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Links and Notes for July 29th, 2022

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/29/the-semi-conductor-bill-and-the-moderna-billionaires/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">The Semi-Conductor Bill and the Moderna Billionaires</a> <bq>The federal government paid Moderna $450 million dollars to develop its vaccine against the coronavirus. It then paid roughly the same amount for Moderna to conduct clinical trials to demonstrate its effectiveness. It then let Moderna keep ownership of the intellectual property it had developed while working for the government. In effect, the government paid Moderna twice, once with the public funding, the second time by giving them monopoly control over what they developed. As a result, according to Forbes, we had created at least five Moderna billionaires as of last summer. Undoubtedly many other well-placed people in the company pocketed tens or hundreds of millions. While the origins of rising inequality may be a mystery to many economists, it really shouldn’t be very surprising to anyone who follows the news.</bq> <bq>If we actually want to promote technology in a way that doesn’t hugely increase inequality we can use a system that only pays companies once. We can make it a condition of the funding that all the products developed have short patents. I proposed four years as a general rule, with everything in the public domain immediately in the case of biomedical research and climate. (See chapter five of Rigged [it’s free].) If US companies find these terms too onerous, there are sure to be plenty of researchers elsewhere in the world happy to take our research dollars on these terms. Remember, we shouldn’t care at all where the researchers are located, the research will be open and available for our manufacturers here, as well as elsewhere, as a condition of the contracts. It is what economists and policy types always hype: free trade.</bq> <bq>We need to get over the idea that manufacturing jobs are a fix for the problems of noncollege educated workers. That was true 30 years ago when our political leaders were vigorously pushing policies to destroy these jobs. However, thanks to their success in these efforts, bringing the jobs back won’t fix the problem.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/07/municipal-debt-bondholders-race-san-francisco/" source="Jacobin" author="Astra Taylor">Wall Street Doesn’t Have to Rule Our Cities: An Interview with Destin Jenkins</a> <bq>They pushed a misleading analogy between household indebtedness and public indebtedness at the federal level; of course, the individual household is nothing like the federal government, because we don’t have the power to print money the way the federal government does. But when you look at lower levels of government, the analogy is actually more accurate, because our municipalities can’t print dollars. They do face these financial constraints, though those constraints are really political and problematic.</bq> <bq>Focusing on fees and fines can add to important conversations around criminalization and mass incarceration: even folks who aren’t incarcerated for draconian stretches of time are still brought into courts and forced to pay various fees and fines. That becomes part of the municipal revenue base, which then gets kicked back to bondholders. This is one insight that links municipal indebtedness to work that seeks to break down incarceration. Incarceration’s fiscal dimensions aren’t limited to issuing a bond to build a prison facility — fees and fines form an important revenue source, through which bondholders are paid.</bq> <bq>In other words, the uprisings trigger not a wholesale abdication of long-term bond issues but the emergence of another kind of debt instrument: short-term debt. Through this instrument, financial institutions actually try to make the possibility of riots appealing to investors. The result is a changing temporality of debt, moving away from long-term investment to short-term returns.</bq> <bq>[...] the bond market brings together state and local governments and private investment. You can’t be anti-statist when your money comes primarily from taxes and interest income.</bq> You absolutely can be anti-statist; you just can't really want to succeed at eliminating the state. So you're lying about your convictions in order to enrich yourself. The most prominent railers against the state are the ones whose entire wealth comes from state coffers. See Elon Musk, for example. <bq>[...] these middlemen aren’t needed, but if we want to overthrow them, we have to understand how they positioned themselves as essential in the first place.</bq> <bq>Perhaps we don’t need middlemen, but we still need mediators. We don’t need people to profiteer off public desperation. Likewise, we might still need credit-rating agencies, even in a socialist horizon — but these agencies would rate whether projects are sustainable, advancing democracy, or enriching people on a community level.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/07/27/is-russia-expanding-its-goals-in-ukraine/" author="Ted Snider" source="Antiwar.com">Is Russia Expanding Its Goals in Ukraine?</a> <bq>Lavrov’s message is not new. In early June, Lavrov warned that "the longer the range of weapons you supply, the farther away the line from where [Ukraine] could threaten the Russian Federation will be pushed." Lavrov’s July message reiterated the same point. Russia’s war aims may have to extent west "Because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Zelensky will control or whoever replaces him to have weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory. . . ."</bq> <bq>[...] it is impossible to know Putin’s thoughts. Putin’s and Lavrov’s words suggest another possible interpretation. The goal has not changed: only the geography for accomplishing the goal has changed. And that geography has been changed by the insertion by the US of long range HIMARS rocket systems into Ukraine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/25/ntzd-j25.html" source="WSWS" author="Oscar Grenfell">An interview with John Pilger: “Assange is the courageous embodiment of a struggle against the most oppressive forces in our world”</a> <bq>There was no justice, no process; the guile and ruthlessness of US power was on show. Might is right.</bq> <bq>Within a few years, driven by new opportunities of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had subverted people’s sense of acting together, their sense and language of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated; class as a way of explaining society became heresy. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. The propaganda was that something called globalism was good for you. Corporatism, its specious language and its authoritarianism, appropriated much about the way we lived,</bq> <bq>Events today are the direct result of plans laid in the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance, a document that laid out how the US would maintain its empire and see off any challenges, real and imagined. The aim was US dominance at any cost, literally. Written by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who would play key roles in the administration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, it might have been written by Lord Curzon in the 19th century. They formed “The Project for a New American Century.” America, it boasted, “would oversee a new frontier.” The role of other states would be as vassals or supplicants, or they would be crushed. It planned the conquest of Europe, and Russia, with all the zeal and thoroughness of Hitler’s imperialists. The roots of NATO’s current war on Russia and provocations of China are here.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/26/the-enduring-tyranny-of-oil/" source="Scheer Post" author="Michael Klare">The Enduring Tyranny of Oil</a> <bq>[...] in 2020, EVs made up less than 1% of the global light-vehicle fleet and are only expected to reach 20% of the total by 2040. So peak-oil demand remains a distant mirage, leaving us deeply beholden to the tyranny of petroleum, with all its perilous consequences.</bq> Someone has to think long-term, to consider the detriments of our current system and think of alternatives that improve on it, that has fewer drawbacks, that is more sustainable. Pollution is the number-one killer, with GHG pollution producing the long-term, grave consequences. Do people think that burning whatever you want and dumping whatever you like is ok? Maybe! No downsides, right? Society and government are stupid, but if it's available to buy, people assume it's ok. They think it must be ok, because otherwise it wouldn't be available, right? It's convenient to them and they deserve it, because they worked for it. Too bad if the poors are too lazy to reach for the golden ring. <bq>Those will include the complete desertification of the American West (already experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years ) and the flooding of major coastal cities, including New York, Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles.</bq> People genuinely think that this is optional. They think that technology will save us. A modern-day Jesus. <bq>Unless China, India, and other non-Western buyers can be persuaded (or somehow compelled) to eliminate Russian imports, oil will continue to finance the war against Ukraine.</bq> I find Klare's summary of this very unsatisfying and disappointingly U.S.-centric. <bq>For many, such hardships have only been compounded by Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain exports, which has contributed significantly to rising food prices and increasing starvation in already troubled parts of the world.</bq> I'm mystified how a writer of Klare's acumen could fail to mention the sanctions, instead describing the situation as if Russia had blockaded all of its own exports on its own initiative. Once again, this is very disappointingly jingoistic. <bq>No doubt Joe Biden had every intention of moving us in that direction when he assumed office, but it’s clear that — thank you, Joe Manchin ! — he’s been overpowered by the tyranny of oil.</bq> That is a ridiculous thing to say, belied by fifty years of Biden's career. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-apocalypse" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Dawn of the Apocalypse</a> <bq>And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined. The desperate response is to burn more coal, especially with the soaring cost of natural gas and oil, and extend the life of nuclear power plants to sustain the economy and produce cool air. It is a self-defeating response. Joe Biden has approved more new oil drilling permits than Donald Trump. Once the power outages begin, as in India, the heat waves will exact a grim toll.</bq> <bq>Sea levels are rising three times faster than predicted. The arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we have already reached 419 parts per million – carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of heat trapped in the oceans . Global temperatures, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, will rise for at least another century. This assumes we confront this crisis. The earth is becoming inhospitable to most life.</bq> <bq>We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate. As early as the 1930s British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar suggested that increased CO2 was warming the planet. In the late 1970s into the 1980s, scientists at companies such as Exxon and Shell determined that the burning of fossil fuels was contributing to rising global temperature.</bq> <bq>The profits from fossil fuels, and the lifestyle the burning of fossil fuels afforded to the privileged on the planet, overro[de] a rational response. The failure is homicidal. Clive Hamilton in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.”</bq> <bq>Europeans and Euro-Americans launched a 500-year-long global rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years – that stood in the way. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago, has become a curse, a death sentence.</bq> <bq>“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion,” Wright notes, “that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature.”</bq> <bq>The greatest existential crisis of our time is to at once be willing to accept the bleakness before us and resist. The global ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced. This will require sustained mass civil disobedience, such as those mounted by Extinction Rebellion , to drive the global rulers from power. Once the rulers see us as a real threat they will become vicious, even barbaric, in their efforts to cling to their positions of privilege and power. We may not succeed in halting the death march, but let those who come after us, especially our children, say we tried.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercrossofiron.htm" source="American Rhetoric" author="Dwight D. Eisenhower">Cross of Iron Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors</a> <bq>I know of only one question upon which progress waits. It is this: What is the Soviet Union ready to do? Whatever the answer is, let it be plainly spoken. Again we say: the hunger for peace is too great, the hour in history too late, for any government to mock men's hopes with mere words and promises and gestures.</bq> Oh, how ironic. The Soviets must have seen through this charade immediately, no matter how sincere Eisenhower seemed to be. The desire for profit, achieved most efficiently by building arms, would continue to drive U.S. policy. It was (and is) not the threat that drives the building of armaments, but rather the profit motive and unbridled greed of a handful that drives the invention of threats to justify the armaments. They instill fear to flatten hopes. It's obvious from Eisenhower's depiction of the Soviet Union that he's bought in to the propaganda and is doomed to lose on his shining vision, no matter how sincerely he believed in it. The U.S., in the grips of a capitalist class that cared (cares) for nothing but its own personal wealth, with no limits, was already (and still is) the evil empire that Eisenhower accused the Soviet Union of being. If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least be divided -- would need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate. Indeed we do. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/28/patrick-lawrence-the-causes-of-things/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Causes of Things</a> <bq>In my years as a correspondent, you got hell from your foreign editor if you left out pertinent facts and background. Nowadays you are more likely to get hell for putting them in, and they will take them out on the foreign desk so your story conforms to “the narrative.” Omission—and it is time for someone in the profession to say this—is an insidious form of lying, akin to passive aggression, that most intractable of neuroses.</bq> <bq>Luce asserted that Americans must “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and… exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”</bq> Breathtaking, the arrogance of it all. <bq>Bessner and Bacevich share credit for judging the American Century a failure waiting to happen from its inception. “The more one considers the American Century, in fact, the more our tenure as global hegemon resembles a historical aberration,” Bessner writes. “Geopolitical circumstances are unlikely to allow another country to become as powerful as the United States has been for much of the past seven decades.”</bq> <bq>One, I am not one for Donald Trump as the personification of American decline. This is liberal escapism. Our 45th president was a symptom, not a cause, and was not entirely devoid of good ideas. The Biden regime, indeed, is leaving these aside while picking up intact all the bad ones.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/28/callers-say-cant-get-through-callees-say-dont-want-to-let-them-through/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ralph Nader">Keep Calling Powerful Players–Even If They Won’t Answer</a> <bq>If the Congress in the sixties and seventies was as unresponsive as Congress is today, ironically in the midst of the communications revolution, we couldn’t have gotten the key consumer, environmental, worker safety and health laws, the Freedom of Information Law and other laws enacted. Clearly, if you cannot communicate consistently with the 535 members of Congress and staff, who are given massive sovereign powers by “We the People” (right in the preamble to our Constitution), you cannot even start to get anything done on Capitol Hill.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/07/colonization-space-exploration-moon-gunther-anders-privatization-earth-destruction/" source="Jacobin" author="Srećko Horvat">Under Capitalism, the Colonization of Space Means the Destruction of Earth</a> <bq>Today, with high-resolution imagery of the origins of the universe, his pertinent question, “What use is the Moon?” is as important as ever, though it may be extended to ask: “What use is the universe?” What’s the use of discovering the magic of our universe, if we continue destroying planet Earth? What is the use of Mars if you plan to colonize it with the same capitalist logic of extraction and expansion?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/30/aozy-j30.html" author="Mike Head" source="WSWS">US carrier group heads toward Taiwan as Pelosi flies to Asia</a> <bq>US military planners regard Taiwan as a key strategic platform for an assault on China. It is also a key economic asset, producing an estimated 92 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips. Just as Washington for years built up the Ukrainian military as a bastion against Russia with the aim of provoking the current disastrous war, the US is strengthening the Taiwanese military and seeking to goad China into military action in a bid to weaken and destabilise its rival.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/30/tmbq-j30.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Record second quarter profits for US oil corporations</a> <bq>Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, earned $17.9 billion in the quarter, more than three times what it earned in 2021, while Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, tripled its profits to $11.6 billion. Both companies nearly doubled year-over-year quarterly sales, with Exxon going from $67.7 billion to $115.6 billion and Chevron from $36 billion to $65 billion. When added to the earnings of UK-based Shell, which announced record profits of $11.4 billion on Thursday, the three largest Western oil corporations raked in a collective $46 billion in the quarter.</bq> <bq>The oil monopolies intend to ride this wave of massive profits derived from chiseling the public for as long as possible. As Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods told the Journal, although refining margins have fallen off recently, it could take years to bring more capacity online. “Demand recovers, and we don’t have the capacity to meet that, which has led to record, record refining margins. This will be a few-year price environment,” Woods said.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2022/08/01/is-taiwans-independence-worth-war/" author="Patrick Buchanan" source="Antiwar.com">Is Taiwan’s Independence Worth War?</a> <bq>And after our victory in the Taiwan Strait, how would we secure indefinitely the independence of that nation of 23 million from a defeated power of 1.4 billion, bitter and bristling at its loss?</bq> <bq>What guarantees are there that 2025 or 2030 will not bring a more favorable balance of power for China in what is, after all, their continent, not ours?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/04/odih-a04.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">US baby formula shortage drags on with no end in sight</a> <bq>A web site published by the White House called, “Addressing the Infant Formula Crisis” has not been updated since late June. Aside from announcing that it has flown in a completely inadequate quantity of baby formula from overseas, the Biden White House has had nothing to say about the fact that the wealthiest capitalist country in the world cannot feed its children.</bq> <bq>The indifference to the crisis facing millions of people was articulated plainly by Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who said on May 15, “The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make formula.” “Let’s be very clear,” Buttigieg said, “this is a capitalist country.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/04/erpq-a04.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Biden wants war with China</a> <bq>US President Joe Biden knows full well, and China has warned publicly, that if the United States repudiates the One China policy, thus effectively recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation, China will retake the island militarily. And Biden himself has pledged to go to war against China if that happens.</bq> <bq>The US geopolitical motivations for going to war with China were laid out by Elbridge Colby, the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, who declared on Twitter Tuesday that a conflict with China over Taiwan “makes sense for Americans’ concrete economic interests.”</bq> <bq>In other words, those who warn that Pelosi’s actions threaten all of humanity are the real problem, not the arsonist Pelosi and the US military. The Intercept interviewer condemns “progressives” who frame the “US-China relationship as being primarily about US actions when there has been, you know, increasing authoritarianism in China.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/05/roan-a05.html" author="Johannes Stern" source="WSWS">German government sets course for world war as it backs Pelosi’s Taiwan visit</a> <bq>Washington’s offensive, aimed at subjugating the former semi-colony of China and securing the supremacy of US imperialism throughout the Asia-Pacific region, is bringing the world to the brink of a third world war that could mark the end of humanity. When Pelosi arrived in Taipei, an American aircraft carrier group led by USS Ronald Reagan maneuvered off the east coast of Taiwan, equipped with fighter jets, combat helicopters and other weapon systems. More warships are on their way to the region.</bq> <bq>All this turns reality on its head. In fact, the NATO powers—especially the US and Germany—are the aggressors in world politics. They have been waging war almost continuously for 30 years, destroying entire countries, killing millions of people and turning tens of millions into refugees. Russia and China were systematically encircled with the aim of weakening and militarily subjugating these resource-rich and geostrategically important countries.</bq> <bq>What this means is clear. Germany should not only play a central role in the war against Russia, but also against China. Baerbock’s speech was an all-out militaristic tirade. It underlined the extent to which the former pacifists of the Greens and the wealthy middle classes they speak for have become the most aggressive representatives of German militarism.</bq> <bq>This means that we must make the European Union more strategic—as a Union that is capable of dealing with the United States on an equal footing: in a leadership partnership.”</bq> AHAHAHAHA. Baerbock is a fucking moron. The U.S. doesn't have partners. It has vassals. Europe---and Germany---are hapless fools, completely on board with whatever the U.S. proposes because this handful of politicians will benefit personally, while they burn their peoples and their countries with short-term and deluded stupidity. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/05/hjgc-a05.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US pledges to send warships through Taiwan Strait in standoff with China</a> <bq>Qin concluded: “Just think: If an American state were to secede from the United States and declare independence, and then some other nation provided weapons and political support for that state, would the US government—or the American people—allow this to happen?” Amid the ongoing military standoff, the US Senate is moving to formally abolish the One China policy, which is already a dead letter in practice.</bq> <bq>The so-called Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, sponsored by Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, would designate Taiwan a “major non-NATO ally” alongside Japan, effectively giving it diplomatic recognition and ending the One China policy. The bill would provide Taiwan $4.5 billion in military aid, a figure in order of magnitude greater than current expenditures. “Our bill is the largest expansion of the military and economic relationship between our two countries in decades,” Graham said, deliberately referring to Taiwan as a country.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/05/roaming-charges-64/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Mad-Eyed Lady of Pac Heights</a> <bq>China is not going to relinquish its entirely legitimate claims to Taiwan. Far from a model democracy, Taiwan is a former gangster state, whose repressive government was shaped by Chiang Kai-Shek, who retreated there in 1949 with his battered gang of CIA-financed KMT thugs, where he promptly instituted a violent crackdown on leftists known as the White Terror, a vicious form of martial law that lasted for the next 45 years.</bq> <bq>Pelosi represents many rich Chinese exiles, who have made fortunes in San Francisco and now fantasize about sticking it to the CCP from the safety of their Nob Hill mansions.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/im-just-going-to-go-to-the-heart" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">“I’m just going to the heart of the inferno”: Interviewing Alex Moyer, Director of "Alex's War.”</a> <bq>But they don’t have stable parental figures and they have sort of unconventional family lives. It’s not the same all the way across the board where it’s a single mother, but there were certainly people in the film that had a single mother. There were people in the film that had alcoholic parents. There were people in the film that had absentee parents. There were people in the film that had parents that were too old to connect with them. In almost all the cases, they were left on their own to be completely feral.</bq> <bq>[...] there’s an entire generation of people who are being lost in the shuffle of this paradigm shift between the information age and the old world and the industrialized society. That’s a big idea for most people to wrap their minds around. But there’s a mental health crisis in this country. There are a lot of people who get left to the sidelines, and then we wonder how, “Oh my God, how could this happen?”</bq> <bq>We’re talking about people between the ages of 16 and 30 years old that are dudes. Those are the people that commit most of the crime in the world. And if those people don’t have any guidance in their lives or any constructive path or opportunity, they’re going to get into shit probably.</bq> <bq>This is what I’m going to do with all of the documentaries that I make, by the way, including the one I just made about Alex Jones. It’s not meant to confirm your biases. It’s meant to actually show you what these people are actually like and then you can make an informed decision based off of watching the film. It used to be called journalism.</bq> <bq>[...] it did make me pretty jaded coming out of that last movie. I was like, Wow , so people, no matter how careful I am and no matter how much integrity I try to execute this with, people are still just going to react like little babies. So I might as well make a movie about something that’s a huge challenge for me that I think is fascinating because I don’t have anything to lose.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/hate-but-dont-look-reporting-on-the" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">Hate, But Don't Look: Reporting On The Other Side</a> <bq>TFW NO GF instead is a collection of portraits of weirdly sympathetic young men from all over the country, all intelligent and self-aware, but fitting the same generally despised profile. They’re white, male, underemployed, often friendless and almost wholly girlfriend-less, sometimes armed, and gravitating toward an online community fueled by depression, rage and black humor. Among the first taboo truths in the film is these men have really been brought together by the very people who hate and fear them most, with the histrionic disgust of would-be polite society being their most powerful bonding agent.</bq> <bq>There’s no starter home in Levittown or AAA membership waiting for these dudes. Instead it’s school, a little college maybe, followed by what may be a short or a long trip wandering across the employment desert, capped by an inevitable return to Lubbock or Thornton or any of a thousand ex-places they come from, maybe to live with a parent or parents already at the end of the same cycle of failure.</bq> <bq>They’re not expected to do meaningful work, contribute, or procreate. No one needs them to defend their country, unless they want to volunteer to use their video game skills to drone the Arab versions of themselves. They’re not building any bridge, dam, or highway their kids will use, because the infrastructure story is going backward, not forward, in the desolate, graffiti-covered, twisted-metal hellscapes of dying small town America where these guys all seem to spend their time.</bq> <bq>The guys in TFW No GF exist on a plane of total, crushing psychic defeat, a world of utter hopelessness far beyond politics.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s not politics, it’s extreme trolling, goofing off to own the beautiful people. “That’s more of what the story is with those guys than it is about them having these really genuine, heartfelt political leanings,” says Moyer. “Because, frankly, they don’t have the intense life experience to have really deep convictions about politics.”</bq> <bq>Moyer even found that investors were uninterested in a film that didn’t use these characters as two-dimensional props to make a milquetoast cable-ready point about the dangers her hated subjects pose to people actually worthy of sympathy, like historically marginalized groups.</bq> <bq>With apologies to my pal Glenn, the notion that Jones needs Greenwald’s help is hilarious. Jones, like basically every other person from Joe Rogan to Trump who’s been renounced by self-proclaimed credibility arbiters in traditional media, has his own massive and growing audience and needs the approval of the center-left priesthood about as much as he needs a case of piles.</bq> <bq>The job is to understand and explain, not to act as societal bouncers, but incuriosity has become the norm. As a reporter you don’t have to like Jones, but since when did it become a point of pride to be willfully ignorant? When did journalists buy the notion that we should shelve professional curiosity when it comes to the people we most urgently need to understand?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-this-week-july-24-31-2022" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">America This Week: July 24-31, 2022</a> <bq>The rise of conspiracy theory is undoubtedly a serious problem in America, but so is the increasingly common practice of only allowing audiences to see controversial news after it’s been filtered through multiple layers of condemnation by a shrinking pool of academics trusted to read raw material.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/30/court-rejects-googles-attempt-to-dismiss-rumbles-antitrust-lawsuit-ensuring-vast-discovery/" author="Glenn Greenwald" source="Scheer Post">Court Rejects Google’s Attempt to Dismiss Rumble’s Antitrust Lawsuit, Ensuring Vast Discovery</a> <bq>But the major obstacle to competing with Big Tech giants generally, and Google specifically, is that these companies have acquired such extreme market dominance in so many key areas of the internet that they abuse that power to prevent competition and crush any competitors who pose a challenge. That these four Big Tech giants are classic monopolies in violation of the antitrust law was the emphatic conclusion of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law’s comprehensive 2020 report, a conclusion that now has ample support from leading members of both parties.</bq> <bq>Attempts to find Rumble videos through Google searches are purposely thwarted by burying Rumble’s videos and instead redirecting the user to YouTube, the lawsuit alleges. Google’s “chokehold on search is impenetrable, and that chokehold allows it to continue unfairly and unlawfully to self-preference YouTube over its rivals, including Rumble, and to monopolize the online video platform market.” I often am unable to find my own videos using Google’s search engines even when I recall the title of the video more or less perfectly, and have frequently heard the same complaint from viewers.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/05/americas-biggest-reservoirs-hit-by-dead-pool-jitters/" author="Robert Hunziker" source="CounterPunch">America’s Biggest Reservoirs Hit By Dead Pool Jitters</a> <bq>[...] according to The Waterways Journal, suggestions to tap the Mississippi River go back decades: “The Bureau of Reclamation did a thorough study of the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to Arizona in 2012, concluding that the project would cost $14 billion (in 2012 dollars) and take 30 years to complete. As recently as 2021, the Arizona state legislature urged Congress to fund a technological and feasibility study of a diversion dam and pipeline scheme to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-identify-master-problem-underlying-all-cryptography-20220406/" source="Quanta" author="Erica Klarreich">Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography</a> <bq>The existence of true one-way functions, they proved, depends on one of the oldest and most central problems in another area of computer science called complexity theory, or computational complexity. This problem, known as Kolmogorov complexity, concerns how hard it is to tell the difference between random strings of numbers and strings that contain some information.</bq> <bq>Now cryptography and complexity have a shared goal, and each field offers the other a fresh perspective: Cryptographers have powerful reasons to think that one-way functions exist, and complexity theorists have different powerful reasons to think that time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is hard. Because of the new results, the two hypotheses bolster each other.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/be-a-writer-or-dont-be-one" source="SubStack" author="Freddie DeBoer">Be a Writer or Don't Be One</a> <bq>There’s lots of criticisms you can make about grad school, but you can’t say it’s not hard. The reading is intense and the writing is more intense, at least at most places. And I think that you can’t survive it unless you commit to doing what you’re doing, unless you permit yourself the vulnerability that comes with unapologetic effort. It’s just too difficult otherwise, especially because of the terrible money involved and the constant temptation to take on more debt you won’t be able to repay. If you can’t summon reserves based on some sense that you’re committed to what you’re doing in a deeper way, that it has some meaning for you, you’ll burn up or out. So commit to doing it or quit, for your own sake.</bq> <bq>The only way to weather the layoffs and bad pay and union-busting is to believe that you’re doing this to satisfy a higher purpose. To deny yourself that as you tie your financial future to a broken industry is a form of masochism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/29/roaming-charges-63/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Tell Tom Joad the News</a> <bq author="Felix Guattari" source="Texts and Interviews">There are two ways of rejecting the revolution. The first is to refuse to see it where it exists; the second is to see it where it manifestly will not occur.</bq> <bq author="David Wallace-Wells" source="NYTimes">Over a decade in which the cost of solar power fell about 90%, fracking lost about $300 billion.</bq> <bq>In his book “To Me He Was Just Dad,” Eric Davis recounts this story of watching MTV with Miles back in the 80s: “I remember watching a heavy metal show on MTV and when Slayer came on, I thought, ‘Dad’s going to hate this.’ He watched for a bit and then said, ‘Huh. That drummer is really laying it down, isn’t he?'”</bq> Dave Lombardo FTW. <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/two-years-on-substack" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Two Years on Substack</a> <bq>I have channeled these preoccupations through sensibilities he could not have shared —his Vinteuil is my vaporwave; his decadent aristocratic salons are my ghost-malls—, and in contrast with his my own experience of memory is at once an occasion for reflection on the new technologies of memory construction and consolidation — my life is now spent constantly hooked up to a machine that can reliably be expected to “drop new madeleines” at the rate of several per day.</bq> <bq>So we inhabit different realities, Marcel the narrator and I, yet some things never change. He and I are both Time-bound, and both feel chronically handicapped by this condition even if we can’t really imagine any other one; both stumped by the strange causal and epistemic assymetries of the past and future respectively, whereby you can know the past but have no causal power of it, while you can exercise causal power over the future but you can’t know it.</bq> <bq>I was always a writer, then, even in the absence of a system of uptake, promotion, and remuneration that was suited to my habits of expression.</bq> <bq>Substack is thus not a publication with a house-style or anything like a like-minded “team” of contributors collectively shaping the homogenised voice of a single media outlet. It is rather a loose community of writers, brought together in the conviction that writing is best when it is not denatured for corporate ends (in at least one, and probably two, senses of “corporate”).</bq> <bq>“My area”, strictly speaking, is G. W. Leibniz’s views on the metaphysics and mereology of composite substances, and how these views shifted between roughly 1687 and 1695. That’s it. On a very narrow understanding, everything else I take up is extracurricular.</bq> I wouldn't even know what my area is. I don't suppose I have one, by this definition. I find it kind of tedious to think about what I would be "allowed" to opine on. <bq>It’s the metafiction, most of all, that I hope reveals the method in my madness. I am concerned, abidingly, with the way technology is shaping, and distorting, our memories and our sense of personal identity.</bq> <bq>I got on BART and the intercom announcements and posted warnings informed me of multiple ways I and my fellow riders might find ourselves arrested, subject to five-to-ten-year prison sentences, $100,000 fines. There were ads for class-action lawsuits against hospitals and banks, and other ads for hospitals and banks that seemed like nothing but bold invitations for more lawsuits.</bq> This has been exactly my experience of the U.S., after having spent nearly 4 straight years abroad. There are warnings and exclamatory marketing and seemingly superfluous explanations everywhere and on everything. <bq>A billboard loomed above us telling us how much more likely we are, as Californians, to suffer from pre-diabetes than to die in a shark attack.</bq> <bq>I had irrationally come to believe that finishing the seventh volume of Proust was going to break the spell of life, but then I finished it and found that it was indeed only a small death, that I was still in Time and as long as I was still in Time I was going to have to keep coming up with new ways to kill it.</bq> <bq>[...] the fluids that keep us all heated, thymic, and horny in youth have largely dried up, and left us alone with our cool wisdom.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/07/james-webb-telescope-capturing-starry-heavens-political-moral-unity" source="New Statesman" author="Justin E.H. Smith">To realise political unity, humankind must look to the starry heavens</a> <bq>There is a sense in which “it doesn’t matter” whether we are alone in the universe or not. Finding out will not solve the climate crisis , or end the war in Ukraine. But it is hard, at least for me, to see what the point of finding our way out of these scrapes might be, if not to enable us to continue asking the profound questions that make life worth living. And none is more profound than the question of our possible cosmic community with other beings like us.</bq> <bq>It is to be taught again what is likely the greatest lesson of the Scientific Revolution, a lesson that was made possible most of all by the parallel disclosures made to us through the new technologies of the telescope and the microscope: that there are levels of detail in the world that were not “made for us”, that are not targeted at our natural and unaided perceptual range.</bq> <bq>Kant, writing in the late 18th century, did not have anything like the tools and resources we have today for observing our cosmos, yet he still understood the unity of the projects of human moral and political progress, on the one hand, and the need to take our cosmological bearings, on the other. What the Webb telescope delivers to us is a powerful tool for helping us with the latter part of our human project. Anyone who scoffs at this incredible gift is unlikely to make much progress in the former part of it either.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/the-ars-technica-guide-to-electric-vehicle-charging/" source="Ars Technica" author="Jonathan M. Gitlin">You won’t be confused about electric vehicle charging after reading this</a> <bq>Many factors can affect how long charging takes, including the capacity of the battery, its state of charge at the start of the session, the battery's temperature at the start of the session, the actual cell chemistry, and, of course, how much power can be drawn by the EV's battery. Charges can range from a few miles of range added every hour, if you're relying on a household 120 V socket, to as much as 100 miles of range in 10 minutes if you're charging from a powerful DC charger.</bq> <bq>Between permits and upgraded electrical infrastructure and the actual cost of the DC charger, plus any battery storage, a DC fast charger can cost anywhere from $150,00 to $200,000, making them impractical for home use.</bq> What the actual fuck? What tiny percentage of the target market can consider such a price for a vehicle. "impractical"? What a fucking bougie snob thing to say. <bq>Between 30 to 40 minutes to 80 percent is quite common for new EVs, particularly if they're limited to lower power or have battery capacities on the large side. Most EV batteries operate at 400 V, but some use 800 V or even 920 V, and these EVs can charge much more rapidly if they're plugged into a 350 kW level 3 machine.</bq> <bq>Although many public level 3 chargers have credit card readers, they're often inoperable, and you may need to download the charging network's app (such as Electrify America, EVGo, ChargePoint, and so on) and create an account to use a charger with the least amount of hassle.</bq> What a fucking surprise. <bq>The de facto standard level 3 plug is the Combined Charging System (CCS) Type 1. It's a much bulkier plug since it combines the already big J1772 plug with two large DC pins below, all attached to a thick and heavy cable. If you buy a new EV today from almost any car maker, it will use CCS Type 1 to fast-charge.</bq> <bq>Don't worry—it's not nearly as difficult as having to print out MapQuest directions like we used to do, never mind the olden days of road atlases.</bq> What the fuck is wrong with you lazy, ignorant asses? Using real maps was efficient and straightforward. Maps work well. They're better than online when you don't have a signal. <bq>But, many EV drivers rely on third-party smartphone apps, including PlugShare and A Better Route Planner (although this one requires a subscription). Usually, these apps let you plan routes, taking into account the battery capacity and efficiency of the EV you're driving, its starting state of charge, and how much charge you want remaining when you arrive at your destination. It's also useful to download the apps for charging networks, as those apps will provide the real-time status of chargers—whether they're functional, in use, or broken. If you're in a pinch, especially if you're driving in rural areas, some dealerships will let you use their level 2 chargers. An app like PlugShare will list those, along with check-ins from users that have successfully charged there.</bq> It's great that this all exists, but it all sounds quite complex, adventurous, and fraught with uncertainty. <hr> <a href="https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2022/07/27/who-is-collecting-data-from-your-car" author="Ryan Raphael" source="The Markup">Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car?</a> <bq>Most drivers have no idea what data is being transmitted from their vehicles, let alone who exactly is collecting, analyzing, and sharing that data, and with whom. A recent survey of drivers by the Automotive Industries Association of Canada found that only 28 percent of respondents had a clear understanding of the types of data their vehicle produced, and the same percentage said they had a clear understanding of who had access to that data.</bq> <bq>Andrea Amico is founder and CEO of Privacy4Cars, an automotive data privacy company. Amico said of vehicle data hubs, “So, there’s many sources out there. Their business proposition is collect all this data, create massive databases, try to standardize this data as much as possible and then literally sell it. So that’s their business model.”</bq> <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://webkit.org/blog/12967/understanding-gc-in-jsc-from-scratch/" source="WebKit Blog" author="Haoran Xu">Understanding Garbage Collection in JavaScriptCore From Scratch</a> <bq>But once lock-free programming is involved, one starts to get into all sorts of architecture-dependent memory reordering problems. x86-64 is the more strict architecture: it only requires StoreLoadFence() , and it provides TSO-like semantics. JSC also supports ARM64 CPUs, which has even fewer guarantees: load-load, load-store, store-load, and store-store can all be reordered by the CPU, so a lot more operations need fences. As if things were not bad enough, for performance reasons, JSC often avoids using memory fences on ARM64. They have the so-called Dependency class , which creates an implicit CPU data dependency on ARM64 through some scary assembly hacks, so they can get the desired memory ordering for a specific data-flow without paying the cost of a memory fence. As you can imagine, with all of these complications and optimizations, the code can become difficult to read.</bq>