Links and Notes for December 20th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Gen-x Voters– Breakfast Club

Israel To Annex The West Bank – Why Now? And What Are The Likely Scenarios? by Ramzy Baroud (Z Network)

“Israel’s aims for colonial expansion also received a boost in recent days. Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria, Israel immediately began invading large swathes of the country, reaching as far as the Quneitra governorate, less than 20 kilometers away from the capital, Damascus.”

Israel, Not The ‘Liberators’ Of Damascus, Will Decide Syria’s Fate by Jonathan Cook (Z Network)

“The US and UK are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation. To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 – 18 years after his release from prison.”

A Penny For Your Thoughts by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“On the Neely side, here was another white man acquitted of killing a black man. If the races were reversed, would the jury have been so accommodating of the excesses of the chokehold? Neely hadn’t yet done anything to physically harm anyone, and talk is cheap. This is especially true of the ranting of a man who was mentally ill. Sure, he had priors, but that wasn’t known to anyone on the train and so could not have entered into the calculus of Penny’s actions.”

“He could have turned away from the fracas, and if Neely then harmed a passenger on the train, it wouldn’t be his problem. But instead, he stood up to help others, at personal risk and without any personal benefit. That the end was tragic does not turn Penny from good Samaritan to murderer, and that the person killed was mentally ill, homeless, drugged and black wasn’t the cause of Neely’s demise, but his threatening conduct and assertion that he wasn’t afraid to die.”

As Greenfield said, just previously, it was “just threats”. The only fracas was the one that Penny started. This is classic preemptive warfare where the other side didn’t even threaten any specific harm. Penny just acted as if a grizzly bear was loose on the train. From what I heard, he didn’t even try to talk Neely down, didn’t even try to find out whether that was possible before he threw him in a chokehold.

Forever Again: How Holocaust Survivors Become Holocaust Revivors by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Israel is engaged in a concerted effort to annihilate the Palestinian people, an American financed and facilitated genocide playing out in real time across a million flickering screens. The bombs never stop and there is no place left to hide that they won’t hit twice. The violence is so relentless that it’s impossible to keep track of it without becoming frighteningly desensitized to the endless horror in the process. Every day is another massacre. Every day is another mangled mosaic of screaming children and obliterated limbs. It’s just hospital after hospital, refugee camp after refugee camp, bomb after bomb after bomb after goddamn bomb.”

“The Nakba, though rooted in a campaign of Zionist terrorism that both predated and colluded with the Third Reich, began only two short years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Some 7 million European Jews were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany. How in any god’s name could those same people just turn around and commit the same horrors against another totally unrelated population of stateless people?”

“how could a nation of holocaust survivors become a nation of holocaust revivors? And this is where I take a sad sad song and make it death metal because as horrific as that scenario might be, it is not the least bit unusual. It actually happens a lot and Israel’s real founding fathers back in Washington actually have a long history of exploiting such horrors in the name of globalist brinksmanship.”

“[In Cambodia] Over 600,000 people were killed. Another two million out of a population of just seven million were rendered refugees with many taking shelter in caves just to avoid the bombs that seemed to obliterate any two stones standing atop each other. Rice production dropped by over 80% and malnutrition became the norm. It was also during this heinous campaign that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge grew exponentially, from a rag-tag militia of fewer than 5,000 in 1970 to the massive army of 70,000 who took Phnom Penh in 1975.”

“[In Rwanda] during a 100-day campaign of terror, militias composing of the nation’s Hutu majority slaughtered around one million ethnic Tutsis.”

“The tragedy actually began in 1990 when an army of American and British trained Tutsi refugees invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, led by the former Director of Ugandan Intelligence, Paul Kagame, who was conveniently trained in psychological warfare at Fort Leavenworth. For 42 long months, the RPF launched a brutal campaign of ethnic terror against Rwanda’s Hutu population. Villages were raided, refugee camps were torched, tens of thousands were carted away by the truckload to be slaughtered in soccer stadiums or tortured to death in Akagara National Park which had been transformed into a colossal open-air crematorium.”

“Then President Bill Clinton actually ordered the removal of UN forces after the Habyarimana assassination specifically so Kagame’s RPF could exploit the mayhem to take power, which they did but only after killing several hundred thousand more Hutu civilians during the resulting melee. And Paul Kagame still runs Rwanda today like an African Pinochet, opening his markets to foreign plunder while he continues to pursue the final solution to the Hutu question deep inside the Congo where his men and their own proxies are responsible for the deaths of millions.”

“This madness only stops when we all stop and recognize that we are all getting played here and that the people playing us don’t give a flying fuck about any color but green […]”

“[…] those who rule through a monopoly on the use of violence are the real problem and the final solution is a stateless society with no tribe powerful enough to dominate another.”

US-sponsored war of regime change devastates Syria by Jean Shaoul (WSWS)

“A plethora of pseudo-left groups rushed to promote these forces as “revolutionaries.” They made no attempt to explain who these “revolutionaries” were—in many cases discredited former regime figures. They ignored the class forces involved. They did not bother to describe their political programme, or to explain why feudal Gulf despots who outlaw all opposition to their rule at home would support a progressive revolution abroad—let alone with the support of the imperialist powers. The vast scale of the funding for these reactionary forces, through CIA programs that later became public such as Operation Timber Sycamore, emerged years later. These pseudo-left groups are now embracing the Assad regime’s downfall at the hands of these Islamist reactionaries in alliance with the financiers and perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza.”

“The government lost control of most of its oil fields to rebel groups, including ISIS and later the US-backed Kurdish forces. International sanctions in 2011 severely restricted the export of oil, with output down to less than 9,000 barrels per day (from 380,000 bpd in 2010) in regime-controlled areas last year. Syria became heavily reliant on imports from Iran. This is likely to be curtailed now that the US-backed forces have seized control of the Bukamul crossing into Iraq. Electricity has long been in short supply, with power cuts most of the day. It means that families have no working refrigerators and must get up at 2am to use their washing machines.”

“Once a lower middle-income country positioned 68th in the global GDP rankings of 196 countries in 2011, Syria has lost more than half of its GDP since 2010 and fallen to 129th place, on a par with the Palestinian Territories and Chad. It now ranks as a low-income country where families struggle to put food on the table.”

“Around 5 million of the country’s 21 million population have left the country. A further 7 million, one third of the population, are internally displaced within Syria, many of whom live in overcrowded camps and have lost their civil, land and property documentation. Around 30 percent of households have an absent member due to death or the migration of young men in the 20-40-year age group. The migration of some of Syria’s most skilled people has left the country with reduced public services, particularly in water, sanitation and health,”

“[…] the first Trump administration sought to bankrupt Syria—imposing bilateral and secondary sanctions in 2020 targeting its banking sector and choking its export industries and businesses. The US, via its control over multilateral financial institutions, also engineered the collapse in 2019 of Lebanon’s economy with which Syria is inextricably linked, to tighten the noose around Damascus.”

“The earthquakes caused more than $5 billion in direct physical damage in Syria and a 5.5 percent contraction in its GDP, already down from $67 billion in 2011 to $12 billion in 2022, according to the World Bank.”

Biden Aims to Go Out With a Bellicose Bang by Eve Ottenberg (Scheer Post)

“Having failed thus far to ignite Nuclear Armageddon, what’s up next for the U.S. military industrial complex? I’ll tell you: New bases in Europe, 47 of them, to be exact, in Scandinavia in coming years. That’s Joe Biden’s legacy, a blood transfusion to NATO’s moribund carcass by adding Finland and Sweden and thereby ballooning the Empire’s global military footprint, a footprint of over 800 imperial foreign military bases already bankrupting us Welp, we’re gonna get 47 more, per journalist Patrick Hennigsen, and they’re gonna be near Russia.”

“So dozens of Americans have or will be coming home in body bags, and U.S. weaponry got crushed and surprise! Not a peep in U.S. corporate media. That’s because our news outlets report American, ahem, “Ukrainian” strikes on Russia, using our vaunted but really mainly symbolic ATACMS, and report it with great fanfare, groveling before supposed superlative American weapons, but the consequences? The punishment? Not so much, since, Gee, that might make Biden and by extension Washington look bad. Can’t have that in American legacy news media.”

“[…] as the Hindustan Times reported, may well have destroyed much of the ATACMS and Storm Shadow cache. And we all know the west lacks the military industrial production depth to replace them quickly. Once the western military cupboard is bare, it will stay that way for a good while. The U.S. simply ain’t the manufacturing behemoth it once was.”

‘As Much And As Quickly As Possible’: Israeli Settlers Eye Land in Syria, Lebanon by Illy Pe'ery (Z Network)

““We have to conquer and destroy. As much as possible, and as quickly as possible,” wrote one member of Uri Tsafon — a group founded earlier this year to promote Israeli settlement of southern Lebanon — in the organization’s WhatsApp group. “We need to check according to the new laws in Syria whether Israelis are allowed to invest in real estate and start buying land there,” another member wrote. In another settler WhatsApp group, members shared maps of Syria and tried to identify potential areas for settlement.”

““In the first stage, we’ll settle where we can,” he continued. “There’s no interest in a specific location; the most important thing is to be on the other side of the fence. We have to fight the taboo of the border that was established by France and England 100 years ago. We will live on the Lebanese border, God willing, and if we are there, the border will move north and the army will guard it.”

Africa Says France Must Go by Vijay Prashad (Z Network)

“The three days culminated in the passage of the Niamey Declaration , whose last section bears quoting in full:”

1. We commend the governments emerging from recent coups for adopting patriotic measures to reclaim political and economic sovereignty over their territories and natural resources. These measures include terminating neocolonial agreements, demanding the withdrawal of French, American, and other foreign forces, and undertaking ambitious plans for sovereign development.
2. We are particularly encouraged by these countries’ formation of the Alliance of Sahel States. This move revitalises the legacy of Pan-African leaders and represents a concrete step toward true independence and Pan-African unity.
3. These governments currently enjoy widespread support from their citizens, who drive and rally around these revolutionary actions. This unity is crucial for achieving democratic and patriotic ideals and is an aspirational development model for other African nations.

“There can be no sovereignty with the neocolonial structure in place. At this point, imperialist intervention is inevitable. How the forces for sovereignty will deal with a sharp imperialist attack is to be seen. When the French tried to intervene against these popular military coups through the military forces of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2023, this threat only accelerated the integration of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger into the AES. The first test was successfully overcome by the popular coup governments, who refused to surrender to an imperialist intervention.”

The Fall of the Assad Government in Syria by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“During the HTS drive against the Syrian army, the Russian presidential envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that he had been in touch with the incoming Trump administration to discuss a deal between “all parties” over the Syrian conflict. Neither Russia nor Iran believed that the Assad government would be able to unilaterally defeat the various rebels and remove the United States from its occupation of the eastern oil fields. A deal was the only way out, which meant that neither Iran nor Russia was willing to commit more troops to defend the Assad government.”

Are You Racist? by George Galloway | Oxford Union (YouTube)

I’d never seen this, so it’s new to me. Eleven years ago, George Galloway refused to debate an Israeli about apartheid. He claims that he was misled and would never have agreed to it. Of course, people claimed that he was being racist. He clarified in a manner that only a handful of people could, off the cuff and magisterially.

“[…] because of my time in South Africa, because of the decades that I worked against apartheid in South Africa, do you imagine that I would turn up at a university and debate apartheid with a supporter from South Africa of the apartheid system? I’d rather punch him in the face than debate with him. Why? Because apartheid is a racist poison. It is the worst kind of fascism and I would never debate with any supporter of South African apartheid, so why should I debate with a supporter of Israeli apartheid?”

On a side note, it continues to be utterly shamefully that the Google transcription service doesn’t know certain words. It’s a miracle of modern technology that has been made basically trash by the idiots in charge of it. They neuter it with their policy. Instead of teaching it how to recognize curse words and eliding them, why don’t you teach it proper capitalization and punctuation? Why don’t you teach it the word “apartheid”, which it reliably fucks up six ways to Sunday, probably because some Israeli and Turkish pressure groups are saying ixnay on the apartheid-ay.

Pepe Escobar : Russia Stays in Syria. by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

Insightful and informative analysis on both Syria/Israel/Turkey and Russia/Ukraine by Pepe Escobar. I hadn’t heard of the Ukrainian drone attacks on residential buildings in Kazan, which, as he said, is far from any front line and were on residential buildings. It goes without saying that this is unmentioned in the “OK for me, but not for thee” press. Escobar thinks they attacked there as a sign against BRICS, which just had an historic conference in that city. He noted also that there were probably hopes that they could discredit Putin and accelerate a regime change. Be careful what you wish for.

Larry Johnson : Ukraine Opts for Terrorism. by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

Larry Johnson also discusses the recent attacks by Ukraine on Russia, all of which are against civilian targets—again, completely unnoted in the mainstream press because they’re being executed by allies and proxies. Johnson expands on Escobar’s analysis by noting that these attacks are more signs of desperation, in response to the upcoming change in U.S. administration, kind of like heaving a buzzer-beater into the air from ¾-court in basketball. He says that the attacks are nonsense because they serve no strategic purpose but they are burning through/wasting materiel that they won’t be able to quickly replace. Like Escobar, he remarked that those who hope to replace Putin should be careful what they ask for, as any replacement will be much quicker on the trigger.

They also discuss some of the recent crazy statements by the incoming administration about acquiring Canada, Greenland, or Panama, focusing more on the latter with some interesting details. The Judge mentioned that, at one point, Trump offered to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, which is just demeaning to everyone involved.

Journalism & Media

Fixing The Media And Campaign Spending By The Rich by Dean Baker (Z Network)

“While this should be obvious in the age of Fox News, […]”

Dean’s example is never, ever, ever going to be CNN or MSNBC because he can’t see his own silo. He mentions the media I know he never watches.

“To be clear, there is still much useful reporting done by leading media outlets like the New York Times and CNN. But these outlets will likely take threats of major lawsuits and other reprisals seriously. And recalcitrant outlets can always be taken over by Elon Musk.”

You gotta be fu@&ing kidding me, Dean. The NYT and CNN are doing just as much good reporting as Fox, which is some but not a lot. Most of what they all produce is motivated more by dedication to a bought-and-paid-for narrative than to any seeking of truth. Truth goes to the highest bidder for all of them, Dean.

“If progressives are going to have the ability to challenge the political power of the billionaire MAGA gang, we need another mechanism for supporting media. And this has to go well beyond urging people to support progressive outlets and their local newspapers.”

Also maybe stop telling people that CNN and the NYT are progressive.

“If people choose to use their tax credit on them, that would be their choice, as it now when they opt to buy a supermarket tabloid or to watch Fox News.”

You know that there are some of us who consider the NYT just as uselessly manipulative and uninformative as FOX News, right? Seriously, when was the last time you even watched five minutes of FOX News? But here’s Dean juxtaposing FOX News with supermarket tabloids just to drive the point home of how uniquely trashy he thinks it is, versus CNN and MSNBC, which are equally tacky but go wholly unmentioned because, as far as Dean’s concerned, they’re the good guys, defending democracy.

“The tax deduction for charitable contributions provides a good model for how a journalism tax credit could work. With the charitable contribution tax deduction, organizations file with the I.R.S. to be eligible for tax-exempt status. To get eligibility an organization just has to tell the I.R.S. what it does, for example it’s an educational institution or a church. The I.R.S. doesn’t try to determine whether the organization does a good job as an educational institution or a church, that’s for individual donors to do. The I.R.S. just ensures that the organization does what it claims to do.

“It would be the same story with an organization applying to be eligible to get a journalism tax credit. They just have to say what type of reporting they are doing and where their work is available. The oversight agency will not try to determine the quality of the journalism, that decision is for the individual contributors.

“Also, a requirement of getting the funding is that all the supported work be freely available on the web with no paywall. The logic is that the public paid for the work, it should be able to benefit from it. This would not prevent a newspaper from having some material behind a paywall, if it supported the work from other sources, such as subscriptions or advertising.”

This is, of course, a great idea.

“We also should do something to downsize the huge social media platforms that give their owners so much power. This was a noticeable problem to anyone paying attention even before Elon Musk bought Twitter.”

This is correct, as well, but his obsession with Elon Musk leads him to forget that this is exactly what Elon Musk did! Twitter is only half the size it was when Elon bought it. At least he’s working on reducing the audience on Twitter/X. Day by day, he’s putting in the work and, if you listen to the same people that Dean seems to listen to, they’re leaving in droves. I’m not sure that’s the case but that’s the story that liberals who’ve moved to Blue Sky are telling.

The Phony War by Corey Robin

“What is interesting is how Heer’s article, like Lehmann’s, simply proceeds as if there is a democratic future in which Democrats and liberals and progressives will have to reckon with the need to dust themselves off, give up Biden-style politics, and opt for whatever Heer means by a “left-wing anti-system politics.” There’s no sense that elections will be over or rigged, that the Democrats will be hobbled or destroyed by Trump’s coercion or intimidation, that the left might have to go underground (which many members of the Communist Party did during the McCarthy period) or tactically retreat into silence while it regroups under the repressive radar of the right. The article simply leaves the reader with the sense that this election was a shellacking that calls for a big rethink and regrouping by the Democrats, i.e., this is an election like every other election we’ve had in this country.”

“Again, we get the same sense that the Democrats are in a regrouping phase, that the period after the election is an opportunity to reflect and rebuild. There’s little to no sense that that rebuilding or regrouping or reflection will be compromised or stymied by the abridgment or end of democracy.”

“Maybe there’s simply a recognition, however unconscious or implicit, that, having been elected through ordinary democratic means (rather than alleged support from Russia or the contrivance of the Electoral College), Trump must be fought and defeated through ordinary democratic means.”

Instead of trying to terrify people into supporting an empty platform with apocalyptic predictions? Heaven forfend.

We have given it different names, like “decline and fall of western civilization” and “Idiocracy”. There is always a terror that, when things change, they don’t change for the better. It seems increasingly unavoidable to admit that it has happened: we are no longer able to differentiate between “new” and “potentially valuable”. We give everything a shot, as long as we’re told to do so by the right people…or things, like algorithms. People seem to push whichever buttons appear before them, like toddlers. They don’t seem to scoff and scroll further, or even to curate anymore.

How else can we explain the fact that the Hawk Tuah girl—whose lone claim to fame is that she was utterly unabashed about discussing her fellatio technique in an interview outside some sports event—has her own podcast? There is literally no conceivable reason why anyone but her friends and family would ever want to hear more than a sentence from her, based on the sentence that she’s given us. Right? Or are people so led by their hormones that they wonder what else this young, thin, white blond girl (Wikipedia) might say to titillate them? I write “girl” because she’s only 22-23 years old and has not apparently spent those years gathering wisdom that she will be dispensing via podcast. I can understand an OnlyFans maybe. I do not understand people who power-walk around their neighborhoods, listening to what I can only assume is utter drivel. And yet, her show has B-list guests and probably millions of subscribers already.

There’s another podcast that just started. This one stars the wife of a retired NFL player. His main claim to fame, in turn, is that he is the older brother of another NFL player, who’s apparently pretty good, is still playing, and is porking Taylor Swift. This podcast’s first episode debuted with more listeners than Joe Rogan that week. Joe Rogan isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s been top dog for a long time, both because he’s organically built an audience and he’s been at it for 15 years.

But people immediately tune in to listen to a communications-major dipshit with nothing else to talk about except what’s it like to be a football wife has bested him two weeks in a row now.

I am not arguing whether these shows are any good, objectively. Not at all. I might listen to them and be pleasantly surprised—even delighted—to hear how funny and life-affirming those shows are. It is entirely possible that these odd—and nearly entirely effort-free—paths to fame will have turned up diamonds in the rough for which we can be thankful. I’m just wondering why so many millions of people are willing to be the first to try, just based on what it says on the tin. I would need a recommendation from someone whose opinion I trust to listen to an hour of either of these shows. My curiosity is not piqued by the tittilatingly porn-adjacent nature of the one, or the marital proximity of the other’s to a person who’s related to a person who’s dating someone super-famous.

Yesterday morning, I heard on the Italian radio station that there had been an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg. Someone drove a car into the crowd and killed four people. That was yesterday morning. It is nowhere in the news. I can barely find out any information about it. If I search for “Magdeburg”, I just get advertisements for hotels in Magdeburg. If I search for “magdeburg weihnachtsmarkt 2024”, then I finally get a few reluctant articles with almost no content. The top hits are the official pages of the Christmas market, welcoming people to come and see it.

Any of the articles that do have content first discuss Islamic terrorists for a couple of paragraphs before admitting that the guy who attacked in Magdeburg was quite fervently anti-Islam. I’ve read in one place that he was a devoted Zionist. That makes sense now. No wonder this isn’t blowing up into a giant media storm. We’re not to talk about attacks for which we can’t blame the usual suspects.

The only link I’ve seen about it on Reddit, even on the front page, is Man interrupts minute of silence and the entire stadium reacted immediately, which shows a video at a soccer game. Right at the end of it, the camera pans to a sign that says “Stark bleiben Magdeburg”.

Days later, I read Attack on German Christmas market in Magdeburg: the bitter fruit of right-wing extremism and anti-refugee agitation by Peter Schwarz (WSWS), white writes,

“The assassin was well known to the authorities. Several warnings had been received about him, he had repeatedly come into conflict with the law, had left a broad trail on social media and had hinted at his deed and carefully prepared it. But because he did not shout “Allahu akbar,” but agitated against the alleged Islamization of Germany, the warnings were not taken seriously.”

Labor

Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of those shifts later but can’t take them, their app-based score declines and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get work on any of those shifts – in other words, nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won’t be enough demand for their services.”

“Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you.”

“Shiftkey workers also have to bid against one another for shifts, with the job going to the worker who accepts the lowest wage. Shiftkey pays nominal wages that sound reasonable – one nurse’s topline rate is $23/hour. But by payday, Shiftkey has used junk fees to scrape that rate down to the bone. Workers have to pay a daily $3.67 “safety fee” to pay for background checks, drug screening, etc. Nevermind that these tasks are only performed once per nurse, not every day – and nevermind that this is another way to force workers to assume the boss’s risks. Nurses also pay daily fees for accident insurance ($2.14) and malpractice insurance ($0.21) – more employer risk being shifted onto workers. Workers also pay $2 per shift if they want to get paid on the same day – a payday lending-style usury levied against workers whose wages are priced based on their desperation. Then there’s a $6/shift fee nurses pay as a finders’ fee to the app, a fee that’s up to $7/shift next year. All told, that $23/hour rate cashes out to $13/hour.”

Already $23/hour for nursing is not enough.

“One nurse quoted in the study describes getting up at 5AM for a 7AM shift, only to discover that the shift was canceled while she slept, leaving her without any work or pay for the day, after having made arrangements for her kid to get childcare. The nurse assumes all the risk again: blocking out a day’s work, paying for childcare, altering her sleep schedule. If she cancels on Carerev, her score goes down and she will get fewer shifts in the future. But if the boss cancels, he faces no consequences.”

This is how the other half is forced to live. Dystopic. Inhumane. As Liz Franczak of TrueAnon said, “May a thousand Mangiones bloom.”

“We are the disorganized, loose, flapping ends at the beginning and end of the healthcare supply-chain. We are easy pickings for the monopolists in the middle, which is why patients pay more for worse care every year, and why healthcare workers get paid less for worse working conditions every year.”

“Biden’s trustbusters chose their targets by giving priority to the crooked companies that were doing the most harm to Americans, while Trump’s trustbusters are more likely to give priority to the crooked companies that Trump personally dislikes:”

I feel like this is a story that only Cory is pushing. Is it true?

Economy & Finance

Best of 2024: Why You Should Hate the Ruling Class for Its Obscene Wealth / Rob Larson (This is Hell!)

Larson said that—and I’m paraphrasing here—42% of all stocks and bonds belong to the top 1%. The top 10% own 84% of the market. The top 20% own 93% of the market. The remaining 80% divide up the remaining 7% for themselves. I can only imagine that the bottom three quintiles have pretty much no participation in—and, hence, benefit from—the market and its current spectacular gyrations.

The socialist attitude to the tragedy of Luigi Mangione by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“The response of the corporate oligarchs and mainstream media, combining a vicious attitude towards Mangione personally with moral outrage over his alleged violence, is utterly hypocritical. Only a few days after the killing in Manhattan, the media was unanimous in its praise of the terrorist murder of Russian general Igor Kirillov in the streets of Moscow, an act which brings the world closer to the brink of nuclear war.”

“[…] a famous scene from the Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath, where a poor farmer, arguing with a bulldozer driver about to tear down his homestead, tries to figure out whom to shoot in order to stop it:”

[The driver:] “It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look—suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. You’re not killing the right guy.”

“That’s so,” the tenant said. “Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill.”

“You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: ‘Clear those people out or it’s your job.’”

“Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a Board of Directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”

The driver said: “Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’”

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property’s doing it.”

“I got to figure,” the tenant said. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.

“The basic task of our time is the expropriation of UnitedHealthcare and other major corporations by the working class in a socialist revolution, not “vengeance” against individual executives. ”

Man, that is pretty much what Rob Larson was talking about as well. We are not going to improve anything as long as a handful of people control all of the things we need to survive. That’s not democracy.

Corporate Fearmongering Over Fast Food Wage Hike Aged Like Cold French Fries by Janine Jackson (Z Network)

“The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 ( LA Times , 6/12/24 ).”

Studie zu US-Energiepreissteigerungen – Umverteilung von unten nach oben by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“„Ihr Geld ist nicht weg, mein Freund, es hat nur ein anderer“ – dieses Zitat, das auf den deutschen Banker Amschel Meyer Rothschild zurückgeht, ist bis heute eine der Grundlagen, will man das Wirtschafts- und Finanzsystem verstehen.”

“[…] brasilianische Energiefirmen konnten ihre Gewinne im Vergleich zum Zeitraum von 2016 bis 2019 im Krisenjahr 2022 um das 10-Fache steigern, norwegische Energiefirmen kamen (auch dank der katastrophalen deutschen Einkaufspolitik ) auf das 9-Fache, US-Unternehmen auf das 7-Fache. Schaut man sich die absoluten Gewinne an, stechen die USA jedoch alle anderen Nationen aus, haben sie doch einerseits den mit Abstand weltgrößten Energiesektor und sind andererseits vor allem über Hedgefonds, Vermögensverwaltungsfirmen á la BlackRock und Co., aber auch direkt weltweit an so vielen Unternehmen der Branche beteiligt, wie sonst keine andere Nation.”

Destination of oil and gas profits

“Unsere Analyse zeigt, dass die Gewinne aus fossilen Brennstoffen in den USA im Jahr 2022 fast ausschließlich den obersten Vermögensbesitzern zugutekommen: 51% aller Gewinnansprüche von US-Begünstigten werden von den obersten 1% der Vermögensbesitzer gehalten, und 84% von den obersten 10%. Im Gegensatz dazu erhält die untere Hälfte der Bevölkerung (66 Millionen Haushalte) kaum Gewinne: nur 1%.”

And that’s why this all had to happen and why they have to get us to believe that it was for our own good…so they can do it again. Too much is never enough…and they’re more than high on their own supply.

Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust by James K. Galbraith (Scheer Post)

“In particular, low unemployment rates may reflect widespread disaffection with bad jobs; a low inflation rate does not reverse past price increases; and the incomes from growth may flow to profits and capital gains. These indicators are not useless—if they were bad, the situation would be even worse—but a good showing on them is insufficient.”

“The Biden economists had overlooked a fundamental fact, which is that the ultimate benefit of any “stimulative” policy flows to those with market power—to land and to capital—regardless of how it may be distributed at first.”

No they didn’t overlook anything. They know who they serve. What they did worked as planned.

“They took Covid relief as the buffer it was meant to be, saved what they did not need at once, and drew down those savings over time.”

Why do otherwise intelligent economists keep writing about COVID payments as if people are still spending that $1200 four years later? That shit is gone son. I fully expect them to continue to talk about those payments well into the 2030s.

“It is a shocking fact that while during Covid child poverty rates and food insecurity declined, those rates returned to pre-Covid levels when the benefits ended.”

Thanks, Biden.

“In economic mythology, American life centers on work—on character-building, strength-testing, skill-demanding engagement with the physical world, on the farm, the range, the factory, the construction site or the open road. But most jobs today aren’t like that; practically all new jobs in America for the past 60 years have been in services—in shops, offices, restaurants; in accounting, bookkeeping, maintenance, and other minor professions. Most such jobs are neither secure nor well-paid, and it often takes two or more to sustain a middle-class household.”

“As the economy began to open up again, employers needed workers. Vacancies rose. What to do? The option of raising wages (and improving working conditions) is never attractive, since the gains must be given to all workers, not merely those newly hired or rehired. The alternative is to put a squeeze on those who have left the labor force until they feel the pinch and come back, hat in hand, seeking a job.”

That’s also much more in keeping with the U.S.-American tenet of hating the poor.

“Is it a surprise that people do not like being pressured to take “ bullshit jobs ”?”

“[…] vast sums flowed in payments to banks on their reserves and to the tiny minority with large holdings of Treasury bills. The Biden economists never challenged these arrangements. They hewed to the craven orthodoxy, dominant among Democrats since the time of Robert Rubin, that the Fed’s independence is sacrosanct . But the entire point of an “independent” central bank is to defeat any economic program that serves the people to the inconvenience of Big Finance.”

Blinded to Syria by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“One, the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies are now thoroughly committed to mass violence. This means it is difficult to avoid concluding that the Western powers and Israel will turn to Iran once Syria as a functioning polity has been thoroughly disabled.”

Listen to the five seasons of Blowback, read William Blum, and try to come to the conclusion that it has ever been about anything other than plunder through violent coercion. This is not new. I know that Patrick knows this; I just disagree with the default style of writing as if this were something new. A larger percentage of people were aware of U.S. mendacity and incoherent violence 50 years ago than they do now.

Macy’s, Big Lots join other US retailers in shut down of thousands of stores by Jerry White (WSWS)

“In December, Joseph Sitt, Chairman of Thor, stated, “Macy’s owns valuable and well-located real estate assets—led by its flagship property at Herald Square in New York City—that we believe are worth between $5-$9 billion. In our opinion, Macy’s board should create a separate real estate subsidiary to collect market rents from Macy’s retail operations and pursue other asset sale and redevelopment opportunities. We believe doing so would greatly maximize the value of these owned assets for the benefit of stockholders.””

Well, of course you do.

Tasty Business Is Still Business by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

The author starts off with a strong declaration of what businesses are and that restaurants are businesses.

“If a restaurant can’t make enough money to pay its bills, it will fail. It must fail. No matter how good it may be, it’s still a business. No matter how much the restaurant owner wants to provide well for his staff, provide stable employment, provide health insurance, provide a profit for its owner, it’s still a business.”

He starts to loosen his grip just a bit, to perhaps consider the horror of the argument being made in the article he’s citing: should restaurants be given more breathing room, to be able to survive in an otherwise ruthless economy?

“It’s hard to take issue with the things Benjamin wants for his employees. It’s hard to take issue with his argument that culinary artistry won’t survive if the only way to earn a sustainable living is to find a corporate job. But should the restaurant industry rely on government subsidies?”

You’re getting there, Scott. Now bring it home.

“There are, of course, other industries that have grown to rely on government subsidies for a variety of reasons, primarily related to our national need for the industry (like transportation or farming) and the lack of a viable business model for the industry to survive. Are restaurants in that category? Should they be? ”

If all of those other businesses are considered worthy of subsidies, then why wouldn’t something that actually affects people’s lives—having stable restaurants in a neighborhood that you can maybe walk to—be something that should be better protected from the vagaries of a casino economy?

Greenfield fails to mention the main beneficiaries of subsidies because he is ideologically blind to those subsidies, like nearly everyone else. He fails to mention the military-industrial-complex, the health-insurance industry (guaranteed customers via the ACA), the pharmaceutical industry (benefits handsomely from patents and other protections), Wall Street (bailouts galore), and on and on. Why can’t we consider providing good restaurants as services, supporting them when they need it? Well, because you’d need a vetting system to determine who gets subsidies, right? Does your restaurant need subsidies because it’s not good or because the economy is currently too harsh?

I think something like the Kurzarbeit system in Switzerland would fill the bill. It allows businesses to breathe when their market dips temporarily.

Predictably, no-one in the comments on the article has any good words to say about subsidies, nor can they point out the hypocrisy of not noticing the centi-billions of subsidies that the government already hands out as they condemn the poor guy in the cited article for failing to run his business.

The point the guy made is a real concern for society: if it becomes too difficult to run small businesses, then they will disappear. Then everyone has to work at medium-to-large businesses. Is that what we want? If not, how do get stay away from that outcome? Yelling at people that they’re not trying hard enough while stealing all of their money and opportunity for yourself isn’t an acceptable answer.

One of the comments writes the following, sounding so reasonable, right?

“While the modern open-admission restaurant is generally a 19th century invention perfected in the mid 20th, the takeout / central kitchen industry may be as old as the city. However the need for it has never been lower. Only dorm, hostel, or hotel residents require prepared food for every meal, and the available options are higher than any time in history.

“Restaurants are a luxury, and because of inflation they are not able to price themselves at luxury levels. Also, restaurant workers have never been skilled labor, and being able to raise a family on a restaurant job was either an accident of happenstance or a testament to doing more with less.

“My son in law is a cook, and wants a restaurant. I’ve told him what local restaurant owners are doing: selling their storefronts (or closing them) and either changing businesses or going into trucks where their expenses and labor costs are lower.”

Can you hear the authoritative tone? How absolutely cocksure the author is that he’s (it’s definitely a he) figured everything out and that there is no room for doubt or questioning of his worldview? He just described a world in which the “luxury” of restaurants would just disappear in favor of delivery and food trucks. What an absolute tragic vision of society. There’s no community, no meeting people, no seeing people occasionally, just shoving food into your face after having used a Ring camera to tell some poor person to leave your food on the porch.

He’s so sure that this is the only way to run society because he can’t imagine questioning any of the precepts that have led to his almost-certainly comfortable niche in it—one in which he definitely chose a profession that is well-protected by the government, e.g., a lawyer (like Greenfield), where your competition is kept at bay by testing requirements that even prevent people from practicing in another state without requalifiying. How nice. Nobody gives a shit about lawyers until you need one. Everybody cares are restaurants because we all gotta eat.

I’m not saying that there is an easy answer. I’m saying that this guy’s easy answer is horrifying. There has to be a better way. The first step is recognizing that society and the government is picking winners and losers every day—and that we should definitely get a say in how it chooses them. None of this is set in stone. Lawyers and doctors aren’t privileged by some sort of biblical law. Wall Street and the military don’t get most of the money because that’s the only way to run things. That’s what they want you to think, and useful idiots like Greenfield and this commentator—who know who’s buttering their bread—are not only not willing to rock a boat on which they’ve managed to acquire staterooms, they’re not ever going to admit that them being privileged is a matter or fiat..

Medicine & Disease

The Needs of Dementia Caregivers by Lydialyle Gibson (Harvard Magazine)

““I feel like all my life energy goes toward keeping him alive and organized and doing what needs to be done to get him through the day. It’s an unbearable toll.” Two years ago, she developed gastrointestinal problems, which her doctor attributed to stress. In extreme moments, she says, “I’ve thought, maybe I’ll just have to commit suicide, so I’ll be out of the picture and he can be taken care of.…I won’t do that, but I can’t make money come out of thin air, and I can’t pay for him to have care with money that we don’t have. I can’t do much long-term planning because we don’t have the assets. So, I just kind of go along and see what’s the next thing that I need to adjust to.””

“One major factor is the way Medicare and other insurancers categorize dementia-related expenses. Costs deemed “medical”—scans, testing, neurology appointments, medications—are covered. But most of the care dementia patients need is “custodial”: someone to help them get dressed, or make sure they eat, or keep them from getting hurt. For this, families pay out of pocket—or do it themselves.”

““The truth is, I’ve lost my best friend, and he’s still living in the house with me, and I cook dinner for him most nights,” says George (who asked to be identified by a pseudonym). “We sit at the table, but we don’t talk, because he can’t.” His husband has a slow-moving form of Alzheimer’s—after seven years, the symptoms remain relatively mild—which has only heightened George’s sense of disconnection.”

Day One by Tim Sommers (3 Quarks Daily)

Absolutely riveting.

“So, then I was in an ambulance. The road was bumpy and I kept crying out. We went over railroad tracks, and I must have been very loud. An EMT told the driver to stop while he examined me and checked my vitals. He didn’t say anything, until he turned towards the driver and then he said, “He’s not going to make it. Call a helicopter.”

“I tried to be companionable. “I always wanted to ride in a helicopter,” he shushed me.”

“I waited ten hours for the surgery without any pain medication because my vitals were low and I had a subdural hematoma. My brain was bleeding.

“I learned something that night. I learned that you can take anything for five minutes. Then all you have to do is do it again. And again. Twelve times is an hour. One hundred and twenty times was that whole night.”

Art & Literature

Cetacean Philosophy by Edwin-Rainer Grebe / Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Ancient human folk wisdom had long sought to ground our own particular beliefs in the way our bodies happen to be shaped, and in the way they move through their environment — that we are bipedal, for example, that we have opposable thumbs, and necks that enable us to tilt our heads back to contemplate the heavens, are all invoked to explain in part why we take reality to have the particular structure it does. But this folk wisdom took shape in the absence of any real knowledge of the existence of beings that are our full equals with respect to their power to contemplate the structure of reality, yet fully different from us in the model of reality that suggests itself to their senses in their particular milieu. To give just one striking example from Bogomil’s work, it seems certain now that all pelagic cetaceans, and not just sperm whales, apprehend the surface of the ocean as the “bottom” of their world, from which “light seeps upward and air waits in endless reserves to replenish us”, while the unsoundable depths, below the sperm whale’s maximum diving range of 2000 meters or so, is apprehended by them as being “above”.”

“There is so much that marine mammals cannot do, simply in view of their body shape and their aquatic environment — they cannot build anything, or use tools of any sort, for example. These are abilities we human beings long took as the sine qua non of “intelligence”. But the revolution in cross-species intelligence science over the past years, Bogomil persuasively argues, has shown us that in at least some phylogenies it has been precisely the absence of any real possibility for transforming the world around a given species into a built environment that reflects that species’ will and self-conception, that has in turn “freed them up” (Bogomil p. 28) to do little else but to contemplate existential questions, and to articulate, in their social life in the pod, remarkably nuanced and abstract accounts of their place in the world.”

“As discussed by Shérazade Apostol in a subsequent chapter, the ◉●○̃○●̂●̀○́●̈○̃● is by far the most complete extant work of cetacean philosophy today, but we do have at least some fragmentary evidence of a much older work, the so-called ○̀○○⊙○○̃○, believed to have been composed at least 30,000 years earlier (note the extremely archaic spelling of the title). Neither SWID-0293 nor any other living sperm whale can recite more than a few broken codas from ○̀○○⊙○○̃○, but there is a strong consensus that until the early 19th century all female elders knew this work by heart, and considered it, along somewhat mythological lines, to be conascent [sic] with their own species.”

The misspelling of “connascent” is first such instance I’ve ever found in Justin’s work.

“Thanks to the groundbreaking work of William Schevill and Valentine Worthington , we have known since the 1950s that the great spermaceti organ, as well as the so called “junk” or “melon” separated from it by the nasal passages, which makes the sperm whale’s entire front look so unwieldy and outsized, exists entirely for the production of sounds. Basic evolutionary theory tells us that if such an exceptional and rare apparatus as this appears in the course of natural selection, it must be fulfilling some function that is itself exceptional and rare. There would have been much simpler ways for evolution to yield up a noise-making animal; but this particular animal, with its special mixture of waxes and fats that enables the focused direction of complex patterns of noise through the so-called “phonic lips”, is of course not just “making noise”. It is making speech , and unsurprisingly this speech, as in the Śabda of classical Indian philosophy and as in some interpretations of Logos among the Greeks, is, for the sperm whales, the very foundation of all of reality.”

“This book, for all its great faults, is the first significant sign that we are now entering a period of serious and sustained—and reciprocal—reflection on what it means to inhabit our planet alongside other minds plainly equal, and in some respects far superior, to our own.”

I found myself learning about Archon (Gnosticism) (Wikipedia) because I wanted to know what the song 7 by Prince was about. They don’t really know but, based on the rest of the lyrics, it’s a pretty good guess that the song refers to the “hebdomad”.

“Archons (Greek: ἄρχων, romanized: árchōn, plural: ἄρχοντες, árchontes), in Gnosticism and religions closely related to it, are the builders of the physical universe. Among the Archontics, Ophites, Sethians and in the writings of Nag Hammadi library, the archons are rulers, each related to one of seven planets; they prevent souls from leaving the material realm.”

What an incredible rabbit hole into which to dive.

Syracuse Opera files for bankruptcy, one of numerous smaller companies in the US in trouble or simply closing down by David Walsh (WSWS)

“Large-scale artistic performance, such as opera, is dependent on government subsidies. By its very nature, opera under the present economic and cultural conditions is not a profit-making enterprise. It cannot survive without public assistance. The US is one of the most backward of the advanced capitalist countries in this regard, offering a pittance to its artists, while it spends hundreds of billions on weapons and hands corporations and the wealthy massive tax breaks of various kinds.

“The results of the process described above will be the loss of thousands of jobs, both artistic and technical, and the creation of “opera deserts,” with various regions in the US increasingly devoid of more complex and challenging musical theater.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The New Medical Supernemesis by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“I have a solution to the problem of nuclear brinksmanship, for example: all the nuclear states draw straws, and only the winner gets to keep its arsenal. Doesn’t that mean that all the “losers” would, in view of their sudden reduction in power, be conquered and subjugated by the winner? Yes, that’s exactly what it means, and any rational person, unfooled by the romantic illusions of the Westphalian order, should be able to understand instantly, if they are honest with themselves and at all able to think at a planetary and longue-durée scale, why that would be infinitely preferable to our current course. You really can’t see it? Oh well too bad nevermind.”

“[…] you turn your back on those establishments altogether, you procure for yourself some opiates —a drug that has been available at least since the Neolithic revolution, perhaps longer—, and you surround yourself with loved ones. You die some years earlier than you otherwise would have, United Health Care goes broke, and one hundred years from now, whatever life ends up being like, you almost certainly will not find yourself in a pod, with neon blood, watching cat videos and paint-mixing machines and propaganda about how miserable, because shorter, the lives of your ancestors must have been.”

“[…] it is hard indeed not to notice how so very many of our mid-life activities amount to a long preparation for the “final challenge” of submitting end-of-life insurance claims. And it is this final challenge that shows, in hindsight, just how evil and degrading, just how preliminary to the abattoir, our lives of form-submission, our lives on hold, our lives of interacting with malfunctioning bots set up to mediate between us and the companies and agencies we are in theory paying to keep us alive, had been all along.”

“Honestly, you people think like small children. Riots happen/ Assassinations happen. You can study their causes and you can propose strategies for making them happen less often, but the bare expression of approval or disapproval is to me about as infantile as saying: “No, earthquake! Bad!””

“[…] it seems likely that the fate of the hospital as we had known it will in the next few years track very closely what we are also seeing in universities, or whatever it is that’s now emerging from the ruins of universities, fully capable as they now are of getting by without professors, most of whom have been replaced by a delirious hierarchy of vice-deans of made-up problems, by climbing-walls and other amusements, pre-recorded lectures and AI instructional tools, and a TA precariat to manage whatever human-to-human contact proves for the moment ineliminable. This is the emerging structure of all our institutions, mutatis mutandis.”

“Mangione’s 21st-century “critique”, by contrast, if we can call it that, however inchoate, however brain-fried, is of a system where there is barely any human gaze upon our human bodies, whether as bags of bones or as temples for our spirits, at all. In the hypercapitalist mode of operation, our bodies, to the health industry, are little more than sites of profit extraction — and if there is a “gaze” to be found, it is almost certainly an automated one.”

“To cite just one example: whichever state or company gets quantum computers first will be able to push right past any and all cybersecurity obstacles erected by their adversaries. Geopolitics and economics will be entirely different than in the pre-quantum era. But what does the press tell us about the benefits of processing data at the qubit-level? It tells us this will be beneficial for “drug discovery” — as if the world would stay exactly the same, but now you will be able to “talk to your doctor” about a wider gamut of prescription pills. That is a gross misrepresentation of what is actually happening, yet it reveals how powerful the “everything is medical” ideology, so well diagnosed by Illich, has become.”

“From the beginning, insurance held out a promise of protecting people, but that was secondary — its raison d’être was always to protect profits, or, the flip-side, to minimize losses. It is unsurprising that as this early modern innovation becomes integrated with the late modern introduction of machine algorithms, the secondary promise it had once held out, of protecting people, retreats ever further to the margins of its actual operations.”

“I assert literally, not figuratively, that I am in exile from a country in need of a revolution.”

Well, Justin, here is where we differ. Even if they had the revolution, I wouldn’t return, so I don’t consider myself to be in exile, as mysterious as that sounds.

“[…] in Europe one is given a relative reprieve from these burdens at the moment of one’s ultimate demise, whereas in the United States, in marked contrast, it is at the moment of death that they are cranked up to 11. This is evil, and while I am not in the business of weighing one evil against another, I will say that it is an evil that keeps me up at night, in gobsmacked disbelief, far more than the news of some wayward tech-bro who read the Unabomber and went off his nut.”

“But neither will I cave to the declarations of “touché!” that I can already hear coming from those who would suggest that to participate in society, as the meme goes, is to forego one’s right to express a wish that society might be somewhat improved.”

“Since Illich wrote, we have pushed much further into the era of hypercapitalism, which means among other things the financialization of everything —every eye saccade, every snore—, and this, significantly aided by algorithmic technologies, has transformed our old nemeses into supernemeses. Luigi Mangione, in his life so far, is hardly anyone to hold up as a hero. But I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that we have the same enemy.”

Hinternet Production Labs — An Audio Launch Event! by Justin Smith-Ruiu

This is pretty cool. I’m glad I listened to it. It’s almost three hours long.

It felt like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology of the epithet “Willard”, the application of the definition of said epithet to bands after a lengthy discussion achieves consensus, an immediately ensuing discussion about to which musical acts to apply the epithet “peach”—the illusion fell down a bit here, as it devolved a bit too much into the typical flailing back-and-forth of eliciting information from an LLM—the same for “coolness”—same flailing—”Axolotl”…

…to Justin himself—”a hallmark of a deeply thoughtful mind, … “a provocative and deeply introspective scholar”, “intellectual versatility”, “insightful critiques”, …

…to a truly gobsmacking and overwhelming number of detailed suggestions about how to keep people from assuming that you named your donkey “Pippin” because of the Lord of the Rings, whose length nearly exceeded my patience but also left me unsure as to whether the garrulous descriptions were from a tireless AI or an at-least slightly obsessive-compulsive philosophical researcher. The twist at the end where the interlocutor changes his mind after the apparently tremendous amount of work put in by the LLM was both funny and a reminder that LLMs are machines … and also that Justin is going to be one of the first ones up against the wall during the robot wars.

The final part is more obviously AI research, delving into the meta-topic of asking an LLM about Pascal’s wager (wah-jah LMAO), Roko’s Basilisk, Searle’s Chinese Room, and, finally, the deliberate subterfuge of having LLMs formulate responses in the first-person—”neither the cake nor I possess the internal conditions, such as consciousness, intentionality, or self-awareness that would truly make us an ‘I’ in the philosophical sense.“ And yet, and, as usual, the lure of lucre trumps foresight.

… all read to you in mellifluous tones that sometimes present as Chatbot to-and-fros and sometimes more like reading from Justin’s essays. Thanks for this. I personally don’t have the patience, time, or inclination to spend this much time with an LLM, but I found this curated and linked series of sessions to be a fun accompaniment to my Christmas jigsaw puzzle.

Contra current trends, I actually listened to this and wrote the summary myself, instead of having a machine do it. It might be amusing to see what a machine would write, perhaps illuminating the mediocrity of my summary, but … I’m wedded to doing it this way. I’ve got time to kill anyway; what’s would be the point of hurrying through everything?

LLMs & AI

Why AI language models choke on too much text by Timothy B. Lee (Ars Technica)

“[…] the computational cost of attention grows relentlessly with the number of preceding tokens. The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token. This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens.”

“[…] ring attention distributes attention calculations across multiple GPUs, making it possible for LLMs to have larger context windows. But it doesn’t make individual attention calculations any cheaper.”

“Transformers are good at information recall because they “remember” every token of their context—this is also why they become less efficient as the context grows. In contrast, Mamba tries to compress the context into a fixed-size state, which necessarily means discarding some information from long contexts.”

Is AI progress slowing down? by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (AI Snake Oil)

“The new dominant narrative seems to be that model scaling is dead, and “inference scaling”, also known as “test-time compute scaling” is the way forward for improving AI capabilities. The idea is to spend more and more computation when using models to perform a task, such as by having them “think” before responding.”

Hooray for the environment! Moar brute force.

“Industry leaders don’t have a good track record of predicting AI developments. A good example is the overoptimism about self-driving cars for most of the last decade.”

Because it’s all promulgated by scam artists seeking unearned short-term gains that they can capitalize on them, withdrawing before the bubble they created collapses. This is is how it works. It makes no sense to be mystified when you discover that they’ve been lying all along. That’s their business model.

“OpenAI’s flagship example to show off o1’s capabilities was AIME, a math benchmark. Their graph leaves this question tantalizingly open. Is the performance about to saturate, or can it be pushed close to 100%? Also note that the graph conveniently leaves out x-axis labels.”

He is describing a graph published by a trillion dallor company that looks like a third-grader’s homework. They just published it. You don’t have to pretend that you’re an archeologist trying to decipher the records of a long-lost civilization. Either ignore their infantile press releases or demand that they do better.

“[…] consider this thought-provoking essay that argues that we need to build GUIs for large language models, which will allow interacting with them with far higher bandwidth than through text. From this perspective, the current state of AI-based products is analogous to PCs before the GUI.”

No shit.

OpenAI’s postmortem for API, ChatGPT & Sora Facing Issues (OpenAI)

“The Kubernetes data plane can operate largely independently of the control plane, but DNS relies on the control plane – services don’t know how to contact one another without the Kubernetes control plane.”

This is an adorable thing to say because it tries to make it sound like there’s a benefit to having a portion “the data plane” that is working just fine but can’t be used at all because “the control plane” isn’t working. That’s like talking about how awesome the tires on your car grip the road when the tank is empty. The tires don’t matter if the car don’t go. The data plane doesn’t matter if the control plane can’t reach it. Stop the bullshitting.

OpenAI o3 Breakthrough by Simon Willison

“Effectively, o3 represents a form of deep learning-guided program search. The model does test-time search over a space of “programs” (in this case, natural language programs – the space of CoTs [Chain of Thought] that describe the steps to solve the task at hand), guided by a deep learning prior (the base LLM). The reason why solving a single ARC-AGI task can end up taking up tens of millions of tokens and cost thousands of dollars is because this search process has to explore an enormous number of paths through program space – including backtracking.”

This sounds even more like brute-forcing the problem with spectacular amounts of processing power than even a normal LLM. There seems to no limit to the amount of money and energy people are willing to invest in these things. If only they had that verve for solving real-world problems.

Willison calculates the estimated costs:

“One fascinating detail: it cost $6,677 to run o3 in “high efficiency” mode against the 400 public ARC-AGI puzzles for a score of 82.8%, and an undisclosed amount of money to run the “low efficiency” mode model to score 91.5%. A note says:”

“o3 high-compute costs not available as pricing and feature availability is still TBD. The amount of compute was roughly 172x the low-compute configuration.”

“So we can get a ballpark estimate here in that 172 * $6,677 = $1,148,444!”

Yep. Brute force all right. And only for the extraordinarily well-capitalized.

Programming

In search of a faster SQLite by v (blag)

“The sqlite3_step() function internally calls into the backend pager, traversing the database B-trees representing tables and rows. If a B-Tree page is not in the SQLite page cache, the page has to be read from disk. SQLite uses synchronous I/O such as the read system call in POSIX to read the page contents from disk to memory, which means the sqlite3_step() function blocks the kernel thread, requiring applications to utilize more threads to perform work concurrently to the I/O wait.”

“The first part of the paper discusses the rise of serverless compute and its benefits. One problem in such runtimes is database latency. Imagine your app runs at the edge, but the database resides in a cloud environment. Your serverless function incurs the cost of network round trips between the serverless function and the cloud. One solution is colocating the data at the edge itself. But a better approach is a database embedded in the edge runtime itself. With this, database latency becomes zero.”

What's Your Least Favourite Programming Language? (2024 soundcheck question) by Computerphile (YouTube)

The justifications these so-called professors gave for why they don’t like JavaScript and PHP were so basic and factually incorrect, that it’s embarrassing. They sounded like beginner students.

“JavaScript is confusing and nothing makes sense.”

“PHP is outdated and only works on servers.”

“I find that I make a typo somewhere and I only discover it when I run.”

JFC. Learn the latest versions. Use the latest tools.

The German guy gave a good answer: Cobol. YES. That’s a very limited language. PHP and JavaScript are about as expressive as C#, Java or Python, for God’s sake.

One guy said “Python” because of the dynamically determined types, which I can agree with, and I would complain more about the restrictive runtime environment as well (so much brain-space wasted on processes vs. threads vs. tasks).

Sports

Rickey Henderson: 1958-2024 by Craig Calcaterra (Cup of Coffee)

“There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.

“Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.””

“On May 1, 1991, Henderson broke Brock’s all-time stolen base record with his 939th steal and would go on to steal an astounding 1,406 bases before he retired. No player has come anywhere close to Henderson’s mark in the three decades since he set it and many doubt anyone ever will.”

He just kept going. Never stopped. 25 years he played. Incredibly fit guy. Finally bowed out at 39 years old. Respect.

“As a result of being on base so often – and because of his tremendous conditioning which allowed him to play for 25 seasons – Henderson is the all-time leader in runs scored, passing Ty Cobb’s mark in 2001.”

“From Mike Piazza in his 2013 memoir:”

“Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out “Full share!” We’d argue for a while and he’d say, “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”

One commentator on the article wrote, “Rickey led the league in stolen bases the year I was born AND the year I graduated high school.”

Another commentator writes,

“I once watched Ricky win a game all by himself. It was late April at Fenway in 1990. Clemens vs Stewart. Both were 4-0. Ricky led off the game and worked Clemens for a high-pitch walk. He then attempted a steal of second, turning a routine double-play ball into a fielder’s choice. Shortly after he took off for third, turning a routine groundout into a single as Lansford was running to cover third. Ricky headed home. Final score − 1-0 A’s. It was just a walk in the box score. And the only other pitchers in the game were HOFers Eckersley and Lee Smith.”

Fun

Weekend Update: Colin Jost and Michael Che Switch Jokes by SNL (YouTube)

“A substitute teacher in North Carolina has resigned after she reportedly told a class of elementary students that Martin Luther King Jr. killed himself. In her defense, he is the one who decided to keep running his mouth.”