text messages while she toiled inside of an Amazon sweatshop is buried in media coverage.”

“One should ask, however, why is a mother working at one of the world’s largest corporations not paid enough to afford childcare or otherwise provided assistance by the company? How could management and security at the Amazon facility be wholly ignorant of Stalling and her daughter’s predicament when Amazon warehouses—inside and out—are monitored 24/7?”

“Where were these resources when a mother in need was making the company profit, or prior to any other of the many fatal accidents that occur at Amazon? A tiny fraction of Bezos’ wealth would be enough to provide childcare and other resources for the workers who are the source of his profits.”

“According to a Bank of America analysis, an average two-income household can expect to spend 15 percent of their combined earnings on infant and childcare costs, but a single-income home could see these expenses account for up to 40 percent of household expenditures, more than food and even rent.”

“The death of Stallings’ daughter, as well as her own prosecution, are not only representative of the injustice of capitalist society but also demonstrate the need for the socialist organization of global society. Under socialism, plenty of resources would be made available to care for children and prevent such tragedies from occurring.”

SCOTUS Recap: Excessive January 6 Prosecutions Overturned by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“I think positive outcome in making clear to prosecutors that, no matter how much you hate criminal defendants, no matter how unpopular in the country their cause might be, you do not have the freedom to fabricate or invent new laws on the spot simply to achieve the outcome of putting them in prison because you believe that’s where they belong.”

It’s fascinating how often we need this reminder: you can’t just make up crimes that you think people you don’t like did, then prosecute them for them. This is wrong. It should be obvious, but it is not obvious to so many people.

”Gaza Is Complicated!” No It Isn’t. Grow Up. by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“So much abusive bullshit hides behind the false modesty of “This issue is too complicated for me to understand.” You see it with Gaza, where westerners act like an empire-backed military force dropping bombs on a giant concentration camp and systematically using rape as a weapon of torture and deliberately starving civilians is just way too compwicated for a dumb widdle baby wike me, goo goo ga ga.”

“There absolutely is a benefit to having real humility about the limits of your own understanding, and to knowing that from a certain point of view everything about this strange reality we were birthed into is mysterious and ungraspable. But if you use this fact to hide from your own responsibility toward understanding your world, your society and your interpersonal relationships, it’s just cowardice and dishonesty. If you use this truth to hide from reality, it becomes a lie.

“If you accept that we all have a responsibility to act in an ethical way, then you must also accept that we have a responsibility to form a mature understanding of our world and our surroundings, because all of our actions necessarily flow from our understanding. This won’t always be convenient or comfortable, just conducting one’s behavior in an ethical way isn’t always convenient or comfortable, but that’s what being a responsible adult is.”

My reply to the people who want to designate my neighborhood a “historic district” by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“I understand why many homeowners might be in favor of it. Homeowners already own homes. We homeowners are the wealthy incumbents, trying to prevent our housing monopoly from being disrupted. If housing is scarce, our houses will be worth more money, at least in theory. But if more housing is built, the price for existing houses, which we own, won’t increase so quickly. From an individual homeowner’s point of view, this looks like “big apartment buildings could depress my property values.”

“But I think this is self-deceptive. Having a house in a city with a lot of homeless people, and one where essential workers can’t afford to live, will also depress property values. It’s not as obvious. It’s not as acute. But it’s a much bigger problem and one that’s harder to deal with.

“Also, a house that is “worth a lot of money” is only worth a lot of money on paper. To actually get the money for my house, I’d have to sell it. Then I and my family would have nowhere to live. We’d have to get another house. And because of widespread attempts to keep housing in short supply, that place would be expensive. High property values only help you if you are planning to move out of the neighborhood to somewhere cheaper, or if you’re a very wealthy person who invests in multiple properties.

“I think letting people live in our neighborhood is good for the neighborhood. The suggested support letter says that current conditions “[allow] small businesses to flourish”. But what small businesses need to truly flourish is more customers.”

“I think allowing new people to share our neighborhood is part of the responsibility of living in a civil society.”

The Lies Continue, As a Matter of Principle by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“It’s not complicated, and your “Did we really screw up?” think piece is by itself an insult. Audiences know the answer: Yes. You’ve been screwing up for five years. Also, it isn’t a “Biden age” story, but a “Biden dementia” story. There are octogenarians who are competent to be president. Biden isn’t one. Audiences have known this since 2019, and the only people you’re impressing by saying otherwise are other media nitwits.”

“[…] I feel like screaming: YOU ARE ONLY TALKING TO EACH OTHER. Even as Biden on a minute-to-minute basis babbles about things like being the first black female president, officially reducing him to 1977-Elvis levels of incoherence, the excuses keep coming.”

“[…] the fastest way to lose audience is to lie to its face and make a show of not trusting it to make good decisions.”

“I don’t much care about the inner workings of the Washington Post, but this points to an impatience with the basic fact that a newspaper without readers is neither a business nor an activist’s bullhorn; it’s nothing at all.”

“Having been caught out in this, the business is still circling wagons. It won’t change, apparently even if it means losing the whole audience. That goes beyond partisanship to a new and mysterious place. Whether it’s turning biology upside down or ruling out the obvious suspect in the Nord Stream bombing or any of a dozen weird Covid myths, there’s been a conspicuous recent propaganda objective of trying to convince people of clearly false things. Often the issues are not even about party politics. Being wrong is a principle with these people. But what principle?”

Journalism & Media

Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump foot soldier, imperiling hundreds of obstruction charges by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“It’s like oh wow you’re saying powerful people won’t have to abide by the same rules as normal people in America anymore?”

“Person who lives in the hub of the US empire while it murders, starves and abuses people all around the world: “If Donald Trump wins, America might become a tyrannical force for evil!””

Jacob Crosse is one of the crazies at the WSWS. He doesn’t care whether this was a sound decision, that it was putting a leash on a justice department that was over-charging people, that charging people with things they didn’t do and putting them in prison for a long time is not a good thing, even if you don’t like those people.

He thinks that it’s OK to get people we know are bad, no matter how. That’s stupid.

But the WSWS is not without its faults. It’s hammering away at January 6th like it was the worst thing that ever happened in America. It’s not even the worst thing that happened that day.

Biden Trump “Debate” – Fiascos for Both Candidates by Ralph Nader

“Democratic operatives were aghast during and after the merciful end of this 90-minute look/see by an estimated 51 million viewers. Biden prepared for over a week with his debate advisors and probably was so overprepared as to be tightly wound. Also, he had a cold which he should have noted at the outset to explain his weak tone of voice.”

Oh, Ralph. You’re not really going to buy that bullshit, are you? They only came up with the “cold” excuse halfway through the meltdown, when the White House, in the infinite capacity for mendacity, started calling their minions in the press to begin brainwashing everyone that Joe Biden is not, in fact, mentally incompetent, but was valiantly soldiering on, despite a debilitating illness. When it heard commentators, who normally march in absolute lockstep with their orders, start panicking on-air and making up their own narrative—namely, that Joe Biden’s mind is pudding—the White House leapt in with the best thing that it could think of: Joe has a cold.

This isn’t particularly good, but that’s because everyone who works in the White House is “suffering from a cold”, i.e., their brains are mush. They don’t even respect us enough to make up a good lie. And Ralph Nader’s already promulgating it for them. Knock it off, Ralph. You’re better than that. Lying for the Democrats won’t stop Trump becoming president; it just drags you down with them.

There are two options. That Joe Biden has a cold and will bounce back, as vital as ever for the next … whatever he’s going to do, is not one of these options. One possibility is that the Biden Administration, world leaders, Congresspeople, and assorted lobbyists were all well-aware that Biden was in decline and they either said nothing or were properly suppressed by a complicit media, who also said nothing. The other is that the media is so spectacularly bad at its job that it didn’t notice. Neither option speaks well of anyone involved.

This is a snow job, pure and simple. Gaslighting on a national level. It’s fascinating to watch people pretend to be grappling with this question for the first time. They’re all a bunch of liars or cultists or both.

Labor

Our Weirdly Random Employment System by Ted Rall

“Human potential is the foundation of the system—yet there isn’t the slightest attempt to maximize it so that society extracts as much productivity as it can from as many employees as it can. Corporations call their personnel offices “human resources” while they squander those same assets.”

“State-run socialist economies like the Soviet Union and China under Mao deployed thorough occupational and aptitude testing regimens on their populations beginning in infancy. School coaches were trained to act as talent scouts, identifying athletes with potential early so they could be funneled into state-run institutions dedicated to building world-class teams of athletes tasked with making their countries proud in international competitions. Students with a knack for STEM were diverted into challenging curricula designed to pump out the world’s finest scientists. Whether a brilliant cyclist or poet or dancer or administrator was from a rich family in Moscow or a poor one from the Urals, there was a good chance their skills would come to the attention of authorities who could find a way to cultivate their abilities.”

“America wastes its geniuses. Great would-be novelists are pumping gas. Awesome should-be coders are serving coffee. Fantastic engineers are running themselves ragged in Amazon warehouses. At most, an American only works an average of 50 years. Compassion, humanism and macroeconomic national interest calls for an employment market that makes those five decades as satisfying and fulfilling as possible for as many people as possible.”

“Even as those with potential sink into depression and opioid addiction, the sub-par are elevated to positions they do not deserve and in which they cannot excel. So we have U.S. Senators who do not understand history or geopolitics; many do not even use the Internet they’re trying to regulate. Companies put CEOs in charge of enterprises they shouldn’t even part of, much less running into the ground.”

Build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s right-wing government! by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)

“Sir Keir Starmer takes his place at the head of a Labour government on a collision course with the British working class. He owes his “landslide” victory entirely to the hatred with which the Conservative government of the last 14 years was viewed, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist expression.

“These factors have placed a new reactionary monster in power, far to the right of any previous Labour leader, with little more than a third of the popular vote on a near record-low turnout.”

“[…] in just a few days’ time, Starmer will be flying to Washington DC to take part in a NATO summit of the political walking dead. He will join French President Emmanuel Macron, whose Ensemble party will likely have been barely kept in government by the grace of the New Popular Front. The senile US President Joe Biden teetering on the edge of forced removal as the Democratic candidate and the discredited German Chancellor Olaf Scholz complete the house of cards at the heart of the imperialist alliance.”

Economy & Finance

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled “facts” about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.”

“Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn’t have to care if it fucked up.”

“This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It’s a contest between “too rotten to stand” and “too big to care.””

“[…] they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat. that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos’s pig-butchering factories:”

“The 7th Circuit bougxht the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company’s objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who’s ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.”

“The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech’s scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals.”

“The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don’t inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs. The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can’t fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples’ lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.”

“This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can’t buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.”

The Fed’s ‘Chicken Run’: Why Sticking with High Rates Will Crash the Economy by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm (Scheer Post)

“The problem at its starkest is this: services inflation is heavily driven by surging increases in consumer spending on restaurants, travel, healthcare, and other higher-priced services. Most of this spending comes from the very rich: affluent, often older, Americans who have benefited from the outsized gains in the U.S. housing and stock markets in recent years. Record increases in household wealth have given the rich confidence to increase their spending, which is a big reason why the American economy has defied expectations of a slowdown in the face of considerably higher interest rates. This wealth effect is a major driver of persisting services inflation.”

“The wealthiest 1% of American households captured 30% of this spectacular rise in financial wealth, while the wealthiest 10% garnered 59% of the wealth gains (amounting to $21.7 trillion). The bottom 50% of the wealth distribution, in contrast, received a pitiful 5% of the recent aggregate increase in household wealth. Wealth is also disproportionately held by older Americans and, of course, whites. People aged 55 and over own nearly three-quarters of all household wealth. However, many older Americans face significant financial challenges: one-quarter of Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings.”

“[…] we find that the wealth effect accounts for almost all of the recent rise in American consumer spending. Economists at Moody Analytics and Visa concur, reporting similar impacts of higher household wealth on spending. In support of our argument, the figure (below) shows that prices have increased significantly faster during 2020-2023 for goods and services purchased by the richest 10% of U.S. households.”

“[…] minority of very rich Americans who own houses, stocks and cars, remain relatively unaffected by the higher interest rates. Their spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve’s push to slow growth and tame inflation through higher borrowing rates, because it rarely requires borrowing and because their ability to provide collateral secures them preferential rates when they do add debt.”

“We cannot rely on the Fed to get the economy out of this mess. We need fiscal and other policies, including serious efforts to regulate industries such as electricity production and transmission in the public interest, to address the underlying problems, not futile interest rate squeezes on the rest of the economy.”

Bring Back Capitalism by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“For those who aren’t fluent in rich-person bullshit, what Schwab and Dimon (and a long list of others, like Apple CEO Tim Cook and BlackRock’s Larry Fink) were proposing was that we take the same people who spent the last twenty years devouring Fed rescues and converting the savings of the middle class into Jackson Hole villas, and instead of hurling them off cliffs, put them in charge of society. They would additionally like taxpayers to fund a big enough safety net to guarantee the next generation of customers for, say, a depository bank. As in: “We screwed things up so badly, you need to give us even more leeway to make things right.” It’s enough to make the most mild-mannered person reach for something sharp.”

“The real story of the bubble era was and is the fusing of state and corporate power. Waves of bailouts created a class of predatory “Too Big To Fail” super-firms that could siphon off massive profits without exposure to market risk, while repaying political partners in both parties with financial backing. The resultant incestuous jumble has been an economy led by a handful of market-immune actors suckling a never-emptying teat of public subsidies, while squeezing an expanding population of everyone else, i.e. the ordinary people and small businesses forced to stare down both barrels of capitalism’s business end.”

“It’s phony competition, but real profits are extracted. Winners preserve gains under mazes of incomprehensible tax shelters, then retire to wealth archipelagoes in the Hamptons or the Vineyard or Davos or any of a dozen other places where failing schools, immigration, crime, poverty, and other issues make no appearance. It’s infuriating and people absolutely should be outraged,”

“Selectively removing the fangs of the market made unfairness an indelible feature of American life, and made these companies and their idiot leaders permanent parasites on the neck of society. In hindsight, they needed big, healthy doses of good old-fashioned capitalist failure.”

“If you fall for this, as a lot of young left-leaning intellectuals seem to have done, you’re the latest in a long line of suckers taken by these people. The leaders of the finance sector are the world’s most expert liars, making CIA chiefs look like drunk poker-playing tourists in comparison. What they’re after with this new “evils of capitalism” campaign is laughable in its transparency. They want protection from markets, not reform of them.”

“During the crisis, the constant demand of the worst banks was to be excused from market consequence. A notorious example was the “ temporary emergency action ” banning short sales of finance stocks in the summer of 2008. SEC chief Christopher Cox, who said the ban was necessary to “restore equilibrium to markets,” suggested short-sellers were guilty of “market manipulation,” and even opened an investigation into the crime of correctly gauging the health of the banking sector.”

“This sidestepping of common sense was so outrageous that even Saturday Night Live noticed, doing a cold open in which Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner explained that conducting accurate stress tests might “unfairly stigmatize” bailout recipients who were “not good at banking””

These people are all LARPing.

“It showed one of our premier Too Big To Fail firms, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, meeting with the Biden White House to find out if the administration is “asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?” This is what “stakeholder capitalism” looks like in the wild: back-room deals between governments and quasi-monopolies on surveillance or censorship or some other illiberal practice, disguised as a form of social programming.”

“That the WEF cloaks this as a response to a “Greta Thunberg effect” — global executives abandoning the profit motive out of reverence for a teenage girl threatening to skip school until adults solved climate change — is the biggest insult of all. How dumb do they think we are?”

Mission Statement − Guter Rat für Rückverteilung by Marlene Engelhorn

“In Österreich hortet das reichste Prozent der Bevölkerung bis zu 50 Prozent des Nettovermögens. Einem Hundertstel der Gesellschaft gehört also knapp die Hälfte des Vermögens. Und 99 Prozent der Menschen müssen sich mit der anderen Hälfte begnügen. Fast vier Millionen Haushalte plagen sich täglich, um durchzukommen. Und das eine Prozent? Hat meistens einfach geerbt.”

“Wir sprechen von Dynastien, die über Generationen hinweg Reichtum und Macht anhäufen. Und sich damit aus unserem Sozialwesen herausziehen, als ginge sie das nichts an. Ich komme auch aus so einer Dynastie. Mein Reichtum wurde angehäuft, noch bevor ich auf die Welt gekommen bin. Angehäuft wurde er, weil andere Menschen die Arbeit gemacht haben, aber meine Familie das Eigentum am Unternehmen und somit alle Ansprüche auf die Früchte dieser Arbeit mitunter steuerfrei vererben konnte.”

“Vermögen entsteht immer aus der Gesellschaft heraus. Ein paar Menschen werden reich, weil sie anderen ihre Zeit abkaufen und daraus Profit machen. Weil sie ein Patent auf ein Produkt haben, das andere dringend brauchen. Weil sie ein Grundstück kaufen, das mehr wert wird, weil die Gesellschaft Infrastruktur rundherum baut. Weil sie die Umwelt vernichten, um an Rohstoffe zu kommen.”

“Und wir Überreiche werden immer reicher, das Geld wandert jeden Tag wie magnetisch in unsere Tresore. Das reichste Prozent der Welt kassiert zwei Drittel aller Vermögenszuwächse. Und gleichzeitig steigt auch die extreme Armut wieder an – zum ersten Mal seit einem Vierteljahrhundert. Als hätten wir die Monarchie nie abgeschafft.”

“Unser Steuersystem bevorzugt ausgerechnet die, die ohnehin im Überfluss leben:Arbeit wird hoch besteuert, Vermögen niedrig bis gar nicht.”

“Wieso sollte ich allein entscheiden dürfen, wie ein Vermögen an die Gesellschaft rückverteilt wird – das nur aus dieser Gesellschaft heraus entstanden ist? Was mit einem großen Vermögen passiert – darüber sollte auch eine große Gruppe gemeinsam entscheiden. Nicht eine:r allein.”

Science & Nature

Cleantech has an enshittification problem by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“For example, your EV could download your local power company’s tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking.”

This only sounds interesting because it’s using technology to solve problems that capitalism has created.

“If you’re making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months’ capital in the bank?”

“But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.”

“There’s an obvious business objection to this: it will reduce investment in innovative cleantech because investors will perceive these restrictions as limits on the expected profits of their portfolio companies. It’s true: these measures are designed to prevent rent-extraction and other enshittificatory practices by cleantech companies, and to the extent that investors are counting on enshittification rents, this might prevent them from investing.”

We don’t want to encourage business models that favor profit-seeking over providing value.

Environment & Climate Change

Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time by Frank Celia (Quillette)

“By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.”

“For a start, no one has fully documented the massive amounts of microplastics (MPs) at issue here. As I’ll demonstrate below, not only do plastic recyclers appear to be a major source of MP contamination, they may very well be the number one source of primary microplastic pollution on the entire planet. So, from an environmental perspective, recycling plastic could be doing far more harm than good. Even some environmentalists are coming around to this view.”

“Finally, if plastic recycling really is a net negative, what then? Humanity still faces a dire plastics waste problem. We’re making 400 million metric tons of this non-biodegradable material a year, nearly half of which is in the form of single-use items that go directly into the trash, and we’re on track to hit 1,100 million metric tons by 2050”

“The reflexive answer from environmentalists is “Make less plastic!” That sounds reasonable, but on closer inspection, it lacks widespread feasibility. Vital industries like healthcare and agriculture would grind to a halt without the benefit of single-use plastics, not to mention the ubiquity of reusable plastics in just about every aspect of modern life.”

You mean that we can accomplish nothing on this scale because we can’t figure out how to profit from it. Quit your bullshit. We don’t “need” single-use plastics there. We haven’t even tried not using it yet. There is so much profit in medical care. There is so much profit in agriculture. So much of it is captured by so few. There are definitely ways to improve here.

“[…] the less-than-perfect yet practical solution of waste-to-energy—that is, burning plastic garbage as fuel—needs to be reevaluated.”

That’s what Switzerland has always done. There is almost no plastic recycling here. They keep saying that there is no plausible way of actually doing it. I guess they were just being honest.

“Given the plant’s state-of-the-art credentials, Brown doubts that other reclaimers around the world are doing a better job at preventing MPs pollution. Nor could she foresee any technological fix. To filter and capture such small particles, reclaimers would need to install full-fledged wastewater-treatment machinery—an economically unfeasible option that, in any case, would still fail to address the atmospheric microplastics.”

“When an Australian broadcaster asked Brown how the UK plant reacted to her groundbreaking study, she had this to say: “So we didn’t actually get a response from the plastic recycling facility once we’d published the research. I think we were really lucky in the first place to gain access to take samples because a lot of the waste industry—and within that the plastic recycling industry—is so closed-doored and quite secretive, both outwards towards the public and within the industry.””

That’s always a good sign that everything is going swimmingly, on the up-and-up, and is definitely going to benefit society as a whole.

“The sad truth is that, unlike paper, glass, and metal recycling, the science underpinning plastic recycling has always been, at best, questionable. From the beginning, the industry’s own chemists repeatedly told them it wouldn’t work . Most types of plastic can’t be recycled at all, and the ones that can become more toxic during the process. “The reality is that plastics can only be recycled—or more accurately ‘downcycled’—once, rarely twice,” the white paper concludes. It then becomes trash just like virgin plastic. Recycling merely delays its journey to a landfill or worse.”

“For decades, recyclers got away with these failures because, up until 2018, they were selling almost all their trash to China and calling it “recycled,” even though, in reality, tons of it were being incinerated, landfilled, or dumped in waterways. The reclaimers were basically skimming the most profitable plastic items off the top and then exporting the rest. In addition to exposing plastic recycling’s inherent flaws and pretty much destroying its business model, the China ban also pushed the industry into some dubious behaviour.”

That is a typically overly generous formulation from Quillette. “dubious” == “criminal”. Their business model was threatened, so they just took it out on the environment and society instead. Well … they couldn’t have been expected to just go out of business, could they? Of course not. They were forced into immoral and criminal acts, the poor dears.

“When China closed its doors in 2018, developed countries in the West resorted to diverting millions of tons of garbage to Southeast Asian countries—often whether they wanted it or not, a practice that unleashed environmental havoc on the region. A web of organised-crime groups, shady middlemen, and legitimate recycling companies used falsely labelled containers, circuitous shipping routes to obscure ports of origin, and garbage disguised as other products to fool these nations into accepting our trash. One of the biggest culprits is California, paradoxically because of its strict green laws. A 2011 state law requires California cities and counties to “recycle” 75 percent of their waste but does not specify how to accomplish this goal. Many officials there feel they have no choice but to export their way to compliance.”

Because they have no principles. Because they’re criminals. This is not acceptable behavior. There is no gray area here. You just made shit roll downhill onto the must less fortunate and those incapable of defending themselves.

“It won’t take long for ambitious plaintiffs’ attorneys to realise that they can use reclaiming plants as a pathway to enormous financial settlements from deep-pocketed plastic manufacturers in the same way that their colleagues used military bases to target PFAS manufacturers. Unfortunately, unlike petrochemical companies, recyclers can’t afford to write multibillion-dollar cheques.”

“Leaving aside the question of whether or not large-scale single-use bans are even politically feasible given the enormous influence of the oil and petrochemical industries, such solutions contain two fatal flaws. First, single-use accounts for only 50 percent—at most—of all plastic manufactured, so even if somehow all of it were banned, we’d still have a significant problem. And second, the medical world alone would grind to a disastrous halt without single-use plastics. Realistically, unless civilisation plans to return to life in grass huts, plastics will remain an essential pillar of modern life for the foreseeable future.”

Oh, fuck off. This is such a copout way of thinking. It’s either profligate waste and environmental destruction of living in grass huts. Listen to yourself. You’re a buffoon.

Record-breaking heat wave hits 150 million in the US by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In San Francisco, the National Weather Service said, “It cannot be stressed enough that this is an exceptionally dangerous and lethal situation.” The weather service warned about the impact of temperatures in California, which are expected to be between 100 to 120 F (38 to 49 C), saying, “It may not seem so if you live near the coast, but an event of this scale, magnitude, and longevity will likely rival anything we’ve seen in the last 18 years for inland areas.””

“The temperatures in 92 major US cities are expected to reach dangerous levels on Saturday and Sunday. The New York Times published a table that showed Saturday temperatures for New Orleans, Louisiana (109 °F); Baton Rouge, Louisiana (109 °F); Mobile, Alabama (109 °F); Jackson, Mississippi (99 °F); Hattiesburg, Mississippi (106 °F); Gilbert, Arizona (110 °F); Mesa, Arizona (109 °F); Houston, Texas (109 °F); Chesapeake, Virginia (109 °F); and Richmond, Virginia (106 °F).

“The heat dome responsible for the extreme temperatures is forecast to reach near-record strength and remain stationary over California and the Southwestern United States for seven to 10 days.”

Medicine & Disease

Threat posed by H5N1 bird flu deepens, as public health authorities delay action by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“In another interview, former CDC director in the Trump administration Dr. Robert Redfield said, “I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.” He added that a bird flu pandemic would have considerably greater mortality than COVID-19, placing the figure at “somewhere between 25 and 50 percent mortality,” while the death rate for COVID-19 has been estimated at 0.6 percent.”

“Redfield’s decades of experience in public health and discussions with experts on flu viruses and the evolution of H5N1 over nearly three decades underscore the significance of his warnings. That this particular virus has insinuated itself into livestock and animals, such as cats and mice, known to habitate homes and farms, indicates the potential ability for the virus to mutate further and potentially evolve to easily infect people via respiratory pathways.”

Never forget how Biden threatened our lives (Reddit)

You're looking at a winter of severe illness and death

“We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this.

“For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”

This is still up on the site, in Press Briefing by White House COVID-⁠19 Response Team and Public Health Officials on December 17, 2021 (WhiteHouse.Gov)

Art & Literature

I Went To Cannes To See The Most Insane Movie Of The Year by Patrick (H) Willems (YouTube)

“Tell me you’re an American without telling me you’re an American.”

​ @AkiVainio No kidding. That was a painfully ignorant segment, even after Patrick had had time to consider what had happened. He showed his little personal, “I’m so shocked” video, which should have been deleted the next morning and then, instead of thinking “I wonder if France shows movies in languages that people know?”, he went on to say that “other Americans” also walked out because they can’t read the movie listings in a foreign country. Did he consider whether French films are shown in French in the U.S.? Or Japanese ones? Of course not.

The listings aren’t intuitive, but they do write it. In German-speaking Switzerland, it says E/df (for English audio w/German and French subtitles) or D (for German audio) after each film. In French-speaking Switzerland, they write VOST (original version; sub-titles) or VA (German dub) or VF (French dub). In Geneva, they even translate the film titles (Furiosa: Une Saga Mad Max), but they show it in VO (Version Originale).

Americans are likely to make a mistake and just assume all listings are the same, ignoring the letters afterwards, because they don’t know a system with multiple languages.

I imagine he was staying in a large city in Switzerland, probably Geneva, where the English-speaking population is quite large due to the foundations and companies headquartered there. If he’d been in a smaller town, then the movie would have been dubbed in French or German as well. Patrick just got lucky in Geneva. Otherwise, he’d have been ranting even longer about it.

It’s a shame that Patrick had to carry his indignation so far. I guess he’d gotten invested in his being 100% right about this. English isn’t a native language everywhere. Don’t be an ignoramus.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Robin DiAngelo Kicks Karen’s Butt (Book Excerpt ¼) by Norman Finkelstein (Substack)

“She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black—and her canvas one color scheme—white over black. She is the bulimic sourpuss in Mike Leigh’s “Life is Sweet” who snaps “racist” when her sister harmlessly puns on a word. What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore! Who, by the way, would choose to be in the company of a one-trick antiracist pony nonstop expostulating on her or everyone else’s racism?”

“DiAngelo isn’t just a dullard possessed. She’s positively a menace. As if a Lavrentiy Beria wannabe, DiAngelo is on the prowl 24/7, bracing herself to pounce on, if not bourgeois class enemies, then white racist enemies; to ferret out even those who “subjectively” don’t harbor an errant thought but still “objectively” serve the nefarious cause, if not of bourgeois supremacy, then of white supremacy. Once having exposed the race (before it was class) enemy, DiAngelo orchestrates a group “session,” a Purge Trial, to gently minister, like the most refined of torturers, her thoughtful “feedback,” so as to publicly humiliate and degrade participants as she chews them up and spits them out, for their own good, of course, until finally, kneeling in contrition, begging for forgiveness, screaming for surcease, they admit it, they blubber out: I’m a racist!”

“It might, incidentally, be asked, if racism is buried irretrievably and irrevocably in the labyrinthine chambers of our interior cyberspace, and if it replicates itself in structures and institutions even absent human intercession, then what’s the point of her coaching? However kickass her “sessions,” DiAngelo plainly can no more “interrupt” racism than a twig can “interrupt” an oncoming locomotive. Shouldn’t she counsel her clients that the fee she charges would be better spent feeding little brown babies in Africa? (I know, racist.)”

Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“And now they’re staring down a whole lifetime of frog-eating and starting to feel like maybe something, somewhere has gone wrong. But they don’t know what else to do. They’ve so thoroughly subjugated their desires that they don’t even know what their desires are anymore. (These students inevitably end up as consultants or bankers or managers at tech companies, industries that richly reward people who are willing to work very hard for no particular reason. And they usually burn out after a few years—“burnout” is just a short way of saying “too many frogs in the belly.”) This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life is like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you’re so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree, but you’re also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment, and you’re not sure why.”

The quiet return of eugenics by Ed Husain (The Spectator)

“Emerging technology is about to present parents with a set of ethical questions that make the usual kinds of debates – breast milk or formula? Nanny or daycare? – seem trivial. We have always had the power (more or less) to control our children’s nurture. Before long – perhaps in just a few years – any parent who can afford to will have control over the minutest details of a child’s nature too.”

Wealthy parents: the people least philosophically and morally equipped to answer these questions.

“Polygenic screening permits parents to choose the very best children, according to their own preferences, almost entirely removing the role of luck in the normal genetic lottery.”

Bullshit. Just bullshit. This is a fantasy believed by people with no idea of the science of genetics.

“The screening itself is expensive, but not prohibitively so – probably in the region of £7,000-£12,000, which is less than a year of full-time daycare in London.”

Listen to yourself. Just listen to yourself.

“‘It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,’ as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted in 2020. ‘It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.’

“‘This is racist trash, Richard,’ replied Dan Hicks, professor of archaeology at Oxford, putting ideology before facts, and highlighting the key contemporary objection to the use of the word ‘eugenics’ (if not, as we shall see later, the actual practice of it).”

This Dan hicks is an idiot. A society has the luxury of not practicing eugenics if it has more than enough resources to handle the drawbacks of not doing so. If it is overwhelmed by negative effects, it will ameliorate them or perish. No marrying your sister or mother is eugenics. We already have it. Now we’re just quibbling over the degree.

“[…] it is common to find people on the left who reject the role of nature altogether, insisting that humans are born as blank slates.”

Because they’re idiots. Stop arguing with idiots online.

“Marie Stopes, her British counterpart, who gave her name to Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the world’s foremost providers of abortion services to this day. So great was Stopes’s eugenics fervour that in 1947 she forbade her son from marrying a beautiful heiress because the woman was short-sighted. After he went ahead anyway, Stopes cut him out of her will.”

“The social and political differences between the two human species would then become so enormous that the fracturing of polities would be likely, with genetically enhanced people eventually forming their own nation states that exclude the non-enhanced.”

We’ve already done this, but with money and power. Quit your bullshit.

“For most of our species’ history, something in the region of 40-50 per cent of children would die before their 15th birthdays. Now, the rate globally is at about 4 per cent, and much lower in the rich world.”

“[…] ensures that people who in other eras would have died as children – perhaps including me, as a fairly sickly asthmatic – are now able to pass on the genes that make them vulnerable to premature disease and death. This so-called ‘crumbling genome’ problem means that without the use of genetic enhancement technology of some kind, we will become steadily more genetically sick as a species: childhood cancers will become more common, our immune systems will become weaker and we will become steadily more reliant on modern medical technology to allow us to weather threats. If for any reason those medical systems fail, it’s game over.”

Technology

LLMs & AI

AI is good for rehashing commonly accepted beliefs, not for discovering anything new by Jeremy Howard (Twitter)

“Absolutely any time I try to explore something even slightly against commonly accepted beliefs, LLMs always just rehash the commonly accepted beliefs.

“As a researcher, I find this behaviour worse than unhelpful. It gives the mistaken impression that there’s nothing to explore.”

Programming

Serving a billion web requests with boring code by Bill Mill

“The function buildQuery which implemented the core part of this scheme is a single 250 line function, heavily commented, which lays out the logic in a nearly flat way. The focus is kept squarely on business requirements, instead of on fancy code.”

“If an app encountered any unexpected or missing configuration, it refused to start and threw noticeable, hopefully clear, errors. I tried hard to make it so that if the apps actually started up, they would have everything they needed to run properly.”

“I should instead have tested against a live database, especially given that we were working mostly with immutable databases and wouldn’t have had to deal with recreating it for each test.”

“Each table in the database had an accompanying script that would generate a subset of the data for use in local development, since the final database was too large to run on a developer’s machine. This let each developer work with a live, local, copy of the database and enabled efficient development of changes. I highly recommend building in this tooling from the start, it saves you from either trying to add it in once your database grows large, or having your team connect to a remote database, making development slower.”

Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

“You’re probably working for a company that is at least ostensibly rethinking global commerce or reinventing payments on the web or pursuing some other suitably epic mission. In that context, devoting any of your limited attention to innovating ssh is an excellent way to fail. Or at best, delay success.”

“Adding technology to your company comes with a cost. As an abstract statement this is obvious: if we’re already using Ruby, adding Python to the mix doesn’t feel sensible because the resulting complexity would outweigh Python’s marginal utility. But somehow when we’re talking about Python and Scala or MySQL and Redis people lose their minds , discard all constraints, and start raving about using the best tool for the job.”

“Your function in a nutshell is to map business problems onto a solution space that involves choices of software.”

“We call the baggage “operations” and to a lesser extent “cognitive overhead.” You have to monitor the thing. You have to figure out unit tests. You need to know the first thing about it to hack on it. You need an init script. I could go on for days here, and all of this adds up fast.”

“The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.”

“It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this.”

“One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort.”

“It’s helpful to write down exactly what it is about the current stack that makes solving the problem prohibitively expensive and difficult.”

“This process is not daunting, and it’s not much of a hassle. It’s a handful of questions to fill out as homework, followed by a meeting to talk about it. I think that if a new technology (or a new service to be created on your infrastructure) can pass through this gauntlet unscathed, adding it is fine.”

Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures by Alex Kladov (matklad)

“There’s a fascinating Rust library, loom, which can be used to thoroughly test lock-free data structures. I always wanted to learn how it works. I still do! But recently I accidentally implemented a small toy which, I think, contains some of the loom’s ideas, and it seems worthwhile to write about that. The goal here isn’t to teach you what you should be using in practice (if you need that, go read loom’s docs), but rather to derive a couple of neat ideas from first principles.”

Sports

EM 2024 – die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden, die sich kaputtgespart haben by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Wenn nun bei der EM aber die Fans beider Mannschaften mit dem Zug anreisen und dann auch noch nach dem Spiel in ihre Hotels, die nicht nur wegen der mangelnden Attraktivität, sondern vor allem wegen der nicht einmal im Ansatz ausreichenden Bettenkapazität meist nicht in Gelsenkirchen, sondern in Essen, Düsseldorf oder Köln untergebracht sind, zurückreisen wollen, ist Chaos vorprogrammiert. In „bösen Autokratien“ baut man für ein solches Szenario leistungsfähige Bahnhöfe. Im „demokratischen Deutschland“ spart man den Nah- und Fernverkehr kaputt und wundert sich dann, dass die „undankbaren Ausländer“ sich darüber wundern, dass hierzulande nichts funktioniert.”

Fuck the Modern NBA by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The term “dominant” is an aesthetic one, an emotional one, not an objective one. But that’s OK because I have an aesthetic and emotional relationship to sports. The Celtics might be better than the 2000 Lakers in L-V@RP, but watching Shaq throw giant men around without appearing to really try and then destroying the rim, again and again, is just always going to be more impressive than watching Jayson Tatum chuck another missed three. Sorry. So is watching Michael Jordan attack the hoop ruthlessly, so is watching Hakeem Olajuwon put opposing centers in a blender, so is watching Steph Curry and Klay Thompson shooting threes at ungodly percentages with their impeccable form. That’s what dominance looks like. Jayson Tatum on a three-on-one break pulling up to clang yet another awkward three off the front rim, and doing so because that’s what he’s been explicitly coached to do, doesn’t look like dominance. It looks like an ugly, boring war of attrition. And I don’t care that it’s effective. I don’t care. I’m not a GM. The point of being a fan is not to be a mini GM, despite what Twitter would have you believe. The point of being a fan is to watch and enjoy the product, and I don’t enjoy the product. It’s frenetic, there’s no rhythm, and it gives me exactly the feeling I get when a middle infielder who weighs 180 pounds sopping wet takes a wild hack and flies out with a 3-1 count because he’s been taught to prioritize launch angle. Do you really want to be baseball, NBA? Do you really?”

“It’s just a brutal, brutal sport to enjoy right now. The product gets more and more boring over time. Every team plays identically, and that’s statistically true, so don’t fight me on it. The pundits are obsessed with being smarter than everyone and they won’t allow any challenge to their most sacred nostrum, which is that the league has never had more talent. Perhaps this is true, in some objective sense, but I don’t watch basketball with a protractor, and this supposedly incredibly-talented league sure is full of guys like Donovan Mitchell and Anthony Davis and, yes, Jayson Tatum, who it’s simply impossible for me to be inspired by. Yes, I’m sure Davis has more midichlorians than Shawn Kemp and will rate far higher on the Ringer’s Top 1000 list that Kevin O’Connor will be working on until he’s 80. Cool. If you’d rather watch Davis shoot another half-hearted three and then complain to the ref than watch Shawn Kemp, I don’t know what to say to you other than “eat shit.””

Fun

cursed_rhymes (Reddit)

We are reaching the second tower … allahuakbar

I laughed out loud at this, not because 9–11 was funny, but because the commentator so nicely weaponized it to troll a typically stupid post for engagement.

Jill Biden: ‘I Hit That On The Daily’ (The Onion)

“For anyone wondering if Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is still up to the task of the presidency, I submit as evidence the handprints on my raw red ass, which show the man in the Oval Office is a pure fuck machine capable of making me come again and again and again, the way the leader of the free world should.” Dr. Biden went on to say that the president only stumbled during the debate last week because his mouth was so tired from a night spent “jowls deep” in her pussy.”

AMERICA F#K YEAH! MUSIC VIDEO Team America World Police THEME SONG (YouTube)

You can America, Fuck Yeah Lyrics

Video Games

Against Slop by Noah Caldwell-Gervais (The Baffler)

“In video games like the ubiquitous Fortnite or Blizzard’s recent Diablo 4, major releases often have “seasons” that heavily encourage cyclical spending. Every three months the game adds new content and asks the player to repeat the experience. The player exchanges between seven to twenty-five dollars to gild the stories they’ve already completed with extra objects, materials, and costumes—real money spent only for the privilege of sinking in the requisite time to acquire these virtual items, creating yet another loop of increasingly meaningless time usage. Fortnite came out in 2017. In 2023 the game generated all by itself a total $4.4 billion of income. A sum larger than the GDP of some countries, generated in one year,”

“Deathloop is a story of a man whose inability to escape the infinite, meaningless repetitions of a day of supposedly fun activities is driving him insane with existential misery—a story quite familiar to players trapped by seasonal content on a treadmill of pretend prizes and endless checklists. Blackreef is small, though. If Cole had a whole world at his disposal and not just a remote island full of jackasses, would he have been so desperate to escape?”

“Elden Ring presents a once-flourishing kingdom literally consumed by creeping nihilism and reflexive despair, which gives sympathetic resonance to the player’s determined and confident attempts to surmount these challenges. The most powerful or villainous enemies withdraw into themselves and let the world rot, while the weakest literally cower from the player, so exhausted by the idea of another painful death. Not the player, though: they exist in deliberate dramatic contrast to these characters by virtue of their own interactive participation with the world, making them the hero as both part of the text and as a meta-textual frame for the whole story.”

The incentive to do something new, or take a risk, or ever definitively say “This experience is over now” is vanishingly small against the profits that come from cyclically remonetizing what is already familiar.

“Perhaps the problem with Elden Ring as an example is that it’s a masterpiece. It captured the imagination of millions. Games as an industry, instead of an artistic medium, don’t want that kind of success for only the games that are worthy of it. The industry needs to make money like that on the games built without subtlety, or craft, or heart. The industry needs to pull a profit off the slop too, and there is nothing they won’t gut or sell out to do it. If the old way was to tax failure, the new way is to dilute success, to treadmill the experience such that it never reaches a destination. Just one more quarter, one more season pass. The best games are those that question their own assumptions, communicating something more than just being the game of it. Many do not, and most cannot: the money is only in the repetitions.”

“It is a crushing tidal wave of cheap slop, a response to the hunger for more content that makes content both infinite and empty, starving even as it feeds. The incentive to do something new, or take a risk, or ever definitively say “This experience is over now” is vanishingly small against the profits that come from cyclically remonetizing what is already familiar.”